Ginny [they/she]

I am a certified Java hater, but you’re allowed to like it. If simple and objected oriented is what you want, I can see the attraction, and it has a good and mature ecosystem.

I also think Java is shit, but if you manage to get a NullPointerException while writing a hello world program, maybe anon is just not cut out for computers?

Czech Budweiser or American Budweiser?

I have it on good authority that Fosters is Australian for “piss”.

What constitutes reliable is a matter of opinion I suppose, but the first concrete statement of fact:

0 emissions

Wrong, right out of the gate.

people in drag’s country actually work to make things better

Which fabled country is this? Do they take UK/EU citizens?

Your mind would have to be positively cavernous.

Sir, you have insulted my ancestors, and I cannot allow this insult to stand. I challenge you to a duel!

You can tell it’s British by the fact that there are two white vans and not a pick-up truck in sight.

If this is true, you are hurt from your own actions of hurting another person.

And thus, by putting her face all over a piece of art than fans liked for not having a face, Cynthia’s hurt arises from her own actions of hurting the fans of the original.

If this is true …

Congratulations! You detected my sarcasm. But if you’d like me to engage seriously, I’ll bite.

Cynthia is allowed to be upset. She made some art and people didn’t like it. It hurts to put yourself into something - in her case literally - and have people not like it. But that’s the risk you run when you make art for other people. People are allowed to engage with art how they want.

What she is not entitled to do is pretend that this is degrading, or in someway offensive. If people were going round scratching out her face from random images, she might have a point. But that isn’t what is happening here. She engaged with the original piece of art by making her own version and putting her face in it. Others engaged with her art by making their own versions and taking some of her face right back out of it in order to make it closer to the original. That’s no more or less wrong than what she did. They’re both perfectly fine. If her feelings are hurt, that’s unfortunate, but it is incidental. And she is entitled to express that her feelings are hurt, but she is not entitled to pretend that that is anything more than incidental.

I daresay Peter Jackson might be upset when people make fan-edits of The Hobbit trilogy by removing a lot of his artistic vision to edit it down to a single watchable film. But if he came out and said it was personally degrading to him, people would call that ridiculous. If Evangeline Lilly said fans were “erasing women” by cutting out Tauriel, people would call that ridiculous. Everyone has their own visions when it comes to making adaptations of other works, and if people disagree with yours, it’s not a personal attack, even if it feels like one.

That being said, I have no beef with Cynthia. She is no doubt getting a lot of grief from racist and sexist weirdos mixed in with the more legitimate negative feedback, so while I think that her statement above is ridiculous, I understand her feelings are hurt, and she is “lashing out” in what is ultimately a very small potatoes kind of way. I hope the movie does well.

As an aside; I’m a fan of musical theatre but an un-fan of the cost of musical theatre tickets, so I was very concerned that no one would attempt to adapt a Broadway/West End musical again after what Tom Hooper did to Cats. I saw Wicked in London and enjoyed it, so I’ll probably watch this film if the reviews are at least halfway good.

Well I think it was offensive of Cynthia to erase the original artist’s vision and it’s shameful of you to defend her.

Both of you have hurt my feelings, and therefore you are in the wrong.

I think usually it’s just for fun. “Fook” is supposed to be evocative of Northern England in the same way “feck” is of Ireland, but in my experience no one in Northern England pronounces it that way for real. Not in the North West, at least.

For those who don’t know: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

* That’sh for blashphemy!

Are you familiar with the comedian James Acaster? He has a relevant bit: https://youtu.be/Zt5qJC1xQ8A

I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing? If you ask me the GNU people are missing a trick. Perhaps if they rewrote Hurd in Rust they could finally shed that “/Linux”.

TIL

All this time I assumed Uranus was just the Roman equivalent of Ouranos.

Earl

Squeal

Gwee

If you want to change a politician’s mind, you don’t do it by dangling your vote on a carrot.

So how do you do it?

I’m literally always saying this.