It stopped being a particularly meaningful term when the distinction between “middle class” (bourgeoisie) and “upper class” (aristocracy) stopped being meaningful. After that it’s just been used to make some variation of “those more privileged workers who get tasty good boy treats as a reward for being white landowners in the imperial core” feel special and separate from other workers.

There’s definitely an analysis to be made about how the intersection of privilege, land ownership, and petty capital ownership creates a reactionary class of precarious but entitled shitbags who are simultaneously murderously terrified of losing their meager fiefs and rewarded enough by the system that they support it against any and all change, but “middle class” is too empty and propagandistic a term now.

Isn’t that joke older than formal logic being a common nerd thing? Like replying “yes” to an either-or question feels like an old sitcom bit about someone not paying attention and inferring from the tail end that they were asked if they wanted the second option or they stopped listening after the first, or just dismissing the question by agreeing to either in an annoying way. In fact, isn’t inappropriately answering “yes” to various questions in general a pretty old bit? Like misinterpreting a question about something as an offer of it, misinterpreting an offer as a request, etc? It’s just one of those “it’s funny because it’s wrong” sort of wordplay gags, similar to “who’s on first?”

Well, they’re not coherent enough for that but if they were that’s what they’d be described as doing .

Isn’t what you’re describing basically the hyperstition/meme magic shit that at least some of them do proclaim as part of their nihilistic irony poisoning?

AFAIK it’s basically just that math education has been moving more advanced concepts earlier and earlier at least as an optional course. Like calculus has gone from a post-grad level thing to a normal college course to something people can elect to take in high school, algebra went from college level material to normal high school level stuff that people start getting introduced to in middle school, etc.

But also a lot of people struggle with the most basic things in high school, graduate, then forget all of the incomplete-understanding they had by the time they have kids. It’s very likely that adults who are baffled and enraged at seeing some basic algebra problem also struggled with math in school and are embarrassed and frustrated that their skills have only gotten worse since then, on top of the possibility that they never even got to algebra when they were in school and instead went through the remedial math track that maybe reaches basic pre-algebra material in their senior year.

hrt can make your mfing hands smaller

Can confirm, I didn’t keep detailed records or anything but I did have a ring that went from being a snug fit on my ring finger to being loose on my thumb, and my hands noticeably look different.

Weren’t those mostly just different automod replies. Some of them have gotten replacements, like the bot and the bot.

BNHA is just incoherent liberalism: the writer clearly understands that the world portrayed in it is bad and the whole hero system is hypocritical and rotten to its core, but he’s too much of a lib to critique it properly. Like the system is rotting liberalism with a brutally racist undercurrent lurking just beneath the surface, the villains are omnicidal fascist lunatics straight up doing the Pasolini quote about fascism being true freedom for the powerful, and the “good” heroes are the ones that put the lives of others first and try to lift their spirits, which is overall an ok take for capeshit, but that’s as far as it goes and there’s not a coherent critique or alternative in it.

You forgot one of the best parts of The Witcher III: when the narrator (framed as a character in the story retelling it all later) basically says “racism is bad, and the real monsters are cruel and intolerant men.”

Oh no Rae’s just an absolutely awful person in a lot of ways. I think at least some of that is her not entirely seeing the world she’s in as real and so feeling entitled to use her obsessive meta knowledge and bullshit protagonist powers to do personal wish-fulfillment stuff, though at least some of that involves helping people in ways she couldn’t in her former life. But it is very much more just a story doing “normal isekai wish fulfilment with problematic implications, but this time it’s queer wish fulfillment instead of straight.” I will say that the LN does have Rae reflecting on how she’s basically playing a homophobic caricature as a defense mechanism of sorts, but I can’t remember if there’s a point where she acknowledges that her whole plot to get Claire is gross and bad even if she’s also trying to save her life along the way.

I think I’ve said this before, but her overall character arc should have been to grow and stop trying to impose her own desires on Claire while finding someone who actually reciprocated them, instead of just winning the explicitly-straight Claire as a prize for doing enough good deeds who was then perfectly happy to be her wife and spontaneously started reciprocating her feelings.

I’m framing it in a funnier way than it actually shows up. The literal text is a lot of very dancing-around-being-romantic stuff and whenever it puts a label on Akari and Menou/Hakua’s relationships it’s “dear friend” or “best friend.” I don’t even know if that’s an issue in the original text or a translator thing, but I’m not exactly hopeful that it’s just a bad translation.

At least there’s I’m in Love with the Villainess which is explicitly, textually gay and in the LN has a lot of somber reflection on real-world LGBT issues.

I usually just mock them and say things like “mEoW mEoW mEoW that’s you that’s what you sound like” but this time they coordinated to block my path with a united front of spinning and screaming.

New headcanon: Menou is ace and also got no sort of sex ed whatsoever and so literally thinks holding hands is as intimate as it gets, a misunderstanding further compounded by her soul merge thing literally involving holding hands.

AFAIK the US embassy in Benghazi got attacked and wiped out, and the State Department and US military were uncoordinated in their response. Basically just the typical rot and incompetence of the imperial machine, which only knows how to do terror bombings with jets and drones and is confused and terrified by any other sort of conflict.

Chuds decided it was some sort of inside job conspiracy by the Secretary of State to facilitate an attack on State Department property and have been banging on about it ever since despite that being utterly mad compared to the mundane explanation that the US military is a shitshow hollowed out by graft and decades of doing nothing but massacring unarmed or poorly armed civilians.

It was also a very regionalized thing: in places where landlords lived in the same general area as their properties they tended to be put on trial and punished, but in places where they instead lived in cities and delegated management of the property to others it was their cronies who were punished while the landlords were allowed to either flee the country or cut a deal to peacefully hand over their properties and receive a job as a bureaucrat in return on account of the dire need for literate workers (a category that pre-revolution was systemically restricted to the rich and some skilled professionals).

I think it’s just that it’s moving at all. Like if you wiggle a string or something in front of a cat, that’s not a good mimic of real prey but the cat goes and freaks out trying to get it. Unnaturally jiggling breasts are a wiggly piece of string for oversexed weirdo men.

Acrylic paints really like two things: an established basecoat on whatever they’re going onto, and to be thinned out a bit (a drop of water for ever few drops of paint, say). High density pigment ones take thinning better, but even those grainy cheap ones spread better when thinned - a drop of an acrylic matte/gloss can make them seem more vibrant and smoother than they are, too. That’s what I learned with trial and error when painting sculptures I’d made, at least.

Lmao holy shit, it’s like a waterballoon full of jello around a spring. That’s like early 2000s “we just invented jiggly bones but haven’t nailed down the details yet” level animation.

From what I’ve heard, Reaper just puts up a “please buy a license” window on startup after that, which lets you click through to continue using the full-featured program after a short wait.

“Oh but also the peasant levies are made out of unarmed women and children, damn life sure sucks huh” and I was like, excuse me, what? Am I even watching the same show?

Given the rest of the what we see of character who claimed that’s arc I can’t help but wonder if he wasn’t just bullshitting or doing something like misrepresenting a desperate village continuing to fight after losing most of its adult male population as some galaxy brain human shields nonsense to turn the blame away from himself and onto others.

Honestly tho I think the last part of the show really worked only because “Oh shit I need to defeat a clone of myself” is just such great narrative shorthand for the need for self-reflection… which is kinda undercut by the prior arc being Harry Potter Death Game, where the protagonists only survive by being such total badasses.

It really felt like it was trying to channel Hunter x Hunter and BNHA there. It also felt like it was trying to backtrack a bit on the cutthroat brutality stuff, cause even in the first trial it backed off and was like “wait no actually most of them were bluffing and are actually uncomfortable with the idea of just casually murdering each other for status, but they want to intimidate the others into backing down so they play psycho” for most of them except Ubel.

For what it was it wasn’t terrible, but it really did ruin the feel the first bit had. Like Frieren being this horrifyingly powerful bag of repressed trauma whose whole life has been some weird deep cover sleeper agent shit is entertaining, and I honestly think the show could have ridden a lot more on the having her give up on subtlety and just casually murk some horribly threat before continuing on with something silly and trivial bit a lot more, like its slowly revealing that it’s just One Punch Man, but Elf. That was a funny enough gag and they could have gotten way more mileage out of it than they did before miring themselves in the snails-pace blow-by-blow shonen fight scenes.

Really a mixed bag of a show, idk Dungeon Meshi is doing it more for me rn.

Yeah. It doesn’t hit as hard as early Frieren, which actually brought me to tears repeatedly because the whole “endless churn of people you may never see again as time slips inexorably away” shit strikes a nerve hard, but it is overall the better work.