Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlAverage US presidential debate
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    5 hours ago

    How do you ever solve a problem if you don’t acknowledge it exists?

    I’m not from the US, but live in a country that is a US ally with a lot of military bases. The US election effects us. The fact the DNC is fielding an old age pensioner who should be sitting comfortably in a retirement home complaining about the birds obstructing his view against an equally old fascist is deeply worrying.




  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlThree Wishes
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    20 days ago

    No, I’m not talking about the 1936 constitution. I meant specifically the disempowerment of local and union soviets.

    I’m no expert on Russian history, so I may be misinformed about this, but as far as I understand it he put in place a series of reforms that stripped power from the local level and empowered the central committee.


  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlThree Wishes
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    20 days ago

    Are the concepts of freedom and working towards collective good so mutually exclusive?

    Not necessarily, and I also disagree with the commenter above that without the USA suddenly the world would be singing kumbaya.

    The problem was dictators seizing power in turbulent times. In Russia, Stalin abolished the soviets (A.K.A worker’s councils, kinda like mega unions) in the Soviet union. I think that says a lot.

    In Romania (I’m a bit better equipped to talk about this one), things were a bit different.

    The original communist government (1945) was essentially a Russian puppet state that drained the wealth of Romania via war reparations. Stalinist purges happened often during this period.

    During the 1950s and early 1960s, Romania got a degree of independence and things were actually looking up. Society in general (infant mortality, gender equality, literacy, standard of living, etc) were all improving rapidly without Russia draining us and making decisions for us, and we didn’t have a surveilance state of the scale that would come later. This was a period marked by political battles between the liberal communists and the Stalinist communists for control, with Stalinists commiting some pretty horrible atrocities (if you want nightmare fuel for some reason, look up the Pitesti experiment).

    Then, 1965, Ceacescu took power. During his early years, he actually looked like a liberal (EDIT: Just to be clear: I mean a liberal communist. This means more individual freedom for citizens in a communist economy). He allowed some emigration, some free speech, and even spoke out about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This, at the start, did not look like a typical authoritarian communist state. Unfortunately, Inspired by the “amazing” society of North Korea in 1971, he started to make changes in the structure of society to be more like it, which included an expanded Securitate. 2 years later, harsh austerity policies to repay foreign loans led to a massive drop in living conditions, which led to riots, which led to crackdowns. Things rapidly spiralled, and the Securitate were given more and more power to keep control.

    This then became the police state that everybody thinks of when they think of communism. A combination of too much power in 1 person’s hands, an authoritarian imperialist overlord (Russia), and rising backlash against dropping living conditions.


  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlbe honest
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    26 days ago

    Considering Ronald McDonald was a character primarily aimed at young children, I don’t think they were mentally capable of having personal responsibility at that age.

    As for the parents who were pestered to buy happy meals by their children, there’s like 50 ways to answer this question. I personally think that in a mentally healthy adult, personal responsibility is a factor, but it’s not the only one and is balanced by social conditioning, genetic predispositions, mood in the moment, and a ton more factors.

    The children who for one reason or another were brought up eating fast food are conditioned both socially and biologically to eat fast food, and breaking out of that addiction (as with any other addiction) can be very difficult, and is more complex than doing the equivalent of saying “git gud scrub”.

    Wow, that turned into a wall of text, sorry.

    Tl;dr: it’s way more complex than just “personal responsibility”.






  • Having one line about sleeping with the captain’s daughter might have been even more amusing (and thus more catchy) because of the double meaning.

    Very likely, probably why the whole captain’s daughter = captain’s whip thing took off as sailor slang to begin with.

    your average deck hand singing sea shanties isn’t thinking metaphorically when he’s singing about getting drunk and laid.

    I never claimed it was a metaphor, it’s slang. Similarly, the “gunner’s daughters” were the gun barrels midships on gunships.

    And insisting that the one line in the song isn’t about fucking is feels like wishful thinking

    I mean, no skin off my nose if you believe that, but it seems pretty clear judging from the fact that the captain’s daughter is a well known slang term for a whip in a song about punishing a drunk that that is extremely likely the correct original intent. Of course anybody can interpret anything any way they want.


  • Think about it inside the context of the song. Every other line is a type of punishment:

    • Shave his belly with a rusty razor (painfully pull chest hair out with a dull blade)

    • Put him in a long boat till he’s sober (put him somewhere uncomfortably cramped on his own)

    • Give him a dose of salt and water (probably the nicest variation of the song, make him vomit)

    • Stick him in a scupper with a hosepipe on him (scupper= hole in the side of the ship, so stick his head in a hole and hit him with a hosepipe)

    There’s also loads of other variations on the song with tons of different punishments for the drunken sailor.

    Why would this line suddenly be different?




  • by any reasonable metric you choose Valve is at best as deeply invested in MTX

    Completely agree with this. I honestly believe the best apples-to-apples metric is to look at their most popular games and compare the mtx across them, in which case Valve doesn’t exactly come across as good in the comparison.

    In terms of publishing, with the exception of Aperture Hand Lab (basically a little tech demo), they haven’t published any third party developer’s game since 2010. For the purposes of this conversation, I think it’s fair to count EA subsidiaries as EA.

    When you make no games you make no MTX

    Absolutely, this was the counterpoint I was trying to make about the raw “number of games” argument.

    EDIT: Oh, I see the misunderstanding! I mean “published” as “financially backed the development, advertising and releasing of the game”, not “published to their storefront”. Same word with multiple meanings can be a major source of misunderstandings.


  • EA has released way more games with no games-as-service stuff in them than Valve in the past decade.

    To be fair, EA has released way more games, period. This is across every category. Valve is primarily a digital marketplace company that sometimes makes a game, and has been for a long time.

    Also, I didn’t include EA as publisher, because it would drastically change the conversation. It’s not part of Valve’s overall business strategy (again, because they’re primarily a marketplace company now) so it’s not apples to apples. They simply don’t publish externally developed games, because why would they when they run Steam?


  • Just googled their latest 2 releases to compare. Sims 4: For Rent, a cash-grab low-effort Sims DLC, doesn’t have microtransactions while Counterstrike 2 does.

    EDIT: Neither does their last full game release, EA Sports WRC. Their upcoming game, F1 24 looks like it’s absolutely riddled with mtx though.