lick behind the knee… goddammit, i need to know

so the title’s left unresolved, and next episode there could either be an unnecessary killing, or a killing to prevent an unnecessary killing – with the obvious question in the latter case of “was that a necessary killing?”

until recently the series has been war between humans and demons, and they go out of their way to convince the viewer that the villains (demons) really are inhuman: creatures incapable of feeling empathy toward anyone and therefore not worth your own empathy. and the heroes (at least in the ideal) are those who do exactly what’s necessary, but no more, when it comes to violence. i don’t know that the story can veer too far from that ideal framing of heroism without losing its charm, but they may be setting up to challenge that framing of villainy.

also, seems it’s becoming a pattern that Fern’s opponents are caught off-guard by her speed & stamina. when she fought the demon in episode 10, that was explained as her suppressing her mana, and the demon being careless/overconfident against such a technique. but here in ep 20 everyone is familiar with mana suppression: that Fern’s overwhelming experienced mages with just raw speed/stamina has me suspicious.

worth noting that Pinephone does boot against unpatched mainline (i.e. kernel.org) kernel. it’ll boot to a DE with graphics and touch working, but you lose WiFi/bluetooth, inherit some quirks with the backlight, proximity sensor, etc. no idea about the modem or audio.

that kind of door is fine for me. it’s doorknobs – where you have to rotate them more than a quarter turn to unlatch the door – for which i’m always spilling stuff (and then ranting to anyone who will listen about how dumb it is that of all the types of door handle, the U.S. uniformly settled on knobs for inside the home).

i keep lemoa installed and i give it a try every update to see how it’s progressing. hopeful that it’ll be a lower-resource option in time, but for now it requires more clicks to do things like view images, which negates most of those benefits.

i use the web client through Tangram, which is just a web browser (webkitgtk) with UX tailored to hosting web apps.

lemmy users

lusers

+1 for Darknet Diaries. got anything else to recommend in that nerdy/edgy genre of story telling?

• 99% Invisible (Roman Mars)
• Slate Star Codex (narrated form of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten column)
• Jack Rhysider - Darknet Diaries
• Maggie Killjoy - Cool people who did Cool Stuff
• Cory Doctorow’s podcast
• Jennifer Briney - Congressional Dish
• Lex Fridman

the first three are all tightly scripted storytelling: generally non-fiction, but exciting or interesting. sorted by general audience -> niche audience.

the next three edge into political territory, sorted from politically-adjacent to 100% political (not punditry):

• Maggie’s focuses on telling history. but she’s self-described anarchist and it bleeds.
• Cory’s is a narrated form of his blog. usually the overlap between tech & national policy.
• Congressional Dish is literally Jen watching hours of C-SPAN and reading 1000’s of pages of text from bills to give actual deep-dives into congressional happenings.

Lex Fridman is if Joe Rogan was hosted by someone who actually did his research upfront, planned out his questions, and chose guests that are less divisive, and more academic or entrepreneurial.

if you listen to any of these, please leave a recommendation for something similar you think i would like! ❤️

John Oliver hosts a political talkshow. that’s fine if you’re showing off a specific Lemmy instance or community, but if your goal is to show off Lemmy as a platform, doing so with that topic is a recipe for disaster.