• 4 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I originally was planning to install GrapheneOS, but now I’m not so sure. I’m honestly quite interested in features like Call Screen and the photo editing stuff, and my understanding is that at least Call Screen won’t work on GrapheneOS. I’m definitely keeping it in my back pocket, but I want to try the full experience first, and I also need to go through a threat modeling exercise as well to decide whether I truly want to do custom roms or not.






  • Wow! Maybe this was naive, but I wasn’t expecting this to get so much controversy and downvotes. I’ll post a few thoughts here FWIW.

    1. I see a lot of comments in here that remind me a lot of this New Yorker cover. As with any other country, there’s lots of different types of people in China with lots of differing opinions, but some comments in here feel like they’re casting all of China as a monolith. I should probably know better than to expect nuance on the internet, but the amount of opinions in here that were expressed as if they were total undeniable truth was still kind of annoying.

    1. Following up on that, the main point of the article was requesting that people not conflate the CCP w/ companies and players. No one who was born in China chose to be born there. But they still have to live their lives, find creative expression, etc. I also hate the CCP, but I was surprised to see so an article that was trying to distinguish between the CCP and ordinary Chinese people receive so many comments that just brought up the CCP.
    2. All that said, while I definitely disagree with many comments in here, I personally didn’t feel like I saw comments in here that were racist, despite what some people suggested.
    3. For me, this article made me interested in finding out what cool games might be getting made in China that aren’t being released to the West. I also found it disappointing that the article explicitly called out that lots of the cool stuff isn’t making it to the West, and yet so many comments here talked about how China hasn’t made any good games, with no acknowledgement of whether the commenter has tried anything other than a small handful of the ones that actually got translations and came over here.

    Anyway, that’s it. Thanks for reading and hope you have a good day.








  • Fwiw I think this was a fine question. I’m an atheist who was raised Christian and left it, so I find myself reacting more emotionally towards Christianity in a negative way than towards other religions, but in spite of that I still draw my own personal line pretty pragmatically. I don’t see religion coming close to going away during my lifetime, and I also know a lot of Christians who are great, caring people. (Even though I know some shitheads too.) So I try to teach my daughter that we can think a religion is wrong and even stupid, but we should never use that to pre-judge any given person solely on their religion, and we shouldn’t be rude to people about their religion.

    I think OP was perfectly within their rights to do what they did, and I’m very happy to know that the FFRF does this sort of thing. For me personally, I would probably need more direct pushing of religion from a teacher to go to the FFRF.


  • A few years ago one of my sisters kids, a son who was 6 years old, passed away. My own daughter is his age, and it was the biggest gut punch of my life, by a country mile. I’m tearing up just writing this.

    I’m the only one in my family who isn’t Christian, and I’m a firm atheist. My family is Protestant, though. My sister had recently moved and her pastor from her old church flew down. He was a really nice guy all in all, and was a fantastic support to them during an unimaginable time.

    He led the funeral service, and honestly did a great job. He talked mostly about my nephew, and about my sister’s family, and didn’t shy from the overall tragedy.

    Yet despite that, I left the service with an extreme emptiness inside. I wasn’t mad at him, or at my family for leaning on their beliefs in that awful time, but the catharsis they got out of that service was completely unavailable to me. I sat there hearing all of these empty promises about meeting again in heaven, etc, that did absolutely nothing for me. I ended up having to seek my own catharsis by talking to friends who were willing to acknowledge the senselessness of it with me and wouldn’t offer empty platitudes about an imaginary person or about things happening “for a reason”.

    That said, I don’t think my sister would have made it were it not for those beliefs. One of my friends even said then that she felt that things like young kids dying are why God was invented in the first place.

    Sorry for the long post, and I hope you don’t mind me bringing up my own experience. It sounds like the service for my nephew was much better than the one for your grandfather, so I’m not saying that I can fully empathize, but to the extent that our experiences overlap, I do. I’m sorry that your grandfather passed away, and I’m sorry that a service filled with talk about an imaginary god and none about your grandfather was the best your surroundings were able to offer you. Thanks for sharing and I hope you can find your own catharsis the way I did.