AnarchistArtificer

I feel like I'm going to end up overusing the joke of blaming the WiFi for increasingly absurd things, because this is hilarious

We shouldn't conflate the Jewish people and the Israeli state/Zionists. That benefits Israel

It took me a while, but I ended up really enjoying Death Stranding. One of the things that made it click for me was that I watched a video essay on a different game that used the playwright Bertholt Brecht's V-effect as an analytical frame.

My rough understanding of it is that Brecht wanted to break the fourth wall and prevent audiences from identifying too heavily with characters, enabling them to better engage with the themes of the play; for example, if audiences end up identifying with a character who is a relatable asshole, then they might be less inclined to critically understand this character and the systems that facilitate their assholery.

Death Stranding invokes this with its absurd characters and setting. I never stopped finding it jarring when you have such silly character names and plots. This meant that for my first few hours of playing, I felt like I didn't "get it", and it seems like this is a fairly common reaction. However, this sense of "I don't get it" is interesting because of how it primes you to search for something to get — some larger point that Kojima is trying to make with the game. If nothing else, I appreciate games and other media that have something to say, even if I struggle to grasp that message.

If I had to distill things down, I think the most prominent theme I understood was "Play is an essential component of human wellness, and it has tremendous capacity to facilitate building human connection". I enjoyed how this was explored narratively through Sam's interactions with various characters, but also through ludic means via the player interacting with other player build structures (I really enjoyed getting so many thumbs up for all the roads I built). Death Stranding sometimes feels pretentious, but I remember thinking "what's more pretentious: the game that's trying (and possibly failing, depending on perspective) hard to say something larger, or the player who regards the game with disdain". Ultimately, I feel that the potential pretentiousness is neutralised by how earnest it is. Yes, it's a very silly game, but that's sort of the point.

Regarding Rings of Power, I absolutely hated the show, which sounds like a stronger opinion than what you hold. However, I completely agree that the discourse around the show is a trash fire of bad faith criticism that makes it impossible to express legitimate dislike of the show that's based in honesty.

My current computer is the one that I helped my late best friend build, and I'm so glad that we ended up going for an AMD GPU. I wasn't using Linux back then (and neither was he), so it was just a lucky fluke. My switch to running Linux as my main operating system would've been far more stressful with a Nvidia GPU, it seems.

I bought a pint for an acquaintance at my philosophy discussion group because he was moving away and this was his last session. I'm pretty poor at the moment, so even a small purchase like this was a lot. It was definitely worth it though, because it convinced him to stay for a while longer than he would have (the group session is held upstairs in a pub, but afterwards there's usually informal discussions that continue downstairs in the main pub).

It felt very much like I was performing human socialisation in a deliberate, but nice way. I already told the dude that I would miss his presence at the group, but buying a farewell drink for him was a way of reiterating that sentiment.

I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn't feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn't want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I'm still learning this stuff).

The nice thing about static sites is that it's pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.

Nowhere in OP's comment do they suggest that their country has no racism. Perhaps you would do well to go back and carefully reread what they actually wrote.

Shall I list off the crimes and systemic injustices perpetrated by atheists, or secular systems? Because the capacity to do great evil is not a trait exclusive to the religious.

I don't deny that religious systems often facilitate the grave injustices that you list, but to lay equal blame across all religions and religious people is foolish because it fails to get at the true problem. People abusing their power would be a problem even if there were no religious people in the world at all.

I keep trying to convert my friends to using Firefox mobile for this reason. I generally try not to evangelise too much, but I have so many friends who keep complaining about ads when browsing the internet on mobile, and this would literally solve their problem. One friend complained about ads so frequently that they ended up getting irked at me telling them the problem was solvable. Our unhappy compromise was that I would stop telling them to use Firefox and uBO if they stopped complaining about this so much in front of me.

I respect their choices, but by God, I'm baffled by them. I get that inertia makes it hard to make switches like this, but when you're spending so much time complaining about how much effort it takes to use the internet on your mobile, why would you not just solve the problem?

I had that error a couple of times, and it inexplicably resolved itself. Try having the person join again (which may require a new invite). I think only 1 out of 4 members of my family were able to join without that initial error message. This was back when Steam had just switched how they handled family sharing, so I assumed it was just an implementation bug of some sort. One of my friends took three attempts before they could join, but it worked ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Though I will note that steam family sharing no longer works if the person is located in another country for the purposes of Steam billing region (so my Norwegian friend could not join my UK family)

I got it laughably wrong

I think they use the same thing that web crawlers use. If Google's crawler couldn't access the content of the page (or could only access a limited amount of content), it would likely rank far lower in search results