Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

nearly all fiction classified as a power fantasy tends to fall into one of four buckets in my experience

1: bullied kid gets their turn to be the bully
2: just outright awful garbage, to the point that being a fan of the story is a massive red flag
3: horrible, awful, terrible, no good, very bad, waste of oxygen, excuse for a human being (allegedly), gets a miraculous second chance and gets to experience a self-serving life at the top of whatever type of hierarchy the author likes most (this one is almost always isekai, and almost always follows the exact same structure)
4: the power of friendship

but you know what kind of power fantasy I've never seen before? a selfless one

yes yes, there are plenty of power fantasies where the protagonist is ostensibly a good person with good intentions, and they try to do good things, but all the ones I've seen still fall into buckets 3 and 4. even when the protagonist does good things supposedly in the name of others, the spotlight is always on them, and they are always rewarded for it. no matter how selfless their actions are supposed to be, the story remains selfish with the protagonist at the center of it

I want to see a power fantasy where the protagonist actually acts selflessly. show me a protagonist that does thankless work, a protagonist that doesn't expect or even desire reward, a protagonist that uses their power to actually change the world around them for the better without any incentive separate from the goal. show me a power fantasy where the world itself is in the spotlight, and the protagonist works to ensure that it stays that way. I want to see a power fantasy where the fantasy doesn't end at having power, give me the fantasy of successfully building a better world in short order, where even though the protagonist is the only one capable of setting things in motion, everyone else is just as important

does this exist

Back online after a week of being treated like a mushroom by my VPS provider as they troubleshoot an outage. I don't appreciate being kept in the dark and fed sh!t.

#mushroommonday #nature #naturephotography

Hi there, a friend of mine is urgently looking for a flat share (or very cheap flat) in Hamburg.
If you have any leads, please let me know.

Reposts are welcome!

discovering that fewer cybertrucks have been sold than Sinclair C5s has amused me greatly. and honestly, if you want to drive a weird vehicle, the C5 is far more fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

Please, please, please stop implying (or outright claiming) that every politician/religious leader/person with social and/or financial power doing anything queerphobic "must be closeted".

It minimises the fact that systematic harms exist because the people participating in disenfranchisement and societal abuse gain from them.

It perpetuates the idea that being queer is an insult/embarrassing thing to say about a person (good job, you hurt the actual queer people who will see what you said, unlike the bigots in question who will likely never see or care about it!)

It creates a sense of sympathy for the bigots in a LOT of people (I have seen/heard countless replies to claims like this that are some version "if you think about it though, they must be in a really painful place to hate themselves that much, which is more sad for them than anything!", and even if *you* don’t have that takeaway from the idea they ‘must be closeted’ you are contributing to the pattern of pushing social dialogues about queerphobia towards discussions of people’s assumptions about a bigot’s gender/sexuality and away from how people can help the victims and stop the abuses from continuing!)

Even if the person IS closeted, that doesn't matter! it doesn’t nullify the harm they are doing to the world or absolve them of these abuses! It doesn’t even really change their reason for their actions- they are still choosing to harming others for their own gain (it just adds another factor of what they may be thinking of as their ‘gain’),

These comments derail important social conversations with bullshit assumptions. We don’t need to try to hypothesise why a person in power is doing something that takes power away from others- the answer is right there in the question.

Just. Stop.

#LGBTQIA #queer #homophobia #transphobia #queerphobia

Hear hear hear. De Correspondent schrijft het ook nog maar eens op. https://decorrespondent.nl/15884/in-holland-staat-een-zuil-hoe-hoogopgeleiden-zich-steeds-meer-afzonderen-van-de-rest-van-nederland/77fa3643-8e64-03e7-367c-f3b4d93a44e3

I wrote this last year. It's still relevant.

Who you are as a project lead gives the example to others of what's acceptable behaviour.

Which also applies outside kernel land with our fediverse projects as well.

https://www.onepict.com/20240512-elephant.html

Money saving and finance tips *can* be very effective... if you have some money.

And if you do, it is worth taking the time to see if you are using your money well. For example, do you spend a lot of money at an online retailer because it's "easy" to shop with them but, as of late, the quality and reliability of the products they deliver isn't worth the premium price? *waggles eyebrows*

It's kind of horrible how much money I've saved since dumping amazon.

A "financial literacy" course for working professionals who are doing OK financially and not worried about money (and thus probably could tighten their budgets in substantial ways) but with the understanding that 2/3s of the money recovered by improving their mortgage rates, cutting useless subscriptions etc. would be donated to practical material help for working poor people in their area.

Assigned as penance for anyone claiming that poor people "just need to budget better."

I tend to hold off from underlining the fact that my kids still mask five years into this nightmare of a pandemic. Pointing it out seems like virtue signalling, and I don't want to engage in that. The fact remains, though, that my kids have maintained a practice that is both highly visible and highly unpopular. They have done so because they believe in it. Some might quibble with the basis of their decision, but you can't quibble with their principles. And that makes me inordinately proud.

So, that happened: 8pm news on Dutch national TV 🤯

(I got permission to share the clip, as long as it's non-commercial)

#SafeguardingResearch cc @SafeguardingResearch

re alttext: thanks @PiiiepsBrummm & @martinvermeer !
re subtitles: thanks @MishaVelthuis !

oh yeah Windows Vista and Windows 7 ship with an Xbox 360 executable file in the Windows folder sorry if this is how you found out