Nintendo games have consistently disappointed me with their lack of depth in their stories. Breath of the Wild had an amazing open world, but the characters came off as two-dimensional and the final boss was completely disappointing. (there's something especially uncanny about having a protagonist who doesn't utter a word, even if it's meant to help players self-insert) Mario Odyssey was even more pitiful in how it retread the same surface level cartoonish villainy of Bowser kidnapping the princess. Nintendo certainly makes games that are fun to play, but as an adult, I've come to expect more from art, and plenty of the games on Steam actually respect the capability of their audience to not turn off their brains.
Ehh, sounds like it wasn't your genre or mood, not that you "need adult games That respect your brain". Do you expect Cuphead to have this rich lore or to recreate the feeling of playing a Fleischmen-era cartoon?
Tastes will be different and I can respect that. But I feel there's no worse kind of criticism than one that is berating a game for something it was never targeting to do in thr first place. Why lambast a Mario game for it's lack of deep characterization instead of saying "I prefer a story-heavy game" and picking up the Last of Us?
We used to have such a thing: it was called HTML. Sites were supposed to have their content in the HTML, and if JS wasn't enabled, you'd still get the semantic hypertext. A vast majority of web pages are text and images, and don't actually require fancy CSS/JS. But the ship of progressive enhancement has long sailed,[0] and tons of static sites have JS, and all the hundreds of APIs that entails, baked into their functionality. Hell, there are many sites nowadays that will use JS to stream the HTML to your device for some reason.
[0]: JQuery/AJAX were probably the beginning of the end. But even without those, you had developers doing things like putting main images in CSS using the background property, overloading text with icon fonts, loading videos using "blob:" crap, or other abuse of semantics. Once it became possible to push more state to the browser instead of the server, the floodgates opened. I remember in the dial-up days, you could take a browser offline, and webpages would function perfectly, yet now, even hitting the back button can be a gamble. Now, hitting File > Save fails 95% of the time for me.
I found it interesting that he wasn't allowed to read the obits themselves, so wouldn't even know if the subject was a human or dog. One might argue some distancing helps for these kinds of moderation jobs, but also sounds dehumanizing to not have any context at all.
Also of note is that he spent a lot of time keeping the comments "safe and sugarcoated", even deleting comments referencing "family fallouts and estrangement". There's such a strange culture around sanitizing people's images after their death and pretending they were angels. Some people were legitimate pieces of shit in life, and silencing those harmed by them in the interest of being politically correct sounds unfair to me. Caring only about letting their supporters grieve without having to think about the deceased's complexities, while for example, preventing those who were abused by them from voicing their thoughts seems to want to preserve order by sweeping anything unseemly under the rug.
There are other times and places for criticizing the dead, either before or a bit after the person's passing. Not immediately after, and not where the grieving will congregate.
Obituaries can complicate that when they purport to be a biographical summary (such as for public figures), rather than a traditional formal announcement of memorial services with some kind words thrown in.
I hope to live long enough to say "Good riddance!" about the passings of multiple people who did bad things, but I'd do it privately, not be a jerk to the grieving.
This reminds me of my first job in radio. I worked weekend mornings 6-12. The station had started with a "beautiful music" format, then recently had switched to adult contemporary.
They retained a lot of the old advertisers: funeral homes. They sponsored two regularly scheduled readings of funeral notices at 7 and 11:45. Basically, radio obituaries.
One woman didn't like the format, so she'd tune in exactly at 11:45. If we ran them early for some reason, she'd call and demand we read them to her. This happened about twice a month.
Sometimes I got the call, sometimes it was the guy who came in after me. Always the same voice. We called her the funeral lady.
One morning the other guy had enough and I heard him taking to her, "look, lady, is there someone in particular you're hoping is going to die? Just give me a name and we'll call you when they're dead."
The Funeral Lady would agree with you. Well, if she's still around. This was 30 years ago, and I would have guessed the owner of the voice on the other side of the phone was already north of 80.
I've no beef with the genre but I think it would've been really boring to DJ.
I'd imagine it was mostly just watching the automation systems run, and waiting to talk.
I might be biased - but the tail end of the beautiful music era was probably a high point for FM Broadcast audio quality - it was the last point before the emphasis towards loudness started.
There's a lot of space between passing over abuse in silence and being a jerk to others who are grieving. Mere mention of estrangement or complicated relationships is hardly shitting on someone.
The bereaved have the right to grieve authentically, even if that means doing justice to a history that involves trauma and conflict. That's part of what collective grieving rituals are for and should be for. There are limits but I don't think there's a universal prescription, or that it's fair to draw a line at, e.g., mere mention of estrangement.
There are people who are so manipulative and full of hatred that they actually have nobody who is willing to truly grief about their death. My grandma was such a person. I really remember nobody who was fond of her. To the contrary, most people were content that she was finally gone. So please, don't tell others how they are supposed to deal with their peers.
Considering that death penalty is considered a punishment so great that lots of states banned it, I guess people think that death already punished the person so badly that their sins can be considered absolved. So whether or not people sanitize dead people's image correlates to their opinion on death itself.
Capital punishment is immoral not because death is sufficient to absolve guilt but because we lack sufficient certainty of guilt. Death is just death, it doesn't absolve guilt.
That's an interesting perspective to take. Those countries in Europe who have prohibited capital punishment have done so because we believe it is immoral even in the case of absolute certainty of guilt. Take Anders Breivik for example: there is no doubt whatsoever of his guilt - he is a mass murderer. Nevertheless, according to modern European concepts of morality he should be treated well even in prison, and the Norwegians take that to a level that many other countries would find absurd.
When we decline to execute a heinous offender, and decline to treat them as inhuman - even when they have offended inhumanly - it demonstrates the moral difference between us and them.
Does Anders truly "win" by being simply in confinement forever, rather than being dead? What does he gain? His life? What life? Playing PS1 games forever, seeing the same four walls forever, acceptable but certainly not impressive meals forever. There is not a single thing anyone can do to him or anyone else to undo what he did, and causing him suffering certainly doesn't bring back any children. More importantly, killing him does not make any of the damage he caused go away.
Americans love to piss and moan about all the freedoms we supposedly have, but are conspicuously unsatisfied with merely removing said freedoms as punishment for crimes.
Maybe they don't think "freedom" is that important or meaningful
There is continued harm though. Every day he is treated well, every day he gets food and shelter and care is food and shelter and care paid for by you, that could have been spent on others.
"Those countries in Europe" is perhaps a bit of an understatement. Any justice system that practices capital punishment is considered so dysfunctional that any plans on joining the European Union is out of the question. This is also why the system is rigged as to make it impossible to extradite someone if there is even the slightest possibility of a death penalty.
Breivik is also a single person; do you really want to change (or even burn down) the entire system just for one person?
In principle I have no trouble just executing Breivik; his guilt is established beyond doubt, he committed an act of exceptional evil, and he more or less declares to want to do it again (well technically he says he wants to be a "non-violent Nazi" or some such, but that's a contradiction in terms: "oh that Holocaust thing was just brilliant, more of that!" is violent rhetoric).
But Breivik-type case are rare. So rare it's not really worth changing the system over it. There's principle of a thing and the practicalities of it: in principle the death penalty is fine, but practically organizing that in a legal system with zero false positives is very difficult, so it's not really worth it.
Aside from the US, you can also look at post-second world war in Europe, which saw some executions that were rather over the top in hindsight.
If you spend some time in the Nordics, you'd find that most don't think "death penalty is fine in principle" as it goes against many of the principles people there try to live by.
He's not treated well. Maybe compared other (inhuman) places, but he feels his treatment is so vindictive that he has tried getting the human rights court involved.
His protests as well as the treatment often perceived as "absurdly comfortable" all hinge on one fact: he is kept in permanent solitary confinement. Which is otherwise considered an additional (and harsh) punishment for regular prisoners. And it's the reason why he has his private gym and entertainment facilities, because those would normale be available as shared facilities to regular prisoners.
Mentioning someone's crimes isn't a punishment, especially when they're not around to hear them. Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that people can still have criminal records after they've finished serving a prison sentence?
Isn't mentioning it considered bad when someone has served their punishment? It's part of right-to-be-forgotten after all.
When the crime is still recorded and even announced, it's considered part of the punishment because jail is deemed not enough. It's how we get sexual offender registry.
Death penalty is supported because we think it sends the person to eternal torment in hell, not because we think it purifies them. It’s literally the opposite to what you are claiming
Among support for the death penalty in the United States, is the fact that some criminals, particularly the serial killer type, have committed crimes so heinous that there is no chance of parole or rehabilitation to return to normal life. When one is burdened with 60 consecutive life sentences, it effectively requires that the state pay to sustain the criminal's life until it comes to an end. If the death penalty were enacted instead, we could both reduce the cost the state (which, in turn, is the tax payers), and reduce the suffering the criminal must endure for his crimes.
If you'd like to take the afterlife into account, the "sends the person to eternal torment in hell" sounds like a particular theology not backed up by the Bible, the typical standard in American thinking. That verges way too much on passing ultimate judgment, which is itself reserved for God alone. Perhaps some people believe it. I don't (and I am religious).
> Death penalty is supported because we think it sends the person to eternal torment in hell, not because we think it purifies them.
It is also supported because it can be used as a self-defence mechanism.
We take it for granted that when we lock up 'really' dangerous people they will be safely away from society, but that kind of infrastructure is a fairly recent phenomena in human history. Prison breaks/escapes still happen:
Not only from a building-prisoners perspective, but also from an excess-resources point of view: through most of human history, suggesting using society's surplus—which probably wasn't there—to feed someone 'evil' while everyone else had to work away would have seemed very unfair.
If a single individual has the right to self-defence against an attacker, and a ("small") group of individuals have the same right (e.g., a bunch of folks worshipping in a temple, mosque, church), then wouldn't a "large" group of individuals (e.g., society) have a right to protect themselves from an attacker?
With regards to "hell": someone, while waiting on death row, many repent of their actions and try to find redemption, but still be executed from a legal point of view:
We, who? The practical reason to support it is that it guarantees there is no chance for them to murder more people, or as a (misguided?) deterrent for others not to murder.
At least where I was taught, death penalty reduces someone's punishment in the afterlife. So in a way capital punishment is a "mercy" because without it they'll be punished even more in hell.
Does it matter if the offender believes in tales of hell and heaven? Or is it just important for the people remaining in society how they think the penalty affects the offender?
> You need a majority of whatever number of people show up to delete a page.
Except deletion discussions are not votes. [0] Closing admins base their decision on the strength of the arguments presented, not on how many people voted one way or the other.
Exactly. And there's tons of stuff out there it doesn't have, waiting to be converted from analog media or out of the clutches of overreaching copyright.
I think the message is more about self-organizing and takings steps to be active in preservation. The Internet Archive does great work, but putting all our eggs in that basket creates a huge risk if it becomes a Library of Alexandria, and publishers would love for it to no longer exist. [0]
It's mostly about Bandcamp but it could indeed be about anything, as later parts of the article mention how MySpace and Twitter are ruined in much the same way.
Twitter's story is a bit different. The company was pretty conscientious of its community (as far as giant corporations go) and the magic they had accidentally bottled. It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably, but because a fool offered the owners far more money for it than it was worth, and they quite reasonably took it, and then the new owner immediately ripped it to shreds, apparently unintentionally, yet so effectively that conspiracy theories about it being intentional abound.
> It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably
Twitter was nicely profitable in 2018 and 2019[0], then went on an overzealous hiring/spending spree in 2020 and was in not-great financial shape by the time Musk happened. Maybe the previous owners could have turned it around, but we'll never know.
i don't see anything being "ripped to shreds". seems mostly the same to me as a casual user. still a toxic place that is still the best for current events. maybe a little more toxic, but it's not like it was great before
The brand value of the word "Twitter" was probably in the billions, and Musk just wiped it away. It was ruined so thoroughly that we can only intelligently talk about it by calling Twitter by its former name because its new name is confusing to even say in conversation.
Twitter's advertising revenue fell off a cliff almost overnight due in no small part to their owner's policy of loudly and publicly attacking individual Twitter advertisers for leaving Twitter.
Twitter had tens of thousands of the most famous celebrities in the world actively participating every day for free, and Musk managed to screw that up in myriad ways, not least of which by falsely labeling them as paid subscribers.
For some godforsaken reason, Twitter's opinion on who and was "notable" or not was a significant status symbol, and Twitter started selling that status symbol for $8/month.
Twitter had a truly impressive internal talent pool, and it's largely gone, ruining their ability to pivot at a time when the whole plan appears to be "wildly pivot."
Did anyone ever actually love Twitter? I can't remember ever getting meaningful value from it. I can't comment on MySpace as it seemed to come and go so quickly (yes, I've been online since before the web, so your dilation may vary).
When I saw a photo on Twitter of that plane that had just landed in the Hudson, posted by somebody who had evacuated the plane, I knew something dramatically new had arrived. I later saw that I could search news events and see opinions and perspectives that I'd never heard of in my life. Everybody was in the same room, we could tap into the zeitgeist.
Eventually it just caused my blood pressure to rise and I eventually decided to step away. But for a few years, there was something very interesting going on.
I loved Twitter. More than once I've read tweets thinking "this will be on mainstream media in a few days". It felt like the pulse of the world. For any event, I would check Twitter before any news site.
I also had something similar to a community on there for years.
There's no doubt that Twitter used to be the main platform for promotion of solopreneurs and technical content creators.
When Facebook started I sure loved it. For a college kid it was such great way to keep in touch with all the friends you made that transferred schools (or that you met abroad), share pictures, plan events, and give people a quick snapshot of your personality. It really felt like a magical use of the internet that refined myspace in to a useful tool.
This one is pretty good tbh. I still think fringe beliefs are tolerated so long as the post isn't inflammatory. That's a pretty hard thing to sustain. I think the mods put the right touch on it.
I consider it a message board more than a social network, it has no focus on social links between members and nothing fancy that web2.0 era introduced (ajax and such)
I never joined Twitter, but wasn't there a pretty great statistics Twitter at some point? Dudes like Larry Wasserman, Nate Silver, Hadley Wickham, Andrew Gelman all pretty active and collaborating in the open. I got the impression it had some nice topical communities like that, whereas the frontpage current events feed was pretty much always shit, but that seems like a universal truth of human commons, not something specific to web-based social media or Twitter.
Twitter used to be quite useful for breaking news stories. A couple of times a year I'd find out about something big currently happening via Reddit, and jump on Twitter to keep track of it as it was developing.
There was always plenty of misinformation, but you'd still find out about the facts an hour or more before it'd be reported on mainstream media. Of course, by the time it hit mainstream media Twitter would pretty much instantly become useless due to all the "thoughts and prayers" retweet pollution, and spammers hijacking the hashtags.
Bandcamp is widely reported to have been profitable since 2012, and it was still steadily growing. Contrary to MySpace and Twitter, its core business is actually selling stuff.
In other words, "Even if you make money, they will ruin your business".
Why is one supposed to read the first sentence? I am interested in Bandcamp but why would I go past the title of this article since it reads like a dramatic but cryptic facebook post by my retired uncle? There are a LOT of article posted on HN every day, I don't have time to go to every single article and read the first sentence.
My thesis about the inevitable demise of all good things is that each of us selects the services we love because they had a specific mix of UX and functionality. After 5, 10, maybe 15 years they change so much that they don't look and work anymore the way they did when we discovered them. We would not have picked them in their new shape, so we cry that they have been ruined. The chances that a service improves after our initial selection are slim. The chances that it gets worse are large.
It happened to me with the new UI of K9. I would never installed that app if I saw it in its current UI. I installed it precisely because it's old odd UI suited my needs. Given the U shape of their votes on the Play store I'd say that about half of their users share my point of view. I keep installing the last version before the new UI.
> I have a friend who lived in the US on F1 and H1B for over 10 years and was banned from entering the US over jokes with her ex-bf about marrying for a green card.
That's insane, especially after her being in the US for 10+ years and having established a life there. Sorry to go off-topic, but I have a friend whose SO is on a work visa and they have joked about the marrying for a green card thing before (a very common joke it seems). How did the government find out about the joke? (in-person, through texts, etc.) I ask because I wouldn't want the same to happen to them and to caution them.
