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Cake day: May 19th, 2025

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  • “Tankie” means “person who, in a confrontation between citizens and tanks, roots for the tanks”. It’s more a reference to a person’s underlying authoritarianism rather than communism per se. The main reason it’s conflated with communism/marxism is because capitalism has, conceptually, staked a claim to the protectorship of individualism, which is assumed to be desirable. And because this claim is unchallenged, anything which stands against capitalism is assumed to therefore be inherently authoritarian. There is some merit to this claim and these assumptions, but to what extent, I couldn’t say. I’m not that smart.


  • I think the implication is actually that there’s a marked dropoff of eligible young Russian men. To preserve a generation, Russia might soon need to use more North Koreans on the Ukrainian front, but that comes with its own problems and risks.

    It’s weird that Putin’s avoiding peace negotiations, as he more than anyone needs to find a way to scale back the war effort before his hold on power begins to waver. I get that he needs to save face while doing so, but he’s not gonna get conditions more favorable than a Trump administration, so the clock is ticking.






  • Page 21 of the ruling:

    First, the Enforcement Guidance contravenes Title VII’s plain text by expanding the scope of “sex” beyond the biological binary: male and female. Although Title VII defines “sex” to also include “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions,” §2000e(k), the Enforcement Guidance concludes that “sex” under Title VII "includes ‘pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions’ and sexual orientation and gender identity." Enforcement Guidance, §I(A)(5) (emphasis added). Notably, the Guidance uses quotation marks around “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions”—but not “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” Because neither the plain text of Title VII nor Supreme Court precedent defines Title VII “sex” this broadly. Thus, the Enforcement Guidance lacks statutory or jurisprudential authority to expand Title VII’s definition of “sex” to include these new categories.

    Interestingly, this also seems to provide a legal basis to discriminate against straight people and cis people. It’ll be interesting to see how Republicans attempt to close that extra loophole without also closing the loophole for discrimination against LGBTQ people.





  • I’ve not submitted my DNA to any genealogy sites for testing, but what annoys me about all this is that in order to get as much info about my family tree as possible (for posterity and confirming theorized connections) I SHOULD be testing my parents’s DNA because the oldest family members are the best for connecting to distant relatives, and my parents aren’t gonna live forever. But I can’t get them (or myself) tested, because of considerations like this. This shouldn’t have to be a consideration. But it is, because of greedy bastards and the gombeen politicians who allow stuff like this to be legal.


  • Not bad. I’ve been using familysearch.org for an online tree (so that distant relatives can find us) and gramps for a local tree (so that I have a tree that strangers can’t edit behind my back). I live in Ireland and so it’s handy to have all the records online for free, but I’m still waiting for the parish records to actually get indexed, because scanning the images myself is a nightmare of scrawling chickenscratch. I’ve only managed to get back to the early 19th century, though.


  • For one thing, hopefully scripts and creative decisions will probably be forced to be finalized earlier in production, as one of the big ways that studios abused CGI workers was to use them to hedge their bets on creative decisions.

    For example, in the old days, if you were making a Thor movie and your script said “Hela puts Thor’s eye out”, but you weren’t sure whether you were gonna stick with that or not, then you might film everything with Thor having two eyes. Then later in post you could either decide to have him lose the eye or not, and if you decided to go with the lost eye, you could suddenly dump that on your CGI people and say “CGI a wounded eye socket onto all the third act shots of Thor” and then the CGI guys would be stuck trying to meet the deadline despite being informed so late in the process and maybe not even getting paid extra for all the extra work.

    Presumably (if this union contract is any good) the new system will be that CGI studios need to be informed of any changes BEFORE a specified date, and any changes you request AFTER that date will cost the production extra, as the CGI studio suddenly needs to hire more animators they hadn’t originally budgeted for, in order to get everything done in time. If it costs the production extra, then directors will be disincentivized to do it willy-nilly, as it increases their budget which might hurt their future career prospects.

    A lot of Marvel projects in recent years have fallen into a “we’ll fix it in post” attitude and this might curtail that.