I once drove an hour with a pretty severe concussion because I planned to just go home and sleep off what I would later learn was a small crater in the front of my skull. After I got home and was poking at the injury in the bathroom mirror, I realized I could feel pieces of my skull moving around so I decided I should probably go to the hospital…

The process of getting my skull fixed with extremely shitty insurance was a whole other set of horrors that in some ways sucked even more than the skull crater.

Sometime last year, I heard someone say something to the effect of “I think the pandemic had a pretty major effect on all of us,” and for a moment I thought “honestly I think I got through it fairly unscathed” because I was only considering my tolerance for the disruption to my life at the time. I was in a financially secure position and had plenty of social contact with friends through online gaming. I never felt any more depressed than normal throughout “quarantine” insofar as we even had one. Got my vaccines. Never tested positive. Didn’t lose anyone close to me (to the illness). Overall, I thought I’d made it through pretty alright.

Then I thought for just a few seconds more and I realized that the pandemic is what caused me to literally give up on humanity. Seeing how little everyone cared about anyone who was actually affected. People making posts online about how it was “fake” when people all over the world were dying. The ones who refused to wear a mask. Such a simple fucking request. Put this cloth over your face for a while and you can help not get people killed, but they still wouldn’t do it. I lived in a more rural area at the time, so it took a while for things to get really bad there. I remember thinking “you idiots will change your tune when it’s your grandmother dying” and then they just didn’t… Their own friends and family dying around them and most just slid further into conspiracy and paranoia.

The whole experience just fundamentally reshaped what I believe about humans and I don’t think anything will ever be able to switch things back. It reminds me of the scene in Terminator where John Connor says “We’re not gonna make it are we? People, I mean.”

Just a quiet resignation to the reality that left with nothing more than our own devices and all the resources we’d need to persist until the heat death of the universe, we’ll likely end up going extinct due to something completely preventable and probably caused by us. We choose our own destruction.

I didn’t feel this way before covid. I used to believe we’d eventually figure things out. Not anymore.

My absolute favorite was an exchange where someone told a long rambling story, then there was a reply where someone said something like “man I thought this story was gonna turn out to be a shittymorph post.” Then there’s another reply where someone agrees and says “yeah I was just waiting for the part where he says the thing about how back in nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcers table.” and obviously THAT comment was left by shittymorph. Motherfucker just showed up out of nowhere and did the thing without even having to string you along with a story first.

As I gain a better understanding of how federated social media works, I just find it even more confusing. This dude appointed himself batman of lemmy, but he’s just a single dev of a single frontend. Don’t most instances have multiple frontends? Even if a secret block list was the key to getting lemmy to finally go mainstream (it’s not), implementing it at a frontend level is simultaneously both way too wide and way too small of a net. If tesseract was the only way anyone could access lemmy, maybe a secret block list could actually change the winds, but it’s such a small slice of the fediverse. It’s like if batman was only beating up jaywalkers and was like “You’re welcome, Gotham. The city is saved.”

What was the point of any of it? Someone was inevitably going to discover it was happening. There were so many people on the block list. Was he just going to personally defend against the ranks of people he found annoying forever? Keep adding more and more regex as the list grows to multiple thousands of users?They’re still on the platform, dude. It’s just one filter on one frontend. What the hell are you trying to accomplish?

I’ve said for a long time that the primary means of American education is advertising. He was advertised as a competent businessman on TV, and so that’s what a lot of Americans believe. The guy’s a walking advertisement. A flim-flam man.

He wins because he’s the best at lying in a country that prizes lying for money as the best skill set one can possess.

A surprisingly effective remedy in a culture full of people who are very protective of their god-given right to hit their head against a wall.

My favorite example of this.

Hint: George Lucas has stated in the most plain-English unambiguous terms that the empire does in fact represent US imperialism in A New Hope. It’s in a director chat interview thing with with James Cameron if you feel like searching it up.

It’s weird how much effort you have to put into convincing people that the team who lost had a bad strategy…

As an American, I don’t understand how anyone can be proud of our “founding principles” without also being deeply ashamed of our failure to live up to them. It fucking hurts to live with this much hypocrisy, and I’m not the one getting snatched off the fucking street. Better just keep absorbing as much info as possible lest I feel guilty for ignoring it…

I play video games, but my “identity” as a “gamer” is not important enough to me to care about defending the label.

If someone says “gamers are trash,” you either know exactly the type of person they’re talking about, or you are the type of person they’re taking about.

I have no desire to argue “well I’m a gamer and I’m not like those people” because I don’t give a damn about the “sanctity” of such an arbitrary label. Also, not only are there tons of toxic gamers who are guilty of all the -isms, but there are also a lot of gamers who are all-to-eager to minimize the shitty actions of the former group and I don’t want to be associated with them either.

“That’s just how online gaming is” or “You think that’s bad? You should’ve seen call of duty lobbies back in the day” are common refrains from people who may not be hyper-toxic themselves, but they’re completely adjusted to bigotry being the status quo for the hobby and they don’t even see it as a problem to be corrected.

Also, I’m white. Seeing people criticize racism in gamer culture and jumping to the defense of the label as if that’s the problem feels very on brand for the way that white people tend to prioritize things. The bigotry is a much bigger problem than my “right” to call myself a gamer without the extra baggage. It feels a bit like still trying to defend twitter. I play video games, but yes, gamers are trash.

One detail I’m still not fully clear on is how widespread the effects are. Say an instance uses the tesseract frontend. Does that mean that everyone who accesses lemmy via that instance was having all of this filtering applied? Does it only apply if they were accessing it via the web? If they logged into the same instance via a smartphone app, would it still be applying all of the hidden tesseract filters?

The superiority of homegrown tomatoes is like THE universally agreed upon gardening fact that everyone who’s ever had a garden knows. People go their whole lives thinking they don’t like tomatoes or that they taste bland and then they try a homegrown one and they’re like “Wow, that’s what this is supposed to taste like?”

I’m just glad I actually got it right. I was mostly typing up that comment just to make sure that my understanding was correct. I wasn’t even thinking at the time that it would be helpful to others as well. I guess I’ve been kind of assuming that everyone else on lemmy already understood how all of this stuff works. Happy to help!

“No CGI” is primarily dishonest marketing hype that actively minimizes the work of talented artists. Yes, they had a puppeteer steering a plastic ball around for Project Hail Mary, but they also replaced 100% of the practical ball with CG. Especially at a time when people are so opposed to AI because it devalues human art, I think it’s important to be aware of the other ways we devalue art that have nothing to do with AI.

This fantastic YouTube series done by a career FX artist does an excellent job of dispelling the marketing hype and recalibrating the conversation around CGI in movies.

I kept thinking of Wishbone when watching the Odyssey, and I didn’t realize until the next day that the reason why is that Wishbone was the first time I’d ever heard the story. My original Odysseus was a dog.

Guess it’s time I learned how to grill seitan.

This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.

The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I’ve got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided “ew, you shouldn’t be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it’s now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses.”

So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it’s just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn’t interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.

Do I have that right?

I’m literally about to go cook some regular bacon right now, but this is completely true in my book. I’ve had some pretty good vegan bacon before, but I don’t know what brand it was.

Just eating it by itself was only like mostly still pretty good in my book, but on a BLT or inside some pancakes, I’d be completely fine just switching. Actually, I’m gonna try to find out what kind it was.

Edit: It was MorningStar Farms veggie bacon. To anyone that thinks all vegan bacon is trash, I’d recommend you give it a try

I remember a YouTuber I follow breaking into a raid shadow legends bit, clearly taking the piss and pretending they’d actually sponsored the video.

It took me like a full 15 seconds to realize that it was just a real sponsored segment. They were just reading it with so much sarcasm that it came across like a bit. Don’t think they ever got that sponsorship again after that.