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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneaffini rule
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    2 months ago

    The problem with a political interpretation of HDG is that it’s at odds with the fantasy escapism of being tamed by a plant monster that wants what’s best for you.

    Fundamentally, the Affini are bad. Their ideology is rotten and hypocritical and in real life it would not work out the way it does on the page. If you try to think about the political implications of HDG at all you will inevitably run into that. “Benevolent slavery” simply isn’t a thing.

    But there’s plenty of fiction that explores evil empires, the point of HDG is to have fun with the kinky idea of “what if a hot plant turned me into a pet?” Exploring the politics of the situation inevitably detracts from the fantasy of it being benevolent.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneaffini rule
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    2 months ago

    Calling the Culture anarchocommunism is somewhat accurate. Humans do have say in what goes on in the Culture, there are humans in high ranking roles in the Culture making decisions. Humans aren’t pets in the Culture, and Minds don’t own humans. Humans are only pets in the sense that Minds are superintelligent AI that largely do all the work to run society while humans live post-scarcity easy lives, but they are ostensibly equals.

    Here’s some background from the author: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

    HDG is kind of like what anti-Culture propaganda portrays the Culture as, but more rapey.



  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule hub
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    2 months ago

    I think it’s a bit of a double entendre, because it’s also referencing this specific part of the report:

    As the stock of “femboys” rose, the fate of porn featuring “straight” guy porn has fallen. Searches for “straight” on PornhubGay tumbled nine spots to 19th place, just above “cruising” and two spots below “cute femboy.” (Notably, “straight guys first time” is still in the 6th spot, though it was knocked out of the top five.)

    So “straight” guys are “out” as a gay porn category and femboys are “in”.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneraile
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    2 months ago

    Really the appropriate term for that is versatile, switch refers to kink roles. In this context I read the post as referring to tops who are switches, but I suppose it could refer to someone who is either a top or vers if they were using a more loose definition.


  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 months ago

    It’s perfectly appropriate to use thorn for all th sounds, eth existed in Old English and modern Icelandic but it wasn’t a thing in Middle or Early Modern English, unlike thorn. Old English is basically unrecognizable as English though, so this dialogue is faux Early Modern English. Most people who use thorn in English nowadays are drawing from the Early Modern usage.


  • My understanding is that not federating downvotes means that for blahaj communities, the canonical vote count has no downvotes, and instances can downvote if they like but their downvotes don’t get federated.

    So if someone makes a post on this community and 20 people upvote it, then 10 Lemmy worlders downvote it, Lemmy.world would see a score of 10 but sopuli.xyz would see a score of 20 still.





  • You’re right. Incidentally, I searched lemmy for “transpeople” and found quite a few hits, some of whom were trans themselves. Not just allies can do it, I suppose. Maybe I’ve just not noticed it before.

    I’ve never noticed “transpeople” before, but I’ve heard a lot of trans folk use “transgirl”, “transwoman”, “transman”, etc, including myself once upon a time. I think it’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t think about it that hard.


  • Linguistically they’re prefixes I mean. You’re right, when used on its own it is an abbreviation but within transgender or cisgender they’re prefixes. It’s a relatively new thing to use “trans” or “cis” as an abbreviation instead of a prefix, so it feels natural to turn it back into a prefix by attaching it to the next word, and “transwoman” and “ciswoman” still kind of work as long as you do both because cis- and trans- are modifying the womanness. I agree that even that is uncomfortable and othering though, it’s definitely better to use trans as an adjective on its own and not divide women/men into separate subcategories based on transness. I just am more understanding of that particular faux pas because I get how people come by it.

    “Transpeople” on the other hand doesn’t work the same unless you’re referring to those who are trans-person and don’t identify as people, which I imagine is not who these people are referring to on purpose and rather they are dehumanizing us as a whole. Both are bad, but I don’t think they’re equivalent.


  • Trans- and cis- are prefixes, so I can understand how it feels intuitive to people to say “transman” as one word, but it’s only appropriate if one also says “cisman”, and for some reason combining cis with the respective words is less frequent. Transphobia, I’d imagine.

    I feel like I’ve never seen someone write “transpeople” who isn’t actively being hateful. That one seems like there’s less of an excuse for it. But then, maybe that reflects more on the communities I move in than anything.




  • I like Cyberpunk 2077 but I honestly somewhat agree. It’s fundamentally the same game it was at launch, and the same people who were hating on it for not living up to their expectations turned around and started glazing it after CDPR fixed a few bugs and adjusted the balance.

    There’s definitely a bit more polish than there was before, but I have no idea how all these people claim to have hated it on launch but like it now. I liked it on day one, and I like it today, but it’s really kind of a mid game. It feels like there’s potential for it to build up to something incredible in a second or third game, but as it is it could stand to be a lot better and I get a lot of your criticism and why you still dislike it.