uralsolo [he/him]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • Russia is not an altruistic actor here

    Always worth bearing in mind. The reason Crimea got taken over in 2014 and Donbas didn’t is pretty clearly because of its relatively higher strategic importance - it took a lot of provocation from NATO and Azov for Putin to change his mind about that calculation, I’ll never forget how bloodthirsty the media was especially in the month leading up to the invasion.


  • How many countries has China invaded or bombed from afar in the last forty years? How do China’s loan conditions compare to those of the World Bank and IMF? The notion that they’re “colonizing” anyone is completely daffy - they have long-running border disputes with some of their neighbors and a long-running leadership dispute with what remains of the previous government of China, those are completely different types of conflict.

    As for Russia and Israel, the difference is that the people in the Donbas who seceded from Ukraine back in 2014 weren’t placed there to displace Ukrainians as a Russian colonial project. They’re the same people who lived in Donbas going back to the USSR’s dissolution, and they had a series of legitimate grievances when the rest of Ukraine elected a government that was actively hostile to them.


  • I don’t remember which Surface I have, but power issues are the biggest bugbear that have followed me with it the entire time I’ve had it. Firstly chargers for the thing are really fucking sketchy - if it’s not in basically perfect, out-of-the-box condition it simply refuses to connect. And even if the little indicator light turns on that doesn’t mean that the bios “sees” it, which is pretty annoying.

    Lately it’s been doing this thing where when I try to wake it up from sleep it takes about a full minute to turn the screen on. This wasn’t an issue until like a week ago, I’ve tried updating everything, reverting back to windows/stock settings - nothing.

    Nowadays my surface is just a second screen on my desk that I use to run Stremio, because it just can’t handle anything else - and this is after me being pretty positive on it for most of the time I’ve had it. I guess I’ve had it for a few years, but damn if it wasn’t such a compact design I could probably swap out the power supply or something.






  • The ending of the communism vision quest might be my favorite moment in any game ever.

    Seriously you should play it for yourself if you haven't.

    That brief moment when all of the meloncholy of DE goes away, and a few people in a room manage to do something impossible together for a few seconds just by believing they can do it is such a beautiful way to end that subplot and injects so much hope into the Elysium universe that it’s unreal.

    You CAN save the city. You CAN stop the expansion of The Pale. You CAN bring about The Return. All you have to do is get fucking organized!



  • I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux

    I had a guide and it was still a big learning curve. Linus had a guide and he still bricked his machine trying to install Steam. Imagine your parents or grandparents being told without context to mount an ISO to a USB and set up their BIOS - for 90% of people there is no way in hell they’re installing Linux without a guide unless they can double click an exe and have an install wizard do it for them.




  • The Ultima series, especially U4, 5, and 6. To this day they are some of the best stories told in gaming history, but their appeal is limited by the fact that they came out in the DOS era - remake them with Baldur’s Gate 3 levels of production value and some QOL updates but otherwise don’t change a thing and they would contend for the best RPGs of all time.




  • I think social structures can be thought of in terms of consciousness, and whether or not they are a “higher” level of human consciousness is mostly a question of your definition of what that means.

    From our perspective we are all making individual decisions, but that’s similar to how a given cell is just managing its own individual chemical reactions. What initially made humanity unique in the animal kingdom was how complex our social animal is able to be - human clans were more complex than other mammals’ packs in the same way that a vertebrate is more complex than an invertebrate. Our social animal is the one that reached the tipping point of adding technology into the mix, which allowed us to add phenomenally more complexity that what evolution on its own is able to create.

    In the modern day, in the western world, people principally think of themselves as individual subjects, and as Marxists we recognize that this is one of the most critical self-defense mechanisms of liberalism, since it prevents class consciousness (and allows false consciousness to form). This is akin to how our cells are programmed by dna not to become cancerous - and when this mechanism fails and a cancer/revolutionary group forms the white blood cells/police usually stamp it out to protect the organism/capitalist society.

    The big difference between society and an organism when viewed through this lense is that when an organism dies its cells all die too, but when society “dies” all the people who were part of it will naturally form a new one atop the corpse of the old. Imagine if when you died your cells all hit a reset button and your corpse formed into a new person - that might disqualify society from being thought of as a consciousness, or perhaps it’s evidence that “consciousness” is independent of life and death.


  • I can’t pin it down to just one, but holy shit school shootings and the way we’ve responded to them completely broke whatever part of me thought that our society was still capable of doing things. They keep upping the ante with how horrifying they are too - the high water mark currently is Uvalde, and I think that the next one that shocks the nation will involve the cops (or a “good guy with a gun”) gunning down multiple kids or parents while trying to “help” and our collective response will still be to do nothing.