I have to admit the Ferguson Unrest of 2014 and the rhetoric about Michael Brown being a thug really changed my mind about Batman, for whom even his games highlight mobs ( mobiles or game artifacts that move) as thugs. And this led to Garth Ennis' observation that Batman is a billionaire aristocrat who beats up poor people

Then again Supergenius Reed Richards could never cure HIV and T'Challa / Black Panther, King of Wakanda and captain of the vibranium industry can't ever do enough to elevate non-whites in the US and in industrialized nations. I digress.

Getting back to Batman, I wonder if the white thugs Batman usually preyed on were Italians and Irish, who had to spend a century in the barrel before they were given white privilege.

I do. Wait...are you gatekeeping enjoying movies?

We Fight For Rock And Stone! 🪨⛏️💎

Malaria...

The screwfly...

Parasitoids like wasps...

Quasistable intermittent ecosystems resulting in frequent binges by predators resulting in massive die-offs of prey species and then famine resulting in massive die-offs of the predator species.

These are parts of nature. No heros. No soldiers. Just mass suffering without purpose. In fact, we flockers and banders who will help a fellow out, right a turtle or rescue a cub are new to the game.

i love the game. Then the devs decided I wasn't playing it right and changed it.

Once again the ownership class pirates freely while disparaging the common folk for violating copyright.

It's almost if it's not a real law, rather something by which to disparage the proletariat.

Sadly, I don't know enough about it to give you advice. Every time I switched phones or services, I had to twaddle with the settings until I could get features (commonly MMS, or SMS with media) so that they worked properly. If AT&T is actually blocking you out for refusing to use an AT&T phone, the trick would be to get the phone to pretend it's an AT&T phone, then way Firefox can pretend it's Chrome when it needs to.

But I don't know the specifics.

If you get phones from the manufacturer they're not labeled compatible with AT&T so much as that they have access to specific radio ranges and are controlled either by soft-stored codes or by a SIM card, and I'd buy the sim card from the service, and then stick it in my phone. The Sony I had for a while was compatible with both the T-Mobile and AT&T ranges, and I used a third party service that was an el-cheapo front for T-Mobile.

T-Mobile wanted me to pay extra for hot-spot use, but I got around that with software, which is like hacking the subscription seat warmers on your BMW.

Curiously, Apple phones will lock themselves (or did for a while... is it better now?) based on what service you initially connected them to, and you have to (had to, I hope) get their permission and pay fees to unlock it again.

The telecommunication companies are an oligopoly, so like a legal cartel, so they pull a lot of bullshit that we end users have to suffer. But it means I feel not a jot of guilt when I hack the hell out of it to extract services I didn't pay for, since it's all a grift anyway.

Being a mathematical nit mostly, and do not want to keep you up at night. When we talk about numbering systems in base X, it doesn't include the digit for X. Hexadecimal includes 0-9 and A-[F]. Decimal includes 0-9 so not A (the symbol for 10). Octal (base 8) includes 0-7.

So 83 can't be an octal number.

But then in the end I realized you were converting from decimal to octal, in which case, yes, it's 123. I am a total derp.

The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can't find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.

Like Roko's Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don't consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.

As with many of my hypotheses, it's more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.

There no 8 in base 8. Just as there's no A in base 10.

They're green! They're obviously plants!

Firstly, some of us media nerds are way into analyzing the fuck out of movies (and books and games and whatever), sorting out what was accidental, what was unconscious and what was willful and intentional, and the differences between fiction that's meant to reflect IRL, fiction that features codes or conventions for sake of the audience (e.g. sound in space) or fiction that reflects author bias (e.g. Christians as represented in Pure Flix Entertainment cinema).

But yeah, speaking of Pure Flix, some movies are out there to send specific messages or to reflect certain dangerous worldviews, and I've seen enough of those to understand that one can't safely just enjoy movies. A big example is the implication in the MCU (Disney) that the status quo (roughly IRL + superheroes, with civilization carrying on) is good, even though that's not the case for most of us normies. In fact, Spiderman's poverty trope was pretty much erased when Iron Man / Tony Stark takes Parker in and makes sure he and relevant family are cared for, and thus out of common precarity. Fucking Disney, man.

Then there's also the problem with media in general, that a lot of it is subject to Hollywood accounting (the studios and labels cheat the artists and developers) and Hollywood management (infamously crunch in the video game industry, but mistreatment and undercompensation prevails throughout.) So a lot of what we consume comes with some gross baggage.

That said, I do enjoy movies quite a lot.

Locked phones are what led me into the rabbit hole of purchasing phones from manufacturer, since the carriers not only lock phones but hobble the OS.

It did mean understanding what was necessary for a phone to qualify for given carriers, but I can tech when I need to, and I tech for my friends when they need it.

In 2024, T Mobile and AT&T (and Verizon) have all demonstrated they do not engage in good faith commerce, and so right now they're being sniveling little shits (quote me please) because the FCC and DoC are escaping regulatory capture.

That is to say, the end users are tired of their shit. Apple and Google, too.

Dr. Manhattan: Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive, meeting, siring this precise son, that exact daughter...

...Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.

To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold...

That is the crowning unlikelihood.

The thermodynamic miracle.

Laurie: But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle...I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!

Dr. Manhattan: Yes.

Anybody in the world.

ETA: Because I'm a pedant, typical sperm count range from 15 million to 200 million, but Dr. Osterman was a physicist, not an endocrinologist.

Sadly much like many Disney movies, Barbie was a vehicle for corporate-approved feminism, but isn't willing to actually confront the class war.

But no movie studio wants to admit to the class war, even when they overshadow the principal antagonist with capitalism (such as the PoTC example, an undead octopus-faced monster with his heart locked away in a box, overshadowed by the British East India Company).

Taking another page from Monsters Inc. no studio today would include the Scream Extractor in their kids movie.

Yes, the paradox of Gabriel's Horn presumes that a volume of paint translates to an area of paint (and that paint when used is infinitely flat). Often mathematics and physics make strange bedfellows.

Yeah, the four color problem becomes obvious to the brain if you try to place five territories on a plane (or a sphere) that are all adjacent to each other. (To require four colors, one of the territories has to be surrounded by the others)

But this does not make for a mathematical proof. We have quite a few instances where this is frustratingly the case.

Then again, I thought 1+1=2 is axiomatic (2 being the defined by having a count of one and then another one) So I don't understand why Bertrand Russel had to spend 86 pages proving it from baser fundamentals.

It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.

It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.

It's why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don't find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.

In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.

During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.

It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.

The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.

This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.