[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago

Laws constantly need to catch up.

I'm not sure what law would be an improvement though. The courts tend to frown on laws that are directed at specific groups of people so you probably couldn't have something as specific as, "When a man says YBMC to a woman she's allowed to consider it a rape threat and knee him in the nuts." It also wouldn't be terribly effective since those people would likely find some variation that skirts the law but carries exactly the same message. That's so common a tactic we even have a name for it, "dogwhistles".

The most general form is a "stand your ground" law. Ie we don't question the motives of the "defender", we just assume they were right. That has some obvious issues too.

There might be something between those two that would work, but I don't know what it would be.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

People are confusing moral and legal rights.

Women absolutely have the moral right to nut-knee someone who says that to them. I wouldn't stop them or testify against them.

People generally don't have the legal right to do that. If someone tries that and gets sued, it will be up to them to prove that there was an imminent credible threat. If the guy is still alive, they'll be able to claim that YBMC is just a joke and it would be up to the victim to prove that it wasn't.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 58 points 3 months ago

They fail gloriously at at that too.

Whenever they get tested the red teams manage to smuggle in everything needed to hijiack a plane plus a kitchen sink.

The few times that terrorists tried to board planes, they made it through security and were caught by other passengers.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 40 points 4 months ago

Things will only have useful size metrics when the buyers want useful size metrics.

Men's pants come with useful size metrics because they're useful and we attach very little meaning to the measurement of men's pants.

Women's pants come with stupid size metrics because we attach a lot of meaning to the measurement of women's pants.

It's the same reason condoms sizes are all on the spectrum of large to extra large without actually providing a length and diameter.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 109 points 7 months ago

I took your advice and looked it up. It seems to be a work of fiction, originally published as "The Hermit" https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100322754

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 50 points 1 year ago

Is it just Gen Z?

Most movie sex scenes are terrible. They fail as both pornography and as literary devices.

When you put a sex scene, or any other scene in a movie it has to serve some purpose. It can move the plot along, it can show the characters emotions or it can just be there for titillation. If it's just there because someone thinks that the main characters are supposed to smash, it's dumb.

I remember that when we rented "Basic Instinct" you knew how often people re-watched the interrogation scene because the old VHS tapes would get worn at that spot and you could see the screen artifacts.

Two things made that worth watching. The whole movie was about sex so it made sense, both in the movie and for the character. The way to get porn at the time was to walk into a store and buy a magazine. And Sharon Stone was hot, OK 3 reasons.

There absolutely are movies where the sex scenes make sense and are important. David Kronenberg's "Crash" and Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry", would have been weird if they didn't include the sex scenes or just left them implied.
The sex scene in, "Team America: World Police", worked because it was a satire of sex scenes in movies.
Pornhub works because their scenes are very explicit.

When you have a boring, unironic, semi-artistic sex scene in a movie that's not otherwise about sex, it's just a distraction.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 52 points 1 year ago

When "they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia" it wasn't in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.

That's still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren't saying that you shouldn't use it at all. They're telling you not to stop there. That's exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.

If you're researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you've ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn't trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren't primary sources. In egregious cases the "sources" are just opinion pieces.

-9
[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 48 points 1 year ago

Every time I see posts like this I remember a frequent argument I had in the early 2000's.

Every time I talked with photography students (I worked at an art school) or a general photography enthusiast, I got the same smug predictions about digital photography. The resolution sucked, the color sucked, the artist doesn't have enough control, etc. They all assured me that digital photography might be nice for casual vacation photos and maybe a few specialty applications but no way, no how, not even when hell freezes over would any serious photographer ever consider digital.

At the time I would think back to my annoying grade school discussions with teachers who assured me that (dot matrix) printers just sucked. Serious writing was done by hand and if you didn't know cursive you might as well be illiterate.

For some reasons people keep forgetting that technology marches on. The dumb glitches that are so easy to make fun of now, will get addressed. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI development. Every major company and country is developing them. The pay rates for AI developer jobs attract huge amounts of people to solve those problems.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 37 points 1 year ago

I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 56 points 1 year ago

“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.

“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 36 points 1 year ago

I don’t. When it comes up I argue in favor of staying federated with hexbear. There are some good ideas there and we’re worse off for eliminating them.

Hexbear does have a lot of posts that consist mostly of smack talk, pictures and memes though. I just block all of those posters individually for myself but I can see why a lot of people just consider it immature and want to block the whole instance.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 79 points 1 year ago

tl;dr I was wrong.

I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.

Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn't think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.

The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.

But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn't think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I'd go once a week and if I ever found a date I'd impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn't like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).

Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.

We decided there's no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.

Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn't recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren't a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(

view more: next ›

nednobbins

joined 1 year ago