It’s because the latest Reddit refugee wave have been exposed to uncensored news for more than five days, breaking a personal best.

When one side unironically complains that the other has kidnapped a soldier from his tank… We’ve been conditioned to ignore atrocities I think, as humans, because those of us who survive still have to live. And further out, people have no sympathy for people they’ve never been shown are people too. But the tank soldier kidnapping thing is just making fun of their own sympathizers to their face. I’m sure there’s a kind of person who picks up on these things and goes from being a “reasonable” “centrist” to looking at both sides and understanding what they’re really looking at. It’s really not complicated

Proud of you, new joiners, I see you.

Another big thing you might be missing: Amazon doesn’t exist in most places on earth. AliExpress does. And it has damn near everything when it comes to some categories. A lot of companies also sell directly on there, depending on your niche (coffee grinders, keyboard parts, 3D printing stuff, repair parts for whatever) straight from the source. For me a big one was metal models, the kind popularized by Metal Earth/Piececool.

The first time I received foreign packages of locally unavailable stuff from an online order in rural Lebanon was an almost magical experience. Even if it did spend two months rotting in customs.

Suddenly I went from having very few options for specific niche things, especially electronic parts, to being on the same playing field as everyone else on earth. I paid like 10 USD for an ATTINY85 from the local extortion shop, compared to like 20 USD for a pack of 10 from AliExpress. Quality? Please, the shop is buying them from there too. The ICs are fine.

I think AliExpress sells itself short, if you open the app it looks like they’re doing some sort of overwhelming and insufferable TEMU-style gamified slop-shopping “experience” on the front page. And sometimes you search for something and the one you want won’t show up, but will be in the sidebar of the page of one of the things you don’t want from that list. But it’s been a life changer for me after getting used to how it handles, I hear Amazon is much easier to use. Although you probably can’t ask the seller “hey can you paint this part differently” or “can you skip this accessory, I don’t need it” on Amazon.

Gregorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz would like a word

I thought about that as I was writing but it would be a little contrived to a general audience, maybe.

I’ve commented about this link before. The gym bro thing is what made me wrap my mind around some things myself.

Honestly that could actually be interesting. Would probably be able to discuss some nuances and make the mainstream a bit more comfortable with some currently uncomfortable conversations. People can remember complicated things if they’re invested in the narrative.

I’m a cis-het potato. If any of this sounds insensitive, I can fix it:

Guy who doesn’t meet the stereotype of a “drug guy” has to cook up drugs to make ends meet. <Narrative device> makes him start making <common drug> for <uncontroversial illness>, which turns out to also be used by <some queer people> for <hormoney things>. At first he sees them as nothing more than the users he was profiting from in an hour of desperation, people who twist their sad lives around acquiring and consuming a substance, but over time as he gets further down this path he begins to understand them in a way that he (and most people) has never had to. “Upstanding-man-who-is-a-secret-chemical-man ally” can go in so many directions.

With all its many many faults, I remember seeing Dallas Buyers Club as a judgmental kid, and it was successfully able to split “queer identity” from “sexual perversion” for me. I think this understanding was beginning to spread before a tipping point in the past decade. Personally I think people saw a lot of (Western) companies really go all in on rainbow marketing, going directly from “queer identities exist” to “these are being celebrated openly” without the critical middle “this isn’t a sex thing”.

If you think it’s bad in the US or Europe (and it’s not always great, it’s not a competition) let me assure you the heightened negative attention has also made people who were able to be themselves under the radar here in the Middle East face more bullshit. The average person around me has gone from “This person gives me the ick but it has no effect on my life really, just stay away from me and my kids, it’s between them and God” to “This person should be fixed immediately before they shove their perversion down everyone’s throats.” The former is abysmal, but at that point they weren’t really seen as an active, growing threat. Unfortunately it’s not just “this isn’t a sex thing” that’s missing here, historically most people have thought “queer” = “perversion” = “pedophilia”, and this was fading slowly before being supercharged by all this torrent of negative attention.

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy

One day I’ll get around to playing Nomifactory CE. I’ve somehow played the base one twice over the past five years.

I’ve been so alienated from friends playing the most popular game on the planet in multiplayer because I can’t play Vanilla for shit. Not since 1.2.5 probably.

I’ll play no Minecraft for two years and then immediately nolife a modpack for two months.

Good shit. The best value game I have ever bought, no question about it.

I thought he was pretty middle of the road as far as fitness bros go, but I’m not surprised the bullshit-du-jour brought some cringe to the surface. Unfortunate. With these guys I can only hope they aren’t too far down the drain. I’ve watched a lot of insightful videos from this guy, even if they didn’t apply to me. I can only hope that some of the other guys I’ve gotten helpful advice from in the past (namely Mario Tomic and Sean Nalewanyj and James Nippard) aren’t like that.

You’d think bodybuilders could be the most empathetic people towards gender nonconforming folks, given their daily physical and mental effort re: body dysphoria. As someone outside the queer community it was ironically cis dude fitness talk that helped me wrap my head around the kind of thing trans people especially have to worry about on a daily basis.

Sometimes your body just can’t do what your mind says it must do and that’s a pretty crazy experience! Sometimes it’s a hormone or chemical thing. Sometimes people around you are dicks about things that they really shouldn’t be about. You bust your ass and sometimes go to extreme lengths to narrow the gap. The theoretical bodybuilder bro - transgender axis of solidarity seems very rational to me. It feels like the disconnect is purely cultural/artificial.