@aleph@lemm.ee
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aleph

@aleph@lemm.ee

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aleph, (edited )
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But do it properly this time. No wizards or halflings in the Second Age, thank you very much.

aleph,
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Nope. Canonically, the blue wizards arrived around the same time as their more famous brothers, early in the Third Age.

aleph,
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The project is named The Hunt for Gollum, which implies it will be in the Third Age, between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In the books, Gandalf mentioned that he and Aragorn tracked Gollum for quite some time during this period, so presumably it will feature these characters as well.

aleph, (edited )
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Yeah, same. The blue wizards would have been doable from a lore perspective, and would have been ripe for exploration seeing as they have so little known about them. But no, the RoP writers had to have their Gandalf + Hobbit to fill their nostalgia quota, of course.

The “always follow your nose” ‘reveal’ was the final nail in the RoP coffin for me.

aleph,
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Yeah, the potential is there for another audience fakeout, but I think it’s highly unlikely. Their target demographic is a mass audience who enjoyed the Jackson movies but aren’t hardcore fans of the books. To these fans, as you said, a blue wizard would be too much of a head-scratcher.

aleph,
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That’s true, however that was more or less a footnote and not something that featured in the published works. Hence why I said ‘canonically’, as in ‘going by the books’.

I think it would have been fine for the RoP writers to have The Stranger be a blue wizard on this basis, though.

aleph,
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I got you

archive.is/…/sony-xperia-is-dying-out-as-it-fails…

aleph,
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Sony only have themselves to blame for the collapse of their mobile division. Everyone and their dog has been saying for years that Xperia phones are too expensive and lack innovation.

aleph,
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Because swing voters still exist in the UK.

The future of desktop Linux might be like OpenSUSE Kalpa/Aeon

I’ve been running Tumbleweed for a few years now. It’s great, but it’s not 100% autopilot, updates often require manual intervention (resolving small problems) or updates try to add 50 packages I don’t need (recommends) all the time despite them not being in a pattern. I’ve been looking for a distro on which I could...

aleph,
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Out of interest, hsve you heard/read much about VanillaOS and their AB partition system, and if so what do you make of that compared to Fedora Atomic?

aleph,
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Online Accounts only supports Outlook mail at the moment, so it’s not a Onedriver replacement yet.

aleph,
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Thanks, I hate it.

aleph, (edited )
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Divestment from Israel can take many forms, depending on the institution. Some colleges may be directly involved with Israeli companies, or receive funding from them, while others may simply have a broad investment portfolio that includes Israeli companies, or just Western companies that also do business with Israel.

So it’s not like all colleges and universities in the US are all supporting Israel in the same way, and therefore divesting from Israel can vary in terms of how complicated the process would be.

aleph,
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A report came out today confirming that 99% of pro-Palestine protests at US colleges have been entirely peaceful, despite the hysterical rhetoric from Congress and the corporate news media.

I don’t think I’ve seen a greater disparity between the mainstream dialogue surrounding a current issue and the actual reality of it since the 2003 Iraq War.

aleph,
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I read that in Werner Herzog’s voice.

Shout out to Encounters at the End of the World, for those who haven’t seen it.

aleph,
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For #1, I found it easier to force the Linux installation to use local time instead of UTC by running the following in a terminal:

timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock

aleph, (edited )
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The danger is that by introducing the threat of civil or even criminal charges against those who are accused of being antisemitic under this strict definition, it will have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and academic debate/inquiry.

You should read this opinion piece by the lead drafter of the IHRA definition itself, talking about the dangers of Trump’s 2021 executive order (essentially what this latest bill is proposing to enforce by law). In it he warns about the definition being weaponized, saying:

Starting in 2010, rightwing Jewish groups took the “working definition”, which had some examples about Israel (such as holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel, and denying Jews the right to self-determination), and decided to weaponize it with title VI cases. While some allegations were about acts, mostly they complained about speakers, assigned texts and protests they said violated the definition. All these cases lost, so then these same groups asked the University of California to adopt the definition and apply it to its campuses. When that failed, they asked Congress, and when those efforts stalled, the president.

The real purpose of the executive order isn’t to tip the scales in a few title VI cases, but rather the chilling effect. ZOA and other groups will hunt political speech with which they disagree, and threaten to bring legal cases. I’m worried administrators will now have a strong motivation to suppress, or at least condemn, political speech for fear of litigation. I’m worried that faculty, who can just as easily teach about Jewish life in 19th-century Poland or about modern Israel, will probably choose the former as safer. I’m worried that pro-Israel Jewish students and groups, who rightly complain when an occasional pro-Israel speaker is heckled, will get the reputation for using instruments of state to suppress their political opponents.

aleph, (edited )
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For those who aren’t aware, this bill aims to effectively enshrine into law the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been a controversial doctrine since its inception because critics say it unnecessarily curtails freedom of speech.

Hell, even the Zionist Anti-Defamation League say on their website that the IHRA definition is a guideline that should not be codified into law because it could be used to infringe the First Amendment:

ADL does not support the adoption and application of the IHRA Definition in a manner that would create new categories of legally prohibited speech that are subjected to either civil or criminal penalties – something we believe the First Amendment and principles of free speech would prevent.

This bill does very little that existing legislation does not already except have a chilling effect on freedom of speech on university campuses, and the fact that it got such widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans in the House is an absolute farce.

aleph,
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That’s quite uncharitable. We don’t know anything about the woman, much less that she thought school shootings elsewhere were “fine”.

It’s pretty normal for people to mentally compartmentalize these types of shocking incidents as “things that happen in other places” rather than their own local community.

aleph, (edited )
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Consumer Reports do in-depth annual reliability assessments of numerous car manufacturers and typically the only European brands that score well are usually in the upper end of the market (BMW/Porsche). The rest are usually in the middle of the pack, or right near the bottom.

Here are their rankings for:

And those are just the newer vehicles. If you look at used car markets, you’ll often see that European brands generally don’t hold their value nearly as well as the Asian brands, primarily because they fare even worse once they have 80,000+ miles on the clock.

aleph, (edited )
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this old man shot this young man for seemingly no reason

That itself is reason enough for this story to go viral. The racial element was just the icing on the cake.

aleph,
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Not nearly enough, evidently.

aleph,
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Been watching a lot of CNN lately, by any chance?

aleph,
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That’s surprising, since you seem to be making the exact same mistakes that the Pro-Israel media are making: 1) These protests are not in favour of Hamas, they are in favour of a ceasefire and freedom for Palestinians, and 2) conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

You’ll find that Jewish people are more than welcome to join these protests, and in fact many of the protesters are Jewish themselves.

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