JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]

I know the article is a threadbare simile, but it more than misses the whole point of Galadriel’s character in the books/movie. For even someone like Galadriel who meets this beyond-human ideal of beauty, purity and “goodness”, the power of the One Ring to dominate life is so corrupting that it would simply turn her into a new Sauron. Which is why after failing to resist temptation, Galadriel leaves Middle Earth and goes into the West. If there’s one point that is hammered in repeatedly throughout the Lord of the Rings, it’s that such absolute power cannot be used for good, despite anyone’s best intentions, and the only recourse is for it to be destroyed.

The intrusion of capitalism into sleep is a final frontier of absolute exploitation. Why work 8 hours a day when you can work 24 hours a day? Why use vast banks of computer servers to run AI models when you can capture the most efficient and powerful ‘computer’ to ever exist: the human brain. Why provide for housing and recreation when you can lock people in permanent dream states, where they can provide intellectual labor and live in dreamworlds while their physical brain is kept alive through an IV drip.

I am skeptical that any technology trying to directly interface with the slumbering subconscious could work, but I have no doubt that such attempts would be damaging to human health, and would be used to push material imiseration to impossible heights.

Looking at this International Crisis Group’s list of donors:

BP

Chevron

ENI

Open Society Foundation

Rockerfeller Brothers Trust

As well as various Western European & gulf state governments, billionaires and billionaire-founded NGOs. Of course they’re coping: their backers were hoping to get a piece of PDVSA.

The proposal is for a globally-levied tax. Where exactly is capital going to fly to?

It’s been an absurd mishandling of the IP by Take Two. Will probably be permanently stuck in early access with only maintenance development at best.

A lot of people (myself included) had the update installed automatically by Steam with no option for rollback, so it caught people off guard.

It’s buried in the article, but yep it’s a Boeing.

Either the banking crisis that’s been predicted over the past year due to high interest rates and bad debt, or perhaps there’s more that will come out about how JPMorgan Chase directly facilitated Jeffery Epstein’s operation in the Virgin Islands.

Wow, they discovered the copium index.

I agree that D&D will always exist, I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision. I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

Kinda .

I don’t think Tencent would be a particularly great owner for the D&D brand, but they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model, and a major shakeup for D&D could be good. Honestly, WotC (or just D&D) could be doing better if it was an independent operation as opposed to subsidizing the Hasbro revenue sink.

From reading the article, “pre-recorded” and “artificial” voices are already prohibited for unsolicited calls, so I don’t see what this ruling would actually change other than a slight clarification. It’s not like robocallers are actually prosecuted in any meaningful way.

Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn’t seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.

Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I’ve done, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there’s no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn’t do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur’s Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I’m not sure if they’d want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)

Obviously, these attacks are bad, but the impressive resistance by the Jenin fighters (as well as the reconciliation between Saudi and Iran, and Israel’s domestic turmoil) do give me some hope for a renewal of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

I don’t really care about the honor of Rian Johnson, but I don’t think your points are correct.

why are there suddenly cloaking devices in star wars

Cloaking devices were introduced in Episode I

why don’t the imperials hyperjump in front of the fleeing rebels?

The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There’s not really a point.

why can several characters leave a chase in progress visit some planet and come back to the chase still in progress?

Yeah, this one is kinda dumb, but it’d be possible for a small ship to escape unnoticed and get out of range in order to jump to lightspeed.

the holdo maneuver breaks several in-universe rules about how hyperdrive works.

Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren’t canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.

Luke’s character “development” happening entirely off-screen (and throwing out better character development from decades of books) makes the flashback scene completely unbelievable.

None of the books are canon. It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.

It’s also fitting the vanguard of America’s descent into fascism will one of the earlier places (in the US) to be rendered uninhabitable by the climate change.

Fascism is a death cult.

I don’t understand the logic here. When the putsch occured and then ignomously fizzled out, I saw Putin as weak for letting Pringles walk out with a (relative) slap on the wrist. Taking Prigo out of the picture was overdue. Obviously, anyone would feel threatened by an semi-autonomous mercenary army, so removing its leadership and breaking it up is just a rational course of action that probably should have been done sooner from that POV

That’s a bit more dramatic than polonium. He was going to get got sooner or later after his tantrum/half-baked putsch.

I think Nigeria could still invade (and drag ECOWAS with it), but hopefully that helps take the wind out of its sails.

Glad to see that your instance filter is working. Everyone should be free to curate the content they see.

For the benefit of others, checking your comment history, it is hilarious to me that you’ve never posted in your home instance even once and have the audacity to call us brigadiers.