Komunitas
lemmy.blackeco.com
Ce matin je me suis réveillé en découvrant plein de toots semblant blaguer sur le fait de convier des journalistes dans des conversations Secret Défense. Sur le coup, je n’ai pas bien compris, puis j’ai découvert l’origine de ces blagues qui les rendent immédiatement plus drôles. Petite sélection : https://toot.community/@[email protected]/114221831093210618 https://toot.community/@[email protected]/114222418252083177 https://toot.community/@[email protected]/114222461985281355 https://toot.community/@[email protected]/114219229265425051 https://toot.community/@[email protected]/114219068251009751
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Ultimately, I don’t think anyone misses it. Community gating in any form should be frowned upon and broke ASAP. Gearscore in wrath is a prime example. The Sparkle Pony During the beta for Wrath of the Lich King, players eagerly dived through the game files in search of anything spicy. Hints at the story, patch content, that sort of thing. Blizzard have always done their best to disguise anything important, with mixed results. It was through this method that players discovered a heading labelled ‘Paid Character Customisation’. There were whispers that Blizzard might be introducing microtransactions into World of Warcraft, but these were quickly dismissed. After all, it was a subscription-based game. Players paid full price for each expansion, on top of a monthly fee, specifically to avoid the ads and in-game shops that were beginning to plague the free-to-play genre. The mere idea of adding microtransactions was so audacious, no one could believe it at first. But this was Blizzard. They had long forgotten what shame felt like. At Blizzcon 2008, WoW’s lead producer J. Allen Brack revealed exactly what ‘Paid Character Customisation’ was. By putting down cash, players could change the way their character looked, in a manner similar to the in-game barber shops (which run on in-game gold). There was no inherent reason why Blizzard had to charge for this – it didn’t cost them a penny to change how a character looked. It was purely a profit-driven exercise. Many players were (rightly) worried where this could lead. If WoW could sell character appearances, what was stopping them selling mounts or gear? Blizzard had always had an online store. It sold books, merchandise and WoW subscription cards – that sort of thing. But in November 2009, new products were added which whipped the community into a drama. These were the Pandaren Monkand Lil’KT. They were pets – non-functional NPCs that follow the player around. And at $10 each, they weren’t cheap either. To smooth things over, Blizzard announced they would donate 50% of the profits of the Pandaren Monk to the Make-A-Wish foundation (a scheme they quietly ended a month later). That thread can be viewed here. The most obvious thing is that most of the comments were positive. Most people saw it as harmless. For the most part, the talk of slippery slopes was hand-waved away. After all, it was for charity! These are companion pets… they have no effect other than a status symbol. Not really that different from shelling out $10 extra for a collector’s edition of an xpac (getting you an exclusive pet). Here’s another post made in response to complaints that Blizzard were taking this too far. Since when did pets and mounts become game breaking items? If people want to spend money on this stuff let them what right do you have to say how people spend their own money? Fair enough if it was some kind of game breaking item (eg legendary item or whatever) but its not it’s a mount… I could just as easily argue “Oh my god Blizzard are selling WoW Mousemats! How long till they start selling epics?” They would come to rue those words. Thank you for spending precious production time on money grabs instead of content which I’m already paying $15 a month for! Said one user, to which another responded: “They’re a business, and are in business to make money.” On 15th April 2010, a new $10 pet was added to the store. And more importantly, a mount called the Celestial Steed. For many, this is where Blizzard had crossed the line. It’s hard to convey to a non-player how significant mounts were to the people who collected them (which was most players). There were some mounts you could get cheaply and easily, some you could only get through in-game events or seasonal quests, some through achievements, some through PvP, some through reputations (usually by completing daily quests for weeks). But the rarest and most prestigious mounts of all came from drops. Each expansion usually had one mount you could get by killing an incredibly rare enemy that only spawned very irregularly, such as the Time Lost Proto Drake, and usually the final boss of each raid had a microscopic chance of dropping a mount too (in some cases we’re talking a drop rate of 0.1% or less). Players would work for years to get their hands on one. I know people who ran through a raid every week for over a decade in the hope of getting The Ashes of A’lar or Invincible’s Reins. What I’m trying to say is that mounts were a huge part of the game, massive status symbols, and were often the motivator that kept people playing. Pets were negligible, but now Blizzard was selling something integral to World of Warcraft. And at what cost? The price tag of $25 would have been high in a free to play game, for what amounted to an art asset. In WoW, it drew shocked reactions from every corner. It didn’t help that the Celestial Steed was absolutely fucking fabulous, so naturally everybody wanted it. Downloadable content is something which has worried gamers for a long time. There has been examples of developers charging for content that’s already on the disc, and allegations of some companies deliberately removing content so they can charge a premium for it post release. But for all the overpriced horse armor and expensive map packs out there, Blizzard’s latest offering on their online store really takes the biscuit. After some searching, I was able to track down the announcement thread. The response from Palisade is probably the most coherent: I think it is extremely unfortunate that we are starting to see F2P (Free To Play) microtransactions in a game that we already pay a service fee for, not to mention the upfront costs of purchases the base retail game and its following expansion packs. 2009/2010 is certainly the era of DLC. Quite frankly I think any game or service that requires upfront retail costs as well as perpetual service fees to use the service should not include microtransactions or paid downloadable content. Period. How long have some us been playing and paying for your product. Those who have been here for years have shelled out an insane amount of money to play a “video game”. While I think server transfer fees and the such are a little expensive, I can understand the need for such a service and why it should cost. But for actual in-game content, there is no excuse for paid DLC. You might as well promote purchasing RMT gold, because that’s essentially same mentality you are promoting here. Give us your money, get something in game. As a Blizzard follower since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans back in the day, this company sure has changed a lot. Customer loyalty has been replaced with corporate greed. It’s unfortunate. But this was a controversy with two sides. That forum thread is full of players excitedly talking about buying the mount. And within three hours of the Celestial Speed’s debut, it had already generated $3.5 million in revenue. They became immediately visible around the game world and glittered in their dozens in the skies above Dalaran. The mount you rode said a lot about you. It was your way of showing off your accomplishments to the people on your server. It might set you apart as a great raider, a distinguished PvP-er, a passionate roleplayer, or a fanatical quester. But what did the Celestial Steed say about you? According to some, it said you were a gullible fool, easily parted with your money. “One by one they are systamatically putting a dollar price tag on what previously you obtained through playing the game, through skill, there is no achievement and no skill in paying money, there is no challenge won buy pulling out your wallet.” This sentiment echoed around the internet, with one Kotaku commenter saying, “umm no thanks… i appreciate cool mounts and pets… but not for real money. gotta earn that stuff in-game or its not cool.” The communitystarted derisively calling them ‘Sparkle Ponies’, sharing memes about My Little Pony, and coming up with various other ways of shaming anyone who bought the mount. Those buyers responded with comics and memes of their own. (Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Komunitas
lemmygrad.ml
(part two) Finally, the text, where they quote some actual authors. But not the page or even the book this is from, so basically impossible to verify and get some context. For the extreme claims they make, the burden of proof is on the article authors, not on us. Anyway, let’s look at what exactly they even say: :::spoiler long quote In April 1919 Lenin signed a decree to create a concentration camp system copied by the Tsarist Katorga, which in 1916 numbered almost 20,000 inmates, according to figures published by Stephen G. Wheatcroft. The new network of concentration camps was named Glávnoie upravlenie ispravítelno-trudovyj lagueréi i koloni (Directorate-General for Labor Camps). It was the birth of the Gulag, the largest Soviet system of repression. The first of those camps had been established in 1918 at Solovki, on the Solovetsky islands of the Black Sea. Again the figures of the communist dictatorship ended up far exceeding those of tsarism in a short time: at the end of 1920 there were already 84 camps with some 50,000 political prisoners. In October 1923 there were already 315 camps with 70,000 prisoners. Those detained there were used in forced labor as slave labor. The prison population had very high death rates, due to the harsh conditions in these brutal detention centers, where prisoners were often starved or killed by their guardians. ::: After reading through the loaded language, it seems that they are surprised there are a lot of prisoners in the gulag during the civil war, and that the conditions were harsh. That’s all they’re really saying. Except, I guess, for this sentence: The prison population had very high death rates, due to the harsh conditions in these brutal detention centers, where prisoners were often starved or killed by their guardians. I vaguely remember reading that the gulags did not actually have very high death rates. I don’t remember the source, unfortunately. It seems to be a rather popular claim, so if you’re doing a debunking for yourself, you might want to try to find some reading on it. The next two claims are ones where I’m not educated enough to know what actually happened. So, you might also want to research these two events. :::spoiler long quote The strikes were also bloodied down. On March 16, 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory, where its workers had gone on strike six days earlier, accusing the Bolshevik government of having become a dictatorship: 900 workers were arrested, and 200 executed without trial. Violent repression, imprisonment, hostage-taking and mass murder were the methods most used by the Bolsheviks to quell these strikes, both in the factories and in the fields. On January 29, 1920, in the face of strikes by workers in the Urals region, Lenin sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov encouraging the use of mass murder against strikers: “I am surprised that you take the matter so lightly and do not immediately execute a large number of strikers for the crime of sabotage.” These methods were even used to quell the protests of workers when they were forced to work on Sunday, as happened in Tula, a malaise that the Bolsheviks simply attributed to a “counter-revolutionary conspiracy forged by Polish spies.” It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of rebel workers and peasants were executed between 1918 and 1922. ::: :::spoiler long quote In the late 1920s Lenin approved of the mass murder of 50,000 “white” and civilian prisoners in Crimea, shot or by hanging, in one of the largest massacres of the Russian Civil War. The victims of this crime had surrendered, according to Robert Gellately, after the Bolshevik promise that there would be an amnesty for them if they surrendered. ::: The Dimitry Pospielovsky guy they cite for the alleged brutality against the priests (paragraph below) seems rather questionable as a source. :::spoiler long quote With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a systematic religious persecution began which would, throughout the history of the USSR, involve the murder of between 12 and 20 million Christians. In 1914 the Russian Orthodox Church had 55,173 churches, 29,593 chapels, 550 monasteries and 475 convents: the vast majority of them were closed and destroyed by the Communists. Something similar happened with the 5,000 Jewish synagogues and the 25,000 Muslim mosques that were in Russian territory in 1917. Before the Revolution there were also 112,629 priests and deacons and 95,259 monks and nuns of the Orthodox Church. The Communists unleashed brutal persecution against them. According to Yakovlev, some 3,000 priests, religious and nuns were already killed in 1918 alone with methods as brutal as those mentioned above. Many lay people were harassed, tortured, detained and killed. Historian Dimitry V. Pospielovsky reported the Reds’ brutality against priests with cases such as the following: ::: Here’s the Russian Wikipedia link for him (English Wikipedia doesn’t have much), the guy worked for “Free Russia” and “Radio Svoboda”. (Yes, I know Wikipedia is not a credible source, but I doubt they’d lie about the guy’s affiliations.) Literal CIA outlets. Can be dismissed out of hand. The other guy they cite is Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. Here’s his Wikipedia. Maybe less unhinged than literal CIA, but still doesn’t exactly seem unbiased. Can’t dismiss every single thing he wrote out of hand per se, but considering the fact they don’t cite book and page so that we could look at the context and the sources, the burden of proof is still on them. :::spoiler long quote If the Okhrana had been characterized by its brutal methods, the communist Cheka exceeded in every way the degree of cruelty of its tsarist predecessor. Among its methods of torture and assassination against political dissidents, Orthodox clerics and others considered enemies by the Bolsheviks, it is worth mentioning savages such as the following, documented by the Russian historian Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and by the State Archives of the Russian Federation, among others sources: ::: I hope any of this is helpful to you. At least that would mean that the hours I just spent on commenting on some worthless Spanish conservative site’s drivel (notice that one paragraph where they excuse Franco in this very article) were at least somewhat worth it.
Komunitas
feddit.org
Bei Goethe wurde alles offen und frei Sie wurden bis in die 1990er Jahre zensiert: Goethes »Erotica« gibt es nun in einer bibliophilen, prächtig illustrierten Ausgabe Diesmal war er nicht gern in Venedig. Verflogen die Begeisterung von einst, das Entzücken, als er im September 1786 bewundernd durch die Lagunenstadt gelaufen war. Jetzt, im April 1790, wäre er lieber zu Hause bei Frau und dreimonatigem Sohn. Stattdessen wartete er wochenlang auf die Herzoginmutter Anna Amalia, die er nach ihrer ausgedehnten Italienreise nach Weimar begleiten sollte. Er fror, er klagte über das Wetter, die Einsamkeit und die Einheimischen, die den Fremden das Geld aus der Tasche zogen, aber er habe, schrieb er an Caroline Herder, »auch gesehen, gelesen, gedacht, gedichtet, wie sonst nicht in einem Jahr«. Hauptsächlich war Johann Wolfgang Goethe damit beschäftigt, »Venezianische Epigramme« zu schreiben. Die ersten waren noch in Weimar entstanden, nun kamen, im antiken Maß der Distichen, weitere hundert dazu, Sentenzen, Sprüche, pointierte Verse, bissige Gedichte, darunter viele erotische Anspielungen und sexuelle Direktheiten, manches so anstößig, dass er es lieber in der Schublade versteckte. Die Epigramme erschienen erstmals in Schillers »Musenalmanach« für 1796. »Ob alle die Zensur passieren«, hatte Wilhelm von Humboldt schon vorher geäußert, »steht dahin.« Der Berliner Zensor indes war gnädig. Er ließ die Sammlung passieren. In Wien dagegen verbot man gleich den ganzen Almanach, und selbst Goethes Bewunderer waren überzeugt, dass der Dichter hier allzu sorglos zu Werke gegangen war. Später, 1885, als Weimars Großherzogin Sophie nach dem Tod des letzten Goethe-Enkels die umfassendste Ausgabe der Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe in Auftrag gab, ein Projekt von nationaler Bedeutung, gerieten die Erotica unter die Argusaugen von Regentin und Herausgebern. Sie hatten dafür zu sorgen, dass nichts in dieser gewaltigen, am Ende 143 Bände umfassenden Edition Platz fand, was »das Ansehen Goethes und seiner Familie beschädigen« konnte. Es gab in den Aktenmappen, Briefschaften, Schreibheften und Blättern, die in Koffern und Waschkörben ins Schloss gebracht wurden, manches, was beim Sichten des Erbes für gelindes Entsetzen sorgte (oder schon von den Enkeln verstümmelt worden war). Die Hofdamen rückten mit Federmessern und Schere den »Venezianischen Epigrammen« zu Leibe, radierten, kratzten oder schnitten anstößige Stellen weg, das (völlig harmlose) Gedicht »Das Tagebuch«, das sogar heute noch in der weitverbreiteten Hamburger Ausgabe fehlt, wurde nur zögernd in späteren Nachtragsbänden der Sophien-Ausgabe von den Auslassungen befreit. Zwei Hefte Erotica und Priapeia blieben gleich ganz unter Verschluss, und manch prüder Editor wollte nicht einmal die Zeile »Daß dir werde die Nacht zur schöneren Hälfte des Lebens« aus »Herrmann und Dorothea« gelten lassen. Kaum zu glauben: Eine Sammlung der erotischen Gedichte Goethes, die Obszönes nicht ausspart, gibt es erst seit dreißig Jahren. Sie erschien 1991 in einem Insel-Taschenbuch.
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
I was just contemplating that in another thread. I had a shower thought, trying to imagine if the ancient Greek religion had survived to the present day through the industrial revolution, how their system of “god of bread, feasts and wheelbarrows” thing would have handled internal combustion engines and email. I think we’ve concluded that Hephaestus would be the god of magnetos, distributors and spark plugs and that Mercury would probably rule over SMS and email. CGP Grey made a video about why the Atlantic Exchange went the way it did; Europeans arrived in the Americas and steamrolled the native populations, partially with vastly superior technology and mostly with plagues. Well, people of the old world were more advanced technologically because almost all of the animals that were ripe for domestication are from Africa, Europe or Asia. It’s a lot easier to bootstrap yourself to the bronze age when you have horses, oxen, cattle, donkeys, sheep, pigs, cats, dogs and silkworms, and not so easy when maybe you have llamas. You’re not going to domesticate a moose or a bison on foot with wood and stone tools, hell we haven’t domesticated moose with helicopters and machine guns. They literally didn’t have the horsepower to climb the tech tree. Why did the natives die of plagues but the arriving Europeans didn’t? Plagues are animal diseases that jump to humans and then become endemic in large, dense population centers. No animal husbandry, there’s no source of viruses in the first place and no dense population centers in which to become endemic. Thus no “Americapox.” That’s why the Native Americans were doomed. Now what about the East? China, Japan, India, Korea, hell even the Middle East and North Africa, they had horses and cattle and such, all of them can lay claim to sophisticated cultures, they had their versions of science and philosophy…so why was the Industrial revolution peculiar to the British of all people? Portuguese and Spanish inventors patented steam powered machines before the British did, so why didn’t the Industrial Revolution belong to Portugal or Spain, let alone India or China? If I were to hypothesize, I think it was a Wright Flyer moment. I use the 1903 Flyer as an example of something that happened the instant it was possible and not a day before; The Flyer barely had enough power to weight that it basically couldn’t fly in density altitudes above -600 feet. It barely lifted one Ohioan a few feet above Hatteras Island in the cold of December. They didn’t have the engine in December 1902 and they didn’t have the weather in November 1903, they flew in December the very day it became possible. I think maybe 1700s Britain was just rich enough from all the Wooden Ships And Iron Men they’d done, and just barely socially mobile enough to allow people like Michael Faraday to exist. Hinduism or Confucian Buddhism won’t tolerate a Michael Faraday.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
Plague still exists mostly as a problem in poor countries without access to antibiotics. I think sheep get it too and it’s a problem in livestock. Also there was a large plague vaccination program in India in the 1890s
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices. I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book. Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn’t like what MySpace looked like a decade later. Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap. As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90’s cars were far better than the 70-80’s cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990’s a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70’s-80’s) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990’s cars didn’t rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990’s cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it’s still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60’s-70’s driving around in the 1990’s.
Komunitas
jlai.lu
À mon avis Firefox pourrait être développé avec de moyens bien plus faibles. Est-il nécessaire d’embaucher que des rock-stars qui veulent un gros salaire ? Faut-il un CEO qui gagne des millions ? Avec un budget de quelques headpats par mois on pourrait avoir des centaines d’heures de travail par mois de transfems qui savent programmer en rust /blague (à 90%)
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Almost as if the 50’s were being plagued by the same dumb rich out of touch assholes from the 1920s and it caused some ~trickle down~ issues for society down the line in the 90s. Turns out 35 years ain’t that long of a time in the grand scheme of things.
Komunitas
aussie.zone
The style of the tyranids in Space Fleet is super cool and super distinct. I’ve never seen their space forces depicted with mollusk like aesthetics before. The tendrils are very creepy. Certainly are creepy! Found some artwork here and here. As folks may or may not be aware, these mollusc-like Tyranid ships would be based off the mind flayer nautiloid ships from D&D.