Ooh! Thanks!

I might just be a massive god damn nerd, but I would rather build my own with an old Pixel, a printer, and a Pi. If I can’t be up to my elbows in its guts, from board to code, then it isn’t mine.

Right? AI-generated pictures of Scarlett Johansen as a flight attendant praising Jesus, or an African kid making sculptures of Jesus out of trash. And all the comments just being ‘Amen’ spam. Bots on top of bots. It’s just fucking dystopian.

Not maintaining artificial connections with people who would reach out to me if they actually gave a damn about me has genuinely been liberating.

I like how Discord- and Slack-like socials are set up. It’s just more natural. Instead of a feed, it’s a forum. It feels more like a physical place, with couches for discussion, corners of the room where people take conversation, and a hall outside for privacy. And if you understood that metaphor, then you know how I feel.

And if I don’t like a server, I can just… leave. Never have to run into them again, but still have access to friends. No holes in the conversation where an obvious block or ignore leaves gaps.

Remember when Bruce Wayne was a millionaire?

And then a multimillionaire?

And then a billionaire?

Yeah. It means they’ll try to keep us down even more by making us poorer and poorer, self-defeating tactic that it is. Eventually, it’ll be like a bolt of lightning or an earthquake; the imbalance of power will hit a breaking point and it will equalize. Quickly and violently.

So… a nation and a religion that was defined by its thousand-year exile by an evil empire forces another nation into a thousand-year exile as the acting hand of another evil empire.

Please understand that this is, on every conceivable level, insanely fucked up and flies in the face of both reason and morality.

The best solution would be to have an integrated, secular government and plans for reparation, return, and reconciliation.

Oh, take my damn upvote you punny bastard. 😂

Ditto what the others said. You might have just rolled bad RNG (DNA) at character creation (birth) and just gotten stuck with immunity to certain painkillers. It happens. Bad luck, friend.

God, the number of times I’ve painted things in Orange and Purple instead of Red and Blue and seen people ardently support the Orange argument, only to shut down in a brainwashed BSOD as soon as I replace the name tag…

https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-5-Season-1/dp/B000I5SYHS

Here. If you want it legally, at least. Believe it or not, Pirate Bay has the fandom-produced 1080p upscale. It looks really good, whoever did the render really put some love into it.

It is, wholeheartedly, one of my most favorite shows of all time. It’s one of the ones that shaped me as a human being.

Just try and give the exiting actors and resulting plot hiccups a little mercy. There was a lot happening in the real world for all of them, and some things are more important than television.

Given the budget that Fox gave them to film this, I’m not going to whine about it when I’ve watched community theater productions and enjoyed them. If the visual realism is a hard sticking point, then unfortunately, you just kinda have to sigh and live with it. Enjoy the story, and maybe try making fandom cosplay and give it a try for yourself.

That isn’t a dig, btw. Being able to make costumes of similar (but lesser) quality made me appreciate the hard work that goes into this more. And being involved in it helped me learn willfull suspension of disbelief. Or course you can see the seams in the costume. The actor is ignoring them and doing their damn best for a good script. I think that effort deserves a little grace.

Bester was supposed to be a one-off villain! They brought him back because he was amazing!

This is a lengthy question, but it comes from a place of positive intent and genuine inquiry.

As someone stateside with Jewish friends in JVP as well as Palestinian sympathies of my own, this is context that I’m missing. I read about the refusenik movement and the Likud Party’s stances on conscientious objectors. And similarly, Holocaust denial on the Hamas side and openly cidal rhetoric. I read a bit about the original treaty between Mohammed and the other local tribes, as it was a founding document for sharia law. As a result, the subsequent Jewish exile shaped the lives and culture of the diaspora. Not just their religion, but their philosophy and morality. The genocide of the Holocaust led a number of German and European Jews to be given the option–from the bloodied hands of the Nazi regime–an opportunity to instead be deported to Palestine as part of the Haavara agreement. The following Nakba, what Israel describes as the War of Independence, was described by neutral parties in the region as a massacre by extreme-right settlers who killed Palestinian Arabs (regardless of religious denomination) and Jewish sympathizers equally. Subsequent laws drawing the lines of Israel by the 1948 lines drew Palestinian Arabs as blatant second class citizens in what I, as an outsider, percieve as a reflection of Sharia law. Gaza’s creation as an open air prison complex is, by national convention, a collective punishment.

This is the context as far as I understand it. Forgive the gaps in my knowledge, I’m a white American with no religious or familial ties to either. But if both the Israeli system treats non-Jews as an other to be eliminated, and the pro-Caliphate extremists favor nearly identical conditions for non-Muslims, which is better? Each regime results in an apartheid-driven ethnostate. Each party having, at one point or another in the past several hundred years, perpetrated several wars and genocides against one another in a struggle for a piece of land that has formed the axis of every major Abrahamic religious conflict since the 8th century, is… a lot.

Is returning a genocide for a genocide right? Is it equitable to vow the extermination of an outsider as vengeance for a crime that their great grandparents don’t remember? Obviously, my fluency in both cultures is severely limited, and I’m trying my best to understand. But if the sanctity of life and the forgiveness of one’s enemies are values held by both cultures, what is the catalyst for this genocide as it stands currently?

If this sounds like an attack, I swear it isn’t. I haven’t had a conversation with someone actually from Israel concerning the matter, believe it or not. So my picture of the situation has been incomplete. Obviously, this was never about October 7th. This started long before that. But where, and when? And why?

What about the seizure and occupation of vacant private property?

Ah, yes, the rhetoric ‘grind culture’ disguising working three jobs just to eat and sleep in conditions that are semi-humane. But being scolded and scorned for never being able to buy a house because we like avocado toast. Working so hard, but never working enough in the same breath.

It was never about the fucking toast. ‘Goblin mode’ and ‘adulting’ and ‘gamer shut-in’ and ‘NEET’ was never about being lazy. It was always about painting out the propaganda to guilt us into not meeting the model of expectation instead of our elders accepting blame. Maybe, hear me out, they should open their eyes and see that we’re living in a level of poverty so hilariously deep that not even our kids–Gen Z and Gen Alpha–will be able to dig it out.

They’re not giving up because they’re lazy. They’re opting out of a system designed to fail.

Friend, fuckin’ same. It seems like all the propaganda hit pieces do is make them feel more relatable, damn.

Because they keep bombing and blockading hungry children.