What’s with political columnists getting into comics writing? I remember Ta-Nehisi Coates did the same thing. It just seems so weird to spend your whole career on short-form non-fiction pieces and then pivot into an entirely different form of creative writing mostly aimed at teenage boys.

I am once again suffering from technology. So my university has introduced compulsory two-factor-authentication using a Cisco smartphone app in order to access JSTOR and the like, which was already a hassle. I had to hand-write a letter to IT because I couldn’t get to campus to set it up, lol. Now Google has updated their “integrity” standards and my cheap Chinese phone is no longer allowed to use said Cisco app at all, which means I’m forced to buy a new phone and contact IT again to set it up. All this because some IT people got it into their heads that the normal method of JSTOR authentication is nonviable or insecure or something. Frankly, I’m hoping those kickbacks from Cisco are worth it.

Ramses Ii

There’s an article about that: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

Unfortunately, we’re organized in a rather informal and egalitarian way, so there’s nothing to be done except maybe be the first to post the agenda. However, someone with more social capital than me called out that this didn’t follow the procedure we agreed on, so maybe we will talk about the way we do things and how seriously we take our division of tasks.

I’ve got to vent a bit. In my local org, we’ve got a subgroup (just a group chat) to prepare the agenda for the next meeting. I created a text document and put some topics in it, but received no reply of any kind. Now, there’s some current events happening, there was an optional meeting I skipped and people got together and created their own agenda. And it’s perfectly fine; it contains everything I wrote down and other, more important things. It’s just that the work I did was completely useless and nobody even bothered to tell me. These social interactions are very stressful to me and I have to make quite an effort to contain my emotions. This is really just my own problem, but I’m upset that I’m upset for no good reason.

Substack should just be forbidden in general, maybe with some exceptions for news articles that aren’t accessible otherwise. We really don’t need the opinions of “leftist” outrage merchants trying to make a buck on some Nazi website on here, I feel like.

Life is Strange has a lengthy stealth section in a dream sequence near the ending which doesn’t really add anything to the game but tedium.

Nearly every computer built after 2008 or so is possibly backdoored on a hardware level due to the Intel Management Engine (and its AMD equivalent). But unless you’re committing computer crimes that could arouse interest from the FBI, you’re better off worrying about your password and email security than obscure and unproven methods of exploitation in my opinion.

Thanks for the good answer! I do have an advantage in that I’m privately insured – something I’m thankful for every time I get involved with doctors about trans stuff – so a private therapist sounds like an option. Would you happen to know if there any good ones in, like, Berlin or Hamburg or so? I always get quite anxious when contacting therapists so I’d rather not do multiple telephone calls just to get blown off because of the wait list.

I’ll get an appointment at one of the places in Munich. Incidentally, I’ve had a preliminary talk at Uniklinik Essen and the experience was uncomfortable enough that I decided against them – can’t actually speak about the quality of the surgeries though.

Need some advice from comrades in Germany: Is there any way to get GCS here without doing multiple months of therapy? I can’t see how I could manage to get a slot at a psychotherapist, given how overworked they all seem to be, and I’ve got everything else done, so to speak, so I’m not even sure there’d be much of a point in therapy right now. Thanks in advance!

Genuinely how on earth do you misinterpret the themes of a film so poorly lmao.

I don’t appreciate that tone. Her accepting her sexuality ends in her having sex with what you call the “embodiment of male sexual domination” and then they both die. How does that make sense? It seems like everyone save the men loses out from her accepting her sexuality. And I don’t think it’s very coherent how the movie shows that sexual desire cannot be controlled – except via marriage – because that has murderous consequences, which can, however, also be resolved through sexual desire. I just don’t feel like the metaphors here work together and that is what I meant by “incomprehensible”.

To put it more clearly: In the Eggers films I’ve seen, every woman either ends up dead or part of a childremoved cult and I don’t think women who suffer are automatically a sign of feminist politics.

It’s so bad! You can’t see a thing, there’s a magic exposition man, everyone constantly talks for no reason and the message appears to be that women having sexual desires causes the plague. Like, Werner Herzog did this movie already and Eggers instead decided to crib most of the changes for his version from Francis Ford Coppola (and from The Exorcist, the scariest movie of all time (!)). I should have realized after watching The VVitch that he’s just another middlebrow director with weird gender hang-ups that get lauded for being incomprehensible. Also, what kind of filmmaker is unable to make a movie set in the current day? Seriously now.

Fuchsia Dunlop has a recipe by Buddhist monks in her Hunan cookbook that’s simple and vegan. You cut some celery and smoked tofu into strips, you fry the tofu in a wok, take it out, fry the celery, put the tofu back in and season with soy sauce and chili flakes. Serve the whole thing over rice et voilà.

Sidenote, but thought experiments are complete nonsense. It’s just something made up by Anglo philosophers so they don’t have to engage with the real world. Trying to ennoble it as a higher form of reasoning just seems like an attack on the kind of political considerations that actually matter. You’re not going to convince a hardcore Catholic that abortion should be allowed by posing them the trolley problem.

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What I don’t understand is why the German economy still hinges on heavy industry. That’s so 20th century. Shouldn’t it be all useless IT startups and financial services by now?

People say a lot of good things about Something Awful these days, but I think there was a real shift towards 4chan-style slur usage and shitposting that occurred a few years back. One of the last things Lowtax did, strangely enough, was close the subforums where a lot of that originated, and one of the first things the new owner did was reopen them and give them free reign of the forums. There was also a minor purge of trans users around that time, as I remember it. I really liked those forums once, but they’re completely unacceptable now safe for a few of the better-moderated megathreads.

Certain discussions of weight and eating habits might also merit a content warning – these might trigger people with eating disorders in some way and so I feel it’s better to be on the safe side.

I’m still nostalgic for the Saints Row 2 character creator because it was one of the only ones with a gender slider. If there’s just two (or even four, see BG3) body types, they’re usually still ultra-male and ultra-female in my view. The development of ever more realistic graphics has only served to cement this, I feel.