I think it's kinda interesting that there's a whole universal force that kinda goes uncommented upon in popular physics. I also don't know anything about the strong nuclear force, but I heard someone say once that it's actually just electromagnetism on a small scale? If there was, like, a good documentary that centers the history and experiments that lead researchers to conclude the existence of these things, that would be helpful. Being able to situate research in historical context really goes a long way to getting my head around a concept.

Parma is quiet at night. The man sitting opposite me is paranoid someone will overhear our conversation. “They hate me here,” he explains in a hushed voice. He checks behind him, but the only other person in the osteria is a waitress who has had nothing to do since serving us our osso buco bottoncini. The aroma of roasted bone marrow wafts up from the table. Amy Winehouse’s cover of “Valerie” plays on a faraway radio.

“Can I badmouth them?” he asks. I tell him he can. After all, he hasn’t been invited here to expose corporate fraud. He has come to tell me the truth about parmesan cheese.

There’s a dark side to Italy’s often ludicrous attitude towards culinary purity. In 2019, the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggested adding some pork-free “welcome tortellini” to the menu at the city’s San Petronio feast. It was intended as a gesture of inclusion, inviting Muslim citizens to participate in the celebrations of the city’s patron saint. Far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini wasn’t on board. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said.

https://www.tumblr.com/anneemay/712987153080205312/dude-literally-received-death-threats-from-italian

(sorry if this is the wrong com for this)

"Everyone [in the United States] born after 1945 is a boomer. The only difference is that, over time, precarity increases and technological sophistication also increases."

-- Matt Christman, Hell of Presidents Ep. 10

This is it. This is the one good take on yankeedom's generational politics. The generation we traditionally define as "boomer", people born within the first twenty years after the end of WWII; that generation has far more in common with subsequent generations than any of us do with any generation before. In the broad view of history, we're the same.

The early boomers were the first to attend a nationally standardized schooling system -- what is, by and large, still the same system we have today. The early boomers were the first generation to grow up with television -- with audio/visual mass media dominating not just the public consciousness, but also the early developmental phases of children. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they were probably also the first generation of US citizens where the majority reach adulthood without knowing chronic hunger. Hell, the first generation in which the majority have not seen the unadulterated night sky.

We have all these things in common with them. Getting mad at them for being how they are is an understandable response. But, I also think it's kind of silly. Those first boomers had to navigate all that without the benefit of older adults who had grown up in similar conditions.

https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/737626132079362048/the-trouble-with-the-rise-of-the-youtube-video

Trascript

The trouble with the rise of the YouTube Video Essayist™ is that everybody wants to be the next Defunctland or Hbomberguy, but all the wannabes know is how to be an influencer, so the resulting video essays are always really about themselves. You’ll get a forty-five-minute video with maybe fifteen minutes of actual, topical information padded out with half an hour of tedious theatrics about how hard it was to do research for the video and how nobody wanted to talk to them, and I’m just sitting here like “yeah, dude, it was hard because you don’t know how to perform research, and nobody wanted to talk to you because your behaviour toward your prospective sources amounted to borderline harassment, and that’s how it looks in your own version of events which has clearly been spun for optics – I can’t even imagine how badly you must have gone about this in reality”.

cus at first blush, it seems like a really sensible suggestion and i myself cannot think of any fault with it in principle

Transcript:

We should base our regions off watersheds instead of state lines, for example, this is the midwest [diagram of the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence River Basin]

https://amtrak-official.tumblr.com/post/736885520460906497/we-should-base-our-regions-off-watersheds-instead

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/5028069

Meta threads will open federation to the fediverse soon, and while this is mainly to mastodon it will still affect lemmy. They are acting like they won't be evil, but let's be real this is Facebook when have they ever done that.

This article which has been trending lately explains some of the issues. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

This comment here is a simple analogy if you can't be bothered reading the article. https://lemmy.ca/comment/5702922

@lodion@aussie.zone

If you want to find the mythilogical GOOD POSTS, try tumblr.

If you already have an aversion to tumblr because of the reputation it has garnered in the past, rember this important fact: tumblr has not gotten any better. This is a shocking abnormality among its peers in the web ecosystem; the rest of them have gotten significantly worse.

Four years ago (...jesus) Yahtzee decided to challenge himself to make 12 games in as many months. The videos don't run too long, are nicely edited/paced, and you get to see how he thinks about game design both in principle and in practice.

I'd highly recommend the series to anyone who's thinking about game design, whether that's as a hobbyist or a spectator. I've linked someone else's playlist because the official one is junk.

This episode had a very interesting conversation about how we talk about "social media" (yes, i'm still putting it in quotes and stubbornly insisting on my own personal terminology). It's multi-user blogs. It's all blogs.

But what really stood out to me was a bit about how Facebook usurped MySpace as The Platform Everyone Is Using. Facebook introduced a bot. You feed the bot your MySpace credentials, and it logs in, scrapes all your friends posts and messages, and presents them to you within Facebook. That's how they encoraged people to move, using programming to eliminate the downside of migrating services. For Facebook users, they never lost the functionality that had been keeping them on MySpace, so migration was an easier choice to make.

Remember when everyone was really mad at :reddit-logo: for changing the mobile app? And it led to a minor bump in lemmy use, but largly people still stuck with :reddit-logo: cus it was were all the communities and posters were still established? Imagine if lemmy had something like Facebook's MySpace scrapper -- like, a bot you could put on your instance that scrapes the posts off of the reddit community you're trying to migrate.

I'm not saying this would be useful or even wanted for hexbear. But it might have resulted in more of the smaller subreddits successfully porting over to a lemmy instance. Something to think about. Reddit is going to do something that pisses off users (and, more critically, moderators) again. It's inevitable. Maybe lemmy should have the tools ready and waiting...

Apparently there's a whole series. It starts out called "Trump's Titans", then they started a new run and I've given up on this summary already. This. This whole thing. It's draining. It is a hot cobalt sphere of numbing smooth -- right through my brain. I wasn't even looking for political things, I found it by accident. They fight elon musk in the latest issue.

I've said before that Donald Trump represents a sea-change in american politics, the fusion of it with reality television programming. It's not like he was the first, John Stuart had already been turning political news into TV entertainment for a solid decade or so. But Trump marks the point where it becomes the new 'meta' -- and not just for the republicans. Considerations of policy, of strategy, of people's lives. It's been drained from discusion. I mean, it's not like it was great before, but it was there. Now... it's just empty back and forth about what figure A said about representitive B. Far more people are keeping up with it, but their keeping up with it in the most shallow way. "Ruthkanda forever".