alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 2.09K Posts
  • 1.21K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • With no voices in support in the original post and currently the only two voices in support here being the mods themselves.

    bluntly: this is not a democracy, we don’t pretend it is, and we’ve never run it that way so this is not a particularly relevant consideration for us. democracy at the scale of communities is an incredibly fraught issue that requires a lot of time and energy to administer we don’t have. in any case none of our referendums in the community (which we’ve done before) have been majority votes, they’ve solicited feedback that informs our judgement. our judgement here is this is a good idea regardless of how the community feels about it, and that even if we didn’t implement the moratorium we’d be cracking down on posts, handing out bans, and doing sweeping removals because we’ve been more permissive than our usual moderation on the subject and let behavior we’d normally step in on go.

    in short: even if the moratorium were removed, that’d just mean heavier-handed enforcement from this point forward. if people really want no moratorium then they should be prepared to start catching 30-day bans (or permanent bans if they’re off instance) for any unkind behavior.



  • If one takes that attitude, you’re right, you won’t change the world.

    i think you’re conflating “having value” with “changing the world” when these are two essentially independent qualities. at no point have we ever sought to “change the world” with this (because we’re five people running this in our spare time, that’s not in our capabilities as people), and from the beginning we’ve said we’d be content with only a handful of people using this place as long as they get something out of doing it (because that’s what we consider valuable, not whether or not this can have sweeping social impact or importance).




  • because you can play meaningless “what if?” games like this forever. at the end of the day you don’t have to be a pessimist to realize the odds of something here changing the world are so minute that it’s fine to put a moratorium on certain kinds of posts. you’re not going to convince me otherwise. and even in the optimistic scenario: virtually all of what’s discussed here, while interesting, is designed to be fleeting and buried. conversations on link aggregators tend to have a shelf-life of no more than a week, and that’s not really where you’re going to find ideas that make change. here the conversations usually die down after an even shorter period (about two days).

    frankly: if the next Lenin or whatever is actually on Lemmy, i’d tell them to get a blog instead of hashing it out in link aggregator comment sections. it’s a better use of their time, it’s a better place to test and hone their ideas, and they have actual editorial control over everything.


  • A lot of people are understandably upset right now, and yes, all the facts of the election are not in yet. But do you really want to have a moratorium on election posts for a whole month?

    yes, the mod team is in more-or-less unanimous agreement on the subject. and if we were moderating to the exact same standard we usually do we’d likely be removing, locking, or severely pruning nearly every thread posted in the politics section on the subject in the past few days. maybe we’ll shorten if it need be but moratorium itself is not controversial and i do not anticipate us reversing course on it. please remember that this cannot be a day job for any of us.



  • Because these are literal sky scrapers. Fire on a wood structure is a recipe for catastrophic failure. A fire in a large structure could have similar effects to those large high rise condos that collapsed in Florida from poor maintenance.

    i think you’re operating under 1) an extremely 1800s understanding of how fire-resistant a wood skyscraper would be and 2) a misguided understanding of where fire safety problems tend to come from in most contemporary buildings

    wood is not uniquely flammable,[1] and the vast majority of the problem in a fire is not going to be with the actual wood itself (as is true of steel, concrete, etc.) but moreso with the fact that we make nearly everything that isn’t the building itself out of extremely combustible materials and we probably should not do that? as i recall that was the entire problem at Grenfell, where the cladding used was a flammable plastic that rendered any airgapping measures between flats useless and allowed the fire to spread uncontrollably. the fire at Grenfell also reportedly began from a refrigerator that was plastic-backed.


    1. it can rather trivially be treated to be fire-resistant–and as the person you’re replying to notes has already been tested extensively and implemented in existing buildings to that end, and in multiple locales, just from a brief search on the subject ↩︎












  • POLL CLOSED, the results are as follows:

    1. Kamala Harris (Democratic) (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
    2. Claudia De la Cruz (Socialism and Liberation) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 30–10
    3. Vermin Supreme (Independent/Pirate) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Claudia De la Cruz (Socialism and Liberation) by 15–11
    4. Cornel West (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 31–10, loses to Vermin Supreme (Independent/Pirate) by 15–12
    5. Bill Stodden (Socialist) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–7, loses to Cornel West (Independent) by 11–9
    6. Rachele Fruit (Socialist Workers) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Bill Stodden (Socialist) by 9–7
    7. Jill Stein (Green) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Bill Stodden (Socialist) by 15–8
    8. Blake Huber (Approval Voting) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 33–8, loses to Jill Stein (Green) by 13–9
    9. Laura Ebke (Liberal) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Blake Huber (Approval Voting) by 10–7
    10. Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 35–5, loses to Laura Ebke (Liberal) by 9–8
    11. Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality) by 12–5
    12. Lucifer “Justin Case” Everylove (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–3, loses to Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) by 10–8
    13. Jay Bowman (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) by 9–7
    14. Robby Wells (Party) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Jay Bowman (Independent) by 8–6
    15. Chris Garrity (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Robby Wells (Party) by 8–6
    16. Richard Duncan (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Chris Garrity (Independent) by 8–4
    17. Shiva Ayyadurai (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Richard Duncan (Independent) by 7–6
    18. Chase Oliver (Libertarian) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Shiva Ayyadurai (Independent) by 11–8
    19. Joel Skousen (Constitution dissident) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Chase Oliver (Libertarian) by 10–8
    20. Michael Wood (Prohibition) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Joel Skousen (Constitution dissident) by 10–6
    21. Randall Terry (Constitution) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Michael Wood (Prohibition) by 8–7
    22. Mattie Preston (Godliness, Truth, Justice) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Randall Terry (Constitution) by 10–5
    23. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Mattie Preston (Godliness, Truth, Justice) by 14–6
    24. Donald Trump (Republican) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 39–1, loses to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Independent) by 22–2


  • Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men, and that building an adult game audience means sexually appealing to straight men. Female characters in adult games are often expected to have sexualised designs, with entitled male gamers complaining about characters like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy or The Last of Us II’s Ellie not being sexy enough; meanwhile, the BBC has reported about female games workers also being affected by a blasé culture around women’s sexualisation, such as graphic, distressing sexual content being thrust upon female games actors without warning. The few semi-famous titillating console games, like the Leisure Suit Larry series or Playboy: The Mansion, don’t exactly seem like they’re interested in feminism.

    But understanding sex in video games means understanding it as more than just cheap eye candy for straight guys. Sex is central to how many video games work, including games that don’t technically have any explicit content. Nintendo games present themselves as bastions of childlike, lightly heterosexual wholesomeness – Mario gets his kiss on the cheek from Princess Peach! – but I’ve written about the gay and trans innuendos common throughout the Zelda games, for instance, and how they’re used to both build Link’s androgynous character and to make use of covertly gay and covertly homophobic comedy. Levels of awareness of sex, from basic focuses on satisfying touch to creating sexual tension, are intrinsic to games in various ways, and the games that play with this awareness often find new and interesting ways to tell their stories, and to reflect on why we play games in the first place.


  • Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having “no goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes.” Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there’s no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.




  • As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

    they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed



  • However, Texas right-wing officials have recently mounted a legal challenge to the federal policy in order to access the private medical records of patients who seek abortion care across state lines. Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading the charge nationally among 18 other attorneys general who signed a formal letter to the health department in opposition to the changes last June. Paxton argues that the new rule—as well as the original HIPAA privacy rules from 2000—limit the state’s authority to conduct investigations.

    “The Biden Administration’s motive is clear: to subvert lawful state investigations on issues that the courts have said the states may investigate,” said Paxton in a statement. “The federal government is attempting to undermine Texas’s law enforcement capabilities, and I will not allow this to happen.”