themeatbridge

Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”

Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).

Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.

I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.

Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.

But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?

Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.

Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered “helper” NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won’t engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.

To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it’s jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don’t make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it’s all stuff that would happen around a table in someone’s basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.

You don’t have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you’re watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.

I think I still have my google voice number.

It’s kind of weird we don’t have the option to create multiple voicemail boxes. How hard would that be?

I’ve been using Etar for years. Can’t complain. Edit to add that it’s an open source calendar app available on F-Droid.

I graduated from college magna cum laud 20 years ago. This is the first time it has come up in any context since I graduated. I took it off my resume 15 years ago to make room for experiences.

Uber.

Scared because he was high? You shouldn’t drive while high.

I love seeing crossovers. The cool thing about comics is you could have someone show up in another book, and then you’re interested in that character so you go read those books. The movies and shows should be like that, relatively independent but with occasional references and cameos.

Like the way Matt Murdock appeared in She Hulk was enjoyable. As long as you were aware of the Netflix shows, you didn’t need to have watched all the Defenders episodes to understand it. But maybe seeing him in that show made you want to check out the Netflix series.

What I don’t want is like a full introduction every time a special guest character shows up. Like if Hawk Girl makes an appearance in Peacemaker Season 2, we don’t need a “Hi, I’m from the Justice League and I’m an ancient alien wielding Nth Metal, how can I help you?” conversation.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

We could go several rounds on the nature of government and the human condition, but that would take time and effort. Instead, I’ll share a blind quote of dubious origin and hope you figure out the rest.

Meanwhile, some capitalist oligarch is paying a team of research psychologists to feed trillions of data points into a supercomputer to determine the exact font they need to use in their international astroturf advertising campaign designed to convince you that you already have the government you deserve.

Until you confirm that you have a working backup, your backup is theoretical.

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apt is for like when you want to, and apt get is the other way to get the apt. And then if it doesn’t, sudo apt will, or then sudo apt get. Like if you’re just doing an apt, and then you also need to apt get, you can.

Watching the Brak Show feels like smoking weed to me, but I’m completely sober. Except for when I’m high.

I think “selfish” is a better word for it in all instances, because some people are just selfish. Like, if you can’t be bothered to return your shopping cart or pick up your dog’s shit, then that’s selfish. It’s not anywhere near the same category as being too burnt out to do the dishes after a double shift, or wanting to sleep in on a day off.

Calling all of it “lazy” creates some imaginary obligation to the universe that simply does not exist. You don’t owe the universe clean dishes or your time in the morning. If you have roommates and you left dishes in the sink, you are being selfish. If your kids have an early baseball game, and you are too hungover to show up, then you’re being selfish. You are always obliged to return your cart and pick up after your dog.

… As was foretold by the prophecy.

And there was much rejoicing. (yaay)

Go to the landlord and provide your account of what is happening. Document as much as you can, and stop trying to figure out why they are so upset. You’re not going to discover some hidden rational explanation, nor is that your responsibility. Protect yourself.