• 1 Post
  • 75 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle

  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldXXX
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    edit-2
    18 days ago

    So he didn’t abandon family, and I don’t know that he planned never to return to a life of luxury, and one can certainly criticize American adventurism in the Muslim world, even early 2000s Afghanistan, but Pat Tillman would fit this broader idea, and he paid for it. His parents were a lawyer and a teacher in San Jose, California. He was an unheralded college (American) football player who improved enough in his first few years in the NFL that he went from barely making the pro ranks to being thought of as a valuable contributor who’d have a long and (by any normal human standards) very lucrative career. In early 2002, his team offered him a contract extension worth several million dollars, but he turned it down to enlist as a soldier the US Army after 9/11.

    He was known to be outspoken, thoughtful, well-read, and assertively non-religious. While he thought there was a moral case to be made for fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he is reported to have called the Iraq War “fucking illegal.” Still, for better or worse he did remain loyal to his commitments and deployed to Iraq. After, he finally went to Afghanistan. He was killed in a friendly fire incident that was covered up at every level, from his platoon-mates burning his uniform, body-armor, and personal journal, to the Pentagon claiming he was killed by enemy fire and coming up with an entire alternative scenario for how he died.

    Even once the friendly fire was known, his legacy was being whitewashed to protect the legitimacy of the war and military recruiting, and his family had to fight not to have him remembered as a generic rah-rah “Patriot,” but as a complicated man who thought about bigger issues and had a personal moral code not tied to generic notions of 'Murica, Jesus, and Apple Pie.





  • As others have said, as a “front page” with voting and real people in the comments, I like it. It’s like hanging out at the one locals’ coffee shop in a small hippie college town somewhere. You don’t get to talk about everything you might like, and there’s a definite vibe, but the people are generally polite, informed, and surprisingly cosmopolitan. That’s where Lemmy really shines in relation to reddit, the quality and accessibility of conversation on general interest and shitpost threads. Even assuming they’re not overrun with bots, and they likely are, the biggest subreddits are just noise and fake internet points, or at best a passing conversation with a stranger on a bus.

    I still go to reddit for (American) football and mechanical keyboards, but for the former I don’t even bother participating, because we’ve got a fun handful of folks here (to extend the coffee shop analogy, imagine a table in the back with a few professors who fondly remember going to a big football school 20 years ago). For the latter I can get the occasional fix here, and I seek that out, but I like seeing the pretty aluminum rectangles and sharing the little bit I’ve learned with newbies. To the extent there’s still a baby splashing around in the bathwater, I’d prefer not to throw it out, but I’m clear-eyed about reddit’s trajectory, and “home” is here.



  • Nothing quite so explicit as that I think, though obviously preserving something is always the intent when carving shit into stone.

    Ptolemaic Egypt was a culture populated by Greek and Egyptian speakers. Of those who were literate, many would only be able to read Demotic or Greek, but meanwhile there is a 2500 year history (at THAT time. Egypt is ridiculously old) of Hieroglyphics being the “official” way to write things down, and the scribal and priestly classes would be part of the cultural elites. Combine that with the Ptolemies attempting to situate themselves as both continuing Alexander’s legacy and being fully Egyptian, and there will be a place for all three scripts. Engraving laws onto stones and placing them in prominent public spaces would have been a pretty common way to “publish” them in a way that’s meant to be durable and secure. See the Code of Hammurabi and Draco’s code for just a couple of examples.

    The fact that Alexandria was cosmopolitan and had a sophisticated regime ruled by elites who were foreign but invested in the local traditions created a situation where this was done often enough for some to survive, several in fact, although the Rosetta Stone was the first found/identified.



  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtopics@lemmy.worldRaddison [OC]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    Most cities do something fun with their kitschy rotating restaurant. Not Kansas City. No sir, they’re good practical midwesterners, and by god a surplus Air Traffic Control tower from the third biggest airport in the Dakotas will be fine! Plop it on a pre-fab concrete hotel and get on with your day.

    Also, their barbecue is overrated.





  • Some of the older apps will still work if you can track them down. Most of the features will work with no Logitech software at all (and something like AHK can help). The custom drivers themselves will probably work without the app or at least without logging in. My old M560 still uses SetPoint in Windows, and it seems less oppressive than the newer LogiOptions or whatever.

    Finally, join us! There’s a whole world of fully programmable open-source-firmware custom keyboards, and mice are coming along, too, especially trackballs.


    1. Cool story. I liked it, and the visual of the skullbone with an arrowhead in it was welcome, as well as sufficiently out of context not to feel gruesome.

    2. I think the headline of “Europe’s Oldest Battlefield” is more likely to be accurate than the article’s “world’s oldest battlefield,” but there may be some nuance of meaning (oldest with war dead actually found in situ?) I’m missing. Neat thing to learn about either way.

    3. The iamverysmart contingent that refuses to read the entire articles is out in full force in the Gizmodo comments, with several people suggesting that the foreign arrow heads were from trade (“The foreign arrowheads have not been found in tombs in the Tollense area, indicating that the arrowheads from elsewhere didn’t simply make their way to the region through trade.”), and several others musing on what the metal arrowheads might have been made of (“The arrowheads were flint and bronze.”).



  • It looks… Marvelous.

    Which is to say it will have a ponderous first act as it takes pains to bring viewers up to speed, some decent zingers and set pieces in the second, and a tedious never-ending battle in the third, with certain parts making no sense at all as they try to save the patient but excise whatever cancerous Kang references they had in it. The success will depend entirely on whether the audience finds the leads charming in the midst of the nonsense.

    I will see it eventually, because I am an aging nerd who can’t quit this cinematic diabetes, but I’m not paying for it or driving anywhere to do so.



  • So you’re a little older, on a fixed income, don’t have a support system nearby, don’t have a place you can stay that has dedicated bathroom facilities or even room to stand up indoors, and you just had a not-insignificant surgery that comes with, at a minimum, laparoscopic incisions, and could significantly affect the way your body processes its diet.

    You may well be doing fine, but I’m not calling out either the doctor or the social worker here. Pushing you a little and making you insist you’re happy was a reasonable call.