The English ‘stole’ words from the French in the same way half the European world ‘stole’ Roman roads, words, and customs.

They were colonised by the Normans you silly codswallop. The British retain French words because they were forced on them by the aristocracy a thousand years ago.

“I bet you could hold so many apples in these, step-gammy”

If people can invent industrial fishing machines that net thousands of fish at a time then there’s nothing stopping them from inventing a fast, clean fish kill method at scale.

If they can’t, then perhaps that method of fishing is unethical and unsustainable.

If China wants to keep escalating skirmishes and expanding ownership claims then it forces world powers to travel via the strait to demonstrate that it’s still a regular legal channel of international naval transit, owned by no-one. The channel is 130kms wide at its most narrow section ffs… the closest passing ships come to land is ~65kms. That’s a pretty large buffer.

China just sailed a fleet of their own warships around Australia three months back, crossing into Australian territorial waters a number of times and even conducting live firing tests in the waters between Australia and NZ. None of which was done with permission, or necessary to be done near Australia or NZ. There are enormous uninhabited sections of ocean that would have been less travel (and cost) for them to reach - its just done to flex muscle and could just as easily be framed as “intentional provocation” and “undermining peace and stability”. So its ‘rules for thee, not for me’.

But how can this be?

All the police procedural dramas I’ve watched emphatically paint them as the good guys that have evolved above their problematic past.

/s because Internet

Oh thanks yeah, typo. Fixed.

Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.

The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.

“NICE SHOT!”
“NICE SHOT!”
“GREAT PASS!”

In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.

If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc

Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.

There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.

Broadly scientific consensus is that at least bony fish likely experience pain in all of the same quantifiable ways that humans do. They exhibit avoidance learning, they have a central nervous system, nociceptors, opiod receptors, exhibit reduced avoidance responses to noxious stimuli when given analgesics… Etc.

The few scientists that have argued over the years that fish likely do not or cannot experience pain have been in the minority in the last 50 years, and each passing year finds decreased evidence for their claims. Dismissing it all as ‘complete speculation’ is… Very inaccurate.

Worth reading:

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

Also - there already is “something dirt cheap to kill them faster” - hardwood fish bat. Lasts forever and instantly stuns, and with a couple of strong well-aimed blows will definitely kill.

TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.

Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?

This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.

At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??

Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):

I’ve forwarded your question to our legal help and will provide an answer as soon as they give it to me. What you must understand is that our lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms, and we don’t have experience with law, so we meet somewhere in the middle. Meta presumably has an in-house legal team that can really embed themselves in the problem area; our lawyers are external and pro-bono and rely on us to correctly explain the requirements and community feedback. The draft has been around for something like a year and none of the community members pointed out this issue until now. I’ll add one thing:

“My assumption, {… shortened for brevity …} is that when you post content it gets mirrored elsewhere, and this continues until a deletion notice is federated. So I’d assume if an instance somewhere mirrors my content they can’t get in trouble for it, and I’d also assume that if there is a deletion or maybe a block and a reasonable interpretation of the protocol would say that the content should be removed, I could send them a takedown and at that point they’d have to honor it.”

The goal of the terms is to make assumptions like this explicit, because assumptions are risky both sides. Just because luckily there were no frivolous lawsuits around this so far doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of one.

Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF’s lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.

I’ll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.

I’m remembering back to the story just a couple of days ago and I’m thinking about all the commenters who immediately accepted the story of the ‘peacekeeper’ guy - and the official line from the police - that Arturo was raising his weapon and heading towards the crowd, so the ‘peacekeeper’ shot “in defence of the crowd”. Many commenters repeated the line he had been, “likely about to do a mass murder - it’s very sad that a bystander died, but they just prevented a shooting spree”. Anyone saying ‘wtf why is the actual killer not arrested’ and suggesting that we only had one side of the story (the killer’s, who the cops were suspiciously immediately siding with) and that there is no proof beyond biased witness claims yet - was being downvoted.

Remember this shit next time you take the word of the police at face value when very few facts are available.

Actually of all of those promises I believe inflation is holding steady and pretty low around 2.6% through Trump’s term so far. But it’s a trend that’s been going since July 2024, so pretty much just a continuation of the prior state of the economy?

Either way its surprising given all the fluctuations and instability of the markets with Trump’s tarrif threats / inceptions / backdowns - I dunno, I’m not a market guy but the market guys in media don’t seem to have an explanation.

I’d guess that steady rate too will also fly out the window if the US declares war special military operation on Iran, so give him time I’m sure he’ll mess this up too.

Australian millennial checking in, when I was young ‘nobody’ my age made bets on sports, like maybe 5% of the population. Gambling ads were heavily regulated as were gaming organizations.

The gambling ads for tipping and online betting and gambling apps have ramped up and online gambling was allowed to flourish with relaxed regulations. Taking us to the current state of affairs where they are unavoidable, and gambling companies are major sponsors of all our sports events.

The current youth now have a huge problem with gambling.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/03/a-massive-public-health-problem-australian-children-as-young-as-10-are-hooked-on-gambling

Push back hard if you can on mobile gambling in your neck of the woods, because once the government gets addicted to the revenue and the ‘corporate events’ they are very disinterested in reeling it back.

See you all in 2 years when the market absolutely crashes and we’re (globally) bailing out the financial system again.

‘Qualified immunity’ is unique to the USA. Never should have been made law and it should surprise no-one that it came about during push-back to the civil rights movement. It enables all of this bullshit by making police behaviour untouchable.

What’s that really though - golf trip security and accommodation costs alone for Trump in just his second term thus far have already cost around that. For which he insists the secret service and other support staff use his own golf courses and hotels so that he literally gets paid handsomly to golf & stay at his own resorts (breaking the emoluments clause of the Constitution in the process).

At least none of that $46mil went to Trump & co and the whole affair embarrassed him by the poor turnout and mediocre parade. Money well spent it was not, but at least he hated it.

Yeah, keep making jokes. Your country is circling the fascist toilet while you make checks notes an average of 17.5 Lemmy shitpost comments a day.

slow clap