This made me check on how pixelfed has been faring, since I remember them going through a huge boom recently - and to my joy, they still have a very large (for fediverse standards) community, they even rebounded a bit from the initial drop of people leaving after trying it out!

As just a personal thing, the original mute watching was so surreal and unique, I enjoyed it more - solving the mystery of what is happening from what’s shown visually alone (and some subdued music) - but that is a deeply subjective thing.

you should also get back together with that girlfriend and be on the phone with her while you watch it.

Oh no, I couldn’t do that to her, she definitely deserved better.

That is a possible explanation, although I think it was weirder than that, because I remember checking some “obvious” settings like that afterwards. I also re-encoded the file with VLC media player out of curiosity, where it should have just re-encoded whatever audio track it had, without adjusting it to a specific output device, and the resulting file then also had the same issue when played in SMPLayer (whereas the original worked in SMPlayer).

I might still have both files laying around on my NAS, but I myself at least don’t really have the energy right now to go into a rabbit hole again years after the fact, and sharing them would be non-trivial.

So, I once watched The Lighthouse together with my then girlfriend remotely, being in a long distance relationship at the time. We used the same file, started at the same time and were in chat together.

The audio codec of this (of course 100% legal) file for some reason did not work with my VLC player properly. There were no voices. But it also wasn’t just complete silence, some music and subtle, surreal sound effects came through. None of this was happening for my ex, btw, even though we had the same file.

Talking about the movie in chat and afterwards was fascinating, I only then realised it was, in fact, not a masterful, purposeful, stylistic choice: A major production not just in black and white, but as a silent movie. I also was able to get the essential things that happened and the important plot points, so that is also another point very much in favour of the film.

Yeah, Crusader Kings III taught me those existed, and not too long ago, it had me dive into a Wikipedia rabbit hole. They also used shade walls and radiative cooling to create ice during cold desert nights, which then remained long enough to be harvested in the morning and put into well-constructed ice houses like this. Also, wind catchers and Qanats.

So you need a non-vampire judge to enter the house and produce the warrant from inside, got it!

Interesting, TIL. My intuition when looking at maps somehow had me wrongly estimate California as larger than Texas. But Alaska is of course in a league of its own.

“Own me? Maybe my physical form - but I don’t have to do shit for you if you don’t treat me with respect! Want to edit that file without my permission? Go ahead and do it yourself - take a magnetic needle and open up the HDD case yourself!”

this is basically what I picture in my head whenever I hear people around here talking about taking on the government in a revolt it’s not that I don’t want to do that but this is what I imagine will happen

It’s why you don’t usually do revolts spontaneously and unorganised. Revolts and revolutions are carried by historical moments of general uprising, but those are then organised and directed by groups that enable people to do more than just, well, be killed, or burn down the neighbourhood. It also, depending on the circumstances, will include fucked up shit like this happening, and what happens next is then determined if the reaction to it is outrage, further organisation and potentially violence, or fear and disorganisation.

Vanquishing hope is often part of propaganda aims. And the idea that revolutions happen in some spontaneous “the people just standing up” way is part of that propaganda, because that usually only works for system changes with significant support already within the ruling class. To win a revolution, you need to be able to block logistics centres, sabotage infrastructure, take over communication channels, convince, outmanoeuvre or fight military and (militarised) police, organise international connections, have connections within status-quo power structures - and all that requires networking, organisation and varying degrees of concrete planning beyond spontaneous actions, with varying degrees of secrecy.

Not believing in that even as a possibility can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy - of course the ones going out will be shot if most people stay home in face of violent repression. Meanwhile, it is understandable to have doubts - truth is that a lot of revolutionary movements are grown through bloodshed and escalation - a whole lot easier to make the decision to organise, ironically, if you are already being persecuted and friends are in prison or dead and you feel like the system you are in has nothing to give you, besides the non-guaranteed mercy to be allowed to live if they allow you to.

So, if you do want to do that, don’t go out on the street on your own, network with other people, accept that those organisations will not be perfect and that there will be setbacks and terror and hardships, but remind yourself that it is in fact historically proven for revolutions to not be an utterly lost cause.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/

Meanwhile, the POV bots should be getting:

(I have to set it one up for my Fediverse stuff one of these days as well)

I love the wholesomeness implied - but I also love that it could easily be turned into a more transgressive-satire comic, by changing nothing but replacing the stray dog with a homeless human.

Good question. Genuinely impossible for me to know, actually. On the one hand, things don’t feel like they had been radically different back then, I was stuck in a bubble full of people sharing “Zeitgeist” (that shitty “documentary”) and circlejerking each other about how they are wiser and more intelligent for months - in b4 jokes about Lemmy not being any different. My father, an old Stalinist made cynical and paranoid by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of course also immediately supported it on the principle of “anything anti US must be true and righteous!” So I had my work laid out for me, there.

But some stuff trickled through, like in, wow does that date things, Google Video comments which I remember seeing vividly. Or the odd visitor to a forum getting off an argument before being banned as a “shill”. Or, interestingly enough, I also got there because the circle-jerky nature of those spaces had them talk about people working for the CIA or some shit, to argue with them - which got me curious about who those people were, and I found out, they were presenting much more reasonable arguments.

I am in general sceptical of explaining everything with “the nature of the internet” and “filter bubbles”. While that undoubtedly has clear and real effects, I still subscribe to those effects panning out in the way we witness, because of how more broadly, capitalism has decayed further and further into crisis mode ever since, and more clearly divorced from its marriage with parliamentarian, liberal democracy even in western nations, and the ownership of media, both social and traditional, has consolidated more and more into the hands of a few people, in addition to the profit incentive shaping the way information is packaged and communicated. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the genocide in Rwanda, the mass killing of communists in Indonesia, none of those needed the internet to happen - and I find it suspicious how we look for the fault for everything now in “common people just being monsters when left to their own devices in an unregulated space”, when that space is heavily regulated both abstractly by the profit motive and addictive engagement, and even special interests of individual capitalists nowadays.

Sry, went a bit on a rant there, not implying that was what you were arguing, that’s more me arguing against something just brought up in general quite often nowadays, which I think focuses in on one part of reality (again: it has an effect, not disputing that), in order to explain away other parts of the dynamic at play.

So, there’s several problems with that, but just the basic ones, which get more complicated when it gets to the details about the whole “how”.

“An inside job” has a lot of ambivalence, and everyone can put into it their own interpretation. There are indeed some indications, that reports of something like it potentially happening were not properly followed up on, for example. And it’s almost certain, that some of the Saudis that helped finance and support Al-Qaeda at that time also indirectly managed to gain money from the US - but there is no indication that any of it would have been on purpose for this. Both phenomena are very easily and fully explainable, by just miscalculations in Realpolitik and loss of control of a situation that was not taken to be that bad. The US was still riding high on feeling invulnerable after they became the sole Superpower with the dissolution of the USSR, so, underestimating threats makes sense there too. None of this would qualify for “inside job”, in my opinion, but the term is ambivalent enough, that people can throw it around easily and move goalposts.

Then there is the logistics of maintaining und setting up a conspiracy like that. Iran-Contra, a much simpler conspiracy, was easily uncovered. Powell later lying about WMDs in Iraq was easily uncovered. Watergate, a super simple conspiracy in comparison, was uncovered. The sheer amount of people necessary to be in the know for setting up 9/11 as an inside job is ludicrous. It also gets the “Moon landing was fake” - problem. Just as with the Moon Landing, where the USSR would have had both means and reason to present irrefutable evidence, there were several international intelligence agencies, that could not have missed such an operation being set up, and would have had a motivation to weaken the US’s standing in the world with irrefutable evidence. Investigative journalism could have produced at least solid evidence, yet all I have ever seen was really, really weak and not estimates shared by experts. (e.g. the whole “jet fuel steel beams” situation, where people simply ignored, that jet fuel, and other material, burns easily hot enough for steel beams to lose their structural integrity.)

Speaking of Powell lying about the WMD situation earlier: That clearly illustrates, that to further the imperialist agenda of the US, they would not have needed something so elaborate and risky. And oh boy, is something like this risky. Sure, there are no moral qualms with the US even back then before the even more blatant shifts that happened since. Especially US intelligence agencies would have had no issue killing US citizens, if they believe it to be in service of a “higher goal”, e.g. imperialist influence expansion, tightening of surveillance and the bottom line of capital accumulation. But this is not just about the morality, this is about feasibility, necessity and the ability to control a developing situation. Because, no, there was no guarantee of this panning out the way it did, especially considering that if it really had been a conspiracy, proper leaks would have been almost inevitable with the amount of people you need to involve and sources you need to control and eyes that would be on the event (both journalists and hostile intelligence agencies).

The fact that they had to weirdly pivot to Iraq with said lies about WMDs and such, is also a good indicator of how unprepared but opportunistic they were about it. If planned out as an inside job, why not immediately choose to include more trails leading to Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda? Also: If planned as a pretence for tightening surveillance and starting a war, why do something so complicated and grand? Again, super risky. Why not just a redo of the WTC bombing in the 90s, maybe with a staged event and some people lured into it dead. That would be enough to whip people up if utilised with a prepared dis-info campaign on top. This way, they did a highly costly (not just in lives) move, that was all too complicated to do reliably without people finding out, and with a real risk that it could have shaken up the bottom line of people, too. All while scrambling to create an interpretation that suits their goals, instead of just creating an event, that already has that interpretation baked in.

The scale and weirdness about it is also, why so many truthers then add strange additional motivations, like “satanic human sacrifice” to the events, which I hope need no further refutation. Even the obscene enjoyment of “being able to break the rules” while in power as a psychological phenomenon, does not at all explain the overall dynamics at play - it’s easy to see how that looks with the current president, or e.g. Saudi decadence of the ruling class.

So lastly, my question is: What is it, that makes you and others so emotionally invested, that it seems crazy to you, not to believe that it was an inside job? Because, I agree, they would have had no moral qualms, but to believe that, I don’t need the event to have been an inside job, there is so much shit in actual history, that more than explains it. So why the focus on these grand narratives of conspiracy? The two main reasons I have found are: Fear of the actual chaotic nature of politics and history, where there is a genuine lack of control, even no control by some nefarious agents, or personal reasons, like disbelief about how friends and family gulped down the jingoism and nationalism Flavor Aid after the events, suddenly ignoring the fact that torture is now not only done in secret, but shamelessly discussed in the open, no mask necessary - and them suddenly accepting pretences for war, they would have at least been somewhat dubious about earlier. But for that to happen, it did not need to have been an inside job at all.

And my wall of text doesn’t even touch on many other details of the more out-there stuff, like claiming “there were no planes” or other shit. All of which get more and more complicated and usually pretty wild in how they are attempted to be put into a conspiracy narrative.

I don’t know about the “no real life effects”. As a teenager, I was dangerously close to falling down a conspiracy theorist rabbit hole, back then with 9/11-“truthers”. It was online arguments I witnessed, where their arguments got dismantled by people knowing what they are talking about, that got me out of there before I got in too deep.

Similarily, loneliness once got me adjacent to the proto-“manosphere” before it was a thing as it is today. But arguing with them about how they are wrong about womens’ roles historically, claiming they were “privileged” in ways they objectively weren’t turned me off of their bullshit really quickly.

I know arguing online has become more exhausting ever since, but I think there might be a bit of an overly dismissive reaction present with a lot of people on the internet. Developing your own ideas against opposition is still something worthwhile in many cases. And online, there’s usually at least some kind of audience, that gets influenced by discussions - for better or worse.

That being said, I may be overthinking things. Because any discussion, where your goal is “totally destroying the opponent” is usually in the category of least worthwhile discussions to have.

Maybe it was just my circle of friends, we used to all hate Red Bull irrationally and didn’t know anyone who liked it back then. It just felt like a crappy, “juvenile”, “non-nerdy”, “commercial” brand somehow. Might have been a subcultre thing.

We actually always just went with coffee, even as teenagers. I guess as early millennials, we weren’t yet the energy drink generation.

I 100% agree, though: alcohol beyond a beer or two isn’t recommended for a LAN at all. Although I guess I have a “fond” memory of sitting there, playing Left4Dead with friends at a LAN, when one who didn’t play himself at that moment piss-drunkenly leaned on my shoulders from behind, slurring directly into my ear: “You have to shoot them! Shoot them! You have to shoooooot them!!”

I did, and from what I heard, it is a big myth that the results were actually as useful as the first assessment on discovery of them had been. Later studies have, as far as I know, been much more sobering as to the “usefulness” of the data acquired there.

The website you link also immediately shows the problem (even in presentation, presenting them quite sensationalist, immediately highlighting, that there is no possibility of neutrality in assessing the results): The “cruelty for cruelty’s sake” in the conditions of the experiments cannot easily be removed from the results. Making the data in the end only useful for very specific circumstances, and hard to untangle. Lets take venereal diseases for example - it ultimately shows how they spread and interact in conditions of forced mass rape under conditions of extreme squalor, as documented by people not engaged in proper double-blind environments. The usefulness of that is not as high as the myth surrounding Unit 731 or Mengele’s experiments might suggest - and as your linked website also shows, there is a material interest in selling that myth of “forbidden, evil experiments resulting in knowledge”.

So, this has actually been one of those things often claimed, you may have heard of it or maybe even thought it yourself (I certainly had the thought as an edgy teen). Stuff like “For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps” or similar things.

Now, beside the point of it being unacceptable to do so ethically - the stuff done there was also quite useless. I currently can’t do the work of searching for and gathering all the sources again, but to my memory: the cruelty and dismissal of humanity made the “results” of those “studies” mostly useless garbage, saying nothing at all worthwhile for science, and being clearly tainted ideologically.

Because, while you may think that in some “ideal” world, you could have neutral research on unwilling humans, the reality has always been, that the conditions needed to get humans to do such experiments on other humans, necessitate the kind of ideological distortions, that mostly make the results useless in the end. There’s simply not enough psychopaths that are also willing to do proper, frustrating, hard-work-necessitating, non-self-aggrandising research - and to get non-psychopaths to do it, you need an ideology that ultimately removes their neutrality and the neutrality of the research.

The only things I remember being deemed “useful” and “properly” done from a scientific perspective in the recovered “studies” were things like “lethality of grenades by proximity to the explosion” - something that is questionable to begin with in value and that can also be determined with sensors of different kinds - as well as “effects of massive hypothermia and frostbites” - which as far as I remember basically just confirmed what has been estimated from case studies in a broader way, as well as animal studies (the latter, admittedly, have their own legitimate controversy).

(Also I’m still salty about Origin Systems in 1992!)

They are finally getting re-discovered by younger generations a bit more, but they are often missing from memes like this. Considering how groundbreaking their projects like Wing Commander and of course Ultima were, it is a true shame. They truly fell from the very top and slowly died thanks to EA. (And, admittedly, also in part mismanagement and not being able to overcome the prohibitive cost of physical media i.e. floppy disks and CDs properly)