So, I'm going to ignore more recent, much smaller instances of surprise to talk about The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer., which ran me the fuck over with surprise in 2022-ish.

This book is marketed as gay YA romance. The cover, the blurb, everything makes it look like a light romance novel set in space, with maybe some space plot to go with the romance.

IT IS NOT THAT.

It's a mindfucky, philosophical, emotionally wringing rollercoaster of a scifi horror/thriller. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar. It's got that same sort of "small humans isolated in the sheer, terrifying vastness of space" vibe. But more horror, more tragedy, and sometimes incredibly upsetting.

There is gay romance there too, and it's an important part of the book (in the way that romance can be important in any literature without that making it romance genre per se), but advertising this book as straightforwardly gay romance is like advertising Interstellar as a family man movie while just ignoring all the epic space shots and the dramatic score and so on. It just boggles the mind that they did this.

Anyway, this book does have some flaws I can nitpick on a technical level in retrospect, but the thing is: I just don't care about them. This book wrung me out and haunted me for weeks after reading it (like, it kept popping into my head in the middle of doing completely unrelated things), yet it also left me feeling hopeful and more at peace with the inevitability of death.

I thought it was just gonna be a fun romance to escape into for a bit, and instead it's one of the few novels that has genuinely changed the way I see real life in a noticeable way. I still think about it sometimes, now over a year later. It's one of the best scifi books I've read in recent memory, along with the likes of the Murderbot books by Martha Wells and Exhalation by Ted Chiang (though these three are all very different than one another, and they are among my favorites for different reasons).

Going on like this about a book of course runs the risk that anyone who takes this recommendation and doesn't like it as much as I did might feel disappointed and over-hyped, but a) I can at least promise I mean all of this earnestly and b) it seems hard to get anyone to read a book advertised as gay YA romance unless they are already people who would be down for reading some gay YA romance.

The thought that this book may eventually end up lost to time because of its marketing pains me. Although I guess I can imagine why they did it, even though it's inaccurate for the contents; the queer YA romance readership is huge and this book seems to have done well with them, even though the goodreads reviews are as a result amusingly chock full of accounts like mine here.

Anyway, this book was very surprising.

Biden literally circumvented congress twice to give Israel more weapons, using an unusual method that is not standard practice. He did not have to do this. No matter what comes out of his mouth, his actions put the lie to it.

I do agree the Republicans would probably be even worse, while simultaneously dropping the much needed Ukraine aid too. But Biden ain't tapping any breaks.

Raccoons have hands. Close enough!

Describing subjective art with numbers means it's objectively good now! No. >.<

Math, and even merely counting, as applied to the real world always has a human element intangled with it, even though people like to pretend otherwise. Like, you can't count apples without first deciding what an apple is, where the boundaries of that category are, and declaring them all to be equivalent for your purposes (e.g. one fresh apple = one barely still edible apple). The abstraction of it adds subjectivity.

Anyway the relationship of math with music is interesting nonetheless. It just doesn't have to be about making art objective somehow.

They do have a lot more soft power over the government than many give them credit for though, plus some (so far) unused actual power that they only don't use by tradition (which these days is more clearly a bad idea to rely on than ever). Plus all there's all that money that goes into the pageantry of it (royal weddings, etc).

I feel like it's be one thing to let them keep their royal titles, but they shouldn't be enmeshed with the state in any actual way imo.

If not "mansplaining", I don't think there's another word that describes that very particular, yet common, experience. It doesn't read as infantile to me.

Regardless, re. feminism, I wonder if the word's meaning may be growing more muddled nowadays. The word is used by regressive TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists)/"gender critical feminists", who these days are very much loud and visible in the media on their trans hate campaign trails, even as the same word is used by 3rd/4th Wave feminists who advocate/fight for intersectionality and gender and sexual inclusivity. Both groups call themselves feminist and often assert that members of the other group are not actually feminist, so if a study asks "is feminism harmful?" without specifying a definition, the answer might depend on what definition the respondent thinks is being used (from the context around the survey, or from whichever contexts the respondent most often hear the word feminism used in).

The article does say that, but the source paper the article links to says this in the Abstract:

Thus, we set out to mechanically render cerebral hemodynamics fully regulable to replicate or modify native pig brain perfusion. To this end, blood flow to the head was surgically separated from the systemic circulation and full extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC) was delivered via a modified aorta or brachiocephalic artery. This control relied on a computerized algorithm that maintained, for several hours, blood pressure, flow and pulsatility at near-native values individually measured before EPCC. Continuous electrocorticography and brain depth electrode recordings were used to evaluate brain activity relative to the standard offered by awake human electrocorticography. Under EPCC, this activity remained unaltered or minimally perturbed compared to the native circulation state, as did cerebral oxygenation, pressure, temperature and microscopic structure. Thus, our approach enables the study of neural activity and its circulatory manipulation in independence of most of the rest of the organism.

And nothing whatsoever about physically removing the brain from the body. It's teeechnically separated from the body's circulatory system - with the experimental, artificial connection replacing the natural one between tthe body's circulatory system and the brain's blood flow - but that really seems to be it.

The article is extremely misleading and only barely connected to the actual study, in short.

I'm personally gonna add Popular Mechanics to my internal list of pop sci rags that can't be trusted.

You do realize that lemmy contains very many users, many of whom disagree on any number of things. You are randomly assigning the opinions of lemmy's pirate users to a random commenter without evidence that they actually hold those opinions, because it'd be convenient for you if they're contradicting themself in any way (though the degree to which that would be a contradiction is also arguable). It's just a way of constructing a strawman instead of engaging with your interlocutor's actual words.

Also, part of the problem is that these LLMs very often do directly copy and spit out articles and random forum posts and etc word-for-word verbatim, or it'll do something that's the equivalent of a plagiarist who swaps a few words around in a sad attempt to not get caught. It becomes especially likely depending on how specific the search is, like if you look for a niche topic hardly anyone has written extensively on or for the solution to an esoteric problem that maybe just one person on a forum somewhere found an answer to. It also typically does not even give credit or link to its sources.

Plus, copyright law, if it exists, must apply to everyone, including major coporations. That's a separate issue than whether or not copyright law needs reform (it obviously does). If you wanna abolish copyright, fine, ok, get it abolished through the government. But while copyright law is still the law, I'm not ozk with giving magacorps a pass to break it legally, especially when they're more than happy to sue random, harmless individuals for violating their own copyrights. They want the law not to apply to them because they're rich.

The argument they're making is just ridiculous on its face when you compare it to other crimes. If AI should be allowed to violate copyright because otherwise it can't exist as it is, then anyone should be able to violate copyright because otherwise their cool projects won't be able to exist. And I should be able to rob a bank because otherwise I won't have all that money. You should be able to commit murder because otherwise your annoying coworker will keep bugging you. She should be able to walk out of a store with an iPhone without paying for it because otherwise she won't have an iPhone. Etc. It's an argument that says the criminal's motivations are legal justification for the crime. "You should let me legally do the thing because otherwise I can't do the thing" is just not a convincing argument in my book.

Thank you for your continued efforts

It seems a smidge absurd to me that some people apparently expect that death row convicts won't fight it, I must admit. Of course he fought it. He was terrified.

A method doomed to be painful because the convict inevitably fights it is still painful, and it can't be deemed "okay" by blaming the convict for it as if he had any choice in the matter when fight-or-flight kicked in. It's yet another failure in a long string of similar execution failures.

I think you're right. If psychological torture is torture - and if things alont the lines of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and so on amount to such - then the psychological experience of being condemned to death, then while in prison fighting through appeal after appeal after appeal for years and being condemened again and again but still having that small sliver of hope, then finally (for those who aren't ruled innocent or insane somewhere in that process) being marched to your end, must be torture too. Compared to that, a few moments of pain at the very end seems so small as to be beside the point.

Any improvement is an improvement, but there keep on being these news stories about "aha, we have finally found the way to do this painlessly!" that repeatedly don't end up panning out for one reason or another. Even this relatively small improvement in the lot of death row convicts seems totally illusive.

Idk that I agree with Nitrogen leaks being a big concern - I don't know enough for certain to say one way or another really - but supposing they are a risk, regardless I think the biggest risk to the executioners or viewers is the psychological one.

Even convulsions after death that truly aren't experienced by the convict can still greatly disturb the people who see them. Plus, in general, the psychological toll of systematically killing people who can't fight back as one's 'mundane' job. It's gotta fuck people up. Maybe along the lines of how drone pilots - who effectively go to war, but who aren't surrounded by fellow soldiers all the time like regular soldiers, but instead who go home every to friends and family who aren't at war, causing prolonged feelings of alienation and separation that tend to hit regular soldiers only after they come home from deployment - end up with a lot of ptsd problems.

It does tell you that it's been changed, though. You can typically still go and play the original game. And it enables the people affected by -isms to enjoy it when sometimes said -isms would pull them out of it for them otherwise.

And it's not like the original intent was for people to be distracted by what would have, to the developers, have likely seemed a small or unquestioned detail. We can never truly approach a game the way its original audience did anyway because culture changes so much, and a large part the experience you have with art is what you bring to it. Thus why graphical updates can make the game look like you remember it, even though it now looks much prettier. I think these sorts of updates can be similar to that.

Granted, it's harder to access the original game because of hardware. But even so, a lot of original intent is always lost in the process of making a remaster. I'd argue "for modern audience" updates tend to be less of a departure than changes in visual design (the different lighting in the various Myst remasters that changes the mood, the extra foliage in Shadow of the Colossus remasters) or mechanics updates (the ability to control Resident Evil like a regular game instead of via tank controls).

Edit: I think my ideal scenario would be if remasters include "modern audience" updates of all kinds, to make the game as enjoyable for new players as possible, but also that the originals be made more easily available such as by legalizing or sanctioning emulation for old games.

Georgia didn't flip because of the "might vote Republic or might vote Democrate" swing voters people usually talk about; it flipped because of hoards of people who don't normally turn out at all finally were approached and motivated to do so. Another kind of swing voter, between "might not vote of all, or might vote Democrate."

Pundits make much of the first group because they always have, and because politicians insist on putting that group front and center in their priorities, but I think they become less and less of a genuinely powerful block as the two major parties get farther and farther apart. Who is even left in the middle, anymore? Never Trumpers, who won't vote for Trump anyway?

Meanwhile, Biden's unconditional aid for Israel's genocide is alienting Arab Americans, who have a lot of voting power in some key states, as well as a large (though I can't say exactly how large) portion of young, Black, and Latin American voters who can see the obvious racism at play.

I think he's made a political bet here to appeal to the people the DNC always tries to appeal to at the cost of other groups, but I genuinely think he may lose because of it, especially if Trump ends up sidelined and replaced with another Republican.

Then again, maybe pushing the abortion rights thing will make enough of a difference to counteract this. I don't know. But I hate that I feel like this election could easily go either way.

I don't think you can become a billionaire in an ethical way, without exploiting hundreds or thousands of people below you.

To me, the "good" billionaires participate in and create the system that keeps everyone else poor and without resources just as much; it's just that they throw a few coins back to charity - what looks like a lot to us, but isn't much to them - to a) make themselves look good and charitable or b) assuage any guilt they feel for their continually exploitation of workers and hoarding of wealth. Like a king gathering so many taxes all the peasants are destitute, then tossing some gold coins into a crowd and getting called generous for it even though it's a pittance compared to what they took. There is no more powerful PR for a billionaire, no better way to steer public and media opinion, than strategically giving their money to charity.

They maybe aren't intentionally evil, but if a bit of charity makes people praise them, and makes them feel like they're using their wealth for the greater good, such that they can feel like they're good people and sleep at night, I think they conveniently fail to think through whether the "good" they do by handing out their wealth outweighs the harm they caused by taking such an outsized share - one much larger than they ever give back - in the first place, because anyone would be extremely motivated to come to the conclusion that it's ethical to keep being an mega-powerful billionaire.

If they didn't exploit workers and hoard so much wealth in the first place, their "charity" wouldn't be needed because all that wealth would be much better distributed to begin with, and it would be distributed more equitably rather than on the basis of whoever most appeals to an individual billionaire's whims at a given moment. As it is, they're like middlemen between workers and the causes that need funds, and in being so they are able to wield ridiculously outsized political power (via donations, being treated as important enough to talk to politicians, market manipulation, etc), and they will always oppose any measure that truly threatens their continued power and wealth.

Also they rely on our current capitalist system that requires the line to go up forever, with companies expected to make more and more money year after year (often by taking more and more from their workers), with no answer to where or when the line can stop going up, which is an incredibly stupid strategy on a planet with finite resources and a global warming problem.

Maybe one day all the human Alexas can have their name back. That would be nice.

Or they're working class or buried in medical bills and can't afford to be spending money on things like search engines that have a free alternative, even if it is worse.

I'm not actually convinced the alternatives are any better here, anyway.

It bothers me that they all look like they're in their teens or 20s, when a male wizard would inevitbly be shown as anywhere from middle aged to Gandalf.

I bet it just always makes women young in every context.

Anyway most of them look like they're from an old 3D Japanese RPG or CG anime. Round face with pointy chin, plastic-y smooth skin.

I'll note that anime and Asian RPG characters often have a light skin tone (another can of worms there) that can cause foreign viewers to perceive them as white even while Japanese viewers perceive them as asian. Animation and similarly stylized art involves a level of abstraction and cultural interpretation that might not be there (at least not in exactly the same way) if we were talking about race (or gender, or whatever else) with regards to more realistic art.

Edit: this also reminds me of Disney's notorious "same face, same profile" problem with female characters in their 3D animated films. Male characters can be any of a wild variety of shapes, but a Disney princess essentially round faced with huge eyes and slim. Even just looking at different slim, round-ish faced male characters, I think you'll find more variety in their portrayals within that group than amongst the Disney princess group.

Aljazeera reliably reports on world news that gets totally ignored by other outlets, is the thing. I haven't read up on Qatar's policy's otherwise, and I do notice that aljazeera never seems point fingers at Qatar's own issues, but I've generally been very glad it exists.

Do you have an alternative that's equally good for breadth and depth of world news, but in your view less biased?

Edit: I'll note also that aljazeera does post no shortage of negative articles about the actions of, and human rights abuses by, Hamas, too. They're just not getting shared here on beehaw, since Israel's actions are rather more attention grabbing at the moment. I've never seen them post any stories or opinion pieces praising Hamas, either.

For those interested in this topic, I recommend PhilosophyTube's videos, particularly this one: I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare System

Also... What the heck is a bioethicist? That sounds like maybe someone involved in advising corporations on ethics, not someone I'd ever expect to see involved in private medical care. Regular doctors and nurses and etc are already required to study and practice ethical medicine.

I'd also like the point out that one can go get their tongue cut in half, or their leg bones lengthened, or get hormone treatment for balding or for menopause, or get a nose job, or surgery to make their boobs bigger or smaller, all without anything like what trans people are forced to go through for the most basic of things.

Even for someone who believes that the gender assigned at birth is the "real" one, or who dislikes or feels weirded out by trans people in general, I don't see how one could justify imposing so many more restrictions on one group of people who want or need to modify their bodies than are imposed on any other group that seeks similar medical care.

Even if we do just talk about children, the disparity doesn't make sense. Like, hormone blockers like those prescribed to trans children have been routinely and safely prescribed to cis children, in cases such as to delay early onset puberty (which, iirc but correct me if I'm wrong, is mostly only an issue because of the social consequences surrounding it), for decades. And in many of the new wave of anti-trans bills that ban hormone blockers to delay puberty for trans children, they specifically leave a cut out for cis children to still receive hormone blockers without issue. Because they don't really believe delaying puberty is unsafe, that's never been the point.

And that's not even getting into comparisons with other major medical decisions made by parents and doctors, sometimes even without the consent of the children (let alone the vehemently expressed wish for treatment like trans children), like circumcision, or weight loss treatments or surgeries, or other cosmetic treatments, or even the forced surgeries and hormone treatments that have been routinely done on intersex children (largely the same treatments as a trans person would seek, but forced, to make a person look unambiguously like whichever sex the parents choose for them). If the people pushing these anti-trans bills really cared about children and parents and doctors making medical decisions with big consequences and risking regret, they should be talking about a whole lot of other things - things much less stringently regulated - besides trans healthcare. But nope, crickets.