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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Those amounts aren’t USD yeah, probably habit when writing down money. The 170k and 360k figures are the WoW virtual currency aka “gold”.

    There is a floor to WoW token’s gold value from what I recall (it’s been years since I interacted with Blizzard and WoW) but no ceiling.

    Dunno how hard it curbed bots/unsanctioned gold sellers/fascist scum grassroots campaigns (no, really, look into Stephen Bannon and WoW gold it’s so fucking stupid) but!

    Blizzard absolutely realized and then moved to take all the money that was being left on the table from 3rd party virtual currency sales, and they apply every measure and analytical tool to maximize that profit because of course.

    This mount’s release is literally them inflating the price of the virtual currency ahead of real life earnings calls, because it absolutely will sell and give them the revenue infusion that the WoW token’s rise in value is meant to provide for as long as they want until it’s time to pump the numbers again with another mount/high sought store item.

    A very similar variant in form and function to this mount was once available in-game and trade able with a rarity tuned that it ended up being sold for the WoW Token equivalent of ~$500 at the prices at the time, as there was no store version or similar option elsewhere.

    It’s no accident that when the price of the WoW Token is at its lowest, here comes a slightly updated and dolled up version of that same highly sought mount version.

    WoW is where real economics, car ownership culture, hoarding, and dopamine treadmills collide and Blizzard doesn’t just know this but have it charted on 5 year plans.



  • Not all.

    Carriers tend to have internal hangar spaces, repair/loadout spaces, machining capability, assisted takeoff/landing systems on the flight deck, etc.

    To “carry” the aircraft and expect them to perform their roles, the carrier has to be a mobile light airfield and not just a deck to land and take off from.

    Edit: Not to say they can’t sail or don’t with any of them on the flight deck of course, but that’s maintaining a certain level of readiness that has some posturing inherent. I guess that’s true for all military readiness doctrines.


  • Software has been leveraged to do mass arbitrations against companies that insist on enforcing it, somewhat leveling the playing field in the power imbalance, at no less a cost than courts ultimately for the corps. Tricky enough they’ve found it hard to make language against them too.

    So in a sense, it is de-enshitification but it is more likely borne from Steam throwing in the towel against a losing proposition (preventing costly mass-arbitration) than doing so because they want every user to have the maximum legal recourse.

    A W is a W though, imo.



  • There’s many answers but I genuinely fear they’re too lost in the weeds of abstraction.

    The truth is still simple; Power is useless to the common* (read: average and averagely distributed) person. It doesn’t grow crops, shoe horses, or help your fellow man, inherently.

    The common person has real concerns to worry about, leaving the search of the trappings of power for the uncommon.

    Uncommonly good* (read: beneficial for the doer and the common person) is harder than uncommonly evil* (read: beneficial for the doer but detrimental to the common person); this is simply entropy, and it readily maps to humankind’s so called capacity for thought.

    That it only takes a bit of shared effort to make lasting structures to help others and fight off sociological entropy is an uncommonly good realization:

    The common man has labors to do, the uncommonly good servant a statistical rarity and the uncommonly evil servants and the structures they engender to keep them in support (entropy begets entropy) a hurdle that by the point of realization takes an uncommonly amount of uncommon good to overcome.

    TL;DR: Human nature + time + compounding apathy in those in a position to nudge things when they were easier to nudge = a need for collective awakening to course correct. We’ve gilded the lily on our sociological underpinnings but have yet to truly revolutionize, only iterate.


  • Part of Fiction writing 101. The more things you need to 'effing name, the stupider the wordplay gets.

    Lots of visual references to make those puns work on Pokemon designs usually.

    Kanghaskhan (Garura in Japanese), is a giant Kangaroo thing with built-in laminar armor reminiscent of Mongolian make.

    At least Kanghaskhan made it to the list of B-tier sound puns to go with the visuals (and Genghis was a ruler, keeping the pun from the Japanese name that is “Kangaroo Ruler”).

    Not all Pokemon get the same wit applied to their puns, some get really groan worthy if examined haha.




  • I thought I had a problem with taking a point or two and stretching them across a handful of paragraphs. I no longer think I have a problem and indeed have learned a few things to limber up and aim for greater mental gymnastic heights.

    You’re not just a fly in history’s wall, to hear you retell it, you can read hearts and minds better’n than most deities too. A graph tells a shaky story but your certainty of the intent of every actor involved is inviolate?

    Please don’t write back at me, for the first time in my life, I comprehend the fear of my acquaintanceships and the long rambling.


  • In 1998, Baker, Ruoff, and Madoff that the organism is most likely a species of Mycoplasma called Mycoplasma phocacerebrale.[7] This Mycoplasma was isolated in an epidemic of seal disease occurring in the Baltic Sea.[8]

    It’s not that we don’t know what causes it, and it can be cultured from seals and has been. It’s that in order to empirically and categorically say in any way that matters that the organism is definitely the cause of seal finger…

    You would need to be culturing a person infected with the disease from whom treatment is being withheld. Either against their will or with their “consent” wouldn’t matter. As we know what the disease can lead to, the ethical course of treatment is clear: a bunch of culture ruining antibiotics injected into you. Right away, without delay.

    Because asking or even taking advantage of someone declining treatment to assess and write the confirmation study that says “Mycoplasma phocacerebrale definite cause of seal finger” goes against a lot of ethical science limitations.

    This is what makes the donating the affected limb of someone who never got care for science post-mortem also work as both a neat joke and ethical loophole. Researchers could accept that gift, ethically.






  • You know the saying surrounding the learning of history and the dangers of the lack thereof?

    It’s not cynical enough.

    It’s always thinking “this time, my knowledge and lack of scruples will supersede the human condition!” with the regressive, self-deluded authoritarian mind.

    The tragedy of the “doomed to repeat it” and “doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” aphorisms both is always going to be a function of linear time, not the wit of the self-styled Masters of the times.

    Sucks to live on human timescales during these times tho, I think every pen since antiquity agrees.


  • Take it easy on the uneducated y’all. The fact that the failure to get anywhere and still keep meeting is the whole point, is actually not as well known as it ought to be.

    Ask yourself dear reader, if world governments didn’t have a place to meet and waste time arguing over geopolitics and agreeing to disagree, how would such disagreements take place?

    Theoretically, there are less big regional wars and no world wars anymore thanks to the UN’s founding as the world government’s pressure release valve.

    I’ll not share my personal stance on the matter, easy to discern as it may be.

    Now, these days are the real test of the institution. It was intended to head off another of what’s brewing (WW), to be a release vent and that’s just fucking laughably not happening as genocide and fascism returns anyways.

    So the institution and it’s non-currently disingenuous members (US politics has been financially tied to Zionism too long for a clean break) need to call out the bullshit and the other four need to find their balls too because the only winner in a WW3 will be the US elite and rich, again.

    Every other oligarch and oligarch wannabe is dreaming if they think our dragons will align with theirs out of dragonhood if Uncle Sam gets geared for global war again; the US will load it’s cannons with its fodder stock of idiots and no-other-choicers and will once again do their outmost to take whatever path leads to the most rubble elsewhere and the most firesales on cheap foreign bonds. Just like before.



  • Right. You are righteously protesting. Right on. No joke or bullshit, I applaud conviction.

    Of course, the bastards have made it so that the price of mass protest of this kind is the same folks protesting dying more often.

    That’s also no joke, or bullshit.

    For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction, and if you stare at the abyss too long it stares back at you; same sentiment.

    Same way you don’t kid yourself about the goal, never kid yourself about the price and who pays it or you’re no better than who you protest.

    I’m sorry if this is news, and it is not your fault; let’s head off that trite response.

    But conviction often quantifiably costs blood, and it’s poignant the theme is literal this time which is why I’m taking the chance to blab this much.

    A warrior should know the weight of the sword they heft.