_NetNomad

for longer drives i queue up albums or an audio book, but for shorter drives i always use the radio. there’s something fun about “fishing” for a good song and those morning talk shows are stupid but endearingly so in small doses

when i lived in buffalo, we had this amazing station WECK FM that was what an oldies station was back when what an oldies station is now was modern, so like all 50s and 60s early rock and pop. five years living there and i was somehow still constantly hearing stuff i’d never heard before

the obvious, surface level answer is that you can’t seperate supporting the art from the harm that the artist does. if you’re either forking over cash or simply doing free advertising by talking about ir, you’re supporting the artist and their ability to do harm. the end consequence of that idea is that you can ethically enjoy a bad person’s art if and only if you can source it for free and keep it entirely to yourself

i think there’s a deeper level to it, though. there’s a quote saying that “art holds a mirror up to nature,” and I think that’s half true. art isn’t a mirror image so much as it is an image seen through a prism, which naturally colors and distorts the image. if i remember correctly, Harry Potter doesn’t deal with gender transition or gender non-comfority at all, but it is an image of the world reflected through the lens of a cruel and bigoted person, and that manifests itself in other ways in the story (two obvious ones off the top of my head being the goblin bankers and the house elves). you can’t seperate art from artist because the artist shapes the art. the shape imposed by the artist is what makes art art and not merely information or a representation. none of this is to say that the mere act of reading harry potter is immoral, but what it is is dangerous. there’s no avoiding doing dangerous things in life sometimes, but trying to look at art in a vacuum is like driving a car with a blindfold. driving with your eyes on the road is a managble danger, an acceptable risk- driving blindfolded much less so!

The company shared that it would go “all-in” on the mobile version of the platform in February.

TIL there’s a non-VR version of Horizon. wasn’t the whole point that it was VR? what’s even left if you take out the VR, just voice chat?

the one driving factor behind libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, or the NAP. the idea is that the only justified use of violence or force is to respond to someone else’s violence or force. in simpler terms, “do no harm, take no shit.” the problem is how you define “harm” and “shit” which is how you end up with right libertarians and left libertarians who each see the other’s “taking no shit” as the initial “doing harm”

if John Nestlé (name chosen for no particular reason) comes to town and takes all the water in the lake, bottles it up, and sells it, and then people start dying of thirst and fight to get their water back, who is doing harm and who is taking no shit? left libertarians say that the townsfolk are well within their rights to get their water back, but right libertarians would say John Nestlé’s business is well within it’s right to defend itself from them. both of those viewpoints come from the non-aggression principle, just going in with wildly different postulates. right now in america the capital-L Libertarian party is mostly right libertarians, so the term has come to be synonymous with them here

if you consider hierarchies to be a form of violence and believe that the only justifiable use of hierarchy is to destroy hierachy, then you are an anarchist and a libertarian. but with the conmotation the word has come to take on, they would certainly avoid calling themselves that

1974 D&D (OD&D) 1977 Basic Set (Holmes Basic) 1978 Advanced
1981 B/X (Moldvay Basic) 1983 BECMI (Mentzer Basic) 1989 Advanced 2e 1991 New Easy to Master 1991 Rules Cyclopedia 1994 Classic 1995 Advanced 2e Revised 2000 3e 2003 3.5e 2008 4e 2014 5e 2024 5.5e

Congratulations to D&D 5.5e, the 15th edition of D&D!

(I’m not familiar with New Easy to Master and Classic so if those are just variations of Cyclopedia then it’s 13. but also individual “rules editions” had different revised printings aside from 1995 2e- my copy of Holmes is the 3rd printing replacing Hobbits with Halflings- so if you include those who the hell knows)

to me, the Super Nintendo was the worst Nintendo console. so much of the library is games that either had better NES prequels or N64 sequels if not both. despite having a buttload more colors than the Mega Drive, so many of the games ended up looking bland and lifeless, with the notable exception of Super Mario World which looks like a Fisher Price product. the sound chip sounds like someone is sitting on it, and that washed out sound is admittedly nice for RPGs but it ruins everything else

and this isn’t me being a bitter SEGA fan! i think the NES and the GameCube were both signifigantly better than their SEGA contemporaries. just considering Nintendo consoles, i rank the Super well below the Wii U and Virtual Boy- those at least offered unique experiences

no because my external drive broke T_T i was flabberghasted when i got a new laptop and it didn’t have a disc drive. how am i supposed to rip CDs!?!? i still have a huge stack of 'em i still need to rip

ELO is an interesting case. Pinning down the original members is already a bit tricky, because the first album was really just a side project of The Move, before Roy Wood left to start Wizzard in the middle of doing their second album. If we’re generous and say their third album was really their first as a seperate band, we end up with a group that’s fairly static throughout the 70s and that most fans would call the classic lineup. the only two truly original members, though, were Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, and everyone else in the and was technically considered an employee, which you can imagine led to all sorts of legal chaos

in the late 80s Jeff decided to shutter the band. Bev Bevan wanted to continue but Jeff considered himself synonymous with ELO being their writer, so eventually the two of them agreed to let Bev tour under the name ELO Part II with a lot of the members of the classic lineup. In the early 2000s, Jeff wanted in again but the “employees” thing and some legal trouble between him and Part II left him wanting to start fresh. No one knows the full story, but Bev, who was seemingly still enthusiastic about touring, suddenly decided to retire. Part II had to rebrand to The Orchestra, no longer having a The Move representative, but kept touring. Meanwhile Jeff did an album and a short tour with his new ELO, which had their classic keyboard player but The Orchestra had basically everyone else from the classic lineup. Jeff’s ELO went dormant until 2015 where it went by the literal name of Jeff Lynne’s ELO. Keyboard player Richard Tandy recently passed away, and with violinist Mik Kaminski retiring this year from the Orchestra, ELO has not one but two ships, one of which has been completely and thoroughly Theseused and the other just one plank away.

i used to be a voracious reader, but as i grew up i slowed down. getting books and then lugging them around was less feasible with Stuff To Do, and this is gonna sound super stupid but i have a hard time getting comfortable reading a physical book. for whatever reason I hold it wildly different depending on if i’m reading the right or left page so i’m constantly moving around

i’ve started using libby and now i’m reading multiple books a month again. you need a physical library card but once you have it you havd access to all of your library’s digital stuff. in the US you can also get a state library card in some states online, giving you access to even more books. you can also find lots of classics online for free through project gutenberg, and the internet archive has a mix of free and rental books. the latter needs a special app to open them, though, and the only one i could seem to get to work was in italian

unfortunately age verification is now required to touch grass

i personally find bananna audio the most appealing

i am very happy with mbin. a lot of people are insisting there are no other alternatives in this thread but i am literally posting here from mbin lmao. the UI is very slick and it can also reply to microblog posts on platforms like mastodon, givinf you a full viee of the fedi. there are also non-federated alternatives like lobste.rs and i think digg is trying to stage a comeback

i think what artyom is getting at is that showing google maps works the way we already knew it worked isn’t much of a point, let alone a big one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategos_(game)

“Perhaps, Mr. Bond, we can make a wager. Should you win our ultimate contest of wits, I will allow myself to be captured, but when I win, you shall be at my mercy. Mwahahahahahaha! so now only one question remains- Strategos, or Warhammer?”

Part of it is that Voyager has the unenviable role of being one of TNG’s two successor shows. The other was DS9, and everything looks bad sitting next to DS9. Part of why DS9 was able to do the wild things that it did was because the writing team had minimal supervision and were allowed to go buckwild- paramount were keeping a closer eye on first TNG, and then Voyager. Because of that, Voyager plays it safe and worships the status quo even when the fiction is begging to go in another direction, and the whole series has this feeling of having been written by committee. This even frustrated the writers, one of whom left the show out of frustration to go write the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which is essentially gritty, serialized Voyager

that said, I watched the whole thing and largely enjoyed it. you kind of have to meet it where it is, and accept that major plot details get glossed over and everyone takes turns holding the idiot ball. for me, the characters are what salvages the underwhelming plot. being a smaller ship, younger characters like Kim and Paris are able to be movers and shakers, giving the show a coming-of-age quality not found again until LDS and Progidy. Janeway is great when she’s not holding the idiot ball, it was really awesome seeing a captain who came up through science instead of command. When the blue or gold shirts give most captains a solution to a problem, they’re glad the problem it solved, but Janeway would get excited about the solution itself, sometimes even finishing Belana’s sentences.

Neelix had never so much as heard of starfleet, and had none of the training or skills even a crewman would need, but his good nature and see-a-need, fill-a-need ethos arguably makes him the most starfleet person on the boat. Kes is similar, with the added twist of dedicating herself to a voyage she won’t live to see the end of.

the doctor is an interesting inversion of the good idea/meh execution pattern because his concept is unremarkable- essentially a rehash of Data learning to be human, just accidentally and with sarcasm- but the execution was incredible. later on when 7of9 joins the cast, she displaces him as The Data but he remains a main character and takes on a mentorship role which allows him to develop even further

all in all, it’s a show full of then-new and brilliant ideas that regularly fumbles the execution. and that isn’t for everyone, especially with the plethora of other great trek out there. but if you watch it and are able to forgive the not great scenario writing you might enjoy it nonetheless