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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • Who? When no one else learns the lesson why should Turkey be singled out for going a step further and shrugging the whole thing off? Admitting to crimes does zero good if you continue committing them and aiding others in doing so while showing no remorse for new acts.

    Germany which genocided Jews now defends the rights of a subset of extremists (though they’re not a subset in the occupation zone, the majority there are unhinged racists according to opinion polls) to genocide others.

    One of them is doing the right thing now about this though for transparently insincere and politically expedient domestic political reasons while the other is doubling down on criminalizing support for victims of an illegal occupation, genocide, and state.

    Turkey’s denial cannot change what happened bad as it is.

    And clearly Germany’s admission that they did commit genocide hasn’t made them a better country for it as they’re happy to enable it again (and still refuse to pay reparations to other non-Jewish victims).

    So admitting to genocide is clearly not a given sign that a country is good or will help stop one in future or has learned any lessons at all.

    In other words things are complex. This is good thing done for likely cynical reasons but it’s still good. Even if it likely won’t impact the situation on the ground immediately it could lay part of the groundwork for eventually causing “israel” to fall as apartheid South Africa did.


  • That they should abolish (or at the least push for drastic, dramatic reforms, not promises of gradual reform maybe someday during election season but a mass movement, amendments, political action, pressure groups, etc) such a system rather than participate and kick the can down along the road.

    Also that their rights will be taken away regardless if they’re going to lose them.

    Biden has done nothing to reverse what Trump has done, he postures, he does a few meaningless policies but at the back of it all he doesn’t value the lives of those people you claim to care about because he won’t stack the Supreme Court, because he and Kamala and the rest of the Democratic party are not interested in actually fighting the Republicans. Their theatrics that Trump is Hitler 2.0 shows them to be either people who want to enable Hitler 2.0 because they obviously aren’t fighting tooth and nail and are quick to condemn someone trying to kill him (when let’s be honest, most of us wouldn’t condemn a person who shot at Hitler) OR people who don’t truly believe that but know it’s good branding. Either way they’re not a party worth voting for, worth endorsing or worth considering as a real option to protect the vulnerable in this country or any other.

    Fact is Republicans do the dirty deeds, Democrats put some peace paint and pride symbols on things but don’t undo those dirty deeds. During Trump’s term pundits and the Democratic party sobbed and wailed about “kids in cages” on the border and yet when Biden continued it? Nothing but silence. And Kamala’s campaign is ramping up and leaning into that border racism by the way.


  • You need to make sure when you rip the film that you grab all English subtitle tracks. Use mediainfo to find the smallest one with least elements and that tends to be the forced/translation track. Some people when initially ripping choose to burn those particular subs and those alone into the video. Others just put them in an MKV container with the full subs and mark them as forced with the flag editor. And others don’t rip them at all.

    That said, if for some reason your copy didn’t have such a track, it’s possible that the particular forced/translation subtitles had some special marker or something that the BD disc or DVD read and tended to force on and use only those subs. In fact looking at options for exporting PGS visual image subtitles in subtitle edit there is an option to mark individual lines of subtitles as forced so that’s a thing but I’m not sure any players or software currently supports it as all software I’m aware of tends to just look for whether a track is marked as forced or default and then use it or not depending on user preferences.

    If you can’t find good subtitles by themselves you could always acquire ('arr) another copy of the full movie and just grab the subs from that and mux them into your file. Again looking for forced flagged/named subs or else ones with less than half the elements of the other sub files.





  • Hamas is a legitimate resistance group exercising their legitimate, legal right under international law to violently resist unlawful colonization, occupation, land-theft, and genocide. They have every right to exist, they have every right to use violence against settlers who should leave and give back the stolen land.

    If you want more moderate types, know that the zionists intentionally crushed them and propped up Hamas to create just this kind of argument and by spouting it you’re carrying water for them. Only the end of the occupation and the formation of a full Palestinian state will result in the breathing room for the creation of moderate groups and opinions.



  • It should be considered illegal if it was used to harm/sexually abuse a child which in this case it was.

    Whether it should be classed as CSAM or something separate, I tend to think probably something separate as a revenge porn type law that still allows for distinguishing between this and say a girl whose uncle groomed and sexually abused her while filming it as while this is awful it can (and often does seem) be the product of foolish youth rather than the offender and those involved all being very sick, dangerous, and actually violent offending adult pedophiles victimizing children.

    Consider the following:

    1. Underage girl takes a picture of her own genitals, unfortunately classified as the unhelpful and harmful term “child porn” and she can be charged and registered as a sex offender but it’s not CSAM and -shouldn’t- be considered illegal material or a crime (though it is because the west has a vile fixation on puritanism which hurts survivors of childhood sexual trauma as well as adults).

    2. Underage girl takes a picture of her genitals and sends it to her boyfriend, again /shouldn’t/ be CSAM (unfortunately may be charged similarly), she consented and we can assume there wasn’t any unreasonable level of coercion. What it is unfortunately is bound by certain notions of puritanism that are very American.

    3. From 2, boyfriend shares it with other boys, now it’s potentially CSAM or at the least revenge porn of a child as she didn’t consent and it could be used to harm her but punishment has to be modulated with the fact the offender is likely a child himself and not fully able to comprehend his actions.

    4. Underage boy cuts out photo of underage girl he likes, only her face and head, glues it atop a picture of a naked porn actress, maybe a petite one and uses it for his own purposes in private. Not something I think should be classed as CSAM.

    5. Underage boy uses AI to do the same as above but more believably, again I think it’s kind of creepy but if he keeps it to himself and doesn’t show anyone or spread it around it’s just youthful weirdness though really he probably shouldn’t have easy access to those tools.

    6. Underage boy uses AI to do same as 4-5 but this time he spread it around, defaming the girl, she/her friends find out, people say mean things about her, she has to go to school with a bunch of people who are looking and pleasuring themselves to fake but realistic images of herself against her consent which is violating and makes one feel unsafe. Worse probably being bullied for it, mean things, called the s-word, etc.

    Kids are weird and do dumb things though unfortunately boys especially in our culture have a propensity to do things that hurt girls far more than the inverse to the point it’s not even really worth talking about girls being creepy or sexually abusive towards peer-aged boys in adolescence and young adulthood. To address this though you need to address patriarchy and misogyny on a cultural level, teach boys empathy and respect for girls and women and frankly do away with all this abusive pornography that’s super prevalent and popular which encourages and perpetuates abusive actions and mentalities towards women and girls, this will never happen in the US however because it’s structurally opposed to being able to do such a thing. Also couldn’t hurt to peel back the stigma and shame around sexuality and nudity in the US which stems from its reactionary Christian culture but again I don’t think that will ever happen in the US as it exists, not this century anyways.

    Obviously not getting into adults here as that doesn’t need to be discussed, it’s wrong plain and simple.

    Bottom line I think is companies need to be strongly compelled to quickly remove revenge-porn type stuff (regardless of the age of the victim though children can’t deal with this kind of thing as well as adults so the risk of suicide or other self-harm is much higher so it should be treated as higher priority) which this definitely is. It’s abusive and unacceptable and they should fear the credit card companies coming down on them hard and destroying them if they don’t aggressively remove it and ban it and report those sharing it. It should be driven off the clear-web once reported, there should be an image-hash data-set like that used for CSAM (but separate) for such things and major services should use it to stop the spread.


  • China: has like 300 nuclear weapons, none of them stationed outside their country. Has no forward military bases from which to stage or launch attacks, has limited forward radar visibility of incoming attacks. Has a couple SSBM subs which likely operate entirely in the south China sea from which it can launch. Wants to expand to 1000 by 2030.

    Russia: Has over 4000 warheads, most aging. Has no meaningful forward military bases outside their country for staging attacks on the west. Has no meaningful forward radar visibility of incoming attacks from beyond its borders. Has a few SSBM subs from which it can launch.

    US: Has over 4000 warheads, many aging. Has many hidden, classified, constantly operating SSBM submarines which regularly intentionally cruise to the north Atlantic (near Russia), the south Pacific (near China), and a variety of other locations. Has ground-launched missiles, an air delivery system. Has world class sonar (included super-sensitive listening stations bolted to the bedrock of the east and west coasts) and aggressive drone campaigns to hunt and constantly track Chinese and Russian missile subs to allow them a first kill. Has forward warning radar systems positioned thousands of miles from its borders in northern Canada, in Europe, in the Pacific on island chains. In addition has a massive, the most massive spy satellite network in operation constantly watching other powers in incredible detail. Has a space force dedicated to among other things sabotaging Chinese and Russian space assets with kill switches or remote disable explosives which could be used in aggression to blind their enemy first. Of all major world powers will have the most warning and most time to react decisively in case of a full scale launch and attempted sneak first strike on them by either Russia or China. Stations nuclear weapons with allies in “sharing” agreements where the US has final say on their use and launch in countries from the UK to mainland Europe near Russia to Turkey, is considering such an agreement with South Korea right on China’s border.

    But tell me again how the US is backed into a corner in this situation and has no choice but to build more warheads and pour hundreds of billions that could feed, cloth, shelter, and provide healthcare to its people into new delivery systems which will fatten and enrich defense contractors to the tune of hundreds of billions of overage costs if not trillions for systems that may or may not even work thanks to contractor greed and sloppiness.



  • Unlike the US which has totally forgiven Iran for the embassy thing in the 70s which was half a century ago and as we know now embraces them as brothers.

    And by contrast the US was inviting the attack on its embassy because they had with the help of the British used the CIA (based out of that embassy) overthrown the leadership of Iran and installed a brutal dictatorship. Additionally no lives were lost in the incident itself.

    This is the international law equivalent of barging into your neighbor’s house because you hear them having a domestic dispute and in the middle of pistol-whipping both parties stopping to go to their kid’s room and shoot her in the leg. Do you think if you were that kid you’d be cool with the person who did that with premeditation 20 years later? 40 years later? Or would you blame them forever for being an unhinged maniac who injured you, gave you a token apology that claimed it happened by accident when you knew otherwise, gave you compensation (but only after they got compensation for you for some damage you did to their yard in a fit you had later while feeling powerless after their violence against you) and has basically shrugged the whole thing off while using their connections to the law to prevent themselves ever being prosecuted and going around the community promoting themselves as the arbiter of decency and a paragon of law and order and goodness and continuing to lie about their deliberate intent.

    So why should they forgive and forget what was never fully admitted to? A crime done by a nation that believes itself not bound by laws or convention trying to operate with impunity as the world’s unappointed emperor at the end of the cold war.

    A nation that within the next 6 years no less went on an adventure through the middle east that left hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, illegally invaded another nation in Iraq based on lies, etc. This wasn’t a one-off oopsie, this was part of a pattern of behavior. The US has never shown real contrition (which by definition must include admitting it being deliberate instead of trying to obfuscate with lies about it being an accident).


  • As others mentioned having a good encoder is an issue for AAC. And some skills in using it, tuning, etc.

    Nearly all quality releasers now use AC3/EAC3 or FLAC. Tigole is the last one who uses AAC to my knowledge and the rest of the QXR group rolls their eyes at it.

    You’re not going to get a meaningful reduction in bitrate and file size with AAC over EAC3/AC3 without loss of quality. We’re talking maybe you can shave 2-300kbps off an AAC version versus an AC3 5.1 track. And it’s tricky. So much so no one other than that one person I mentioned bothers. At least no one accepted in the higher echelons as competent in creating acceptably transparent encodes.

    If a source has EAC3 (itself capable of up to halving the bitrate required vs AC3) or AC3 I’d recommend keeping it as they tend to already be efficient. They’re also universally compatible as codecs. Re-encode those big 1500kbps DTS tracks and those even bigger monster lossless Dolby and DTS tracks but I’d leave efficient codecs like AC3 alone.

    That said it’s up to you what sounds good. If you’re using lower end stuff and can’t tell the difference after trying a few different test videos with different types of sounds then go for it.




  • Don’t bother with M-discs. They only provided a meaningful advantage in the DVD era. I’ve researched this a bit myself and consensus at least in the data hoarding community is use 2 Blu-ray Discs from two different batches (bought 6 months apart). Which still comes out cheaper or the same as branded M-Discs. (Though that may be overkill and truth be told as long as you test the disc and it’s data done months after writing you’ll tend to catch any rare bad ones)

    Truth is, quality Blu-ray Discs have all the features that would engender M-disc type longevity in the design spec. Just make sure they’re not low to high (LTH) discs which are inferior but always marked as such at least.

    Don’t get no-name cheap ones either, get Verbatim, Sony, some other good Japanese brand. For Verbatim specifically their discs marked MABL on the package are better.

    Always burn data at lower speeds too, less errors.