I normally hate turning to Youtube when there’s a text resource available, but I’ve definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

Not easily - I think that notebook is living at my mum’s house, from rather a while ago before I moved out.

I absolutely can when I am next there and manage to dig it up - I’ll try and remember to ping you once that happens.

At one point in time I illustrated my own version, I think I made it to like 20 plates out of 26 or so.

I had to stop working on the project while ‘out’ at like work or cafes, because people would snoop over my shoulder and then assume that I’m a fucking psycho. When I started the project, I had assumed that it was a relatively common and well-known little picturebook. Turns out no.

And why on earth would he admit it later??

Effective journalism. Someone asked him the right question in the right way, and he wound up volunteering something he might not have otherwise chosen to say.

That said, I think some of this is just reasonable openness and accountability. Given the game was effectively a full year ago and the issues with VAR from that game are still a somewhat spicy topic, it’s obviously something he’s been questioned on rather a lot - and given that PGMOL also released a statement, and he mentions that he spoke to on-field ref after the game … it seems like he’s already owned that mistake professionally and personally, so making the same acknowledgement of error publicly isn’t that huge a step beyond that.

It was definitely a mistake that the fans deserved an accounting of, considering it’s the exact sort of problem that VAR exists to address - and that it should have been a call, of some sort at least, was absolutely undebatable to anyone who’d seen it.

my family can euthanize me even if I object?

No.

There’s no law that allows killing of the unwilling; even a living will addressing assisted suicide or euthanization due to incapability assumes that you would still consent at the later date, but lack either physical or intellectual ability to communicate that. If you can clearly communicate that you’ve changed your mind, they have to respect that, even if that changed mind has reduced capability due to dementia.

Your best hope would be to go with assisted suicide while you still have enough faculties to make the decision and execute on your portions of the act.

Also, on the subject of this song being “breakout/viral” - how hard is it to manipulate streaming numbers?

It’s seemed like the numbers there are 'semi-'manipulated in the way that Kpop can be - hugely inflated by deliberate rewatching and multi-platform streaming, but by individuals who genuinely want the song to do well, rather than bots or purchased fake stats.

It’s really seemed like ‘the right’ sees Oliver Anthony as “their guy” and rallied behind him and his song in order to push it up the charts as an imagined way of ‘owning the libs’ - and I think OA’s industry backing worked hard to seed that narrative among those circles in order to elicit that sort of boosterism from them.

Oh yeah, for sure. The spectacle and near-‘festival’ atmosphere around the capture, trial, and execution of notable criminals of the era absolutely lionized the criminal in many cases.

There was also some amount of ghoulish fascination with particularly macabre crimes and criminals as well, but The State was already very close to being the bad guy for the average bloke in that era, so criminals whose acts were relatable, daring, or ‘noble’ somehow also were turned into backalley heroes via the spectacle of their trial and execution.

There’s the necessary info, thank you! - I’ve heard horror stories about hosting exit nodes, and was immediately spooked this would result in the same issues.

I really enjoyed some darker content in terms of establishing that humans aren’t always the good, wise, enlightened people of the galaxy, consistently The Good Guys in nearly every encounter.

But shifting to that “oh there’s a dark side to all the optimism” as the consistent ongoing tone for the show rings wrong as much as the always good guys tone did with older trek.

No it’s still against the rules. Ref will just happen to not notice it, though. Which is definitely unrelated and totally coincidental.

Yeah, I had to un-quit Whatsapp when my siblings-in-law moved to Argentina - because Whatsapp is the main communication platform for a lot of Argentina and that’s where all the various family chats moved to once the in-laws no longer had local phone numbers or reliable SMS service.

For a more values-based interpretation - players have to keep the ball ‘in play’ in a way that the other team can interact with, without posing a danger to the player(s) on your team.

As in this case the play is either unstoppable, or requires the other team to somehow extract the ball from between two players’ chests, it’s a fun theoretical loophole - but is not a fun or safe way of playing football if it became a commonplace strategy. In most cases, this would be seen as daring dangerous play - either the other team needs to kick it free, or jostle the players until they drop the ball, both of which are taking pretty significant risks of injury.

The person you’re responding to is basically making the, “steal a loaf of bread to feed your family” argument. It’s complicated by the fact that loaf of bread was already reserved for saving others,

That’s a spurious argument here, though. This is like not buying groceries for two months, having the cash to buy groceries, then stealing a loaf of bread to feed the family.

These people shouldn’t be there, they’re on evacuation order, and they have safe routes to leave. Not one of their lives is in danger that they haven’t chosen. But they did choose - to put their property ahead of their own lives, and in stealing fire equipment they’re putting their own property ahead of the lives of fire response teams and ahead of all the other properties in the same area. They’re willing to have the whole neighborhood burn around them, to cut off safe evacuation routes, all to try and save their own home.

but it’s stupid to act like they’re a deranged person without a point.

They’re engaging in sophistry and misrepresenting the situation to try and make hindering firefighting efforts into something personally justifiable. It isn’t.

Could kind of see how someone facing down an impending roaring wildfire, then stealing from the same people they want help from, might be counterproductive. The people telling them not to steal fire equipment are there. They’re the ones fighting the fire.

No private resident needs that equipment “to save their own life”. They’re on evacuation order, there are safe routes out, they should not be there, and they chose to stay in order to protect their property. The bridge that sprinklers are getting stolen from, for instance, is protected so there will be a safe passage out of the area consistently even if the fire shifts in that direction.

This is about wealth - not health. Stealing that equipment is choosing to fuck over the entire region and everyone else who needs fire protection, just to better preserve their own home, is selfish and stupid.

Yeah there’s two ‘main’ kinds of people who want a platform where users are able to post hate speech and reach “everyone” with it.

• People who want to be hateful and want access to the targets of their hate. They want to upset people, they want to ‘own the libs’ or be able to toss slurs at minorities, and those things are unrewarding for them if they don’t get to see how upset they’ve made their targets.

• People who want to recruit people to being hateful. They want to convince normal people to share their prejudices and their biases, they want “debates” or would like to share “statistics” and are seeking a soapbox that can reach people who might find their views convincing.

This is a huge part of why defederation works, why platforms like Voat or Gab rarely thrive for very long. Being hateful in an echo chamber towards people who are outside the room is rarely fun for those folks, and very often results in in-fighting and fragmenting of the movement. Moderates and ‘normies’ are driven off because now they’re a target rather than a participant or spectator.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on ‘rival’ platforms.

I think OP’s response to skimming a single Asterix comic is almost illustrative of how people ‘on the other side’ can so easily get their shit knotted up and wind up wanting to ban any and all books with rainbows in them or that acknowledge LBGT people exist - so I think that both those takes showing up in one place is a spot of fantastic irony.

I don’t care to actually read this so I don’t know what the plot is about.

Yeh. Right there. That’s the hallmark quote.

So early and up front, there are definitely huge problems with how Underzo illustrated black people. I think there’s very good arguments to be made for removing the comics including some of the more offensive racial caricatures from common circulation. However, OP is working a little too hard to be a little too outraged here.

A lot of this isn’t defense so much as context and the importance of it when engaging in critique from a position of good faith.

Every single group portrayed in the comics is caricatured. In the modern era, we have sensibilities that mean caricatures of minorities, and black people especially, are significantly more frowned upon than similar caricatures of ‘pale’ folks. I won’t dive into the ‘why’ around minstrel shows and shit, but it’s absolutely necessary to understand that is a very recent sensibility. That sort of portrayal could only come from deliberate prejudice today - but that is not the case in even the recent era these were made.

OP may have skimmed past, or even not have a cultural context to recognize that, the comics are also making fun of ‘gaulish’ and ‘roman’ features in similar fashion, or that the series did so towards all the other groups that the comics encountered. Nobody appeared on page without getting a few potshots sent their way.

Yes, in that specific comic the black characters played a very small part and were in a servile role - they were slaves. As actual romans had slaves and were callous and cruel towards them, so too the Romans in the comics. They are the villains, in case that was missed while skimming. The vast majority of the series takes place in Northern France during the roman occupation, so non-white folks are a pretty decided minority in that part of the world and in that era - and the cited scene takes place in some Roman vacation town IIRC, where again, nonwhite folks are very minority and very likely to be property.

While it doesn’t make the exact depictions OK, I think OP has definitely missed the fact that the practice of slavery and the power dynamics are being criticized there and that the Romans’ treatment of their subjects is not glorified - while OP is responding as if the Romans had been the good guys and we’re all supposed to be supportive and indoctrinated by how they treated the black folks in the comics. The gag about beating up masseuses is, for example, setting up the villains as villainous, and is not supposed to be a straightforward statement that the reader agrees with.

It doesn’t take that much work to pick that up.

So that OP is both refusing to read the books and is effectively skimming looking for outrage-bait, and then also going off on the existence of a series and a bunch of narrative they had to invent, while recognizing this from their childhood and pretending that they saw it in people’s houses and hated them for it, while it’s some sort of alt-right racist indoctrination leaflet…

If you’re going to pretend you’re better than the people calling for kids books to be banned “because they ‘ask people to be decent’” then actually be better. Don’t write essays supporting and decrying various books if you’re unwilling to put the bare modicum of effort into understanding the criticisms and the context behind them. If you don’t know - you don’t know. You don’t need to gild the lily with fiction and personal invective. You certainly should be above jumping to that sort of wild personal judgement, and even prejudice, based on something you have near-zero understanding of.

Even the very well-educated and and ‘expert’ people who are calling for some Asterix comics to be removed from circulation / libraries are doing so because the caricatures are no longer appropriate to modern sensibilities. No one with any familiarity with them, even who wants those books removed from circulation, is subscribing to any small fraction of what OP has, effectively, made up about them based on looking at maybe 20 panels from a ~50 page book.

The caricatures are super racist.

The actual content is not some wild racist indoctrination material, OP somehow wound up rooting for the bad guys while skimming, and seems to think that everyone else would get brought along similar.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one’s yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one’s mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren’t quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We’d get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who’d been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and … shit started going downhill. The couple weren’t bad. Their friends weren’t bad. Their friends’ friends were awful. I didn’t like the new crowd’s vibe, I didn’t like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn’t get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn’t want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone’s patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we’d built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn’t drop the grudge and didn’t see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn’t want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy “why are you here?” old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections … to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends’ defense - we had agreed we’d make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn’t have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I’d never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad’s charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn’t care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I’ve connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don’t think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don’t want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn’t. I took the low road and went behind my friends’ backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult’s perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn’t concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn’t a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room … I just didn’t like how there was more of “them” than “us” and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that’s one of the best changes they’ve made in ages and I’m glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it’s been an occasional frustration to hit ‘hide’ by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.

Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.

Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.

The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn’t ‘for men’, the term wasn’t about men specifically, and it didn’t start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.

Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.

Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don’t think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the “true definition” is doing either camp any favours. The “involuntary” part of the label isn’t trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply “celibate, but not voluntarily celibate”.

One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn’t care why someone was an incel, ie “it’s OK if you’re celibate because you’re into horses, but that’s illegal” that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.

I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.

I think that in light of this, it’s even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.