• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Not a full on extinction event, but the late bronze age collapse has always fascinated me. So much do that it led me to pursue archaeology in college.

    So many theories, everyone has their favourite, but yeah, what ultimately caused every near eastern civilisation as well as the Mycenaean Greeks to just all collapse and disappear over a relatively short 200 years or so (archaeologically speaking a blink-of-an-eye)








  • looks like OP is a beginner and not an experienced editor

    Basically yes. I have contributed a few times when I thought about it, but then go long stretches between contributions. But it’s only now that I’m trying to make a conscious effort TO think about it more once I downloaded organic maps so I could move away from Google.

    I’ve always had the opinion that if you use an FOSS product, the “cost” is in “contribution”; which doesn’t have to be monetary (though I often do). The payment for using a FOSS app (to me) is to contribute in terms of either helping to develop it, or writing user manuals for it (I helped with LibreOffice Documentation back in the day) or even creating tutorials or recording tutorials, or even just championing it’s use to your friends and family.

    Moving away from Google I realized that I had been negligent in that with OSM. I’ve contributed to most of mybigger ones (GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, LibreOffice, etc…) But OSM just fell under the radar. So I’m trying to correct that by making a point of contributing to the data as much as I can.








  • Hicks and Newt had to die in the beginning of Alien 3 in order for the film to thematically even be an Alien film.

    At their heart, the films are about Ripley being alone, more in common with the titular alien than with her termporary allies. She’s an outsider in her crew. She’s a civilian among marines. She’s a woman among convicts. She’s lost her child, she’s lost 57 years of her life. The Alien is her only real touchstone now, and in a way that is very expressly shown in the films, that becomes a kind of “relationship” in itself. She’s closer to the alien than she is to the people who surround her.

    If Hicks and Newt survived and were part of Alien 3, it takes that away and makes it an ensemble cast, which thematically doesn’t fit, and (I think) it’s one of the reasons that a lot of the new Alien films just don’t feel like Alien films; they’re missing that key thematic ingredient. Ripley is a tragic character, doomed to battle alone against the only thing she has left in her life.


  • The main problem is that some, sometimes most, of immigrants don’t want to assimilate. They are creating ghettos, don’t respect local laws.

    Generalisations like this are the very reason it’s a polarising issue. Opinions like yours generally derive from “observation” and “gut feeling”. Which by definition is completely anecdotal and harmful when it begins to be applied to millions of people all at once.

    Betsy from insert town here sees an immigrant couple down the street in her home-town keeping to themselves and not really wanting to take part in the community. She’s talking on the phone to nosy-nessie the town busybody who says “oh…you know…my aunt said the same thing about her insert culture neighbours.” And then all of a sudden, that’s just “how those people are”…all of them…everywhere.

    Maybe this couple is just a little embarrassed about their english skills and want to strengthen them more before going into public everywhere, which comes across as shy. Maybe they’re just private…who knows. But suddenly…“it’s just how (those people) are”, becomes the anecdotal “truth”.

    It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and the fact that you don’t even grasp the irony of your own comment is telling in a lot of ways.