Kiernian

The belief that everyone decrying Harris' stance on Gaza was knowingly or unknowingly participating in enabling a worse stance on Gaza than the still-not-great one we would have gotten with her.

Look back now with hindsight and tell me what would be better for Palestinians in Gaza. What we're getting with trump in charge? Or what we might have gotten if every single person who said negative things about Harris' stance had instead focused solely on how Trump's stance was objectively worse per his own words.

By not putting the focus on the absolutely 100% guaranteed WORSE stance of the two, people enabled talking points that led, in part, to where we are now.

THAT is why so many of us screaming about harm reduction and the lesser of two evils is SO pissed off about single-issue Gaza voters not putting in for Harris.

Stop letting perfect be the enemy of good. It leads to this.

Elections are about holding your nose and making the best of a bunch of imperfect choices.

Trying to make it anything else from the top down is folly. You have to start from the bottom up. Until that happens, we will never see our way out of a two party system.

Turning, my ass.

They're tossing penny candy off both sides of the parade float in the hopes that the crowd won't rush them.

Until he wasn't.

Lucas was eventually quite against large swaths of the EU.

It doesn't change how many people enjoyed it.

I think we can both agree things would be vastly different if Tolkien were still alive, but what I sincerely doubt anyone can agree on is what that would look like.

Just look at how many origins there are for orcs.

Not even Tolkien was a Tolkien purist, read some of his letters where he explained the overarching subject matter.

Originally, the Hobbit wasn't intended to be connected to the Middle Earth stories of involving sauron and the rings at all, he didn't even think it was set in the same world at first.

I think getting all up-in-arms about stuff that was still evolving and growing until the moment he died is a bit ridiculous.

Rings of Power is definitely MORE THAN ENOUGH into the realm of "in the spirit of" for me to personally find it highly enjoyable.

I'm having a hard time figuring out why so many people seem to have such an abiding need to specifically shit into other people's bowls of Wheaties the instant they find out they poured them from the box with the Harfoot biathlon team on the cover, though.

Considering the amount of whipped-up outrage I saw years ago when the first picture of a black female dwarf was revealed, I'm finding myself wondering if a bunch of actual fans are getting caught up in a driven sentiment that has nothing to do with fandom for Tolkien's actual work and more to do with a few overly vocal groups finding every niche, crack, and crevice they can to put a negative spin on representation in any form.

I would love to know how to do this, step by step, preferably without a Mac.

The Colin Meloy (decemberists) cover of that song is incredible.

I am. I absolutely love it.

In my mind this is no different than the 90s when we got a BUNCH of "extended universe" Star wars stuff, some of which went in some unusual directions.

My friends and I didn't care because it was MORE STAR WARS!

This is MORE MIDDLE EARTH! And it's AWESOME because of it in my mind.

I can't wrap my brain around how picky and critical so many people are these days.

Like, does anyone remember when it was nigh impossible to get stuff to watch in genres you liked? That was way worse in my mind than "the lightsabers look weird".

That probably shouldn't seem as weird to me as it does but I swear, 50% of the more vocal population of star trek online are far right folks.

I mean, people miss the point of fight club too, but that's only two hours long...

More like "sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched."

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I've worked, every place that a place I've worked has had as a client, and every business I've ever visited had the same problem -- sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren't enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

I read some of Hancock's earlier stuff like, 20+ years ago. There were some interesting theories about the possibility of civilizations more ancient than we were then aware of having actually existed.

In the time since, as I understand things, we've discovered "evidence" that points to civilizations of some kind 20,000+ years ago, which we didn't seem to have much of back then, and some of which seems to disprove some of Hancock's atlantis-type sophisticated lost ancient civilizations theories, but it was still a moderately compelling, engaging, and fascinating IDEA at the time even if the magnetic poles flipping opposite every 12,500 years was a little hard to swallow.

I'm not sure what he's peddling now, but when he throws out ideas, he's good at making them seem cool, so it could just be keanu is honestly fascinated by whatever concepts the dude is dishing out.

(The sphinx was originally a lion statue 100,000 years ago or whatever)

Saw them in concert.

Fricking amazing band.

I highly recommend them.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the "everyone has a streaming service" model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don't.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say 'please watch it this way, that's just how they rank stuff, sorry'?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that's behind all of the money they're trying to force it to make for them.

And that's just for one side of the debate.

Why isn't the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it's current incarnation?

That's actually a phrase translated into every language that has a phrases page on omniglot, which cracks me up consistently.

Ah!

I will not buy this TOBACCONISTS!

IT is scratched!