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rhube · 7 hours
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Uh...
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That's not me, what the fuck????
To be clear: I don't think this is someone stealing my handle. When I click through they have their own name, and those are my badges, not theirs. But this is a disturbing glitch??
@staff
[Edit: I refreshed and it now gives their name, but I stand by this being an alarming glitch??]
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rhube · 7 hours
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Ah, my heart. I am glad to know that Clancy Brown is as lovely as he seems (except when he's playing non-lovely people very well).
I love Clancy (aka Hank Anderson!)
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rhube · 8 hours
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The super bowl or whatever I'm not american
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rhube · 9 hours
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Fascinating pay info for the TOS season one cast.
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rhube · 11 hours
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Romancing Astarion means having your Tav constantly reassure him that you actually do want to be with him, and that you wouldn’t choose any of the other companions over him, and that you want him for more than just sex, and Astarion constantly being like:
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rhube · 13 hours
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Larian missed out on a big opportunity in BG3. When Astarion is brooding about not being able to see his reflection you should be able to offer to draw him and the DC is super high for you to succeed but if you fail you just end up making some shit like this
Can you fuckin imagine how funny this would be omg.
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rhube · 14 hours
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This comes directly from Twitter/X and BlueSky, and it makes me very angry.
Twitter invented the Re-[whatever] technology that came to underpin Tumblr - it's why a lot of people at first though Tumblr WAS an extension of Twitter and that eventually Twitter would just buy Tumblr as more successful cousins often do in the tech world. That obviously never happened. But what you had first we a retweet over there, and then a reblog over here.
It's important to remember that this is not a universal social media technology, and most attempts to do something similar (like 'sharing' a post to your wall on Facebook) are clunky and really not the same. On most of the Internet, outside of Twitter and Tumblr, you have to steal content to have it on your blog - to 'repost' it.
But when Elon fuckface decided that Twitter would be called 'X' and all mention of 'tweets' would be purged from the system, the pour UI-text writers were left with a quandry about what to call the technology Twitter had invented. You couldn't retweet things anymore, and I guess they decided that 'reblogging' was Tumblr's thing (for all I know it's copyrighted - I hope not, but I'm too tired to check). So they settled on calling it a 'repost'.
At the same time, Elon's mate Jack is spinning up his new Twitter clone, Bluesky, which he wants everyone to join. So it has to have the 'retweet' facility, but it can't be called 'retweet', and presumably they went through the same UI-text grumblings. Like 'X', 'Bluesky' isn't a thing you do, so you can't re-Bluesky, and it doesn't lend itself to anything metaphorically similar, the way you can retoot on Mastodon. So they align and call this a 'repost' too.
Honestly, I also don't think it's a coincidence this blurs the lines of long-establish Internet usage in distinguishing a 'repost' (theft, copying a post without permission or credit and claiming it as your own work) and a 'reblog' or 'retweet' (sharing the actual original post to your feed or blog, with your name beside it, uneditable or claimable by anyone else).
I also think it's a sign of what happens when executives name things. There was clearly no thought process about the implications of calling a social media platform 'X' or 'Bluesky' along the lines of 'This will make our decades-old, well-established, technology-defining UI-terms nonsense' or, the name of the platform should in some way align with the platform's function and it would really help us create a coherent brand if it were easy to verb. You know, the kinds of thoughts that happen if you ask a writer to name something, and not a white man with more ego and money than sense.
So apparently some people new to Tumblr think a repost and a reblog are the same thing, so when they see creators asking for people to not repost, they're thinking the creators are saying to not reblog 😭
Y'all, a repost is when you copy/download the work and create a new post using the work making it seem as if it's yours. A reblog is you using a site provided feature to share the creator's post directly from the creator so that it's still credited to them and they still get all of the traction/notes from the work.
Please, reblog fics/art/etc. that you enjoy! Reblogging is not reposting! Creatives need support too, and reblogging is a way to do that!
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rhube · 15 hours
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Existentialism and anti-fascism
I don't have the spoons to make this the essay it should be, but a passing quote from Sartre on Mastodon brought something into focus for me that should have been blindingly obvious. The quote is this:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. - Jean Paul Sartre (1945), Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 13-14
(It should be acknowledged that he's specifically addressing anti-Semitism, but apart from the fact that fascism and anti-Semitism tend to go hand in hand, I don't think it's controversial to say that they operate using the same playbook.)
What jumped out at me is the bit about acting in bad faith.
You see, the importance of acting in good faith is a central aspect of existentialist ethics. In brief, the thought is that, for conscious beings (humans) existence precedes essence - we are fundamentally free and self-determining; each person decides their own purposes (their 'essence'). When you blame your actions on external forces (genetics, societal pressures, God etc) you are acting in bad faith and seeking to evade responsibility by denying that, whatever circumstances you found yourself in, you still had some form of choice for which you are responsible.
When you act in good faith you not only acknowledge the responsibility for your choice and its consequences, but also recommend that action to others. By acting, you attach value to the kind of action you performed (it is worthy of being done), and it is in this that moral value is created.
In this way, integrity is central to existentialist ethics.
As we have all seen in recent years, fascists have absolutely no integrity. They cannot be shamed. Few have denied that characters like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Silvio Berlusconi are ridiculous figures. Frequently those inside and outside the countries in which they reside look on in horror and ask themselves 'How is this possible? Why do people keep voting for them? Can't you see these men are a joke? A dangerous joke?'
Yeah, but they don't care. They live in bad faith. They have no integrity, because they know integrity is draining, and taking responsibility for what they do and say is something they have no intention of ever doing. They don't deign to give reasons because they want to convince you that the reasons (or at least ones that make sense) don't matter. They will dizzy you by jumping from argument to contradictory argument without hesitation, because any person who lives in good faith feels bound to unpick the mess they leave behind to justify their own decisions.
But it's a trick. You should be prepared to justify yourself to interlocutors acting in good faith, in as much as you should take responsibility for your actions, but the person acting in bad faith has no argument. Their actions are not at all bound by anything they say. You are arguing without an interlocutor, and the fascist has succeeded in wasting time and energy you could have put to meaningful resistance.
I've always been partial to existentialist philosophy: there is no fate but what we make for ourselves, no meaning to life but what we put into it. I don't think it's the whole picture. Long-time readers will know I favour a refined form of rule utilitarianism, but a part of that is that I believe you cannot have a happy society without integrity.
Just as with Davidson's Principle of Charity - we cannot even begin to have meaningful communication unless we assume that those with whom we communicate are speaking the truth and are largely correct in their beliefs.
Fascists trample all over that. They do not care about the truth and they have no problem lying to you. They require no correspondence between their words and either the world or their actions.
And yet it's still true that they rely on a background of truth and sincerity in order to be understood. They need to at least appear to be speaking the same language as we do. They may more frequently stumble into obvious gaffs where communication collapses - Johnson's vague blustering noises, Trump's 'covfefe' - but they have to string enough words together to at least *sound* like what they are saying means something.
Anyway, the point is: I always admired this philosophy, and I knew that it came out of the post-war sense of abandonment - that there is no force for good that prevents death and torture on a massive scale, only human endeavour. What humans choose to say and do.
As someone who has often been troubled by the quietism of despair, I immediately found this deeply comforting and empowering, even in as a teenager in the boom years of the turn of the millennium.
What I hadn't put together was that talk of good faith and bad faith is not only a deep philosophical truth about ethics, it is a straightforward practical critique of fascist rhetoric.
This way of arguing to score points - usually in support of right-wing positions - was something I found intensely frustrating as a young adult. I can remember specific individuals who behaved that way and the destruction the wreaked in my life. As a philosopher - someone who is good at arguing - it felt sort of shameful to me that I wasn't quick-witted enough to marshal my thoughts in the moment and unpick why what they were saying was nonsense.
But I can now see that that wasn't my fault. What I eventually did - which was to remove myself entirely from their presence - was the only rational call. It's just soul-destroying that for me that meant leaving behind the vast majority of my friends, who couldn't see what the problem was with that person, and were thus left to be poisoned against me by what they said.
I'm digressing into an old pain. The point is that at that time, people behaving like this were isolated individuals. Now they are dominating our politics, traditional media, and social media. Because fascism is rising again.
Of course Sartre was talking about how people who act in bad faith are dickheads that poison our communities - he lived through the rise of fascism!
He was making the incredibly important point that it's not just that a failure to take responsibility for one's actions brings negative value into the world, but that the Worst Wankers You Know literally argue in bad faith as a way to tie careful thinkers in knots and whip up the emotions of less careful thinkers.
A middle-class white 16-year old, living in boom years, just couldn't connect the dots - even though I was still at the intersection of multiple oppressions. I had been raised to fully believe that good debate was possible and should be the goal. I was doing a Media Studies A-Level, so I knew dishonesty happened in news and media, but... how to explain?
Elder Millennials were sold a dream of reality and progress that genuinely seemed to be going on in our teenage years and early 20s. There were still problems to solve, obviously, but many of us - especially where we had some kind of privilege - believed that racism was declining; the gender pay-gap was closing; homophobia was decreasing; and anyone could achieve anything they put their mind to, no matter their disadvantages, if they just tried hard enough. Nevermind that in my country if you were LGBTQ+, but not L or G, you probably didn't realise it, because you weren't allowed to learn about people like you in schools.
It's why so many of us are burnt out. Because it wasn't true. And we tried to be all we could be anyway.
But when you're 16, you're not burnt out yet. You believe that 'Never Again' means it can't possibly happen again. You learned about the Holocaust in school and are horrified, but it's at a complete disconnect from your reality. You have never knowingly heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic (of course, you probably heard things said in code that you didn't understand). It's a feature of The Past. You don't understand how it could have come to be, because no one actually taught you how it came to be.
I read Existentialism is a Humanism, but I didn't read Anti-Semite and Jew. And when they taught Existentialism is a Humanism we discussed Sartre's example of the student who's unsure if he should join the resistance, but no one explained that 'bad faith' wasn't just a technical term that has a specific meaning for Sartre's ethical analysis, it's also literally about how some people make bad-faith arguments as part of fascist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
So I never thought, 'Oh, this person is arguing in bad faith on purpose to waist my energy,' - like, I sort of knew they were doing it to wind me up and because they were an arsehole, but I didn't get that it was a political strategy for stifling progress.
And all this distillation of political statements into 'sound bites' is fundamentally to the fascist's advantage. Because they explicitly don't care about reasons, and normal humans DO. So when all you heard are sound bites you can fill in reasons not given, and it doesn't matter what you imagine for the fascist, but if a progressive doesn't get to explain their point fully, it's very easy to make them into a strawperson they will spend the next few news cycles failing to unpick.
ARGH.
I'm not sure I'm any nearer to knowing how we defeat fascism. To an extent, it's comforting to know that we came out of it and had these discussions before. But it's endlessly frustrating to know how much was LOST from the public consciousness - even from people who DO know something about what was said - despite the best efforts of philosophers and writers and film directors and everyone who kept trying to communicate it to us.
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rhube · 15 hours
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Treato yo’self! 🤡
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rhube · 16 hours
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It's important to know that the Queen of England does exist (and is in fact the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but that includes England). Like there was one that died who was a reigning queen, but she definitely existed and her rotting corpse still exists. And there's one who's a queen consort who is alive right now.
I would say either is as likely or less likely to knock on your door than a walrus.
Ok but I think we're all just fundamentally thinking about walrus/fairy surprise in two different ways. Behold:
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We're all just looking at it from two different angles here.
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rhube · 16 hours
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it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.
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rhube · 16 hours
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rhube · 17 hours
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Was enticed to read the article by your quotes and the mention of Sean Lock, who I generally adore, but I've been sucked in by things OP never even hinted at.
This on Ant and Dec and Nigel Farage being on I'm A Celebrity really stands out:
They were basically forced to endorse fascism. I think in the future, if the country gets back on its feet and we kick this lot out, and we stop having such obviously racist policies to inflame passions and we manage to disentangle the privately-funded think tanks from policy making, then we’re going to look back on the fact ITV reality television had Nigel Farage on it with utter disgust, and they’ll be caught up in it.
Throughout he's insightful, generous, and compassionate in a way I'm not used to seeing - it feels like a really fresh and authentic point of view, from someone I can respect as an older lefty who has been through it. That he believes there could be a brighter future... it makes me want to believe it.
Sometimes, you’re a comedian with a touring show to promote, so you do an interview with a regional newspaper.
I think that’d be the funniest possible time to reveal a big scoop, wouldn’t it?
Stewart Lee is currently touring, and to promote his Yeovil performance, gave an interview to Blackmore Vale Magazine.  According to Wikipedia, the Blackmore Vale is an area of north Dorset, south Somerset and southwest Wiltshire.  According to the comedian Jake Baker, the magazine would cover his school sports day as he grew up in Dorset.  That’s the level of news you’d expect.
The questions are friendly and easy, from a journalist clearly familiar with Lee’s work and history.
The first question is about the show’s angle.  Lee describes the nature of the show, and here’s an excerpt:
So it looks like stand-up, and sounds like stand-up, but it’s actually a kind of character piece about a desperate person who’s frightened and trying to organise the world in a way that puts them in control. And I guess you could argue that’s what a lot of stand-ups are doing anyway. Ricky Gervais to me looks like a very frightened man. He’s frightened of transgender people coming after him, the act is a defensive wall.
Fun!  This is a Ricky Gervais hate blog, so it’s nice to see a sudden, unexpected attack in an unrelated promotional interview.
Lee mentions Gervais again in response to question four.
Sometimes I become bitter and think ‘I get all this good press, why can’t I get 10 million quid for a TV special like Ricky Gervais?’ But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want that audience, it wouldn’t allow me to be better.
And then again to question eight, where Lee explains why he spends six months running new shows in the relatively small Leicester Square Theatre (as opposed to arena comics who might do 10 warmup shows followed by 60 tour dates).
You can still run it like a club gig, you can interact with people in real time. Also, you wouldn’t get better at the show because you wouldn’t have done it as many times. You can see this with an act like Gervais. Those shows have not been run in, they’re not fluid, they’re a succession of inflexible statements that would snap like twigs if the pressure of an unforeseen event was applied to them.
The journalist finally addresses this head on.  It really is worth reading the entire article - there’s a lot more than I’m quoting, including an interesting story about Sean Lock:
But here are my favourite bits:
[Gervais] still kind of copies me though, which is the weird thing. There’s still a lot of cadences of what I do but they’re used in the service of evil. In Star Wars, he’s Darth Vader and he’s taken the force, which is me, and used it for evil purposes. He was a fanboy, he was actually the booker at University of London and used to book me and Sean Lock all the time. And when he became famous for the Office, he wrote an hour-long act that was so indebted to us it was awkward. [...] If he’d come up through the circuit that would have been rubbed off him because you find your own voice doing club gigs. It took me two years of gigging five nights a week to come through the mesh of things I liked. But he didn’t have that experience in the same way. [...] Funnily enough, in his first show there were bits I’d never recorded that he’d do almost verbatim. He’d clearly remembered them. I went to see him at the Bloomsbury – on his invitation actually – with my then girlfriend and she was very concerned for me. I’d given up at that point due to lack of interest, and she was concerned for what it felt like to see my act being done to hundreds of people, it was quite weird. On the other hand, that sort of did make me think I don’t want it to be consumed into someone else’s vocabulary. And also, I think because he had a residual sense of guilt, he would always credit me in interviews as being an influence – that helped me in 2004 to get the audience back.
This is, to my knowledge, the first time Lee’s ever claimed that Gervais stole his material.  He’s certainly talked about Gervais clearly taking influence from him (though in the past, he downplayed this compared to the account given in this interview).
It’s a pretty big thing to accuse a comic of stealing material.  That’s a big taboo.  I reckon this is partly because Lee wants to discourage fans of Gervais from coming to the show.
Anyway, let’s finish by quoting the end of the interview:
It must be strange to have that level of financial remuneration and those audience figures but not really a single good review. And I expect what that does for you is create a cognitive dissonance where you have to manufacture a worldview by which the whole world is wrong and you’re right. Which can’t necessarily be very good for your mental health, although I expect the money’s nice.
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rhube · 17 hours
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These are so dang expressive!
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Did some texture paintings because i have so many canvases just sitting around
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rhube · 19 hours
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Do you keep shadowheart's parents alive?
During my play through I told Shadowheart that she doesn't need me to know what's right to do, and she chose to save them, which honestly, I love that ending for her, she deserves to have her family back and her stardew valley life.
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As for the sharran wound, well, what are one last big adventures and the power of head canons for.
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rhube · 22 hours
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Cunk on Earth 1x04
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rhube · 22 hours
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Microsoft Word are also pushing cloud-based, let us train AI on it, stuff, so while I have loved them for decades oflver Google Docs, where this has always been a danger, I will be exploring alternatives. I hate modern tech.
Okay, so, looks like Google Docs might actually start implementing their rule about not sharing explicit content. (This includes writing.) How in the ever loving fuck am I supposed to back up 1,000+ stories that equate to 3 million+ words into fucking Microsoft Word????? And efficiently, for that matter?! HELP.
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