James Riley
571 posts
@James_Riley___
I.T ‘Fix It’ man from the North West of Tasmania.
Project Hail Mary writer Andy Weir on social commentary in books: "I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that." "I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that." "To that end, I also don’t talk about my personal political opinions publicly. I don’t want readers to even know, honestly. I don’t want that in the back of their minds as they read my stuff." Is this why he has the #1 sci-fi movie in decades?
“I’m a lefty anti-imperialist but Argentina is wrong on the Falklands”
now that the mana drama slop has died down i can post this
like yugioh text is undecipherable to new players yes, but so are magic keywords. you need to get used to reading the lingo, when you get to it you can scan through cards easily, and that appliea to both games rush duel formatting is so much better tho
Unpopular opinion about marriage Just wondering, is marriage scary?
Commies do love medals.
Between 1914-1918, the British Army shot 306 of its own soldiers at dawn. They were led out before firing squads, blindfolded, tied to a stake, and killed by men from their own regiments. The charges ranged from desertion and cowardice to quitting a post without orders. Most of these men were volunteers, civilians who had enlisted out of patriotism and found themselves broken by conditions that no human being was designed to endure. The Western Front was not a war in any traditional sense. It was years of continuous artillery bombardment, rat-infested trenches, mass death measured in yards of mud, and the constant expectation of the next assault. Men watched their friends disintegrate beside them. They lived for months at a time without sleep in any meaningful sense. They developed shaking fits, paralysis, blindness, and complete psychological collapse. The army called it shell shock. When it manifested as an inability to return to the front, the army sometimes called it cowardice. The trials were brief and often deeply unfair. Many men were undefended or chose to speak on their own behalf, unaware of their rights. Some were convicted and executed on the same day. Officers suffering from the same conditions were frequently diagnosed with neurasthenia and given medical leave. A private soldier who broke under identical circumstances could be shot. The class divide in how shell shock was treated was stark and documented. The case that finally forced the government's hand was that of Private Harry Farr, executed for cowardice in 1916 at the age of 25. Farr had already been hospitalized for shell shock and sent back to the front before he collapsed again. His daughter Gertrude spent decades insisting her father was not a coward, eventually joining a legal challenge against the Ministry of Defence. In August 2006, when Gertrude was 93, Defence Secretary Des Browne announced a blanket pardon for all 306 men. Forty others, convicted of murder and mutiny, were excluded. The pardon took legal effect the following year under the Armed Forces Act 2006. The pardons were not without controversy. Browne's announcement included a careful caveat: the pardon did not cast doubt on the procedures or judgments of the time, and it did not cancel the original sentences. What it changed was the formal designation. The men were now to be recognized as victims of war. The Shot at Dawn Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire had already been standing for five years by the time the pardons came. Unveiled in 2001, it depicts a young soldier blindfolded and bound to a stake. The figure was modelled on Private Herbert Burden, who had lied about his age to enlist and was seventeen years old when he was shot for desertion. Around the central figure, individual wooden stakes bear the names of each of the executed men, arranged in a semicircle. The effect is deliberately overwhelming. For many of the families, the shame had lasted nearly a century. Soldiers shot for cowardice were denied the pension their widows would otherwise have received. Their names were left off local war memorials. Their children and grandchildren grew up knowing the circumstances of the death but unable to speak of it. The pardon did not undo any of that. What it did was confirm, in law, what the families had argued for generations: that the men who broke under the weight of industrial warfare were not criminals. They were casualties, distinguished from the men buried in the official cemeteries only by the manner in which they died. #drthehistories
@SenTomCotton China is capitalist you fucking idiot. Marxism requires you to have a stateless and classless society. China is neither of these. But of course, you need to apply scary labels to anyone against U.S. hegemony so you can keep your delusional population dumb and obedient.
Shipyards desperately need welders, pipefitters, and other skilled workers. But this work is grueling and dangerous. cbsn.ws/4bIyP6O
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou: “I was talking to Doug MacGregor about Iran's hypersonic missiles. And I asked, Can an aircraft carrier defend itself from a hypersonic missile? And he said, NO, there's no defense from a hypersonic missile.” “The Iranians have hypersonics.”
If Valve’s 30% transaction fee is so outrageous (it’s not), then others can simply provide alternatives and charge less. If players still don’t want those alternatives, it’s for a reason: the higher prices they see are worthwhile for the various services involved. So, the alternatives need to also compete on quality. That isn’t an “unlawful monopoly”, that is a competitive service provided at an acceptable rate for developers and players alike. A competitor can undercut that price, but they have to actually do a good job providing an alternative. It is completely absurd to involve the government to punish Valve.
