bogdugg

The left doesn’t want free speech.

You've placed the bar so low that this suggests there is nothing an individual person can say or do that would warrant being banned, which is frankly bullshit. Every forum has rules, including this one, as it should. This is critical for maintaining a place of a discussion that is actually useful. I see no reason why "yeah but they're popular" should give license to skirt the rules.

Freedom of speech, in the US at least, exists specifically to prevent the state from restricting speech. That's all it is, and all it needs to be. Banning users from a private website does not contradict this.

The suggestion that unbanning Alex Jones makes the service less susceptible to 'ignorant propaganda' is also laughable.

I think you've correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.

It's true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it's kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.

tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions

If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn't produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a "true" map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.

I don't really know what this post is on about, but science is not truth. It's a system of prediction. The closest you can get to "truth" would be observation and data. Science is the process of interpreting these facts to better understand what things will look like in the future. It is obvious that science is not 'true', because by its nature it requires change over time as our models of the world improve.

My hot take is that you don't actually want fewer streamers. As it stands, pirates benefit the most from content wars because the services are paying more to produce shows than they are receiving in subscriptions.

The obvious losses are legacy content and access to it. I don't know that there's a good solution. A streaming service benefits most from surfacing content that will keep you on the platform, meaning either a modern series with promised future seasons, or older content that's still popular. Any old obscure media is going to lose money for rights holders on a $/stream deal because they could potentially make more $ from a single physical media sale than any amount of streaming would net them (if it's $/stream, and only 2 people stream it, that's very little return). And nobody subscribing to these services is going to shell out more money for specific titles because to them, that's why they're subscribing in the first place.

Watched the video and was still confused. Had to stare at the cardioid animation on the Wikipedia page for like 10 minutes before I could wrap my head around it.

I don't play Standard, or constructed, so this could be a dumb idea, but how would players feel about shifting what "Standard" means?

Right now, you immediately have access 10 sets worth of cards. The obvious argument to having that many sets is to present lots of different options to keep the format feeling fresh and changing. But of course, the new problem is that it doesn't feel fresh anyway, so the value of having all those cards available is diminished.

What if instead, after launch week, you slowly introduced the 9 other sets (or more) of the format on a weekly basis? As in, for launch week only the launch set (let's call it Set A) is available to play, then week 2 adds the next most recent set, so A + B. Week 3 is ABC, and so on. So, every week you get a sort of developing meta that's subtly different from any other period of play. Older sets are more naturally phased out, newer sets have renewed emphasis, the format has a chance to build and evolve over time, weaker niche cards could have their chance to shine. I don't know.

Backpack Battles, basically.

If you try to just use the characters and setting to tell a different story, it’s also going to be soulless because those characters aren’t made to tell that story. Make your own characters and tell your own story if you don’t want to stick to the spirit of the original work.

I don't exactly agree with this. If the creator has a vision, I say let them try. They should be able to stretch and change and rework things however they want. Of course, the farther they stray, the more it begs the question "Why?" but I don't think it's impossible if they have ideas.

or played the game

I would argue it's actually a detriment to experience anything other than the source material when adapting a work. Especially with books, different people are going to have wildly different interpretations of the world. The character that exists in your mind is going to be different from somebody else who read the same book. But once it is adapted to a visual medium, you lose a bit of that magic. Which sucks, because all of those previous interpretations are still valid! More valid even, than anything that was put to screen, because they were yours.

I think the argument for accuracy is kind of bullshit anyway (not that you said this, but others have). Is The Shining (the film) worse for the changes it made to the original text? Stephen King might think so; he would also be wrong. You don't want something accurate, you want something that's good. You want somebody with passion and artistic vision to create something new and uniquely amazing. The recent Last Of Us show, to my knowledge, tread pretty closely to the source material. "Aha!" you might say. But what is also true, is that the best episode of that first season was also the probably the biggest deviation from the source material. I probably don't even need to say which one if you've seen the show.

Anyway, companies should hire people who are both passionate about the source material, and want to make something cool and new in that world - not robots who are just going to recreate the original work beat for beat. If I wanted that, why wouldn't I myself just, you know, read the book?

Cadence or intonation depending on what you mean.

Edit: This would seem to sum up the various parts of speech pretty concisely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)