Ludo? I haven’t played that since I was a tiny kid! I can’t say I remember much about how it’s played.

Fun fact: nothing justifies genocide. Nothing.

I’ll add, not me personally, but I do know two people who had a similar arrangement. I don’t know the precise details of the reasons, but I believe it had something to do with dysfunctional parents or finances. In both of those cases, the couple are now happily married and well-integrated into the broader extended family.

There are two separate issues with lootboxes.

First, children. Porn games (and videos) have never been marketed at children. Lootboxes have. It’s not an age-gating issue, it’s an issue of actively promoting gambling for children. Games with gambling elements should be illegal to sell or market to children, and platforms can back this up with parental controls tools, without the need for any privacy-invading ID or facial recognition.

The second is relevant to adults. General things around lootboxes being exploitative bad game design, regardless of the audience. You don’t have to support banning it to be able to say it’s really shitty. Personally, I would advocate very strict reporting on odds of success, and mandate the implementation of self-exclusion features, the same as the law requires (at least here in Australia) for casinos.

“hmm so these women abandon their ‘motherly’ duties of raising children and staying in the home

More than that! When Lucy is turned into a vampire, she feeds on children. She turns into the very opposite of the motherly feminine ideal. The same is true of Dracula’s brides, who feed on a baby in one of the early chapters. Dracula, by contrast, feeds on adults. He shows an interest in Jonathan (bisexual? Eww, that’s not natural!—side note, Stoker himself was likely bi) but most of his attention is focused on women like Lucy and Mina. The expectation of a gentleman being a chivalrous protector of ladies is inverted.

There’s also the fact that Lucy, who early in the book expresses her wish to marry all three of the men who proposed to her:

Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?

It’s the very sexually-forward woman who ends up succumbing to vampirism and being killed for it. But not before receiving the bodily fluids from all three of those propositioners—plus van Helsing. The sexual undertones of the blood transfusions are hardly subtle, but this also ties into another major theme of the book, which is how powerful modern science and technology can be as a tool to defeat strange unnatural superstition.

We’ve recently been doing a Dracula bookclub over at !vampires@lemmy.zip, reading through each diary entry/letter/newspaper clipping on the day it is set. We are, as we speak, amid the section between when Lucy has died and arisen as a vampire, but before she has her final death at the hands of the crew of light. In fact, as soon as I’m done with this thread I’m gonna go and do today’s reading, and I think that might be Lucy’s last. edit: I was wrong. Lucy unlives for another night…or two…

Provided it’s got a decent narrator, audiobooks are like literal bedtime stories

One of my favourite books I’ve literally only read on audiobook. I don’t love ebooks, and this book is out of print with second-hand copies going for $200+ online, so audiobook is basically the only option. It’s not the same experience as reading with your eyes, but it’s still a great way to get the story.

Automattic’s CEO seems to be saying that this is a bug. Apparently people who previously paid for the app should not be getting ads. I’m extremely sceptical about this, given that customer service on both email and their forums are pretty adamantly saying the opposite, but this is a space worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve followed this probably closer than the average gamer, but I still wouldn’t say I’ve followed it very closely.

The sense I get is that once TCR took it over, they moved the game in a direction that allows less personalisation in terms of roleplay. You’re no longer playing some newly-embraced nobody, you’re playing a hundred-year-old character with a very specific backstory. But it’s honestly still not completely clear. I’ll be interested to see feedback from people after its release.

My experience is that on Reddit it replaces the comment with [unavailable], similar to [removed] when a mod removes it, or [deleted] when they delete it themselves.

And that on Lemmy, it depends on client. On lemmy-ui (the default web client), it sometimes shows up as that “1 more reply” option, but when you click it, it never loads in. On Jerboa, it says something along the lines of “unable to retrieve this comment”.

Both of those are what happens when you come across a comment from a person who blocked you in the wild. It may or may not be different when it’s in your inbox.

I’ve been blocked by at least one person on Lemmy, for reasons that I honestly have no idea, and have come across this in the wild a couple of times, including opening something I originally found on my computer in Jerboa to double-check, as well as opening up incognito where I’m logged out and therefore not blocked.

Also replying to @MagicShel@lemmy.zip, @wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com

If you block someone, you don’t see their replies

On both Reddit and Lemmy, blocking someone prevents them from replying. It prevents them from even seeing your final word*

* sort of. Depending on exactly where and how they look.

that goes onto a separate device only for those purposes

Or in a VM if you don’t have any spare devices available. VM escapes exist, but they’re a pretty rare and severe type of vulnerability that’s unlikely to be casually utilised by proctoring software.

I’ve found out people have no problem logging into their Google or Microsoft account on public PCs. I brought the PDF on a CD

With 2FA I probably wouldn’t have too much of a problem with doing this. Especially if I then change password afterwards.

Another option would be to host it somewhere that you can remember the URL. If you don’t care for the privacy of the document itself, just using a URL shortener and Google Drive’s public sharing would work fine, or hosting at your own domain.

Personally though, I’m glad that on the rare occasion I need to get something printed (I have my own black and white laser printer at home for 99% of my needs), my local company for that sort of thing lets you upload it from home and pick up.

Would they do that? No idea. But could they? Yes, without a doubt. I don’t know that browser in particular, but if you’ve installed some software on your machine, that software can do anything any other software could do.

edit: this page (which seems like it might be from the developers of that browser) indicates it can monitor your screen and restrict your Internet access.

Did they require you to install any desktop software or browser extensions? Did they request permissions like camera access or screen recording? If the answer to all those questions is No, then I can’t think of any way they could possibly know what you were doing.

you brought up top month and I don’t see how you’d want that to work

The truth is I don’t want “top month”. What I really want is “best result, filtered by this month”. But unfortunately that doesn’t exist, and in the absence of that, I use “top month”.

I mean, based on the source, they’re still even on Twitter which is a lot more overtly fascist than WhatsApp. So…yeah…

Yeah Modern Revised Romanisation transcribes ㅐ as “ae”, which works a lot better.

Though it introduces its own problems. For example, it transcribes ㅓ as “eo”, which causes English speakers to pronounce it as “ee-oh”. Take Jecheon (제천). Most English speakers would pronounce that as “jeh-chee-on”. A better pronunciation would be jae-chun (with “u” being the vowel in “gut”, or maybe jae-chon" (the vowel in “chop”).

Yeah “hun day” isn’t too bad. I’m not Korean myself, but I think I prefer that pronunciation to “hi-oon-day” which is what I usually hear.

“Hun day” kind reminds me of “win” as a pronunciation of Vietnamese “Nguyen”. It’s obviously wrong, but it works pretty well as a pronunciation that uses phonemes and phonotactics common to English.

It’s definitely not unique to Americans.

And tbh I don’t really blame them too much. It’s spelt with an older form of romanisation which is, in my opinion, really, really awful. I don’t really love more modern romanisation schemes, but at least “dae” would be unlikely to be pronounced as “die” in the way “dai” is.

I did have to go and check but yeah, that’s it.

Very, very few westerners can. They almost always pronounce it with three syllables.