sparksbet's recent activity

  1. Comment on Ex-Barack Obama aide says Holocaust education is ‘confusing’ young people into sympathizing with ‘weak, skinny’ Palestinians in ~society

    sparksbet
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I think it's pretty callous to the other ethnic groups who were victims of Nazi Germany's systemic genocide to claim that it is as a tragedy belongs exclusively to Jewish people, unless you define...

    I think it's pretty callous to the other ethnic groups who were victims of Nazi Germany's systemic genocide to claim that it is as a tragedy belongs exclusively to Jewish people, unless you define Holocaust in such a way that it refers to only the actions against Jewish people but deliberately decide to call the exact same actions against, for instance, the Roma and Sinti, something else for some reason. And even that's pretty weird imo.

    I don't think necessarily treating it as a universal tragedy is sensible -- I live in Germany, after all, and there's a pretty stark difference between how Jewish people are affected by it even today vs how it affects white German goyim.

    But we shouldn't erase other groups that were very much victims here, especially when they are still treated like shit here and are the victims of a lot of racism to this day. The man in charge of my case at the immigration office a few years back casually dropped a slur against Romani people while using them as an example of people who didn't have the right to freedom of movement in the EU because they don't work. And this was from a man who was in all other respects very nice, helpful, and polite (albeit with the quintessential personality of a German civil servant).

    18 votes

  2. Comment on EU backs away from chat control in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I'm usually not the type to police people for calling something fascist, especially in the current political climate, but my main concern is that calling this specifically fascism and describing...

    I'm usually not the type to police people for calling something fascist, especially in the current political climate, but my main concern is that calling this specifically fascism and describing it as part of the current general trend towards fascism in Europe (which absolutely is a thing) gives parties that are undeniably fascist but oppose chat control (like the AfD here in Germany) a free pass, and it also doesn't paint an accurate picture of how involved mainstream centrist liberals are in these policies. Authoritarianism is not always or automatically fascism.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them? in ~tildes

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Yeah, they're pretty awful. I see them much more often when I browse German websites than English ones, they've become pretty popular here.

    Yeah, they're pretty awful. I see them much more often when I browse German websites than English ones, they've become pretty popular here.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Against 'Metroidbrania': a landscape of knowledge games in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Oh yeah I do agree, I think a lot of people (including in this thread) wildly over-apply the term to things that aren't supposed to be clearly solvable puzzles in the first place (I think most...

    Oh yeah I do agree, I think a lot of people (including in this thread) wildly over-apply the term to things that aren't supposed to be clearly solvable puzzles in the first place (I think most Dark Souls examples fall into this category) or just puzzles that they personally found difficult. Modern point-and-click adventure games sometimes play with the idea of moon logic puzzles as part of the genre's legacy, but actual puzzles of that nature are pretty rare these days. A puzzle being bad or difficult doesn't necessarily make it moon logic, and neither does the fact that you had to look it up!

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Against 'Metroidbrania': a landscape of knowledge games in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I don't think most fans of "metroidbrainias" really include 12 Minutes, much like several other examples the author of this article includes are never called metroidbrainias imo. Not every game...

    I don't think most fans of "metroidbrainias" really include 12 Minutes, much like several other examples the author of this article includes are never called metroidbrainias imo. Not every game that includes puzzles or even time loops is a metroidbrainia. But I'll admit I might be biased in this particular case because 12 Minutes is an incredibly badly written game and is not a game where you can ignore its awful story.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Against 'Metroidbrania': a landscape of knowledge games in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    fwiw. I don't think it's useful to combine moon logic with the concept of pixel hunting, as those are two pretty much entirely independent problems that games like this can have (and luckily the...

    fwiw. I don't think it's useful to combine moon logic with the concept of pixel hunting, as those are two pretty much entirely independent problems that games like this can have (and luckily the rereleases of the Phoenix Wright games all have QoL features that get rid of any pixel hunting issues).

    I also just straight-uo disagree with you when it comes to the actual testimony side of things -- while everything may not always be super intuitive, it very much doesn't approach moon logic in terms of puzzle design. Moon logic is usually reserved for puzzles that are nigh impossible to solve without someone telling you the solution because the solution is that absurd -- puzzles like the Gabriel Knight cat hair mustache puzzle, which is infamous enough that it has its own wikipedia page -- and I don't think any testimony in any Ace Attorney game has been even close to that bad. Your Myst example is another bad one imo, because the whole point of criticizing a puzzle as moon logic is that the consequences don't logically follow from the things you need to do in the game to accomplish them. Moving an elevator to access something that is blocked by where the elevator was placed is an extremely clear logical path no matter how difficult it was for you to realize that's what you had to do.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Against 'Metroidbrania': a landscape of knowledge games in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    As a fan of classic point-and-click adventure games, where I think "moon logic" as a criticism originated (or at least became super popular), I don't think you're right on this one. There are...

    As a fan of classic point-and-click adventure games, where I think "moon logic" as a criticism originated (or at least became super popular), I don't think you're right on this one. There are certainly players out there who call every puzzle they can't solve "moon logic" but there are also a lot of puzzles that really rely on leaps of logic that would be incredibly unintuitive at best. There's something kinda nostalgic about the whole thing but there's so much that really would be absurdly near impossible to figure out on one's own.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them? in ~tildes

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I mean, the vast majority of articles with paywalls on Tildes have links to archive.is already in the comments before I get there. So I think in terms of the preferences of the rest of Tildes, the...

    So, which do you want me to do? The one where I contribute to the conversation more ignorantly, or the one where I pirate the article?

    I mean, the vast majority of articles with paywalls on Tildes have links to archive.is already in the comments before I get there. So I think in terms of the preferences of the rest of Tildes, the answer is pretty clear.

    18 votes

  9. Comment on Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them? in ~tildes

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I definitely wouldn't put any money on the German one being better lol

    I definitely wouldn't put any money on the German one being better lol

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them? in ~tildes

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    yeah iirc DW is still accessible without this which is nice

    yeah iirc DW is still accessible without this which is nice

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them? in ~tildes

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I suspect the Meta case is what I initially read about regarding this issue, thanks.

    I suspect the Meta case is what I initially read about regarding this issue, thanks.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on EU backs away from chat control in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    while I think this "chat control" surveillance is absolute garbage and I deeply hope the EU Parliament will rightfully throw it out, I don't know if this issue is as simple as just calling it...

    while I think this "chat control" surveillance is absolute garbage and I deeply hope the EU Parliament will rightfully throw it out, I don't know if this issue is as simple as just calling it fascism. In fact when I tried to use one of those websites for contacting your representatives about this issue, it helpfully showed me that one party in my country was already officially against the chat control laws -- that party being the one that's fascist enough that there are calls for them to be banned. This issue is politically complex and kind of orthogonal to the traditional right wing/left wing politics, and and some otherwise relatively progressive political parties absolutely embrace it for various reasons. That's part of why it's so insidious.

    15 votes

  13. Comment on Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them? in ~tildes

    sparksbet
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    I agree with most others here that this on its own shouldn't be a reason to exclude an article from submission -- but since it's relevant, I have a question about these cookie popups: I remember...

    I agree with most others here that this on its own shouldn't be a reason to exclude an article from submission -- but since it's relevant, I have a question about these cookie popups:

    I remember hearing that the cookie popups that require you to accept all cookies or pay a subscription fee are in violation of EU law but that it's just not being enforced well. I'm in the EU myself and I have noticed these most often on websites from my home country. Does anybody here know if what I've heard is true or if I'm misremembering something else and these popups are actually totally fine legally? It doesn't make much difference practically for me since they show up anyway, but I'm curious.

    4 votes

  14. Comment on Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world in ~health

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    The scale has definitely increased and the internet has definitely been a big part in that, but I really do think you're severely overestimating how recent anti-vaxx stuff is. It wasn't the...

    The scale has definitely increased and the internet has definitely been a big part in that, but I really do think you're severely overestimating how recent anti-vaxx stuff is. It wasn't the mainstream (which is why most people just got whatever the doctor recommended) but it definitely existed.

    What is recent in the US is how tightly it adheres to party politics. Alternative medicine and specifically anti-vaxx is basically a core part of right wing politics in the US now, whereas it used to be something with some bipartisan appeal that happened to be disproportionately popular among right wing women. The Green Party used to include homeopathy and alternative medicine prominently in their platform, even! I think the political polarization when it comes to alternative medicine was already starting when Trump first ran (the Green Party officially dropped it from their platform in 2016) but obviously Covid had a huge impact by making vaccination and "alternatives" like ivermectin such central political issues. It forced the issue into the spotlight much more suddenly, I think, than it otherwise would have, but it had definitely already been growing for a while.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world in ~health

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I think if you think vaccines weren't an issue before YouTube became a thing, you really just are not very familiar with these people at all. Wakefield's first big "vaccines cause autism" paper...

    I think if you think vaccines weren't an issue before YouTube became a thing, you really just are not very familiar with these people at all. Wakefield's first big "vaccines cause autism" paper was published in 1998 and it entered the public consciousness as a big thing in the early 2000s before YouTube even existed at all. I didn't get flu shots growing up even though even by the time YouTube did exist for my mother to watch, she didn't watch it -- and she still doesn't, to my knowledge.

    There are absolutely other ways that this misinformation spreads and has spread for a long time. A lot of it is very based on word-of-mouth through in-person community (my mom got many of her bad recommendations from women at church). If I were to blame a particular social media source here, it would probably be Facebook rather than YouTube or Tiktok, as Facebook is much more designed to amplify this same effect and used to be more popular among the demographics mainly into this stuff. Facebook Groups are an absolute haven for this sort of thing afaik. But it's also extremely possible to get sucked into this with very little to no social media use at all, especially in certain preexisting social circles.

    Also, most of the "alternative medicine" fans I've encountered absolutely go to the hospital. In fact, they often go more often than most people, since often undiagnosed or inadequately treated chronic illness is a big factor in why they turn to "alternative" sources. And you can absolutely find MDs who will go along with this grift for money too -- the names of doctors like this are likewise circulated in these same groups.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on Social Democrats in Denmark suffer sweeping election losses – PM Mette Frederiksen's centre-left party loses control of Copenhagen for first time in more than 100 years in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    even just reading the news coming out of Denmark it's reassuring to know they're not center-left. If "we will forcibly evict and relocate non-white people out of any neighborhood with more than...

    even just reading the news coming out of Denmark it's reassuring to know they're not center-left. If "we will forcibly evict and relocate non-white people out of any neighborhood with more than 50% non-white people" is a center-left policy, I sure don't wanna know what right wing policy is in Denmark!

    11 votes

  17. Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Absolutely agreed on this re: the disparity in learning pre-reform English.

    Absolutely agreed on this re: the disparity in learning pre-reform English.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science

    sparksbet
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to...

    If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to argue it's that much of an improvement for them, is the thing. Especially since these splits affect huge swaths of the language, not just rare or obscure vocabulary -- the cot-caught merger is incredibly widespread throughout the US but far enough from universal that not distinguishing the two in writing will also alienate plenty of speakers. Do we distinguish merry, Mary, and marry in spelling? Different speakers distinguish different subsets of those words. And that's just changes that differ regionally within the US. Include even standard Southern British English and you've got the father-bother distinction, the trap-bath split, and many more differences that speakers without those distinctions would simply have to memorize.

    And, of course, the main issue is that choosing one dialect to base a standardization on inevitably privileges that dialect and its speakers over others (especially in the educational system -- we see this often enough already in that context). And of course the prestige dialect is not chosen in a vacuum. If more educated, richer speakers are able to "write how they talk" but poorer speakers with histories of discrimination and less access to quality education are forced to memorize how to spell words based on how those privileged speakers talk, we're widening the gulf that already exists there compared to now, when everyone has to memorize a bunch of weird arbitrary rules.

    I think most of the good arguments against English spelling reform are fundamentally more practical than this -- it's just not politically or socioculturally feasible to actually accomplish that switch even with the perfect system. But the perfect system also doesn't exist, in large part because of English's being such an influential, global global language.

    EDIT: forgot to address my efforts, but I'll scrounge around for my notebook. my spelling reform efforts were principally based on frustration with a famous conlanger's similarly lighthearted non-serious spelling reform proposal, which I disliked a number of the principles of because they didn't take advantage of methods common among other Germanic languages to indicate certain vowel quality/length distinctions through context (i.e., the existence of rules like doubled consonants indicating the previous vowel is short, or things like the silent -e rule in English). These rules make it much easier to handle the huge vowel inventories in Germanic languages and are present even in much more phonetic systems (like how Standard German is currently written, which is quite regular), though a unified approach to vowels still really isn't possible if you don't want US and British English to have separate systems. I gave up when trying to finagle vowels got more annoying than fun lol

    5 votes

  19. Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different...

    Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different places. Spelling reform that allows the same system or even a mostly-similar system to be used between even just "standard" General American and "standard" British English would not be able to be a good phonetic representation across both dialects. The vowels in particular are so, so different -- even more different than you think if you haven't tried doing this (which I have in my free time before.) With spelling reform like this, you either need to force everyone to write in one dialect, which will force speakers of other dialects to write in ways that deliberately don't reflect how they pronounce those words and involve memorizing how to spell many words as a result, replicating the current issues, or you come up with a system that reflects dialectical differences and speaker write how they talk, in which case standardization goes out the window even within the US and definitely within the UK, much less between the two countries, and the systems for different dialects would end up being so divergent that you'd need to learn them separately.

    And that's before getting to the practical issues with reprinting everything ever written in English, physically and digitally.

    I agree that English spelling is a mess and its inconsistencies when it comes to pronunciation make literacy harder, but I've tried to make even pretty conservative spelling reform proposals for fun in my free time because I have that flavor of autism, and it's very difficult to make a system that doesn't require a large subset of speakers to write differently than they speak even if you focus on just US American English -- doing so in a unified way for English as a worldwide language is pretty much impossible.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on US hemp industry plans next move after Donald Trump signs THC ban in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I think the bigger issue that they were trying to draw attention to was your throwing out health claims that you yourself admit you don't have more than a bare minimum surface-level understanding...

    I think the bigger issue that they were trying to draw attention to was your throwing out health claims that you yourself admit you don't have more than a bare minimum surface-level understanding of (re: diabetes) after being called out on an attempt to equate selling food that contains nutrients we need to live with selling unregulated synthetic cannabinoids.

    Frankly, I'm already sick enough of how some people on Tildes constantly parrot claims about diet and nutrition unsolicited in threads about completely different topics, since I find that type of discussion triggers disordered eating and similar negative thought spirals (which, ftr, don't help me eat more healthy or even lose weight, in case people want to justify it on that basis), but I can only block tags that relate to the topic, not comments in threads on a topic that is more or less completely unrelated to dieting or obesity. On reddit I unsubbed from some subreddits because they had a tendency to constantly talk about obesity in the comments of even barely-related posts, but since the culture here on Tildes isn't really different across groups in the same way, that doesn't work as a tactic, and it's not possible to block any particular other user who does it often here either.

    4 votes