There was some kerfluffle in the gaming press like this; a lot of magazines used to score games out of 10, with a 7/10 being effectively the lowest possible score. “When I booted the game up, my C64 caught fire, as did my Spectrum, which was turned off at the time and not relevant to this review. Then the developer kicked in the door, gave everyone in the building AIDS, then went on a worldwide tour kicking every single puppy. 7/10.”

There was a magazine that was in the habit of actually using the entire scale with a “meh, s’alright” being a 5/10, and some developers outright blacklisted them for it.

It’s like how grades of meat are all positive sounding. Which is the worst grade of meat: Prime, Select or Choice?

I once saw a documentary with the engineer who worked on the toilet equipment such as it was on the Apollo spacecraft. Urine was collected essentially by a condom with a hose at the end, which came in three sizes. Of course none of the astronauts would be caught dead ordering anything but a large so they were labeled “large, gigantic and humongous.”

You know how XKCD sometimes draws fantasy maps of like, the internet or something? I’m picturing a map like that of internet marketplaces, and there’s a dark amorphous cloud whose nature I’m not entirely sure of that strongly compels sellers to need 5-star reviews like a smack addict.

In a healthy, honestly run marketplace, 5.0 ratings will functionally never happen. Because idiots exist. For example, I bought a small inverter that runs off of drill batteries. It’s powered from a 20v lithium ion battery pack meant to run power tools, it has a standard American Type B power socket on it to power things that run on AC, but it’s limited to 150 watts. The reviews were divided into two camps: 4 and 5 star reviews from those who understood that last sentence, and 1 and 2 star reviews from those who don’t.

I really don’t want to buy a product that has a few 5 star reviews, because that almost certainly means it’s dropshipped Chinese garbage, the reviews are either fake or coerced.

But no one does.

Nothing I’m conscious of, though a lot of the names of races or peoples end in an oh or ah sound. Zora, Rito, Gerudo, Shiekah,

So, there’s a fun fact about that related to the Zelda series. You know how the Hylian language kind of sneaks out in enemy names? Like, Stal- is a prefix meaning skeletal, -fos is a suffix meaning warrior, so a stalfos is a skeletal warrior? And a lizalfos is a lizard warrior? A stalchild is a skeletal child. -orm or -arm means worm creature, like Moldorm.

Well, in the games prior to the N64, geld- meant desert or sand. The geldarm is a sand worm creature, the geldman is a sand man like enemy from Link to the Past. Then in Ocarina of Time there’s a race of women from the desert called Gerudo. Hmm.

Who’ve you checked with? Boomers or Zoomers?

With a radio control drone you, your face and your smart phone can be a quarter mile away. Plus, have you been in aerial combat? I haven’t. Yet.

There are none of us in our 20s anymore.

Wasn’t there a guy who built an AK-47 out of a shovel?

Is there a common quadcopter on the market capable of carrying a paintball gun or something else that can splatter lenses?

By “blue collar work” do you mean that done by mechanics, carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, machinists, tool operators and repairmen? because yes I do.

Capitalism != free market.

Under a free market, a painter buys paint, an easel and some canvas at prices set by supply and demand, and then paints and sells portraits again at a price set by supply and demand.

Under capitalism, an artist wants to start a painting business, so he goes to a rich person or group of rich people and says “If you give me some money to start my painting business, I will give you a share in ownership of the business and its profits.” with this so-called capital, the artist rents or buys a building and supplies and operates the business to effectively pay back that loan. The working class make a living and the rich get richer for having been rich.

Unfortunately I think that bed has been shat, because everyone wants to be a general purpose instance. Nobody wants to be sportslemmy or musiclemmy or movielemmy where they only host communities that match their theme, which is why we have linux@lemmy.world, linux@lemmy.ml, linux@sh.itjust.works, linux@feddit.org…

So “Join an instance for a community you’re interested in”…not sure if that’s tenable on Mastodon but it sure ain’t on Lemmy.

There is absolutely no inaccuracy in that description of that frelling show.

Yeah that this is just how millennials talked in high school and we’re entering into that “old person stops caring” phase of life about now?

The third verse, which starts about 1:50 into the song. Repeats the same homophobic slur multiple times, it’s possible you know the version of the song where that is just lifted out.

I do occasionally receive a temporary field promotion to Major Aggravated.

I think this was and still is in part true for me.

The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.

The USPS (and probably other countries’ mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.

There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.

Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content…one monolithic stack.

Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there’s a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren’t in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.

Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I’m a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate…within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet…Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just…Can; abstract as it is it’s a thing this collection of software can do.

I’m not sure you can define “the biggest bubble” in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it’s used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn’t ideal but I’m pretty sure that’s an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it’s a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there’s some of it we can’t see because the middle is in the way, and there’s nowhere in it where that isn’t true.

As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon…I don’t know, I don’t actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I’ll leave to someone else to answer.

In men it’s the third layer down under hair and grease.

Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” has a couple lines that often aren’t broadcast.