I know, I don’t get why people are scared of them. Yes, a wild rat can be infested with all sorts of nasty parasites and diseases, but you wouldn’t try to pet a rabbid racoon either, that’s a wild animal.

Tame rats are adorable, don’t believe the stereotype. ^ _ ^

I don’t need to be paid, I just don’t want corpos profiting off of my data for any reason, so robots.txt works fine for me. The reason that’s enough in my eyes is, I don’t hate capitalism nor am I an anarchist or tankie, this is about halting enshittification and for one other reason:

“AI is fundamentally about giving the wealthy access to skill while depriving the skilled of the means to access wealth.”

In short, eat the rich because they’ve ruined everything. They want capitalism? Then no more “laissez-faire” bullshit, you pay your fucking 90% tax on every dollar above 1 mil and shut it. Nobody needs 15 different colors of common Lamborghini and 1 Lambo out of less than 500. Nobody needs 5000 days of going to the mall to buy a dress every day. Nobody needs a personally-owned A380 private jet. Nobody needs 25%, 25 fucking percent, return on investment.

That also applies to the internet and tech companies as much as reality and banks. When I used Reddit, I never told them they could block access behind a paywall and they know it, and they also knew I can’t afford an international court case against an American tech giant. Now 90% of google is locked behind reddit, a company which shadow banned me well before the API issues.

As long as Reddit, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, etc. can’t legally make free money off of this, I’m happy.

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If Nintendo actually wins this, I will - as someone who grew up with Pokémon - destroy them as a company. I will slander them into submission if I have to, fuck them if I can’t even have a circus to go with my bread.

Never understood why the whole “mpox” word is really that offensive. It was NEVER calling Africans monkeys, the disease name started with non-human primates such as Chimpanzees and Gorillas, most other primates are surprisingly empathic and intelligent beings, and finally? While I am definitely not going to call anyone else a monkey, I am a human being; humans of all skin colors, even white, and all origins, as in the entire Homo genus (even our extinct relatives), are great apes. All great apes are old world monkeys, and all old world monkeys AND all new world monkeys (as in, the species that evolved in the Americas, not the human Mesoamerican cultures who are of course human but came to the Americas from elsewhere some time after humans evolved in Africa) are - in scientific classification of taxonomy - monkeys.

I won’t deny it would be insulting to refer to someone with dark skin a monkey. I just feel denying our one universal shared trait when mentioning a disease that most primates can get is anything but respectful to ourselves as a species and to many species who we should not be thinking of as brutish or stupid, such as Gorillas or Bonobos. Monkeypox/“mpox” does not make you less human, to imply calling it monkeypox is insulting purely due to political correctness is like saying we shouldn’t take vaccines because the word “vaccine” comes from cowpox and that “cow” is offensive to female bovines because human women don’t like the term. Calling a woman a cow is insulting AND inaccurate, and calling someone a monkey a loaded word, but calling a human a victim of monkeypox is not the same as saying getting monkeypox makes you less human. The former is someone to care about, the latter is insulting AND inaccurate. Being a victim of monkeypox, if anything, should prove a person’s humanity.

Besides, while it’s a disease and has painful and awful symptoms, it can be treated. To say “monkeypox” is an insulting word is missing the point; it’s “pox”, a skin lesion caused by a more internal infection. Cowpox does the same to cows. As for the really scary one, smallpox? “Monkeys”, US, huamity, have nearly eradicated it. Nothing capable of perceiving a way to kill a viral disease is anything short of a species worthy of note, and no matter what, you cannot tell me that there haven’t been African or African-descendant persons who contributed to eliminating smallpox. They saved people with a medical procedure that neither Europeans nor Native Americans knew of: https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather

I understand this is a topic with lethal and cruel historical baggage. Moving past something is not easy. Further, racism is still around. The issue is, giving a word that describes us all a taboo-ish reputation is a dangerous and, yes, racist precedent to set. What if it was COVID-19 people said was racist against Chinese people and we had to call it “VID-19”? Fact is, the CO goes with the V and has nothing to do with China in and of itself, it’s short for “Coronavirus” or “Crown-like-spiked Virus”, and yet YouTube banned that too. Hell, the Human Rhinovirus (common cold) is technically a non-issue coronavirus. So I just hope by this point people realize the only real dividing factor here is the one they choose to support by making ordinary words into taboo. You could probably find some “racist undertone” to just the word “taboo” if that’s all you look for, but as someone trying to stop himself from keeping making an assumption that everyone hates him, I think maybe the reason I needed to realize that is because we’re all far too guilty of it and my anger convinced me to stop taking the high road.

tl;dr: As a member of the human species, I take “offense” to the implication that I am NOT a monkey, because that implies I’m not taxonomically human.

Actually, in all seriousness I hope the cat is okay now. They’re far more affectionate animals than we give them credit for, apparently treating us like giant kittens. And we all know cats are scared of water at the best of times.

Oof, that’s got a whole litterbox of unfortunate implications. ;P

Here in Canada, I sure hope so. I, however, subscribe to the idea that - at present - they are unreliable in a Canadian winter. That means you either drive, or you start asking for better transit. Considering how rural we are I doubt my province will be able to build bus routes that can serve most car owners better than a car. It’s not an all-year thing, but yes, this part of Canada gets brutal winters with ridiculous snowfall.

I do approve of the high speed rail project between Edmonton/Red Deer/Calgary and the company with the orange rentable electric scooters. I just know it’s not as simple as “drive an electric car” or “don’t drive unless you have to” here, which admittedly is not the case for the US, China or India who are all subtropical/temperate and dense and produce tons of CO² emissions but also are the biggest drivers of advancing renewables energy. Sadly Canada does not have the advantage of density or technological focus to reduce our own sizable emissions.

If anyone you know has died/dies of climate crisis events like floods, you have my condolences and apology, not stereotypically but genuinely. This really was partly our fault, the numbers say we produced as much as the US in carbon emissions with a tenth of the population, and among changes like Bill C-11 and corruption in the immigration process that are failing to protect people in danger, I cannot claim I have a likeable, benevolent home country. We try, but… Yeah. Life isn’t made of tropes and problems have arisen here. Hopefully we can at least rejuvenate our energy grid with all this, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Just FYI for anyone reading this, “SJW” stands for the “Sh.itJust.Works” instance of Lemmy that the Agora is part of, not “Social Justice Warrior” which was the first thing that came to my head. Hopefully this prevents some misunderstandings. You’re welcome!

I hate Netanyahu because he’s an asshole who has ensured the people of Palestine will never get the slightest solution to their crisis. I don’t hate Israel or it’s people, regardless of what anything I may have said on the fediverse in the past (it’s REALLY hard not to be absolutely furious that kids are just plain being slaughtered over what was probably some fucking “BuT tHaT wOmAn WaS sHoUlD mY wIfE!!1!!1!” that happened so long ago nobody remembers it, and I am truly sorry for any past comments that could be interpreted as some sort of justification of anti-semetic violence; I do not want harm to come to anyone innocent and am just glad I have not let those poorly-chosen words inform my actions in any way) and I definitely don’t hate any jews living outside of Israel because anyone who thinks an expat or second+ generation immigrant has any links to a foreign nation really is dangerously xenophobic.

If I thought there was a better way to help the people caught between these two sides, I’d be saying it. Unfortunately, it seems this issue will likely be solved only if the US decides it has to intervene in some way, which is why I absolutely support charging that asshole with a war crime. I don’t like it one bit, but I have to repeat myself: The attempted extermination of the Gaza Strip, despite the sheer irony of it being so, is industrialized genocide or “destruction of humanity” - a.k.a a Holocaust - by the very definition of the word. We truly live in the most vile timeline imaginable.

Admittedly I have made and make the mistake mentioned a lot.

I do try not to assume it’s about me but when the majority of input from complete strangers (never from anyone who actually understood me like family or friends) in 2017 seemed to be criticism about me and believing so destroyed my life it’s hard not to be bitter and simply say…

“I don’t even care whether it’s about me or not, because you are all telling everyone via everything from Gravity Falls and Once Upon A Time to Changeling: The Lost 1e to Homestuck and Undertale to Calvinism and a certain rant by a certain lolcow coughRobert Pellonicough that they have to ‘grow up’ without giving even the slightest reason other than ‘childishness is true evil’ (yes, it sounds insane but that’s the message you give when your hero’s greatest foe is always a child who is basically the devil) so I am right to actively resent society itself for telling me that being yourself is invalid if you’re a childish person” because at the very least I was not a bad person."

I didn’t let my youthful inner POV make me insufferable (I’ve done my best to fix that since 2015 as well as accepting that basically every Discord writing server is permanently off limits to me, and nobody is calling me a hassle IRL right now) or bratty or like a spoiled rich idiot, but thanks to the above shit I went through I now have actual PTSD and I don’t even know what the trigger is, just that I seem to have some and certain things set it off.

I had ONE dream, to be a writer, but now that is impossible because I am unable to think of my audience as anything but a crowd of adversaries willing to read my work only to attack whatever I wrote because nobody believes in technology or happy conclusions or that killing actual child characters JUST for shock value means you are not a writer but a goddamn marketer and you should not be writing stories because it is extremely disturbing to be three episodes in when Travellers drops the dead kids bombshell, instead of the first episode so that at least you know what you’re getting into instead of feeling betrayed.

I know it’s not always about me, but why is it NEVER about me, not for even just a little while? Why does everybody else get a fucking soapbox on the internet and I’m the exception only because I don’t have a social trend to back me up? I’m not going to take your soapbox, but you won’t let me have one and until you do I will resent anything that - if reapplied to me - makes me feel like you think my very soul is invalid just because my way of looking at the world is so different from literally everyone on the fediverse it seems.

I say nice things and I do mean them. I just need you to all know I do it because the internet was my life and now I have no life and even when I spent the past 8 years trying to rebuild my life, circumstances mean I was doomed to fail and this? This is like breaking someone’s kneecaps and then telling them they need to get over it and start walking again.