QuietCupcake

There is an overwhelmingly strong argument to be made that Zelensky is merely a useful figurehead that the Ukrainian Nazi-led military is willing to tolerate so long as he's useful. There are even videos of one of the commanders talking about how uncomfortable he was that a Jew was being put into the head of state role, but relaxed once he saw how successfully it whitewashed them in the eyes of the world. Zelensky is there to serve a purpose, neither the military command structure nor the poor grunts who are forced to fight in the trenches have any love for the former comedian doing vanity photo shoots and kowtowing to Trump's mockery on live TV.

And speaking of the low level soldiers and their low morale? On top of ordinary forced conscription (which is always popular /s) Ukraine has been pressganging innocent people off the street who are shoved into white vans and sent to the front lines to fight and die as cannon fodder. Do you think those soldier's morale is going to drop that much more because the leader presiding over the country when that happened to them also got kidnapped? Most of them would probably chuckle and correctly say he got a taste of his own medicine.

Kinda hard to sanction the country that prints the currency the world economy uses. If dedollarization had somehow happened, it might be conceivable. Even then, the west is structured, by design, as a hierarchy of subservience to the US, economically, militarily, even ideologically.
edit: I know you were drawing a comparison to the west's reaction to Russia's intervention in Ukraine to highlight the hypocrisy. I'm just sayin'.

Ratchet effect working as intended.

Everyone seems to be focusing on the absolute interest rate, but just as interesting to me are the changes since 2024. Like why is there such an outlier increase in Indian porn interest this year? It moved up 15 places. Solo female is the next biggest jump by moving 10 places up. Milf and anal have both dropped a bit. Not by much, but they were dethroned from being the very top placed in popularity to now being below, presumably for the first time, lesbian and transgender, both of which climbed more than milf and anal dropped. Makes me wonder how much of this is a reflection of some kind of deeper cultural shift, and how much the smaller fluctuations are just expected randomness and noise.

Edit: not like pornhub is following any kind of scientific rigor, so it's hard to draw any kind of real conclusions from it, but assuming it's representative of people's interest within the population that has access to internet port, it's still interesting.

If one was thinking of building a good gaming PC soon (I probably can't begin to afford it, but you know, hypothetically), and wanted it to be mainly a Linux box, but hopefully still high end for gaming, would it be wise to buy just the GPU for it right now? Even though the rest of the components can't be purchased at the moment, maybe they can be later, at least the sky rocketing prices of the GPUs would have been avoided. Also, assuming this hobby is something this hypothetical person knows very little about, what GPU should they get? As far as best bet on being as future-proof as possible. It should be AMD for Linux, not NVIDIA right?

Or maybe it's already commonplace and we just don't analyse or talk about it the same way.

I strongly suspect it's that. Not because I have any real statistical information to back it up, but as loathe as I am to admit it, I think at this point I fit the definition for hikkikomori. And on the few occasions I've tried to find others like myself, doing so wasn't exactly hard. I don't know how different I am in that I actually used to have something of a normal, if very reserved social life. I fell into this current, but long-lasting deep isolation later on, post-youth, so maybe I'm just a hermit.

Most of what I've read (which isn't all that much) is that in the US and other western countries, people who fit the description usually just get categorized in with others with extreme depression and anxiety disorders, since that's virtually always part of the hikkikimori package. But that the US equivalent to hikkikimori lifestyle isn't really counted or studied as a phenomenon unto itself. There is some study of NEETs, but that usually doesn't have as much to do specifically with extreme social isolation as with the economic factors for not working or being in school. I've been diagnosed with AvPD, Avoidant Personality Disorder, and at least as of a few years back, I wasn't the only hexbear to say so. My suspicion is that this disorder strongly correlates with a very similar kind of lifestyle to the hikkikimori in Japan.

There are (were) like 10 to 15 power posters I could name off the top of my head that, while not the only ones to do so, were a huge piece of what kept this place hopping, but who are all just gone now. Some from bans, like you said was the case with Nakoichi, but also Z-poster (somewhat ironically because the two of them always wanted the other banned if i remember right), many others left due to the struggle sessions like PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULT, Egon/REgon, (this part of the list I think is longer but I'm not sure about some of them), and some just seemed to up and vanish like Frank. (I miss that guy).

With some it's hard to know because frequent name changes. But it's still clear that many of the people who were the biggest posters just aren't here anymore and we dont seem to be getting new high frequency posters to fill the very real void they left.

Shoutout to the power posters who have stuck around though!

The highly scientific term for this phenomenon is "blep."

For anyone reading this who might be scratching their head as to what "tankie" means, you can find descrriptions of its history a number of places, but for all intents and purposes here on the fediverse, it simply refers to the people who have the most education in history and socioeconomics. Since reality is in direct contradiction with most of the prevailing narratives pushed by the powerful beneficiaries of the dominant systems (the most obvious of these systems being capitalism), there will always be a contingent of true believers in the dominant narrative who are shocked to find that there are others who openly reject those narratives. The former will clutch their pearls, aghast that the propaganda they've believed all their lives is being questioned by these... these... muckrakers! And so a pejorative is used (hence the word "tankies") to otherize and sequester the individuals best able to challenge those narratives, individuals whose presence tends to trigger the uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance in those who aren't yet ready or able to put their beliefs to honest questioning.

In short, if you have no problem with seeing and reading perspectives that might make you question your own perspective, then you should have no problem with the "tankies." And as for those who would actively defederate from those vile tankie instances so as to avoid having to confront even the possibility that their own beliefs are riddled throughout with deep misconceptions, well that should tell you something about the priorities of those tankie-fearing communities.

The game defaults to the hardest difficulty and describes it as the intended experience but it also says "But go ahead and play on a lower difficulty if that's what it takes you to finish the game."

And that's literally the simple answer to all this supposed controversy. Doing it this way makes it a no-lose scenario. People who want the developers intended vision can have it. People who need or would like it more accessible still get to play it. The developer gets to be confident that people who can play it as intended will probably do so while more people who never would have been able to play otherwise, still get to experience it too, if a little bit lighter of a version than the "intended" one.

But the "git gud" crowd still bleats and moans and acts as if mere knowledge that an easier mode exists would somehow negatively effect their experience. Which reveals that for most of them it's actually a lot more about them wanting to be gatekeepers than it is about some supposed artistic purity. They should be happy with difficulty settings because if anything it's an additional feather in a person's cap to be able to say "yeah, I beat such and such game on hard mode.!" Like, I get to feel pride to be able to say I 100%'ed Aeterna Noctis, contender for the hardest metroidvania, on its hard mode setting. (For the record, I'm not very good at games in general but I loved that one and so I enjoyed practicing it. I was also privileged enough to have the time to do so). It has an easier mode, and I'm glad it does, for altruistic reasons: I'm happy that more people get to enjoy it, and for selfish reasons - I can puff out my chest and boast about how I beat it on the hard mode.

There is no good argument that any difficult game can't do as Pathologic 2 and Aeterna Noctis ended up doing. Make it clear that the game is "meant" to be played on the hard mode, but give people the option to play it on easier, more accessible modes.

bring more hilarious results

If I remember right, he did have more to tell the interviewer about the workings of magnets but much of it was about how they're just a specific peculiarity of something that happens all the time with literally everything we see that we don't question because we're used to it, only that we think the same thing is strange when we see it lined up a certain way on a macro level, so we try to look for analogies that make us feel like we've made sense of it. But that ultimately there is no analogy that he or anyone could make to the macro human-experiential world that would be adequate. It's like rubber bands - well no, it's really not. It's like the solar system - well no, it's really not. And that while he could tell you a bit more about what was going on at a deeper level, which he did, eventually you and everyone else just has to accept that yeah, this do be what it do, and there truly is nothing further that we can say about why it do. In the same conversation he talks about how physics, rather our understanding of it, is like peeling an onion, and we don't know if there is a final deepest layer we haven't reached or if it just keeps on forever with more layers (either way it's fun to try to find out).