Using the phrase "serious question" or "honest question" will make me immediately assume your question is the exact opposite of that. Probably I'm overreacting, but expecting that anyone might respect that declaration you've made about your own question, that gives me narcissist vibes.
We have seen exactly zero indications that the republicans might start nominating better candidates anytime soon. The next candidate will probably be "Trump, but less incompetent at implementing his agenda". It makes sense to want to stall as long as possible, but needing a democrat victory every single election from here out is not going to be a winning strategy longterm. If Trump winning is guaranteed global chaos, then there aren't votes we can cast that will do anything other than slightly delay that.
Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water
I don't understand what you're trying to suggest here. Taking it at face value doesn't make any sense at all - in spite of massively outnumbering third-party voters, the potential impact of non-voters should be dismissed because they are all somehow incapable of being convinced that voting is worth their time? Casting a ballot is a difficult mental hurdle to clear, so it's reasonable to write off anyone who has not yet shown that they're capable of doing so as a hopeless case?
If the argument is that third party voters are throwing their votes away, why should we consider a protest vote to be different in any meaningful way from a protest non-vote?
I only discovered encabulation is a thing like a month or two ago and it's been life-changing, I've seen the original paper but finding videos on youtube is like a treasure trove. The Chrysler version is probably my favorite I've seen, entirely because of the tech guy that the video switches over to for the second half.
The SANS ICS HyperEncabulator video is also really special. The throwback "I don't understand you" scene at 1:53, I can't even make out most of what he's saying but somehow the delivery and the grin get me every time I watch it.
I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of these voters. Maybe I'm just consuming the wrong media, but it feels like third-party voters get 50x the blame nonvoters get for ruining elections with probably something like a thousandth of the population. I basically never see this discussion call out both third-party voters and nonvoters equally.
I keep seeing third-party voters maligned for thinking a candidate has hope to win a national election, I see so many arguments to address why third-party candidates can't win. In spite of that, I have never come across any community anywhere where people collectively believe these candidates actually have a chance. People who consume crazy media can believe crazy things, that's why MAGA is a thing, but there's a whole Fox News etc media machine feeding those people. Is there a forum somewhere with more than ten people where there's a consensus that a third-party candidate might actually win? None of the third party voters I have known or met irl believed this, and I would be shocked if they're all weird exceptions.
Like, please, where are these people congregating to spread the ludicrous idea that a third-party candidate can win a national election? Looking on the recent green party posts on their subreddits, the only thing I see even close is a thread with a headline about "candidates are electable if people vote for them", where the furthest they go in the comments is a few people talking about how big a deal it would be for the party if they got 5% nationally, and a couple other people replying to say the greens won't even get 1% this year but the election is still very important because of some nonsense about incremental gains.
It feels like we've imagined a brainwashing machine that does not exist in reality, rather than admit to the existence of protest votes. Condemning protest votes means condemning protest nonvotes equally, and we'll never have sufficient information about protest nonvoters to reasonably make a claim about how they would have voted. That would severely muddy any attempts to assign blame for election results.
If you're trying to convince these voters to act differently, the way to do that would be to address the arguments they're actually making, like the incremental gains nonsense. If you're addressing arguments they haven't been making at all, then it's worth asking whether you're trying to convince someone other than them.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I'm assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I'd try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.
I agree with the sentiment that it's very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I'm not sure I really agree with much else you've written here. In particular:
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn't have a place on a private tracker, that's not a problem because they're not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won't stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I'm sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won't say I endorse that, but I'm cool with it, and even if I wasn't I still don't think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I'm invested. I don't care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it's morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
It really bugs me when people don't comment their code at all. I have no idea what this is supposed to do.
I 100% believe the lemmy developers' firm belief in this policy is why the platform was able to take off eventually. In the early days we would frequently have people join and then stomp their feet about free speech and the slur filter and then fuck off to whatever variant of voat was en vogue (...that was wolfballs for a little while). It was a small community, discussions were heavily (but not exclusively) tech and communism, but I don't think it would have been an appealing landing spot if that kind of toxicity had been allowed to grow.
Absolutely no question there's more hostility in the conversations here after redditors came here, but more users will do that. The exodus has made it a lot easier for me to abandon some of the smaller subreddits I was still active on.
I need some relationship advice. I suggested 125% but my wife won't budge from 10%. Is this normal? How did it go when you had this conversation with your romantic partner?
Same here, played it about a month ago, fun idea at its core that's executed extremely well, very memorable. Unfortunately it's very short, probably around ten hours for me to complete everything, but it have might gotten stale if it went on too far beyond that without significant gameplay alterations. Probably like 70-80% a puzzle game, 20-30% action. My only complaint is that I don't really like hearing all the terrified screams, but I'm not sure those could be removed without destroying the immersion.
Different genre, but another indie game I want to mention is Eastward, which is actually something I tried playing after seeing a poster here on lemmy give glowing praise just a week or two after it came out. I think it's the best pixel art I've ever seen. The dialogue and story are wonderful overall, heartwarming at times and creepy at others. The charcters have personality. Overall the appeal for me is that there's a lot of emotion packed into every aspect of the game.
I think the gameplay is fun, but that's not the reason the game is memorable and the main complaint people have is that there are many long stretches that are just building atmosphere with minimal gameplay. I didn't mind that at all, but I was disappointed with how much of the story was up for inperpretation after beating it. I spent most of the game excited to see how the loose ends and parts of the story I didn't get would be tied together, so it was a let-down when the game ended and most of those questions just weren't answered.