VoxAdActa

It’s news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That’s what all the “US news is world news!” people were saying in the meta thread.

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

It’s going to be a science-based 100% dragon MMO.

One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.

Okay but why didn’t they have a usable option before killing off the stuff people use?

They didn’t fucking think about it. It literally never occurred to them to consider all the third-party work that went into being able to make their site actually usable. They just assumed that, obviously, the official app is fine, and people would just “adjust”.

The conversation they had with the mods of r/blind was a complete joke. It just never once occurred to anyone that people with accessibility needs use Reddit at all.

The following is a dramatization

“Who in your company has accessibility certifications, and which ones?”
“… uh… well, of course we do…[texting their boss what the fuck is an accessibility certification???] I just… [ding! A what? TF is that?]… am not allowed to answer that… … right now…”

“When was the last time you had a third-party accessibility audit, and who performed it?”
“…oh, we… totally… had an accessibility audit, just… like… you know, just recently! And it was performed by… uh… [texting Who the fuck does accessibility audits???]… uh, you know, that big company, from Canada… you’ve probably never met them… [ding! What audits? The fuck are those? I don’t fucking know!] I’m just… not allowed to say right now.”

it’s hard not to just allow it in my mind to just to consider it as another form of intelligence.

If it makes you feel better, that’s probably a biological response that everyone has, to varying degrees. I heard the phrase “textual pareidolia”, meaning that if we see text that looks human enough, we’ll automatically put a human face on it and want to treat the author like an actual human. Even though it’s just a way of creating sentences that mimics human language, and has no form of “intelligence” whatsoever. It has no idea what it’s saying and does not understand the meaning of any of the words it’s producing. But our lizard brain is still fooled because it sounds good enough. It’s like seeing a face in the clouds or Jesus on burnt toast.

Even though I know what it’s doing, and can “break” it by making it sound very not-human without too much effort, it’s still hard for me not to end a chat session with “Thank you, have a nice day!”

I hated them too. It’s rude and unpleasant to interrupt a conversation between other people so you can correct their grammar.

Hi! For clarity, consider rephrasing the sentence in order to avoid the use of the indeterminate second-person pronoun! Try: “Interrupting a conversation between other people in order to correct their grammar is rude and unpleasant.”

(Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

Got to the one where I had to include an emoji. I know I can get them on desktop, but I wasn’t willing to learn how tonight.

How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.

You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.

I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.

If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.

If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say “JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.”)

As for the bit about speech, you’ve lost me. I’ve never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I’ve lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the “and”. Maybe it’s different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.

I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.

I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.

Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.

I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.

And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.

So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/health/oxford-comma-maine-court-case-trnd/index.html

The biggest difference I’ve experienced between the fediverse and Reddit is how infrequently I come across outright bigotry in the comments. I didn’t expect that, and I certainly didn’t expect that to feel as refreshing as it did. I had gotten to the point where I was just numb to the racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, etc. Not having to put up with it to nearly the same degree in my first few weeks over here was amazing.

Now that I’ve (a) seen that a community can exist with a minimum of people calling me slurs, and (b) realized how much those comments were actually affecting me (I’m not so tough after all), I am very aggressive about protecting this space while it’s still possible to stem the tide.

I suspect a lot of other Reddit migrants feel something similar. We’ve been forced to put up with these chuds for years, to the point where we’ve just started treating them as an inevitable, natural forces, like shitty weather or beach seagulls. Over the last four years, particularly, we’ve very clearly seen the result of allowing these fuckfaces to take root and grow their communities. Now that we have a chance to make something different, a place where that doesn’t happen, we’re (pretty collectively) jumping at the chance to actually fight against them. Trying to fight them on Reddit was like trying to fight a snowstorm, or fire ants, or the just the fucking tide. Here? There’s a chance.

Edit: Another great thing about this place is I can see everyone who downvotes comments like “I’m glad I don’t have to just suck up and deal with being called a f*g twice a day”, go through their activity, and see if I want to just block them preemptively.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

Why does this headline read like some kind of clickbait advertisement?

Which minority communities are the supporters and politicians of the Democrat party calling for the extermination of? I know Republicans and their surrogates have started talking about “hunting Democrats with dogs” and having gay people “line up against the wall”, but I must have missed that rhetoric from the Democrats. Do you have a link or something I could check out?

So, see, here’s the thing. Most countries don’t do birthright citizenship (that is, you’re automatically a citizen if you were born in the country). They trace it by pedigree; some combination of your parents, grandparents, and, possibly, great-grandparents have to have been citizens in order for you to be born a citizen.

THE PROBLEM IN AMERICA, tho, is that we had slavery for 200 years (as America). So when the slaves were freed, guess what? Their parents, grandparents, etc., were never citizens, says (mostly) The South. So sure, they’re free, but they can’t hold office or vote or anything, because they’re not citizens. Ever heard the term “Grandfathered in” or “Grandfather clause”? That comes from the test that Jim Crow states used to determine who could vote (for free, or without jumping through hoops, or, in some cases, at all). If your grandpa could vote, you can vote. Guess whose grandpas couldn’t vote? Yup.

So we had to drop a ban hammer on that in the form of writing birthright citizenship directly into the constitution. Because the people who were crying into their grits that they lost all their slaves just wouldn’t get the fucking hint.

Do we necessarily need birthright citizenship anymore? Absolutely we do. 100%. Because as soon as the GOP decides to trash it, they’ll come up with some Neo-Jim-Crow shit fucking immediately.