Endymion_Mallorn

Ongoing development of mbin and attention to the platform as a whole. His lack of overt politics compared to the Lemmy devs also makes me happier. Plus, as an admin, he’s mostly hands-off in my n experience, certainly not a micromanaging mod.

Another kbin.social refugee here. I only moved when it was obvious that Ernest wasn’t coming back. So instead, I decided to lean on Melroy, who’s been an awesome admin and dev.

So, Ernest, I wish you nothing but the best. Thanks for kicking off a small revolution. And Melroy - thank you for taking up the torch.

Reasons I can think of for the size:

1. Ammunition is large and needs to be stored carefully so it doesn’t explode. And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that’s going to massively add to the weight.
2. Human beings are soft and squishy. We’d need huge amounts of suspension for the purpose, plus the matter of armor. Think about how large a jet plane really is, or a tank.
3. Physical laws around mass and movement. Tanks are as small as they are because treads are effective at transferring torque and creating linear acceleration. If they were just on wheels, they would need to be larger. Legs would require huge amounts of mass to safely support the machine, and we’d need to have excellent stabilizer systems in addition to the suspension mentioned above so that you don’t fall flat on your face
4. Passive cooling (which would probably be necessary for safety - you don’t want a sniper stopping your whole mech by shooting a few fans) requires wide surface areas to dump the exhaust heat.

That’s all I can immediately justify, but basically, it would have to be huge.

So you want wanzers.

Seriously though, realize that if we ger Mecha, it’s going to be more like Armored Core. Or a game set in an AC4 AU, Metal Wolf Chaos.

Do you want the US President (especially the current one, to have something like that, and be told to believe in his own justice?

The Statue of Liberty wasn’t something commissioned by the USA. It was just how one French guy saw us. The New Colossus is not law, it’s a poem.

We’ve never really been proud of immigration. The only President with a reasonable take on immigrants was Teddy Roosevelt - and his belief was that the only path forward is full assimilation.

Just use mbin. No need to go out of your way.

David Bowie - Five Years Tennessee Ernie Ford - 16 Tons Iron Maiden - 2 Minutes to Midnight

And about half of Pink’s oeuvre.

Fair enough. My whole life has basically been defined as “very niche” since about 2012. But then again, I basically only use music to shut out the world. And yes, I said use, not enjoy. It’s basically a source of predictable noise that acts as a filter to the more random noise around me so I don’t have more issues than usual. That’s why staying in-genre matters and Pandora helps - it matches based on the predictable traits.

I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC. If I want to discover new music in genres I like, I’ll go and listen either to a terrestrial radio station, Soma.FM, or Pandora (which has many of Spotify’s issues for me, but serves more as a platform for discovery of obscure music). The rare times I listen to music, I’m usually going somewhere on mass transit, or I’m on foot. And during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode. Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.

1. Closed non-federated streaming platform; requires an Internet connection.
2. Requires a subscription for a lot of basic functionality.
3. Even though it requires a subscription, they barely pay artists - the only ongoing benefit to using a non-pirate setup.
4. The increasing amount of “Perfect Fit Content” & LLM-generated music in playlists to avoid said payments.
5. They provide a guaranteed platform to political podcasts.
6. Audio quality is not only dependent on the subscription, but even the top-tier is generally subpar and can vary based on how they throttle you that day.
7. As a platform for mass appeal, discoverability is, loosely speaking, crud.

Pick any of those you like.

Okay, then find small local bands and pirate their shit instead.

So you’re suggesting the American Dream is the only way to beat an American nightmare?

No. Take what you like and burn the rest.

Save your money. Stay home and pirate the music.

Then they need to be removed for normalization of the data and average daily volumes.

Are those two drops to zero a reporting error?

Eugenics and slavery.

Note that those are widely considered bad things.

I’ve heard of Dogwelder. He’s creepy.

Huh. Kind of a depressing moment then, but I can see him doing it for the greater good. I guess the few contacts he had with the Endless and Constantine affected him.

Superman’s been woke since 1939. And always supported people choosing to live.