Just a bard with a thousand faces.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • True Pacifist Undertale just the other day. Which, to be fair, took me something like two years to get around to doing because I was way too lazy to deal with some of the ending fights of Neutral route.

    Now I have the itch to go back and play EarthBound again… Which may be related to the lo-fi Mother 2 mix that got posted earlier today over in the Music community.


  • Oh, yeah. I realize that there’s a lot of nuance at play. It’s just that I’m a historian who grew up in the Deep South, so I’m well aware that whatever other excuses and loopholes are used, it’s ultimately all about trying to reinstate segregation by another name. Because it always is.


  • Roberts’ opinion brought a strongly worded dissent from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who accused the majority — including his colleague Brett M. Kavanaugh — of creating a “consciously segregated districting system” in the name of the Voting Rights Act.

    I really want to know what he thinks the current system is if it’s not that.






  • I wouldn’t necessarily call it “security through obscurity” so much as just the nature of a web that isn’t all in a few big baskets.

    Besides, it’s a knife that cuts both ways: the barriers to fluid movement means the worst people are kinda just stuck festering in a handful of places and everyone eventually learns where they are. Like, the big basket-style web has been a boon for fascists and their ilk in large part because there’s lower barriers to entry and its possible to build a funnel from normal/mainstream boards to the more radicalized ones through intermediary communities.

    But, when everyone knows, for instance, that something like Voat or Stormfront is where all the vitriolic racists are, there’s kinda an upper limit to how easily they can lure people in since eventually they’ve gotta drag you there or else you’ll probably slip away from the indoctrination, and that often means tipping their hands just a bit too soon to get past the “wait a moment, these guys are terrible people” filters.


  • I suspect the answer is that there’s probably a depressing number of authentic human adults who just are like that, and it creates a feedback loop/spiral where people are pushed into being more aggressive/vitriolic as a defense mechanism.

    The real problem, I think, is the ease with which those individuals can hop between communities/be directed toward communities particularly sensitive to their brand of bile on social media sites. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about making on-boarding to Fediverse stuff easier, but realistically, being able to layer several barriers along the way (e.g. finding an instance to join, finding an instance to harass without getting either yourself banned or your entire instance defederated) will go a long way toward limiting the influx of bad actors.