DancingPickle

  • 195 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • DancingPickle@lemmy.worldOPto3DPrinting@lemmy.worldCommitment
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    1 year ago

    I’m 100% retro and linux gaming, but I don’t need to force my kids down the road I’m on. I just share what I love and hope they choose it for themselves so we have common interests. So far, surprisingly, they both love NES / SNES and that’s thanks to Nintendo developing the same franchises for decades, for better or worse.

    I don’t really game on the go other than mindless android games. If I did, steam deck makes way more sense. For the kids I keep thinking Switch mainly because they already love the Wii, and all their friends have Switches, so it’s a social vocabulary thing.

    Surely you’re right about the satisfaction part. I need to make sure the kids are part of it, maybe choosing models and building, painting, etc with me. They are pretty young but once they get a little better spatial awareness and reading skills, python and freecad are not out of the question! They play minecraft already, so we’re off to a good start I think.








  • First, let’s consider that up until fairly recently in human society, writing has been the domain of the wealthy and not entirely accessible to everyone. The rich could write whatever they want or patronize those who could write what they wanted for them. The rarity - relative to the greatest developments of proliferation being chiefly the printing press and recently the internet - of written works, demanded that anything someone bothered to put into physical written form must have considerable innate value to someone. If they didn’t, nobody would have bothered with the effort or expense.

    I no longer have access to the reference for a citation and am having trouble digging it up, but I saw (probably on a blog about AI) some figures recently describing the amount of written “material” produced by humanity on a daily basis (or some other comically short time) in 2023 being comparable to the amount produced in the ~five thousand preceding years since the written word is thought to have been invented.

    With as much “writing” being produced, most of it being spam or low-effort shitposting, the signal to noise ratio is unbelievably high. Regardless of the profundity of the thought being born and described, the chance of having anything written today - randomly on the internet - recognized for its quality is infinitesimally small.

    I believe that there IS a fantastic amount of truly remarkable writing being done every day all over the internet. Nearly all of it will be retained on some form of media basically forever, even until the media is woefully obsolete / destroyed / the heat death of the universe. Most of it will never be set upon by human eyes again after this weekend.

    Today, like hundreds of years ago, what rises to the surface does so due to commercial pressures. If you are awesome and impress a publisher with deep pockets, your words could be preserved in a form that will be read in 2434. Of course, it will have to continue to be impressive long after most of the books selected by Oprah’s Book Club.
















  • So we’re clear, I am not conservative by any means. Reviewing the article for hints, I don’t see anything that I would call “thinly-veiled conservative propaganda” at all. The same words in the same order could be written anyone with any political perspective. Maybe my skeptic muscle isn’t working right now. Please point out what you mean.

    That said, the content doesn’t have anything specific to do with atheism or religious bias. Tangentially, the right is fueled in large part by religion, which fuels the hatred being mentioned. I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch.

    I posted the link because it’s on a prominent atheist blogroll. I subscribe to many of them and collect the articles here, because Lemmy is a link aggregation website. It’s pretty typical for people in a community of perspectives with one specifically in common to share many (not all) similar values and interest in similar topics, so I thought that a topic of interest for the author in question would be appreciated by enough of our community to be worth sharing.

    To be sure, am not rooting around the web looking for articles about natural disasters and puppy mills and topics completely unrelated to philosophical discourse and superstitious belief. My posts will, at least, be humanities focused. Often, I find the propensity for humans to seek out and find - or create - differences to compartmentalize each other into rival groups of particular interest and relevance here.





  • As one who has never burned a book to the best of my recollection, I’m flummoxed by the pleading for respect of dogma.

    It’s one thing to be respectful of other human beings, in adherence to the social contract. It’s quite another to demand respect for an arbitrary thing, such as a point of view.

    For example, I refuse to knowingly use Apple products in my house and, by extension of the same principle, my family chooses to use products on offer by companies who respect the rights conferred by ownership rather than effectively leasing a device to me with provisions. If I am vocal about my distaste for the way Apple does business, and you happen to be an Apple user, I expect that you understand that I mean no disrespect to you, the individual. I don’t care one whit what you use privately, provided it doesn’t perturb my rights to act differently from you. Anyone who has had this conversation from either perspective knows that being an Apple user is practically a religion on its own, so I think the comparison is apt.

    And yet, nobody is going to put up a serious problem if I smash an iPhone. People understand that destroying a physical object in protest is not meant as a personal affront.

    Meanwhile, religions throughout history have committed no small number of human rights violations and atrocities that pale in comparison to burning a book. Nobody has ever caused harm to another human being by setting fire to a book in protest, unless they then threw that book at someone wearing flammable pajamas.