GraniteM

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GraniteM ,

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.

--Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer

GraniteM ,

Just wait until he puts her on the Supreme Court after Alito retires.

GraniteM ,

Okay, well I definitely wondered what the hell the star of Gremlins and Drop Dead Fred was getting up to.

How could we go about making a jurisdiction where advertising is illegal?

I want to get as far away from the ad economy and ad culture as possible. Since there's a 0% chance the morons supporting it will ever learn from their mistakes, I'm starting to realize the only option going forward is to create new places where we aren't stuck with the "tunnel vision of the stupids." ...

GraniteM ,

Billboards are illegal in the state of Vermont.

GraniteM ,

If you drive from the east coast to the midwest and back, as I have, you'll get a sense of how weirdly huge the United States is. There comes a point where your primitive monkey brain is confused that people still speak the same language.

GraniteM OP ,

If the three sea shells discourse isn't a stand-in for 90s Americans' anxiety about bidets then I don't know what is.

GraniteM OP ,

Comrade, I rented that movie from a locally-owned VHS rental shop that used physical membership cards.

Sure it's a dystopia, but it's a dystopia where they solved too many problems. John Spartan gets into a high speed car crash and his car instantly fills up with safety foam and he's completely unharmed. The police force is ethnically and gender diverse. Guns are museum pieces. The cops don't know HOW to assault somebody.

Sure they've killed a large amount of choice, and the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he's a sociopath with Mr. Rogers' speech patterns, but all told I'd much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.

GraniteM OP ,

Holy shit, I had no idea Raymond Cocteau was this before he was Raymond Cocteau. That's total genius casting.

GraniteM ,

Scenario A: You're minding your own business, when a bullet passes through your heart/lungs and you're dead in seconds.

Scenario B: You get caught in a trap and wait for hours for an ape with a knife or a bolt gun to come along and finish the job.

Honestly, if I were an animal, I'd prefer Scenario A.

GraniteM ,

I'm familiar with all of the technology involved, but I'm not sure about the applications you're describing.

With a Have-A-Heart, the specific goal is live capture and release. There is no killing involved. The animal might be properly freaked out at the experience of being trapped, but that is specifically so as to permit an animal's live relocation.

With a bolt gun, it's meant to be used in a slaughterhouse scenario, which is a whole moral discussion of its own, but at bare minimum one wants the animals to be kept as calm as possible until the bolt gun is applied, because stressed out meat tastes worse than calm and placid up until the moment of death.

With hunting, the goal is to kill the target as cleanly as possible, preferably with a single bullet. That's the Scenario A I'm describing above.

If one were hunting an animal with the intent of killing it, then a trap, followed by a knife or bolt gun, would maximize the terror felt by the animal to be killed. Sure, one may be putting less lead out in the environment, but at the cost of putting the animal through... almost the most appalling experience of death possible, with the admitted exception of a poorly-aimed bullet or arrow, followed by a wounded flight through the woods and slowly bleeding out.

So... if one's absolute maximum goal is to reduce environmental lead, yes, that is one way to do it, but the moral implications of that method seem pretty rough.

GraniteM ,

If an angry mob had closed a loophole around Richard Nixon's neck after he received his pardon, we probably wouldn't be in the mess we're in today.

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

See also: A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

This was why I was fucking bummed when Biden got into the Democratic primary in '19. Name recognition >>> Younger, better options.

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.

Proverbs 11:10

GraniteM ,

"Do you have money?"

"Yeah."

"Right this way, you exploitable rube!"

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

"Gambling and crypto" reminds me of when I was in DARE and they would refer to "drugs, alcohol, and tobacco," and I thought "aren't those all drugs?"

GraniteM ,

I was gonna say. His entire fucking cabinet was his handlers. Shrub couldn't have successfully managed a baseball team if he hadn't been surrounded by more competent people.

GraniteM ,

There's like a Zach Braff, Joel Osteen, Ray Romano continuum of vaguely odd-looking dudes.

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

Depending on the photo, without size context clues, I would probably have a hard time telling them apart.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e1660b99-18de-4171-8a8f-bbf4a40ca15d.jpeg

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

Presumably at some point a human being was involved in the decision making process to try and use this image to convey... some kind of message to other human beings, and at least one human being in that process couldn't be bothered to give the AI slop more than the most cursory glance.

Unless of course one could design a fully-automated system of generating pseudo-scientific clickbait factoid garbage accompanied by AI-generated illustrations, entirely dedicated to producing as much vaguely plausible-seeming garbage as possible, 24 hours a day, just spewing out the opposite of useful knowledge at an unfathomable rate.

But what kind of monster would deploy that weapon on humanity?

GraniteM ,

Aw, fuck.

Hi StarTrek.website, I'm Karim Diané aka Jay-Den Kraag from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, AMA! (Responding to questions Thursday @4pm!)

okay THIS WAS A BLAST thank you for all the questions! i am so sorry i couldn't answer every single one i have to run to set now but feel free to dm me on IG @team_karim if you want to ask me anything else and i'll try my best to answer!! 🖖

Karim Diané holding a piece of paper that says "startrek.website" thursday @ 4pm"
ALT
GraniteM ,

Welcome to a deeply weird community!

If you were going to spend a day as a member of a Star Trek crew (other than your current show), which would you choose, and why? Assume it's going to be a normal and pleasant day, not one of the exceptionally horrifying days where everyone gets space parasites or some such.

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

Hey, there's still that mushroom-based coffee substitute!

I'm sorry for making light of a serious situation. I would also rather die than drink that cursed substance.

GraniteM ,
GraniteM ,

Actually, an animated person made of just their skin and organs would be significantly more horrifying than an animated skeleton.

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  • GraniteM ,

    Surely they don't have Willem Dafoe!

    GraniteM ,

    Everything is overpriced so that the people making more money than us can make even more money.

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/537457da-c3ed-4794-8cda-0b1acb89d911.jpeg

    SMBC

    GraniteM ,

    I worked at a used media store 10+ years ago, and I remember worrying about what would happen when everything was conveniently available on good ol' reliable Netflix, which at the time seemed like the logical thing that everyone would eventually sign up for, and then what would I do?

    Fast forward to today, and streaming has certainly changed the market. Huge TV show box sets are almost impossible to sell, though it's not a totally dead market. DVDs and Blu-rays sell about as well as they ever did, if not better. Maybe everything is on a service somewhere, but most households aren't going to sign up for every service, so as a result of all the streaming services fighting like dogs for library rights, there's almost always someone looking to get a cheap, used, physical copy of a movie they can't get elsewhere.

    If anything, I feel more secure about the future of physical media today than I did ten years ago.

    GraniteM ,

    Commentary tracks are the underappreciated treasures of physical media. Lord of the Rings gets a lot of deserved praise, but The Matrix has a philosophers commentary track which is awesome, and the 1989 Batman has Tim Burton geeking out over his own movie in a delightful fashion. Also, Jonathan Frakes does a hilarious commentary on Star Trek: First Contact where he sounds simultaneously like a popular high school jock and a gigantic Star Trek dweeb, and I adore him for it.

    GraniteM ,

    Reminds me of New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain, a famous rock formation that looked like a man in profile, which was so identified with New Hampshire that they put it on their state quarter... and which collapsed within a couple of years of the quarter being released.

    GraniteM ,
    GraniteM ,
    GraniteM ,

    The Boats!

    GraniteM ,
    GraniteM ,
    GraniteM ,
    GraniteM ,

    Maybe you just gotta piston pound your balls for yourself, comrade.

    GraniteM ,

    We live in the stupidest timeline. I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the first woman president could be someone in the Sarah Palin / Marjorie Taylor Greene / Kristi Noem model.

    GraniteM ,

    I'd replace Dick Dastardly with Boris Badunov and Natasha Nogoodnik, as they would be sent to make sure Russia's interests are covered.

    Swap out Vader for Jabba the Hutt; one violent, disgusting, sexually depraved slug belongs with another.

    Burns and Cruella are both just about vile enough to fit into this picture.

    Trade Hannibal for Buffalo Bill. He's about at Trump's level. Maybe director of Health and Human Services.

    I'd trade Joker for Hugo Strange, because despite being an evil psychiatrist, his defining trait seems to be having a poor understanding of the even more psychotic people around him, so he'd be the ostensibly intelligent person in the room who thinks they can manage Trump and get him to do the specifically horrible things they want him to do, and instead he's just going to shit in their Cheerios and make them eat it on live television.

    GraniteM ,

    James 5:1-6, NRSV

    Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.