I’m so glad this show is back. It just makes me so happy to watch.

Also Japanese question: What was the word confusion that made craft store guy misunderstand what Gojo meant? It wasn’t clear from the subtitles.

I guess it was like this before, but it’s only something I really thought about now: It’s nice that the fake anime looked lower fidelity than the real one. I have a running joke with friends whenever we see an anime in an anime and ask whether the anime is photorealistic in their world. But here the thing one level down from their reality looks less real than their normal animation, so it kinda works out. All I’m saying is I want to see an anime where their world’s anime is in 1D just for the gag. The audience never actually gets to see it properly and the characters talk about it like it’s completely normal to them.

Having seen way too many rom coms… I give it a zero parcento chance of that going anywhere other than just getting interrupted or awkwardly shrugged off.

Nice ending to the season. I figured the kids were coming back to life. I don’t know if that was meant to be a twist with just how telegraphed it was over the last 2 episodes. I was both surprised and not surprised by Shi Sui being alive. I thought she didn’t seem like she was planning to die and had some kind of plan, but then she got shot… a lot. I don’t know how she survived that. Did she have ye olde bullet proof vest and blood squibs?

Jinshi still can’t take a hint. That whole relationship feels like one of those things that would be creepy if they weren’t playing it off as cutesy/comedic.

I’m looking forward to S3. From the teaser trailer I’m hopeful that we’re going to get some kind of status quo shift/reset so we can get back to the more Mao Mao focused stories. But we’ll see.

Yeah as much as I love the show, the political intrigue has mostly just confused/bored me. I just want more bits with Mao Mao being Mao Mao. I don’t know the source material, but the S3 teaser makes me think we’re going to get away from all of that since it says they’re going to a distant land. Seems like a reset.

Maybe. But you’d need servers. And that would cost a lot of money for something aiming to be that scale.

My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.

Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.

But numbers are also text

Yeah. That’s always been such a strange contradiction in their beliefs. “People can’t be trusted with power, so that’s why we need a system that empowers the absolute worst people!” Setting aside how wrong that belief is, the conclusion doesn’t even logically follow from the incorrect “fact.”

As for how we handle things in the future… idk. You’re right that people have methods of socially dealing with bad behavior, but I also wonder if we can reliably transplant the experiences of pre-industrial societies into our modern world. As technology progresses, it becomes easier and easier for smaller and smaller groups of people to inflict harm on others. In the past, if you wanted to go fight a war you needed to convince a whole army’s worth of people to go risk their lives and hurt others. Now? A handful of people in an air conditioned room can level a building on the other side of the world without ever getting up out of their chairs thanks to drones. Not only do you need to convince fewer people, they’re also more isolated from both the risk and horror of their actions, so it’s easier to convince them.

I don’t think it’s that plausible to deal with those kinds of problems through social pressure alone. What to do about it? Idk.

I have less hope for two reasons:

1. These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.

2. The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.

Maybe we don’t want to do that again… people have some really short memories.

Same. I was also talking with some friends that have it and they also think I might. I already got a mess of other issues. I guess I’ll ask at my next psych appointment and see if I need to add that to the pile.

I can’t remember. I feel like I’ve seen it on at least one other place though.

One of the doctors going to fight the bad guy in hand to hand combat has the same vibe as the bridge crew in Star Trek always going on away missions because they’re the main characters.

Hey, sometimes they also bring shampoo!

I think what’s interesting about the conflicts that do arise in Star Trek is that while they often mirror issues we have today in some way, it’s being grappled with by people and a system that has purposefully turned away from greed and cruelty. They might not always get things right, but it’s not because of some special interests making it that way, it’s just because even in the future humans are humans and they make mistakes and have blind spots.

For example, I was thinking about that episode of DS9 that dealt with Bashir being genetically modified. Obviously it’s some mix of discussions about GMOs, steroids, and one of those imperfect fantasy/sci-fi racism analogies. You’d kind of hope we have stuff like that sorted by the future, but it’s kind of understandable why they have this quandary. The reasons for keeping genetically modified people out of star fleet isn’t entirely without reason and is clearly not coming from a place of cruelty, but it’s also hard to get around the fact that this is still discrimination based on something someone was born with. But nobody really specifically stands to benefit from the status quo. So you just have the matter at hand with no clearly perfect answer getting discussed honestly by well intentioned people.

Section 31 definitely doesn’t fit that mold. It’s some last vestige of a system that prioritized a self-serving order held up by force. I think to the extent that it has any place in ST, it’s something like how it was handled in DS9 where our characters were actively trying to uncover a rogue organization instead of it just kind of being a part of Starfleet like in Discovery.

I don’t have a smart watch both because I don’t really see the point in them and because adding extra things to be on me bothers me, so I wouldn’t even be wearing a regular watch.

As for tablets: It’s just a convenient compromise between a phone and a laptop for basic browsing and video watching. I can comfortably lay in bed with a tablet rested against the wall or propped up on my nightstand. It’s harder to do that with a phone or laptop and obviously the phone screen is also just smaller. I don’t really take the tablet with me unless I’m going on a long trip, but when I am it’s nice to both have the bigger screen and actually have my media device be on a separate battery from the device I need for communication and navigation.

Legally you’re right. But I think it sort of ignores the spirit of what that free speech should be and the reality it actually exists in. There are corporations that have reached a level of size and power comparable to governments. Plus the government in general is an arm of the capitalist class it represents. Most of the speech that happens today is on these privately owned services. To allow those large corporations to act as censors, it makes the protections on speech from government interference largely moot. Generalizing more, the way I put it is in America, you have freedom… if you can afford it. Sure, nobody is able to stop you from saying what you want to say. But you get to say it to a handful of people you know while a rich person gets to say it to millions of people through media channels and advertising. Sure everyone gets one vote, but if you’re rich you can influence a lot more than one vote (and you can probably buy more than one vote of influence with whoever wins.) You may have the right to an abortion, but if you’re poor you might not have the means to actually do it. People have the legal right to due process, but despite that, tons of cases end in plea deals or settlements because people don’t have the means to be adequately represented in a legal case. When the US legally abolished (most) slavery, many of the freed slaves ended up as share croppers, not much better off or free than they were before because they didn’t have the material means to exercise that freedom. Later, the US passed anti-discrimination laws. No more barring black people from living in some towns/neighborhoods. But despite that, the area I grew up in was still heavily segregated. Legal freedoms don’t mean much if you don’t have the economic freedom to exercise them.

Now, there’s clearly a line. It seems obvious that say, if you had some private chat room it would be fine to kick people out of it for whatever reason. And at the extreme end we have these massive platforms acting which perform the role of a public service but in the hands of private interests. There I think there should be limits on what censorship they should be able to do. So where do you make the cutoff along that spectrum? Idk. I feel like a Lemmy instance is probably closer to a private chatroom than a social media corporation. They’re small, they’re not run for profit, and they’re not engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. There’s not that much stopping someone from moving to another instance or even making their own.

Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

Another executive was quoted saying “What’s most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity.”

Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don’t know. Talk about losing your humanity.

I’m wondering if it’s gonna be Trigger again. That’s mostly why I bothered with it in the first place. But they tend not to do sequels, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.