…

You’re right. My fault, I looked it up and don’t know where that came from but the evidence doesn’t seem to exist at all and I’m not sure why I remembered that as being a thing.

Yes, but knowing how to install a toilet the difficult way (instead of hiring a plumber) was replaced by knowing how to install a program the difficult way (via a command line instead of an installer).

Now, Zoomers aren’t stupid or tech illiterate, I have a Zoomer friend and she’s more tech literate than I am. The issue is that installing a program the hard way has been replaced with minimizing your carbon and digital footprints. That’s not the skill of a super predator, its the skill of prey. We’ve been reduced to prey for the shareholders of corporations.

Nuclear trains and cargo ships might actually be necessary, even. In North America and over oceans, getting the vehicle weights, the weights of cargo and the distances between cities to work under any reasonable system means not just DC but even AC are insufficient in transmission range on land (and of course useless in the middle of an ocean), and companies like Amazon and AliExpress account for a lot of direct climate-disrupting emissions and a good chunk of the wealth letting assholes like Bezos live like kings at everyone else’s detriment.

What’s worse is, not only can we do it, so could the Egyptians.

Concrete. We build skyscrapers out of it. We make it from sand and various other common minerals. If you make it from Cretian volcanic ash, like the Romans, you get concrete that is even more stable if you use it with seawater, and can be used to construct submerged concrete structures in shallow coastal water without draining away any of the liquid.

And if you grind up Egyptian sandstone and add freshwater like from the Nile? You can make huge blocks as smooth as polished marble that a razor blade can’t fit between, transport it in more manable quantities and forms than giant stone blocks, and it will last tens of thousands of years (not including the ~5,000 it has already lasted) unless the humidity of the Sahara goes through the roof.

I’m not saying Egypt was or wasn’t advanced, just that they were sufficiently advanced to convincingly look to a more advanced civilization like magic. Or in this case, “aliens” or “ancient astronauts”.

The only reason I would not be surprised if hieroglyphs were found on the moon is because we did it before we could fake it. If faking the moon landing couldn’t be done without modern computer software or LED lightbulbs yet actually doing it is trivial enough that it was done 55 years ago, why resort to aliens to describe how that’s possible? For all we know you could get to the moon with a railgun built from hand-smithed iron and the lumber of California Redwoods, doesn’t mean its superhuman if you figure out how to actually do so.

Modern globalized society is in the same boat, but yet at the very least it is the least-impoverished empire in human history.

When the gamer you play Call of Duty with could be a kid living in South Africa (and yes, I do mean an average black South African and not the kid of some wealthy expats/diplomats/colonial old money) or Nigeria (ditto) and the world’s largest country is a democracy (India, it recently surpassed China’s population) yet we’re still convinced the future is doomed to be The Hunger Games, I think it’s time to admit that the anger of 9/11 and the Great Recession not only led to hate led to suffering, it then led to cynicism, defeatism, nihilism and finally outright anti-humanitaianism.

You want something to be scared of? Even monsters like the Nazis had an ideal, you clearly just want the world to burn because it’s easier to sit in a chair reading social media and doing nothing to actually solve the problem until things get bad enough that you have a perfect excuse to go hurt whoever you disagree with. You know who was doing that during and leading up to WWII? The sheeple that let the Nazi party take power. Don’t be a fucking tool, especially not a tool of oppression. Careless realism costs souls, regardless of whether a soul is immortal or a scientifically-quantifiable finite mental construct, and even if you honestly came to the conclusion free will is an illusion it would mean our entire moral and legal case against slavery comes into question.

Seriously. Find an ideal, please, especially if its one that keeps you from hurting people instead of blindly hating anything that could be achieved. I don’t know you, but I know the internet and I’ve been seeing this pattern of existential anti-humanitarian (my best attempt at a philosophical label for it) behavior online since 2017 and I do not like what I’m seeing coming. If you don’t find something to live/die to protect, then someone seeking a mob to do their dirty work will, and if that happens the “ideal” you will be serving will be a lie and anything but ideal.

It might not be a mere country by a long shot but the one thing I find most interesting about Africa (IIRC) is that despite the linguistic variation and the number of nations being no less than any other continent has ever had, every precolonial culture in “Africa” referred to it as Alkebulan (I think that’s the romanized pronunciation) with the possible (partial?) exception of Egypt.

That said, my memory about that feels sketchy. Can anyone confirm or dispute if Alkebulan is the actual name used by the local languages? Claiming I’m sure about this without actually checking feels disrespectful, but I no longer trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage because their use of Google’s algorithm means NewPipe is censored from all search engines except Bing and Ecosia and search results have been uninspiring since ~2017 thanks to enshittification.

Hold on, checking Wikipedia…

Edit: No trace of the word itself on wp, but it did bring up the Akebu language when I searched it. Anyone know how much I was wrong? Or is this just survivorship bias due to me only knowing how to speak/read English?

Surprisingly it’s not the only one. Dubai is honestly the center of (what remains of) the hub-and-spoke air travel network because it’s the closest point to every other landmass on Earth. Middle Earth was supposed to be Tolkien’s locale for a hypothetical creation myth of modern (well, then-modern) Britain. Alkebulan (the native name for Africa) is the cradle of humanity and the only continent where everyone there agreed what said continent was called for all of recorded/known history. I’d say being in a geopolitically central location, even if that’s really just dumb luck, is something cultures have taken pride in for a very long time.

Tell that in respect to (ha) Southern Ontario and Montreal to a British Columbian, Albertan, Saskatchewanian, Manitoban, Yukonite, any First Nations Canadian or any resident of Atlantic Canada or the Northwest Territory, and see if they think differently about Ontario-Quebec than most Americans think about the Republican party.

Oh, did you know 90% of Canadians are well-to-do or upper-middle class residents of Southern Ontario or Montreal who produce less than 10% of Canada’s GDP and vote for anything that lets them continue to take advantage of the rest of the country? Yeah, our population density is horrifyingly low AND yet we have a profit-off-of-artificial-scarcity-induced housing shortage? Fuck you for supporting tyranny by majority, it’s still possible for the majority to all be in with the rich pricks, whether the minority is 49% or <10%.

Then it’s likely cheaper to make a bluetooth headphones phone than include a 3.5mm jack? Or they could just be greedy, although I would hope FairPhone won’t turn to the dark side so soon.

Excuse me, this is meant to be an admin account for c/[email protected] so I’ll have to return to whence I came.

They had to, I’m guessing. At this point nobody is manufacturing headphone jack hardware for smartphones.

…which engine is the upstart and promising engine following in Blender’s footsteps? Do you mean what Unity was supposed to be until they ruined it, or did you forget to drop the name of the engine in question?