nzpol, uspol mention
There was a post on birdsite about the (lack of) rights of US prisoners, because the state will find reason to stop those that are politically inconvenient.
Unfortunately, NZ is no different.
In NZ, prisoners can't vote either. What's worse, is this law was introduced in only 2010, by the National (right wing) government.
Paul Quinn, the member who sponsored this legislation, bases his justification for the legislation loosely on social contract theory. This is the idea that prisoners have breached the contract with the state and therefore, some of their rights can be validly restricted.
They also tried to revert New Zealand to FPTP, because they felt MMP was... not good, for whatever reason. Probably because it allowed for fair and broad representation in the house?
National is fash-lite and will do whatever it takes to restrain inconveniences.
Thankfully the existing government wants to undo the prisoner rights' restrictions, like a lot of National's garbage.
Which of course is why Simon Bridges was so adamant about how gangs - predominantly pacific islanders and maori and born out of the cycle of inequality - were dangerous and we needed harsher laws, until he got booted out. The guy he's been replaced with is a piece of shit too, of course, but given he's got famous for having a MAGA cap, I doubt he'll be popular.
... not disastrously unpopular, unfortunately, because NZers have the memories of goldfish around politicians, but still.
re: BNA, personal thoughts, +politics
At the same time though, there's so much going on in the world that needs solving. Inequality and corruption are not things that should be treated as cute struggles that make people grow. They're painful and unfair and they're born from those that want to cause hurt. But those are things that must be solved together.
Evil is simple. In fantasy, Evil you can beat up and it makes Good shine through. In the real world, the unfairness and corruption and bigotry is made of lots of tiny cogs, and it requires all of us together to outnumber those cogs. It takes all of us crying out enough is enough until those in power can take no more, cannot use their power, or are replaced with those that do better.
And that's a lot harder than one person magically making everything okay.
Vague Brand New Animal spoilers (ep 6), personal/identity thoughts
Thinking about these lines a bit regarding my feelings around "godhood".
How much of my desire to fix things and make a better world is self-righteousness? How much of it is just me wanting to personally feel better? What's the difference between feeling happier because others are happier, and wanting to feel happier by making the bad things in the world go away?
And what about "hard work"? What about the growth and understanding that comes through mistakes and turmoil? Removing those with the stroke of a brush would be supposing mistakes and struggles shouldn't exist, it would simply cause stagnation.
Dream of light, stars, and space.
Interesting dream last night.
I was talking with someone, who was talking about the suns/stars throughout the universe. I'm not sure who or what, because most of this dream was just visuals of space. I remember comparisons and close-ups of stars, though that part is vague.
A small ball of light with a long tail streak was flying through/orbiting the solar system. It was shimmering softly through all the colours down the tail. At the start of the visuals I was watching a lot of things from above, including seeing that light, and then I was that light flying through space myself.
I just had the terrible realisation that, the world we live in now, in 40-60 years, will be considered "the old days".
We all have a specific image of what "the old days" feel like. But our modern era will be someone's old days. Our media that we see as present and developed, will become retro. Our culture for all its advances, will become dated.
I don't know what the future will be like when millennials are old, but the thought our world will be looked at as we do boomer/silent's, is scary.
Idle thoughts re: that Twitch discourse
The thing these furry hating gamers seem to miss, is that for as animal as some of us furries want to be, we know to behave human when the situation calls for it.
But of course in the end this is just queerphobia dressed up in its 2004 rags, because of people existing with "non-standard" lifestyles.
Who needs sleep when I can be coding things and making nonsense mistakes resulting in bizarre errors?
oh god why is my sleep cycle so fucked
Anyway, I spent several hours cutting out cruft from my CTB code in WTU, and starting work on the turn order display. At one point I mistakenly named a method the same as the variable it modifies.
RMXP/ruby didn't complain about this, it just... made the turn order very very wrong.
tech/IoT vent
You know there's a problem when capitalism's solution to overworked people is to sell them internet controlled devices to ease the lack of free time they have, instead of giving them back their free time.
You know there's a problem when they target parents and create SMART CRIBS to rock your baby over the internet.
You'd think the developers of all these Internet of Things things'd have never heard of LAN. How hard is it to just make them constrained to your LAN? It's hard, apparently.
I'm not mad, just disappointed.
https://awoo.space/@Taylor/103887140894914874
I'm not entirely sure what this proved in the end.
Speaking of which, here's the recent avatar commission I got.
Brand New Animal spoilers (ep. 4)
BNA skirts close to this issue but as of yet I haven't seen if it has a furry fandom in its setting.
There exists fans of the beastmen that hold what appear to be masquerade rave clubs.
So there's an element of appreciation and costuming amongst the human population, which sort of mirrors the furry fandom.
(Although given the racism, you could suppose the appreciation is supposed to come off as insensitive.)
Unless some sort of societal change/discovery happens post/mid-90s, any fictional setting with "real furries" should as a result treat the furry fandom differently.
You could probably get away with it being the same if the animal people live in a secret society, but still.
This is the same sort of problem as other scifi where everything is the same in terms of the cultural effects of fiction, except the one series the story is set in (e.g Doctor Who) doesn't exist.
Sometimes players will reset and reload to get the most out of a playthrough or mechanic.
Is it better that this process be easier for this purpose, or better that it be inconvenient (ie. load times, splash screens) to discourage it?
Alternately the choice is to give the player more control over mechanics instead of relying to RNG, but sometimes less exactness feels more natural and interesting, so it's harder to avoid.
I really don't want to have to replace my Surface. I just bought a new desktop. That's enough money burning for a while.
Lately my Surface has been mysteriously shutting off way before the battery is low/critical. - ie. about 20-25%, when the concern level is 10-15% - And by shut off I mean it just stops dead, and booting up again starts from scratch.
It also has a habit of screen burn around the edges for a few minutes if I've been using a bright/white program like SAI.
And now that I've started it up after the most recent pop, the screen is flickering while on power.
I'm an artist and something of a game dev living in New Zealand.
I talk about personal things that can get tangentially NSFW. While I wouldn't call this an after-dark account, it's kind of a mishmash personal account and prefer to mingle with people I know or trust.