Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it having “ideological connections” makes this metaphor weaker. In fact, I think it highlights exactly why using a comparison out of left field makes the metaphor stronger. The only reason non-fundamentalist-Christians and Jews in the west have for denying the genocide in Gaza is that it has become normalised to do so. If you take a step back and think about why a white moderate “Christmas-and-Easter Christian” (or even an atheist) American, Australian, or European might have a connection to what’s going on in the Middle East…like, really think about it, there is no rational explanation. Only because others have decided to politicise it and make it a talking point and a part of political identity, do westerners end up having disproportionally strong opinions about it. It’s self-reinforcing in that way, but it’s no more rational than the Welsh Rwandan genocide denier, at its core.



  • For every time a person has an intensely strong opinion about something they don’t know much about and which doesn’t actually affect them.

    The first thing that came to my mind is the genocide in Gaza. Jews and fundamentalist Christians have a vested interest (sort of…), as do Israeli citizens (more obviously) in denying the genocide, but way more people than those small demographics do so. Those others are the grandpa.

    But it occurred to me as I was writing that this could equally apply to things like gay marriage, or trans rights.





  • Splitting lanes is not legal in the vast majority of the United States but idk where you’re from

    Where I am it’s explicitly allowed for motorbikes (at a maximum speed of 30 km/h), thanks to a relatively recent law change. Pushbikes are a different story. There’s no law explicitly allowing it, and this has led to some people (even people in positions of perceived authority, such as the social media team of the Department of Transport and Main Roads) to suggest that it’s not legal for bikes. But the reality is that it is legal, as a necessary side-effect of the fact that cars are allowed to overtake bikes without leaving the same lane. Basically, bikes are allowed to share a lane with another vehicle, and this has the effect of also allowing a bike to come up through congested traffic.

    It’s very very rare for me to see a car blow through a red light outright

    I find this rather hard to believe. First, remember that an amber light does not mean “be careful” or “get ready, you might have to stop soon”. It means stop right now, if it’s safe. How often have you seen drivers actually do that? I’ve had so many times where, as a driver, I saw the amber and found myself in that awkward position where I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to keep going or to stop, and eventually decided to go through; a situation where it is obviously going to be the case that anyone behind me should stop, because I was on the borderline, so anyone behind me must be well over the other side of the line. And yet, so many times not only has the car behind me gone through, the car behind them did too. And that’s before we even get into the daily cases where they don’t even start to enter the intersection until after it has turned red. I’ve got a mate who rides a motorbike and posts helmet-cam footage on Facebook at least weekly, and every one of his compilations includes at least one case of a driver who runs a fully red light.

    For cyclists, recall that there are some places in your own country that explicitly allow cyclists to go through a red light if it’s safe. Not everywhere does (nowhere in Australia, to my knowledge), but those places that allow it do it for a reason. Evidence shows that it makes cyclists safer. Not all lawbreaking is equal, and the evidence pretty clearly tells us that when cyclists break the law, it tends to be for far better reasons than the reasons drivers break the law, even though the rate of lawbreaking is the same.



  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoRPGMemes @ttrpg.networkCampaign of Chaos
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    2 days ago

    V5 was a mess? I’ll admit I’ve only read through the rulebook and watched LA By Night, never actually played it. But I really, really like the system. It feels like it strikes a pretty great balance between an amount of detail that can give you meaningful character choices, while also being really elegant and intuitive to play with. The same thing that made 5e so successful for D&D.

    Werewolves have never really interested me, so I never looked much at that. But I quite liked the idea behind Mage so I was looking forward to seeing what they’d do with it, both mechanically and in the metanarrative.


  • I can’t speak for horses. I’ve only once in my life encountered people on horses while on a bike. It’s an exceedingly unusual scenario.

    I can tell you that, as a matter of fact (not anecdote), drivers and cyclists break the law at roughly the same rate. But that in crashes between cars and bikes, the car is the responsible party in 80% of cases. And that studies have established that when cyclists break the law, it is overwhelmingly done in the interest of their own safety, while drivers break the law in the interest of perceived convenience.

    I only realised after writing the above that that you mentioned “trails”. Sounds like you’re talking about mountain biking. I can’t speak to that, I’m almost exclusively a roadie, using the bike either as a means of transport or for exercise/training on the road. Saying “you” doesn’t really work here. The amount of overlap between mountain bikers and road bikers is surprisingly small.