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hollyhoppet wrote (edited )

Reply to This post is for FLEXING by cowloom

Hey BRYCE? NSString properties are supposed to declared with copy access semantics instead of retain. Since NSMutableString is subclass of NSString, the property could be mutable under the hood!

Also I know I'm going past flexing here and I haven't talked to you in like ten years but FUCK YOU for writing a steam review that says pacific drive has "unnecessary ideological symbols." I'll put a trans pride sticker on my in-game station wagon and be happy the option is there. Consider yourself unfriended.

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missingno wrote

Reply to This post is for FLEXING by cowloom

In 2021 I wrote a long essay about how several terrible publisher decisions were killing my favorite game. While some people agreed with what I had to say, I got quite a lot of backlash, including a few people with power and influence in the scene who bullied me into quitting.

Last year I broke my silence to put out a followup video essay about how the passage of time proved me 200% correct. FUCK YOU I WAS RIGHT.

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cowloom OP wrote (edited )

Reply to This post is for FLEXING by cowloom

Back in college, I was taking an ethics class, and one day we were going over Marx (yeah, I don't know why he came up in ethics class, either). The professor made a mistake in explaining one part of his philosophy, and I raised my hand to correct her. I don't remember exactly what it was about, since this was over ten years ago, but she told me I was wrong, and not to interrupt her class. Well, a couple days later, I showed her a quote from Marx himself setting the record straight (in rather harsh language - what can I say, it's Marx), because several people had the same misconception in his day. This made her even more irate. Another student later tried persuading me to apologize to her, but I wasn't having it. Nobody ever acknowledged that I was right, so in spite of that, check out this flex, Dr. Wrong!

Edit: I just remembered another one. In a former programming job of mine, I was arguing with my boss over one piece of code. I said that the code wouldn't run, and he said that it would. So, I ran the script, and it threw an error, as I expected. It wasn't that difficult to understand; I think a computer science student could have understood why it wouldn't work. But, I chose to act meek, and say, "Huh, looks like it threw an error." But now that I don't work there anymore, I can confidently say, "Error: Variable manager_intelligence not found."

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nomorepie wrote

Reply to This post is for FLEXING by cowloom

(Omg. So. Not so much as a flex, but as an airing of a deep childhood wound, but) Fuck you, Judit, I did not borrow money from you! It's not my problem that you handed out all your pocket money cos everyone forgot theirs and wanted to buy ice cream at the top of the mountain! I didn't! Everyone else and even the teachers sided with you cos they all thought I was a little freak and they hated me but I was innocent!

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oolong wrote

Reply to comment by twovests in On life and how it ends [tw discussion of suicide] by nomorepie

i don't have a recommendation beyond having connections outside america that would then spur you to decenter the usa then doing the whole we are human and connected and have a shared struggle thingy. like there's no point in joking about learning about american politics against my will, i have loved ones there and my local politicians get inspired by their us counterparts all the time.

god ok. so. the paper i read isn't even focused on the act of self-immolation itself but rather how language oppression is linked to death. in the context of necropolitics, the ways in which a government controls how people die (extreme simplification)(the 'killing' of a language and its deleterious effect on the speakers being above's thesis), ccp state surveillance removes typical avenues for protest such that people find themselves disappeared, jailed and/or extrajudically killed and their message erased, which is where self-immolation comes in as an act arresting enough to defy that. see here also. there's more to be explored in whether you see the act as violent or non-violent re buddhism and the ethics of its reproduction in how we (whether inside or outside of tibet/china) report on it and talk about its effectiveness.

not to crying emoji now but i'm not prepared to write an essay on this because i definitely haven't done all the reading and always feel lacking when asked to write. i hope i am making sense

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twovests wrote

Reply to comment by oolong in On life and how it ends [tw discussion of suicide] by nomorepie

Yeah, that's entirely fair. I'm sorry about being Americentric but I also don't know how I would be less so from my positionality. I can only post from the sum of what I know, which has been poured into my brain inside America.

I don't mean to ask for an essay but I'm also not firm in my stance and want to know more? I think suicides to send a message are still probably usually a waste of the rest of a life. But I want to know more about your viewpoint in general (or at least the paper you mentioned? I know only a tiny bit about Tibet and the general history of Chinese imperialism, and even less about Tibetan self-immolation.) (And it's not unthinkable to me that censorship and repression could be so strong that self-immolation is the only way at all to spread a message, especially when so many people are doing it. But I don't know enough to go the rest of the way and imagine anything specific about the impact it would have.)

(I also am eager to discuss suicide in general and I appreciate this thread a lot so I hope my first comment doesn't monopolize this whole thread lol)

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twovests wrote

Reply to comment by oolong in On life and how it ends [tw discussion of suicide] by nomorepie

Sorry; I should clarify what I mean. By "cheap and quick", I really do just mean that the amplification is real and short-lived. And I only have my American political context here.

The self-immolation protest suicides in Tibet are something I really didn't know much about at all. (Other than searching up their wiki articles after having had read your comment.) I'm only speaking in my context as someone in the USA who's mostly aware of these suicides in how they interact with politics in America.

I can only readily recall two examples (other than suicide attacks), even though I know there were many more. The most salient being "Aaron Bushnell"* self-immolating last year. The anniversary is tomorrow and I doubt it'll be remembered at all.

And by "cheap", I'm trying not to fedpost here, but far-right terrorists in America have conducted suicide attacks that have proven to have real political gains. Trump might not be in the office today if his supporters didn't show ten years of evidence that they're willing to throw away their lives and drive and shoot and kill for him. I think suicides amplify a message, but don't have the same chilling effect that suicides attached to terror attacks do.

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twovests wrote

Reply to On life and how it ends [tw discussion of suicide] by nomorepie

I feel for that. I think "copycat suicides" really are a serious problem. I think suicides to prove a point are usually just a waste. They're a cheap an quick way to amplify your voice a little bit, at the cost of ever being able to speak again.

That said, suicide is also a pretty good solution to almost every personal problem. So much of the dialogue around suicide refuses to acknowledge this, because "We concede that suicide is a reprieve from all pain forever" probably isn't good messaging." Trying to reduce suicides is probably a good thing.

And I'm not sure a peer group of depressed and suicidal individuals wouldn't just fuel each others' worst tendencies.

This is a difficult point for me. There used to be such a group on Reddit that did go into the "Suicide will end your pain but also put it onto others, and most suicidal people really shouldn't do it, etc." It was legitimately good and useful dialogue with decent moderation.

When Reddit banned the community, it found another form, and it lead to many many premature deaths. I know people who have died after discovering methods on the offshoot community. I think these communities are possible to exist as something healthy, but that's very difficult to do and is also a huge liability.

I don't have any answers here, I'm sitting here with you on this. It's a subject I love to talk about but it feels like such a danger. It's very unique as a taboo.

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