QuietCupcake

joined 4 years ago
[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Plenty of other actresses with awooga booba too.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Same thing for me.

I couldn't connect at all most of yesterday even though at least some others could get through judging by the posting in that time. Then it all seemed back to normal last night except for the Anubis anime character here and there. But today it's back to being completely inaccessible from the standard website. Nothing but 504 after 504. What happened to Anubis?

So anyway, I just resorted to using an app and it seems to be working fine that way. Feels weird using hexbear from an app and odd how much it changes my uh "workflow."

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 15 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Yeah I really don't understand the over-the-top infatuation with her in particular. She's not that great of an actress from what I can tell. She has a very flat affect (the "dead eyes" you mention) which can be a good thing and just what certain roles call for but not great for versatility and expressivness in general. And there are countless other conventionally beautiful actresses that can check off all the same tickboxes for mass/pop-culture appeal that Sweeny can. I guess it all has to do with being in the right place at the right time and doing a bit of work in some crass and culture-war adjacent things, like that dog-whistley jeans commercial, that made the chuds latch onto her symbolically as the quintessential Murican woman.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago

Exactly. I think it's also worth noting that it's not as if soft power isn't material. Soft power is not idealism it's just not as straightforward as direct military might. What Alaskaball said is true of course, but those things also feed back into soft power which in turn makes US hegemony, military dominance, and imperialism (like gunboat diplomacy, Marshall plan, etc.) more accepted and even supported by the vassals and the imperialized populations. Not unlike how base and superstructure both form a reinforcing and reproducing feedback loop with each other.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"Making sure you're not a bot stalin-point"

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago

Really surprised that Democrats are such an outlier at only 29%. None of the other demographics come close. Every demo jumped down, which isn't too surprising, but Democrats dropped by 35% with the percentage who disagreed at 29% now in '26 whereas black people as a demographic are at 47%. I really would have thought that number would be lower.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 21 points 3 days ago

I do remember learning that lovely little fact (kars4kids being a front for laundering money for the entity) from TrueAnon a while back. I just looked it up and its episode 477 if anyone is curious. The thing I'm shocked to hear at this point is that a court in the US actually ruled against them. Obviously this means California is antisemitic.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

brave enough to keep a discussion grounded in reality

But that's just it, he doesn't keep the discussion grounded in reality. He speaks on things that are vastly out of his purview and says shit that is blatantly false because he thinks he's an expert on everything just because at one time he did real theoretical physics. Even with physics, he says things for a "general audience" that are so dumbed-down as to be insulting, but worse, grossly inaccurate, leading people to have their misconceptions further ingrained rather than doing what a science communicator should do and clarify misconceptions.

string theory hasn't panned out mathematically

The math pans out fine. The problem is that it can pan out in virtually an infinite number of different ways that may or may not be valid descriptions of the universe, and nothing but the math can get panned out wrt string theory, at least with current tech or tech that is conceivably feasible.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 1 points 5 days ago

Good points. That all fits pretty well.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Good point, I have to admit I forgot about him too. What is up with that though? I would have thought he'd be more consistently demonized, seeing as he was the only one who could be said to actually be a leftist and had some genuinely correct views. Or I maybe that's it, there's incentive not to remind anyone of him lest more people start looking into his reasoning, where as these others are mostly just boilerplate libs?

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago

I tried it with Tor browser on a standard OS, hoping I'd get a similar result to what you got using Tor on Whonix, etc. It fed me a line about how my information was still shared but because javascript is turned off, it can't tell me what that information is. More like it won't tell me, because amiunique.org and other sites like this do so just fine. I know I can turn js on and reload, but part of the point would be to see the difference in info shared with it on vs off but this place can't test that.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

vegan-edge vegan-liberation

Another outsider here, so I can't vote But to anyone saying this will be too hard to moderate, know that other instances have done this (or very similar) with the result being less work for the mods.

 

It's a 2016 dialog choice and QTE driven game along the same gameplay lines as Telltale games like The Walking Dead. Of the writer-director, wikipedia describes him:

Khonsari was raised in his homeland Iran until 10. He fled Iran as a political refugee to Canada after the 1979 Revolution with his family.

My assumption is that there are two possibilities for this game. It's either just another run-of-the-mill both-sides-bad centrist-brained libfest that paints the revolutionaries as being "well intentioned" but all revolutions (except for bourgeois ones of course) inevitably lead to "authoritarian" dictatorships that are even worse than what existed before and any good-guy revolutionaries presented at the start of the game either turn out bad or are shown to have been naive fools for ever hoping things could be better. That's what the game is painting itself to be, regardless of whatever it is. The other possibility, made more likely given the writer-director's background, is that it's flat out unabashedly pro-imperialist, anti-Iranian unmitigated western propaganda.

I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think you know what I mean, where they kind of represent two ends of a shitty spectrum. (There's also the exceedingly slim possibility its politics are halfway decent, but I'm not really entertaining that thought because the chances are too close to null.) I'm curious enough about where this game lands on that spectrum that I think I'll go ahead and play it. I'm not one to rage quit in the traditional sense, but if it gets bad enough, I probably won't subject myself to it any further. So before going in, has anybody here already experienced whatever this game is pushing? Any thoughts about it one way or another?


Some quotes from the "Political and institutional responses" section of the Natopedia article on it:

When the game started gaining popularity in June 2012, Iranian conservative newspaper Kayhan published pieces naming it "pro-Western propaganda" and accusing Khonsari of espionage; he subsequently felt afraid to reenter the country. Some developers used aliases to protect themselves, and the concept artist fled Iran due to his involvement. Khonsari said that "anytime Iran has something written about them in the west, they feel as if it is propaganda against them." Following the game's release in 2016, the National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) blocked all websites distributing it in Iran and began gathering all illegally distributed copies in the country.

featured in a November 2016 UNESCO report by Paul Darvasi about the impact of games on learning about conflict resolution; Darvasi noted the game "might be studied to determine if [it] can be used to support the production of historical empathy, global empathy, and ethnocultural empathy, all which contribute to the acquisition and development of intercultural understanding".  In 2022, a branch of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education critiqued the game; teacher Alexander Zart found it affected by subjective depictions due to Khonsari's significant personal background, despite its framing as an "interactive documentary".

 

Thanks to ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @yogthos@lemmy.ml for this one, I saw posted here. Wasn't expecting to see a comic so perfectly nail it.

Edit: Aaaand now I see that this was basically posted yesterday, but as a link to the xcancel thread about it. So I guess here's the direct link to the comic at least.

 

Edit: So it looks like there are a couple posts about how this crackdown is fake news. Even in this very thread, someone is doing that, though they actually don't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

No, this is not fake news. These sites that are still up are not fmovies, which was itself part of a large piracy network, the rest of which has been dismantled as well, as has been discussed in other posts here. The sites still up are merely copycat sites riding the success of fmovies and trying to cash in themselves. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that, and if you can still watch movies like you did with the real thing, great. But some of them it appears are not the most scrupulous of pirates and have or link to potentially dangerous malware.

Regardless, please don't jump to "fAkE nEwS!" accusations when you don't know what you're talking about. All you're doing is muddying the waters about what really is going on and possibly leading people to think that misleading, potentially dangerous sites are fine. Don't do that.


So that's what happened to my beloved free treat-dispensing Fmoviesz. It hasn't worked for a month or so, but now there's no more need to speculate exactly why. There has been a huge wave of "piracy" outfit takedowns recently, which is both sad and worrisome and I wonder why this is all happening so all of a sudden. Why the severe crackdown now? Or is it the sort of situation where a big domino fell and they're all connected? They're really making sure any hint of commons gets enclosed and demonize it in the meantime.

I also wonder about the political motivations of Vietnam to go along with this and make the actual arrests. Is it due just to pressure from the west? Does Vietnam have any stake in copyright laws and this takedown, or the precedent of it, does actually benefit them somehow? What's the deal with all that?

From the article:

The efforts marked “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe”, said Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Hollywood trade group the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the chairman of Ace, in a statement. Larissa Knapp, the executive vice-president and chief content protection officer for the MPA, said the takedown sent a “powerful deterrent message”.

“We look forward to ongoing joint efforts with Vietnamese authorities, US Homeland Security Investigations and the US Department of Justice International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (Ichip) program to bring the criminal operators to justice,” she added.

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