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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • Oh yeah, they weren’t like democratic utopias, lol.

    The point being that Sparta was as shit as anything in history, but they were a bit less discriminatory towards women. Probably because they weren’t really as posessive of them as many other cultures. For… some reason.

    On the night of the wedding, the bride would have her hair cut short and be dressed in a man’s cloak and sandals. The bride appeared dressed like a man or a young boy to be perceived as less threatening to her husband.

    In Sparta […] the cropping of the bride’s hair and transvestism likely aimed to transform her temporarily into an adolescent Spartan boy – a less threatening figure to the groom, who probably had made his own transition to adulthood via a close emotional and sexual relationship with an older male and was now in the position to sexually initiate other boys into Spartan society


  • Remember that “ancient Greece” is our term for an area, rather than a singular nation / empire like Rome.

    The area of Greece mainly had Athens and Sparta, and Athens is probably who you’re referring to.

    But Spartan women weren’t that bad off, compared to other places in antiquity.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Sparta

    Spartan women were famous in ancient Greece for seemingly having more freedom than women elsewhere in the Greek world. To contemporaries outside of Sparta, Spartan women had a reputation for promiscuity and controlling their husbands. Spartan women could legally own and inherit property, and they were usually better educated than their Athenian counterparts.





  • I think the easiest thing “plot-wise” is to endow the magical object itself with a sort of sentience. Like not as much as the Sorting Hat in HP, but to the tune of that.

    I strongly feel Vision definitely is sentient, as anyone who’s seen TNG would know the arguments made for Data, and they very much apply here. If we assume the first, and there is something in the hammer that judges people, then yeah, it’s hard to explain how some can move the hammer a bit, but not gain the power, despite the wording of the spell. Cap almost moves the hammer, even making tor raise an eyebrow slightly. So perhaps there’s “degrees of worthiness”. And Vision is pretty high up there, but not “have all the power” high. Or perhaps the power just didn’t manifest at all because Vision didn’t even try to “tap into” it. Who knows, comics can explain it however they feel like.

    But I would not agree that Vision is “an elevator”.

    “Prove to the court I am sentient.” - Captain Picard (from “ST:TNG The Measure of a Man”)

    These are fun to talk about but yeah, it does boil down to “take your pick.” Still, doesn’t mean we can’t have fun theorising.



  • This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.

    Sorry to disappoint you, but most of that text is found offline — as it’s an excerpt from Douglas Adam’s “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” (sequel to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). I probably should’ve attributed it.

    If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).

    And then you’d have to account who knows what, which version of a person you’re talking to. Say you’re having a conversation with someone before traveling in time to a time in which they’ve not timetraveled, so it’s either their subjective past or future, but then you continue the conversation, so you’d have to account for both the speakers perspective and the person being spoken to, who would then be subject to two different tense “totalities” since the conversation with them would have been taking place in two different times at the same time.

    I seriously suggest reading Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett for that sort of thing. I used to use Pratchett books as a substitute for weed when I was a bit over twenty.


  • Exactly.

    The Picard Maneuver was born out of desperation during the battle. The Stargazer, which was damaged, suddenly accelerated into high warp directly towards the Ferengi ship. By doing so the Stargazer appeared to ship’s sensors, for an instant, to be in two places at once.


  • Do you guys not know that that is exactly what a Picard maneuver is? Seemingly being in two positions at once?

    The Picard Maneuver was born out of desperation during the battle. The Stargazer, which was damaged, suddenly accelerated into high warp directly towards the Ferengi ship. By doing so the Stargazer appeared to ship’s sensors, for an instant, to be in two places at once.


  • Dasus@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldI think he couldn't
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    3 days ago

    Since vision is clearly sentient, couldn’t one argue that his sort of absolute sense of morality just made him worthy?

    Might not be a biological life form, but defining life is hard and he clearly is sentient.

    Like imagine Commander Data. I think he could be worthy to lift the hammer, if it’s about the lifter being “good”. And TNG had a lot of arguing if he’s alive or no.


  • Dasus@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldtragic
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    3 days ago

    Yeah. I genuinely think it’s definitely not most people. And most people aren’t greedy.

    But living in a society where the power is with the small insane minority who is greedy and blind to consequences will make a society in which even non-greedy people end up making “financially smart” decuisions (read:selfish gain at the possible cost to others, like cheap items despite knowing they come from countries with very badly exploited workers).

    But yeah, I’m honestly of the opinion that we genuinely have only one massive problem on this planet, and it’s the psyche of these money/powerhungry fucks. And while it might be somewhat common — ambition is not be frowned upon, as long as you’re even vaguely moral — the truly pathological version comes when an ambitious psyche is twisted by our already somewhat twisted society.

    Here’s a nice piece from a self-confessed money addict, former wall street trader. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html he’s also written an entire book about it.

    So what could be done about this? Well, it’s genuinely an addiction and lack of empathy. Do we have any medication with anti-addictive and perhaps empathy-generating qualities?

    We do, actually. They’ve been under lock and key for almost 100 years, because they’re potentially the antidote to the ills of our world, and the psyches of the powerful fear such things.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathogen

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/antiaddictive



  • *tense marking is fun in time travel.

    One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

    The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

    Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.