[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 6 points 17 hours ago

No need to tag me, my inbox is filled with 3k notifications for movie showings on ~~hextube~~ blorptube, but I'll be watching for your release post Friday. As it so happens, the only other game I have on my sputtering and wheezing potato laptop is a game a different hexbear put out a few years back. Fortunately it doesn't look like Guardian Cry has exceptionally high system requirements, though. But damn, now that I look, I see you've released a bunch of games already!

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 18 points 22 hours ago

I was also a teen at the time but I knew about their idolization of Hitler pretty soon after it happened. I do remember it being mentioned in the news, but their Nazism was always just a quick side note, only remarked on in passing before focusing on the fact that they played Doom and listened to Marilyn Manson, which was where all The Discourse got centered. Their fascist inclinations were what got written off as typical edgy teenager behavior whereas the shit that really was just typical edgy teenager behavior (at worst) was what got all the attention. A decent example of emphasis/de-emphasis as a tool of propaganda in news media.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 7 points 23 hours ago

P this-is-fine (while also complaining about cold)

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

For anyone running into the paywall:

https://archive.is/qjPeo

And just the part about 50 years and nuclear weapons:

spoiler

TG: Do you feel that in 50 years, we'll be closer to having some kind of unified theory that incorporates all the forces?

DG: Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people … that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small.
Due to the danger of nuclear war, you have about 35 years.

TG: Why do you think that we'll blow ourselves up, essentially, within 35 years, give or take?

DG: So it's a crude estimate. Even after the Cold War ended, [when] we had strategic arms control treaties, all of which have disappeared, there were estimates there was a 1% chance of nuclear war [every year]. Things have gotten so much worse in the last 30 years, as you can see every time you read the newspaper. I feel it's not a rigorous estimate, that the chances are more likely 2%. So that's a 1-in-50 chance every year. The expected lifetime, in the case of 2% [per year], is about 35 years. [The expected lifetime is the average time it would take to have had a nuclear war by then. It is calculated using similar equations as those used to determine the "half-life" of a radioactive material.]

TG: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

DG: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year.
There are steps, which are easy to take — for nations, I mean. For example, talk to each other.
In the last 10 years, there are no treaties anymore. We're entering an incredible arms race. We have three super nuclear powers.
People are talking about using nuclear weapons; there's a major war going on in the middle of Europe; we're bombing Iran; India and Pakistan almost went to war.
OK, so that's increased the chance [of nuclear war]. I would really like to have a solid estimate — it might be more, and I think I'm being conservative — but a 2% estimate [of nuclear war] in today's crazy world.

TG: Do you think we'll ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons?

DG: We're not recommending that. That's idealistic, but yes, I hope so. Because if you don't, there's always some risk an AI 100 years from now [could launch nuclear weapons], but chances of [humanity] living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal.
So [the answer to] Fermi's question of "Where are the civilizations, all the intelligent organisms around the galaxy, and why don't they talk to us?" is that they've killed themselves.
You asked me to think about the future, and I am obsessed the last few years, thinking about that ‪—‬ not the future of ideas and understanding nature, but of the survival of humanity.

TG: I think in some ways, during the Cold War, it was easier for people to conceptualize because we had one major enemy. Now there's chaotic interactions between countries.

DG: There are now nine nuclear powers. Even three is infinitely more complicated than two. The agreements, the norms between countries, are all falling apart. Weapons are getting crazier. Automation, and perhaps even AI, will be in control of those instruments pretty soon.

TG: That scares me too ‪—‬ that a lot of weapons are using AI systems to make decisions on some level.

DG: It's going to be very hard to resist making AI make decisions because it acts so fast. If you have 20 minutes to decide whether to send a few hundred nuclear armed missiles to both China and Russia for "our dear president," the military might feel that it's wiser to make AI make that decision. But if you play with AI, you know that it sometimes hallucinates.

TG: The problem feels too big for ordinary people to do anything about, which is the same thing with climate change, right?

DG: People have done something about climate. So that's something scientists began to warn people about 40 years ago. And they convinced people that's a real danger.
It's a much harder argument to make than about nuclear weapons.
We made them; we can stop them.

edit:formatting

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 25 points 2 days ago

She knows. But it's not about that, it's about scoring points by owning the leftists and courting controversy to keep up engagement. It's not at all unlike the typical MO of the explicitly rightwing grifters. It works. She is at this point essentially nothing more than the radlib version of the rightwing grifter and it's not a new phenomenon to her either. As Awoo mentioned:

You can see the exact same behaviour spiral from Ethan Klein and to a lesser extent Destiny. All three of them share the same politics with different presentation styles.

I might also add to the list although a bit more crass, funny-clown-hammer (va*sh) who I thankfully never even hear about anymore, but who generated a similar response on this website, as seen in this very thread, with calls to limit posting about them because it feeds the grift.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 17 points 3 days ago

Did you win? Sounds like you probably did if he got so frothingfash about it. On the other hand, just because one of them throws a hissy fit at the drop of a hat or gets physically threatening doesn't mean they failed to get their way.

I knew and had to spend a lot of time with a former small business owner who lost her ~100 employee business and ended up living the worst nightmare of any capitalist: being a wage worker. Having to exist on the other side of the class divide and get exploited rather than do the exploitation went a long way in humbling her I think, though it happened a decade before I met her. But she still remained one of the most petulant people, totally unable to admit to having any fault or being wrong in any way and was always just so childish for the most asinine reasons. (Though to be fair I've also known life long proles with similar issues).

Small business owners really do put the "petty" in the term petty bourgeoisie.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 8 points 6 days ago

About 12 hours ago I started getting intermittent 502 gateway errors when trying to connect. downforeveryoneorjustme.com also confirmed hexbear.net was down, but then after a couple minutes it would work again. It's still ongoing though, because just a couple minutes ago I got more errors and couldn't connect.

18
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by QuietCupcake@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

It's a 2016 dialog choice and QTE driven game along the same gameplay lines as Telltale games like The Walking Dead. Of the writer-director, wikipedia describes him:

Khonsari was raised in his homeland Iran until 10. He fled Iran as a political refugee to Canada after the 1979 Revolution with his family.

My assumption is that there are two possibilities for this game. It's either just another run-of-the-mill both-sides-bad centrist-brained libfest that paints the revolutionaries as being "well intentioned" but all revolutions (except for bourgeois ones of course) inevitably lead to "authoritarian" dictatorships that are even worse than what existed before and any good-guy revolutionaries presented at the start of the game either turn out bad or are shown to have been naive fools for ever hoping things could be better. That's what the game is painting itself to be, regardless of whatever it is. The other possibility, made more likely given the writer-director's background, is that it's flat out unabashedly pro-imperialist, anti-Iranian unmitigated western propaganda.

I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think you know what I mean, where they kind of represent two ends of a shitty spectrum. (There's also the exceedingly slim possibility its politics are halfway decent, but I'm not really entertaining that thought because the chances are too close to null.) I'm curious enough about where this game lands on that spectrum that I think I'll go ahead and play it. I'm not one to rage quit in the traditional sense, but if it gets bad enough, I probably won't subject myself to it any further. So before going in, has anybody here already experienced whatever this game is pushing? Any thoughts about it one way or another?


Some quotes from the "Political and institutional responses" section of the Natopedia article on it:

When the game started gaining popularity in June 2012, Iranian conservative newspaper Kayhan published pieces naming it "pro-Western propaganda" and accusing Khonsari of espionage; he subsequently felt afraid to reenter the country. Some developers used aliases to protect themselves, and the concept artist fled Iran due to his involvement. Khonsari said that "anytime Iran has something written about them in the west, they feel as if it is propaganda against them." Following the game's release in 2016, the National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) blocked all websites distributing it in Iran and began gathering all illegally distributed copies in the country.

featured in a November 2016 UNESCO report by Paul Darvasi about the impact of games on learning about conflict resolution; Darvasi noted the game "might be studied to determine if [it] can be used to support the production of historical empathy, global empathy, and ethnocultural empathy, all which contribute to the acquisition and development of intercultural understanding".  In 2022, a branch of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education critiqued the game; teacher Alexander Zart found it affected by subjective depictions due to Khonsari's significant personal background, despite its framing as an "interactive documentary".

45
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by QuietCupcake@hexbear.net to c/covid@hexbear.net

Thanks to ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @yogthos@lemmy.ml for this one, I saw posted here. Wasn't expecting to see a comic so perfectly nail it.

Edit: Aaaand now I see that this was basically posted yesterday, but as a link to the xcancel thread about it. So I guess here's the direct link to the comic at least.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 57 points 11 months ago

I feel like Trump operates on the assumption that no one will react to counteract whatever strategy he implements.

Well, when his greatest domestic opposition is the democratic party, it's been a correct and winning assumption. The logic becomes "What's anyone gonna do, impeach me again?" On top of that, when most of the vassals fall immediately in to line when he says so, being good dogs for the US, and the strategy keeps working even with foreign policy, there's not much incentive to do otherwise. Fortunately China is not the Democrats nor are they Europe.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 54 points 1 year ago

Similar to what others said, it is about control. The US state has complete control over how the "algorithm" feeds people the narratives that the US wants to feed them when it comes to the major social media platforms. But not with TikTok. It is not a national security threat in the way they want people to think it is, but it is a national security threat in that they can't force their curated propaganda through it as they see fit, like they can with the other platforms. It's a propaganda liability.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 59 points 1 year ago

So you appear to be one of those dorks who thinks that all political positions exist only as a binary, falling somewhere on a spectrum between liberal and conservative. This is fucking stupid. It's not entirely your fault, since that's all that's allowed to be officially acknowledged in amerikkka, but really you should know better by now. Hell, you should know better simply by virtue of the fact you're posting your ignorance on a communist website. So apparently I'll be the first to inform you that both liberalism and conservatism are very similar rightwing ideologies, with conservatism being essentially another branch of liberalism. This is recognized by most of the rest of the world, even many other "LiBeRaL dEmOcRaCiEs." As communists, anarchists, leftists in general, we wholly reject liberalism and that includes conservatism (conservatism itself still subscribes to almost all liberal doctrine such as worship of private property). See, learn something new every day. :new the-more-you-know

100
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by QuietCupcake@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

Edit: So it looks like there are a couple posts about how this crackdown is fake news. Even in this very thread, someone is doing that, though they actually don't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

No, this is not fake news. These sites that are still up are not fmovies, which was itself part of a large piracy network, the rest of which has been dismantled as well, as has been discussed in other posts here. The sites still up are merely copycat sites riding the success of fmovies and trying to cash in themselves. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that, and if you can still watch movies like you did with the real thing, great. But some of them it appears are not the most scrupulous of pirates and have or link to potentially dangerous malware.

Regardless, please don't jump to "fAkE nEwS!" accusations when you don't know what you're talking about. All you're doing is muddying the waters about what really is going on and possibly leading people to think that misleading, potentially dangerous sites are fine. Don't do that.


So that's what happened to my beloved free treat-dispensing Fmoviesz. It hasn't worked for a month or so, but now there's no more need to speculate exactly why. There has been a huge wave of "piracy" outfit takedowns recently, which is both sad and worrisome and I wonder why this is all happening so all of a sudden. Why the severe crackdown now? Or is it the sort of situation where a big domino fell and they're all connected? They're really making sure any hint of commons gets enclosed and demonize it in the meantime.

I also wonder about the political motivations of Vietnam to go along with this and make the actual arrests. Is it due just to pressure from the west? Does Vietnam have any stake in copyright laws and this takedown, or the precedent of it, does actually benefit them somehow? What's the deal with all that?

From the article:

The efforts marked “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe”, said Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Hollywood trade group the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the chairman of Ace, in a statement. Larissa Knapp, the executive vice-president and chief content protection officer for the MPA, said the takedown sent a “powerful deterrent message”.

“We look forward to ongoing joint efforts with Vietnamese authorities, US Homeland Security Investigations and the US Department of Justice International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (Ichip) program to bring the criminal operators to justice,” she added.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 49 points 2 years ago

No prob! I get a kick out of reading the modlog and was kind of in awe when I saw this massive line of bans filling a page-height with what amounted to "Nakoichi BANNED for being an EVIL TANKIE!" Naturally, I was curious what heinous, egregious thing you had said, but I couldn't find any removed comments of yours in the log. I thought it must be some new mod with an old grudge or something. Then I happened on that post to see that your great unforgivable sin was to mention that the BBC didn't consider Tiananmen Square to be a massacre.

walter-shock rage-cry How dare you?!

Then I laughed. Tbh, I thought about posting it to the dunk_tank, but 1) I figured it would probably get removed for being low-hanging fruit, and 2) I wasn't sure if you wanted attention called to their dipshittery but regarding you. Glad to see that wider hexbear gets to point and laugh at them too now.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 57 points 2 years ago

Meanwhile, what is it that actually makes it to the front page of that shithole copaganda site?

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QuietCupcake

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