Content warning: Single user instance fediblock: social.icod.de (CW: homophobia/transphobia)
Been (re-?)watching Babylon 5, and I think it holds up remarkably well with a good story.
I'm into Season 3 and it's only been really dated by the intro, CG quality, aspect ratio, and the use of CRTs.
(questionable "re" because I think I watched only a handful of episodes as a kid)
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Random recommendation post:
Kagi: https://kagi.com
"Premium" Search Engine, free tier to try it out and a small monthly fee to use it regularly. Absolutely better results than Google, no ads, and more privacy. I really do recommend it. (And for my family there is a family plan as well...)
Beeper: https://beeper.com
A universal chat platform, if you long for the old days of Trillian, GAIM/Pidgin, and the like. Days when you could use your own chat program and just talk to everyone across everything... well this is it again. It's a Matrix service (think open source equivalent to Messenger/Skype/Discord/etc) and bridges to all the other services. Currently it's free, but it's planned to be free + paid extra features.
This has made a world of difference in my experience talking and chatting with people, especially the short list of people who talk primarily on Discord rather than SMS or Messenger. Plus if you're on Beeper or another Matrix service, end-to-end encryption is the default for complete security (You can even use your own client if you like without losing that)
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😂😂😂
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"The numbers are likely to get much, much worse."
A new study shows that infant mortality is worse in states with #abortion restrictions, based on data that predates the fall of Roe v Wade. From our friends at Truthout: https://www.texasobserver.org/infant-mortality-abortion-restriction-states/
#news #politics #USpol #health #healthcare #ReproductiveJustice #RoeVWade #racism
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who could have guessed that being pro life would lead to so much .... death?
Oh, basically everyone. Everyone told you this would happen.
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This is two years old but could easily be mistaken for current news.
Also a great summary of the whole situation and still entirely relevant.
https://youtu.be/INCXqWzH5vk?si=8fUbaEpG5AhcTrku
#israel #israel-gaza #Israel-GazaWar #Palestine #palestine-israelConflict
Uncomplicating The "Complicated" Palestine/Israel Conflict - SOME MORE NEWS
For 20% off your first order, visit http://MackWeldon.com/somenews AND ENTER PROMO CODE: somenewsHi. Is The Palestine/Israel Conflict Actually Complicated? P...YouTube
Ooof, just watched the new episode of Dimension 20.
Dropout is genuinely super fantastic about content warnings on their content... but they fell a little short on this one, mostly because they did something new and extreme... and didn't realize that they needed stronger warnings.
And of course in the FB group there are a whole bunch of people going "It's not their fault you didn't read the content warnings" like douches.
Content warning: Palestine/Israel, international politics
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A Detective Sabotaged His Own Cases Because He Didn’t Like the Prosecutor. The #Police Department Did Nothing to Stop Him.
==
Across the country, police have undermined and resisted reform. To protest a prosecutor, one detective was willing to let #murder suspects walk free, even if he’d arrested them and believed that they should be behind bars.
#StLouis #Missouri #Crime #CriminalJustice #Courts #News
St. Louis Cop Sabotaged His Own Cases to Undermine a Prosecutor
Across the country, police have undermined and resisted reform. To protest a prosecutor, one detective was willing to let murder suspects walk free, even if he’d arrested them and believed that they should be behind bars.ProPublica
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it seems that police hate to be accountable when they behave badly. Waaaaa!
Excellent investigation and reporting as always. Thank you!
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>Harry Potter reference in bio...?
>denied
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It's really wild coming into Baldur's Gate 3 after playing Solasta.
If you're not aware: Solasta is an unlicensed D&D 5e game that uses SRD content plus some of their own content to flesh it out some.
Interestingly enough, I'd absolutely say that Solasta is waaaaaay more faithful to D&D than BG3 is. And it's battle system is much better done, both between being more faithful and supporting things like proper flight and spider climb (as opposed to BG3 which doesn't have spider climb and implements flight as just a fancy long range jump basically).
It does a much better job of short rests vs long rests, let alone fast travel. Solasta doesn't have you warping back to camp mid dungeon, but instead you have to find a safe spot to camp in the dungeon if you want a long rest. And fast travel is done by accelerated movement rather than warping, so you can't use it to magically escape a dungeon.
That's not to say Solasta is outright better.
BG3 shines on drastically better story and voice acting, as well as making your dialogue choices really feel meaningful. I was never able to bond with my own characters really in Solasta like I can in BG3.
Oh, and BG3 feels like a complete package since so many races and classes in Solasta are behind DLC.
If someone told me they wanted to play BG3 specifically for the 5e combat and mechanics, I'd definitely point them to Solasta over BG.
#DungeonsAndDragons5e #DungeonsAndDragons #BaldursGate3 #BG3
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If two autistic people share a similar stim behavior, is that a stimilarity between them?
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I'd like to think there was a stimilarity between me and my mother when she was doing effleurage on my upper back.
(What I call effleurage is a very light caress, and is actually what the French word means. Well, more light *touch*, than light *caress*.)
It’s so sad that Elon Musk died of ligma
RE: https://mstdn.social/users/murphyslawyer/statuses/111182337374723094
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For those educated outside of the US, when are you required to start leaning a second/foreign language in your education, and how many years are you required to take secondary/foreign language classes?
For context, where/when I was in school in the US, no foreign language classes were even available in grade school (5-14yo) and only 2 years required in highschool (15-18yo), with a max of 4 years available. (I did 2 years)
Higher education can be extremely expensive here, and unless it is required for their major, many do not continue foreign language classes after highschool.
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"I'd like to share later some thoughts about my experience of learning foreign languages in the US. I know it is not exactly what you asked! But I think it is an interesting conversation."
That would be great! Looking forward to it!
I've been finding all the replies very interesting!
This was so much more difficult to write than what I thought!
Initially I came up with a long rant, which I deleted last night. This second time is equally long, but I think I've done a better job at extracting the main ideas.
First, as a white Latina woman, I have the privilege of not experiencing much discrimination -that is, unless I talk. But unfortunately, I've experienced discrimination, microaggressions and even overt aggression related to me speaking Spanish and my country of origin.
This made me think that the situation in the US may not only be a lack of language education in k-12, but perhaps also an active suppression of foreign languages other than English (languages from the global south as well as Native American languages). But this is just an hypothesis.
What I have observed is that not many people seem interested in learning languages (except international students), and not many kids from bilingual families maintain their second language when growing up. People can have many hobbies and cultural interests, musical instruments, sports, etc. But no second language.
I interpreted this as a mix of:
1) there is no immediate practical incentive. What practical reasons are there to learn another language other than English? The only incentive I heard was to "help immigrants that don't speak English" (but again, this frames the second language as a negative thing). Learning and speaking a second language takes effort and energy. If you don't practice it, you forget it.
2) difficulty of choice and practice. With few practical incentives, from all the possible languages, what do you choose? Do you learn Spanish? Ethiopian? Ukrainian? Mandarin? Lushootseed? And once you choose, where do you practice it?
The "difficulty of choice" has been the reason cited by my school district on why they don't teach any second language: they told me our city has immigrants with so many languages that the district cannot make a fair choice. They obviously cannot have one teacher for each language, they cannot choose one language over another, so they don't teach any.
(as a parenthesis, that does not seem to be a problem for our library, which recently started having story time in English, Spanish and Mandarin, has occasional programs about Lushootseed, and has children's books in Ukrainian, Russian and French. People, if you are in the US, please support your local library!).
The burden and microaggressions that came from our school district for having a bilingual kid (no longer bilingual after starting kindergarten), plus my gut fear of not wanting to speak Spanish in public for fear to be profiled as an "undesirable immigrant," makes me think there are deeper cultural roots beyond "a second language is not offered at school".
Content warning: Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
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Content warning: Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
Content warning: Injury, but it's only a cop and no visible injury; laughing at someone's pain and misfortune, but again it's a cop
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Gotta admit... I'm sold on Kagi.
The experience and quality has been fantastic using their free tier (100 free searches a month), enough that I decided to pay for it to keep using it.
Gist: it's a search engine that chose to rely on subscriptions instead of ads and data mining... and it shows in the quality of the search results. There isn't a whole page of them linking to other partner or owned services before you get any results. On top of that there's a crapload of customization and control of your experience (such as choosing what things it tries to automatically answer).
As mentioned, there's a free tier of 100 searches a month, that's actually good for most people to use for a week or two. No sensitive data needed, so I recommend giving it a try.
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30 Days of US Healthcare: DIR Fees
https://youtube.com/watch?v=I61wCVh0Y1E&si=FvaY0Ci3XrHOsB0p
Day 23 of 30 Days of US Healthcare https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpMVXO0TkGpdvjujyXuvMBNy6ZgkiNb4W
Another thing I’ve noticed this week; I’ve blocked half a dozen guys for trying to defend various sex pests, and all of those guys have either used a different account or a different social media to get in touch to tell me why I was wrong to block them.
It’s almost like they really struggle to understand the concept of consent on any level.
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Saw this and decided to share my commentary on it because it's extremely harmful:
Unfortunately nothing here is valid. They've solved the finger problem and it's pretty much only old models that show up there. People are bad at even as well (let alone the fact that real faces are asymmetrical). Purposeless or lack of intent is also common in human art (there are whole art styles around it). And lack of perspective often is because the real art it's emulating lacks perspective.
And those AI detection pages are very very inaccurate. They can't remotely tell you if it's actual AI work, just if they think there's a chance of it being AI work.
All of this, including the detection sites are causing problems for real people who get accused of their very real artwork being AI. People get shut out of communities and told that they need to entirely change their personal style if they want to be accepted because it's too "AI like".
And finally the comment about it taking an incredible amount of resources: it actually takes remarkably little. You can run these AI systems on a single desktop computer with a low to mid range graphics card. (One of the problems for these AI companies and one of the reasons they're so widespread is because it's so easy and cheap to run it yourself)
Note: I don't have the energy for an image description, if you reply with one I'll edit this post to include it.
The USPS will start shipping free COVID-19 tests again. You can start placing orders next Monday, September 25
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@gregly no the post office employees will do that too. basically, HHS paid for the test months ago, they were shipped to central USPS location, USPS handles requests of and distribution via their database.
this was planned in advance of shut down.
@gregly this is what's called "fee for service" in business.
lots of business is marketed as being delivered by one entity but that entity really farmed out the work.
(ghost kitchens are fee for service. one company provided the recipes, built in customer and brand marketing, the other provides the kitchen and chefs.)
Content warning: neurospicy, business, discrimination
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Just a reminder:
Mastodon != ActivityPub != Fediverse
It's been driving me up the wall how often people act like Mastodon is a synonym for both AP and Fedi.
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@raf@babka.social@shiri@foggyminds.com the actual thing I wanted to add but ap does not properly support is an tumblr-ask style thing. A post in wich user A sends a "dm" to user B asking one thing and user B answers publicly showing A's initial message.
Like it would require all fedi software to support this kind of stuff...
#Ther-more-I-think-on-it-the-more-I-can-think-on-a-hacky-solution-actually
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alternative_be✅🖖🏻
in reply to Erik Moeller • • •Content warning: Single user instance fediblock: social.icod.de
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Erik Moeller • •Content warning: Single user instance fediblock: social.icod.de
@Erik Moeller That is alot of homophobia for someone claiming to not be homophobic...
And if their feed is constantly populated by dick picks I think that says alot more about them than us...
I run my own server and follow alot of LGBTQ+ accounts and the first and only time I've seen dick picks has been one account I explicitly followed knowing I'd see them (and prior to that there was a content warning on the picture already).
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Shiri Bailem
in reply to Shiri Bailem • •Content warning: Single user instance fediblock: social.icod.de
Erik Moeller
in reply to Shiri Bailem • • •Content warning: Single user instance fediblock: social.icod.de
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in reply to Erik Moeller • •Content warning: Single user instance fediblock: social.icod.de
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