They show me nothing but naked hostility. The feeling is mutual.

If you really want to piss people off, treat every individual with compassion and dignity. Even (especially) if they don’t treat themselves like that.

Also, corporations are not people, my friend. So use the above to help guide your social engineering tactics.

Not unethical or illegal, but avoiding a barrier, if you have a problem that a company won’t solve using regular customer service means, spend time to find their email formula (FnameLname or FLname or FnameL @company.com) do some online searching, and then email your unhelpful CSO person and start to CC senior people in the company “to bring this error to their attention.”

If the unhelpful CSO person hasn’t messed up, then it’s no heat on them and their supervisor will just say “ugh, just get rid of this guy,” and solve your problem. I’ve used this method a dozen or so times, works well.

It’s paid by weight and thickness so fill it with trash like pieces of cardboard and sand.

I’ll second NK Jamisin’s Broken Earth series. At a dinner a friend mentioned he had just finished the second book and the dinner immediately turned into talking about how amazing the series is. Highly recommend.

Three Body Problem is hard science sci-fi with amazing storytelling. The last book sort or rushes some parts, but I think that story of works for it in the context of a story of humanity rushing at dealing with possible destruction.

I didn’t see it mentioned, but the Hyperion Cantos books are more classic SciFi/fantasy but it still hit. I cried at the ending, I’m not sue I ever have before at a book.

I actually liked A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) but, obviously, an incomplete series. Still.

Came here to recommend this.

Amazing series. Totally out of the norm scifi-fantasy that’s beautifully written. The kind of books you can’t put down and then once you hit those last 200 pages you get anxiety about what life is going too bed like without this story on it anymore.

Intentionally confusing.

This had been planned and pushed back something like 3 or 5 years, so it’s no surprise, and doesnt affect that many Americans. Without confusing you to think you’ll be fingerprinted to go to the store, it’s not getting a lot of clicks.

VLC maybe 20 years. How long has it even been around?

GIMP 10+ years for sure.

Another form of this question is for married people, of if their spouse’s genitals one day just flipped inside-out or outside-in, would that be enough to end your relationship?

I love my partner so, so much, as she basically saved my life. And if she woke up tomorrow sporting a turgid member, I wouldn’t love her any less. In fact, quite far from a deal breaker. Even if she, out of nowhere, wanted bottom surgery, I would support her 100%. But, with that, presenting as the gender she does is what makes me attracted to her. My brain stem loves them good lady shapes, and the rest of my brain loves this individual lady in particular.

It’s a package deal, but of she had a package, that’s not part of the math for the deal.

Where’s the Kalshi bet that he TACOs this?

It was the first anime series I had seen, IIRC. Maybe not the first anime anything. I saw it on VHS tapes back when it was new-ish in the US. A friend in college rented it in parts over several weekends spanning a couple months. We binged it until around 4:00am each night he could get tapes and I slept or almost slept through a few boring bits and pieces of it that are contextually important. I was all about the Eva lore and battles and liked that the Evas weren’t just robots.

I might be remembering this wrong, but the store only had the original episode English dubs, so we had to find some random on craigslist with Death and Rebirth (or was it End of Evangelion?) episodes copied on a VHS tape he just had and then borrow that, or maybe we bought the bootleg copy for like $10. Then somewhere read a text file on some geocities page about the differences to get caught up and make sure we had the right episiodes. This was before torrenting more than MP3 via Npaster was a thing, and I think I had first seen a movie on DVD a few months before this, so this was sort of our only shot.

The first ending made me so mad I told my friend I wasn’t going to chip in for the rental that time because the cellos and drawing episode was such BS as an ending. I understand why the director kept trying to redo the ending after that, it was such a confusing let-down.

Recently watched it again on Netflix, and forgot how much weird art-but-also-borderline-loli scenes there are. I was actually surprised how much I recalled and didn’t sleep through. Amazing stuff, and I certainly identified more with the 3 adults playing the Id/Ego/Superego this time around than I did the kids.

My thought process as well.

TNG? Hell no, it was the end of a Golden Era. SNW, all the way. By the time you get old enough that missions of science and explorations are thrown to the side in exchange for war, you’re 100 and living in some retirement holodeck.

Summer mode:

Front right pocket, phone. Left pocket keys and slimline wallet. Optional, pocket knife in little coin pocket.

This is utter BS.

A foreign national on US soil doesn’t get the same protections as a US citizen would overseas.

What they’re saying is “fuck 'em all, let God sort 'em out!” for warrantless data searches and collection. And then waiting for the lawsuit 20 years from now about clear violation of the law to bother thinking about this.

WTF is this article? Browser extensions are standard browser fingerprinting data.

Another humorless Marxist cosplayer on Lemmy 🤦

I can see you also didn’t read. Only one word was important and you missed it!

your lack of enthusiasm for Marx.

You…

So you have an axe to grind and simply won’t accept anything other than your brand of groupthink.

Then, my apologies for not realizing you were from a .ml instance earlier.

yet

Um, so I’m threatened with a terrible no good downvote you’ve already given me, and mean words, unless I conform to your groupthink? lol. Tell me more about who’s free and who isn’t while expressing how trapped you are mentally, monetarily, and emotionally. You’re welcome to call me stupid for choices my parents made as a child, as it only shows how you’ve tried to apply the label sticky-side out.

Perhaps your reading of Marx was too shallow, as to skip that socialism fetishizes material goods and materialism to the point where it seeks to control all of it. It’s every bit as materialist as capitalism, otherwise it wouldn’t care at all about who controls the means of production at all.

Indeed, and failed socialist governments proved the point time and again for a century that they were every bit as materialist, in some ways, much more so. Religion is inherently non-material; it’s spiritual, yes? That’s a pretty easy definition to agree on, that Invisible Sky Daddy is non-corporeal, right? I can attend any temple or church I want and never give them money. Some say I should, and that’s between me and Invisible Sky Daddy. Or, even better, I can be a pagan out in the forest praising nature, or a Buddhist. Socialism makes those things illegal exactly because they’re non-material and therefore not subject to control of the materialistic state. Music, movies, all media is regulated by the state because it might give you non-material feels about life and hope and joy. That media can only fetishize the materialism of the state and those who lived lives doing so.

Definitely don’t change your mind. it’s OK, I promise, that hate will burn you up from the inside and give you nothing to show for it.

;D

Nope, very much the opposite. But I also know how materialism is defined and not many people in this thread seem to, through will or ignorance, neither would surprise me.

Taking a step back, this thread is tankie catnip for people who only think materialism=capitalism, and capitalism=the only bad thing ever. Sorry that this is how you find out, but socialist governments have been and remain hard materialists as well. More so than capitalists in some ways. The easiest example is that non-material social groups - religions - are generally illegal. Regardless of your personal thoughts on that, science, the “religion of materialism” is permitted. The only non-material fetishization is generally around the Party. Socialism in general is all about not letting people decide their own fates with regard to material goods at all, but having the state command all aspects of production.

If people in a capitalist country can’t afford to do anything then they’re in an economic prison. We can agree on that, right? But the bars of that prison, short of medical issues, are bars of your own making. If you move to a hippie commune, is that a zoo in a world where everyone is in their own prison? Or is that simply another kind of prison because they might have rules about helping out with time and effort? Those are costs, too.

Do you need Marxism to be the only answer?

I’ve never been called stupid for being homeless as a child before.

That’s 100% not what anyone considers materialistic.

Obviously, feed your children. Feed yourself. That’s not materialism, that’s surviving. I’m not talking about starving as some moral high ground.

I’m talking about people who stress about not going to brunch or having the latest whatever BS phone. That is materialism.