You are not able to create enough pressure with your mouth to force a milk duct to expand and fill with air.

Yeah - the real freaks left because moot dated like Brianna Wu or something stupid and weird like that. 8chan was the place for a bit.

4chan is owned by an anime figma company at the moment - i think Nendroid?

The thing is - North Korea isn’t known to have accessible internet. There is an intranet, for people very privileged - but that would be monitored and you wouldn’t be on Lemmy.

This is just extremely unlikely, and based on other comments, the Korean looks Google translated.

How are you accessing the internet? My understanding was that there was only an extremely restricted intranet.

Do you use Red Star OS?

I’m not even getting the 500 I’m paying for already!

Yep! I actually closed my account pretty much immediately afterwards, and went with a local credit union which has been consistently great! They gave me a really good rate when I needed a car loan, have floated me if I was a little short before my direct deposit came in…

Wells Fargo made a lot of money on ‘Sort Order Optimization’

Say you have $100 in your bank account. You buy a candy bar for $2 from a vending machine, a coke for another $2, fill up $20 worth of gas, and then spend $100 on groceries. You’d think one overdraft charge, for the groceries, right?

Nope. The groceries will be taken out first, then the gas, then the candy bar and coke. Three overdraft charges.

It’s expensive being poor - and they knew that:

“Given our dependence on a small set of OD consumers (4% generate 40% of total OD/NSF revenue),” Zimmerman wrote, “a small change in behavior within this group can cause a large change in revenue.”

As does the end of our conversation.

Fuck Cox.

When I was doing Amazon Turk - had like $10 to my name, I accidentally clicked on “withdraw funds” instead of “deposit funds” for the $15 I’d spent ten hours earning.

Bank of America charged me $35 for the “overdraft.”

I can’t think of a single online space ever that has catered to trans men. It’s always infinitely easier to just act like a cis dude 99% of the time.

I guess there is Hudson’s Guide lol.

The current state seems to be that only big corporations have IP protections.

Most of the biggest channels on YouTube and TikTok are people who steal other folks content, and this has the tacit approval of the platforms (look at how YouTube handled Sssniperwolf versus jacksfilms. She just records herself laughing at TikToks, he called her out for not crediting folks, she showed up at his house and YouTube said ‘uh uh, seems like both sides are in the wrong here’ because they make buckets of money on her stolen content.)

YouTube figured out that you can’t host full movies, because Paramount can afford the lawyers. Small time content creators though - fuck them.

Similarly, look at how Facebook’s LLM was trained on Anna’s Archive. I use Anna’s, because I’m broke, but Facebook could afford to pay for those pdf’s legitimately. (I love how they also claimed that it was okay because they didn’t seed…)

Current IP law seems to only honor the IP of corporations.

No, it’s his wife, who has collaborated in a bunch of his fucked up endeavors, likely including helping with sex trafficking.

I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all, other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?

Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad? Can we pick eras we want to compare at least?

Might as well dump some A1 on every IEP in a state on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon line…. (and lord knows that ‘AI’ is already involved)

It really is made better by having actually read 1984. (Like, it’s not that difficult a novel? Medium sized, was comprehensible to me when I was in middle school. I can get pretending to have read/understood like Derrida or something - I do that all of the time - but seriously, it’s a novel that we ask high schoolers to tackle.)

There’s multiple versions of Brazil - the American version is just a little bit shorter. Those changes aren’t a big deal though. Howeverr, theres a made for TV version referred to as the “Love Wins Out” ending.

The movie is a parody of 1984 (absolutely hilarious and worth watching as are most things involving Terry Gilliam. I’ll spoil it a wee bit but the point isn’t these plot details.)

Basically, instead of Winston and Julia being lovers standing up to Big Brother, you have a delusional idiot who fucks up his pretty easy job in the evil totalitarian government by obsessing over and stalking a woman who has zero interest in him. His grip on reality is tenuous at best.

At the end, he fucks up and gets the Room 101 treatment. We’re treated to a fantastical scene as La Resistance comes in to save him, exciting bombings and car chases and reality bending visuals that are too ridiculous to be real. Him and the woman ride off into the sunset as badass rebels escaping the evil government.

That’s where the “Love Wins Out” movie stops. It’s clearly a hallucinatory dream sequence, and the actual ending reveals our “hero” has been tortured into insanity.

Like, the whole point of the movie is that she doesn’t like him, doesn’t know him, doesn’t want to know him. We don’t even know that she’s in La Resistance - it’s a great “unreliable narrator” film. But this TV version gives a character who exists to be an unlikeable moron the girl and a happy ending.

“No cuts” come from someone at Ghibli being so pissed about the butchering that they gave Weinstein a fake katana to let them know not to fuck with Mononoke.

Suzuki knew of a small, hard-to-find store in Tokyo hidden away underneath the train tracks between Shinbashi and Yurakucho. It was where Japanese film studios bought the realistic-looking weapons used in Japanese samurai movies. Suzuki picked out a sword there and brought it with him to New York for our meeting with Harvey. It was a very convincing replica of a Japanese samurai sword. It was realistic in every detail except that the blade was not sharp, which you could not tell unless you got a good, close look at it.

These were still the days when you could bring a samurai sword with you in your carry-on luggage on a commercial flight from Tokyo to New York. Suzuki presented the sword to Harvey in a conference room full of horrified Miramax employees. One of them later approached me and said, “You gave Harvey a SWORD? Are you CRAZY?”

When Suzuki presented Harvey with the sword, Suzuki shouted in English and in a loud voice, “Mononoke Hime, NO CUT!”

Something very similar happened to Angel’s Egg/Tenshi no Tomago. This slow, meandering, beautiful existential art film about how hopeless it is to be alive. (Like, the only real talking in the story is a telling of the Noah’s Ark story where God leaves and the bird doesn’t come back)

It’s probably one of the best films ever made - as profound as anything by Tarkovsky.

So of course an American director cut it with random bits of live action, dubbed some dialogue in, and made it a shitty post apocalyptic movie.

To me, it communicates that you prioritize the aesthetics of the books over their contents. (That hackneyed phrase, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ I think is part of the “hatred” people express towards this choice.)

There are def books to be collected because of their aesthetics - I have a gorgeous Taschen on the Crusades, a Maimonides text in Hebrew (which I can’t read), or very old English translations of Chinese texts. I’m very jealous of people who have things like complete Harvard Everyman’s or lots of vintage Penguins. Or people who just love Moby Dick so much that they’ll fill shelves with Dicks (Along color - Penguin put out a beautiful blue edition that I still can remember holding and debating on buying back in 2018.)

I don’t get “hating” the way someone else chooses to collect or organize their books. (And I’d have no room to stand on, because some of my shelves have more stacked on them than they have in them, it’s chaotic) I do “judge” people on the books they have and show, because the books you read and consider important are pretty easy ways to see what ideas have influenced your mind.

I love the opportunities for conversation that looking at a bookshelf brings, because I suck at small talk. It gives me a deeper understanding of a person - I can pick up a few niche interests and broader themes with a quick look.

I really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.

Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.

When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.

I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.

Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.

The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.

I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.