#disputed

[whatbigotspost]

BOOSTING APRIL 2024 Active boycott notice!!!

Source

[dougielombax]

I don’t get the Rockall dispute.

It seems like a needlessly petty issue designed to rile up small minded jingoistic idiots into a feral fervour over fishing rights.

In the 21st fucking century no less.

Get with it people!

For fuck’s sake!

Fucking morons!

[tenth-sentence]

It looks as if the pace of evolutionary change accelerated all across the Old World after 800,000 years ago as ape-men entering the cold north encountered wildly different climates where random genetic mutations could flourish.*

*That said, Heidelberg Man did live in Africa as well as Europe. Some paleoanthropologists envisage a European origin followed by a spread back into Africa, but others assume that Heidelberg Man, like Homo habilis and Homo ergaster, evolved in Africa in response to local climate changes, then spread north. Bones rather like Heidelberg Man's have also been found in China, but that evidence is more disputed.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[faultfalha]

The mist hung heavy in the humid air, a slight chill running through it like a warning. It had been centuries since the first oil had flowed beneath the South China Sea, and the family of the original discoverer had long since perished. And yet this afternoon, CNOOC Ltd would be the first to witness a new era of profits and power, a history-defining event. As the dockyard filled with the crew, a pale yellow and orange sunset shone on the horizon, the clouds like swirls of oil. Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in the sea's story.

[ot3]

whenever your political understanding of gender gets you to 'men are oppressed for being men' you've taken a wrong turn. but so many people find their way there regardless

[codewithcode]

US, Philippines hold largest war drills near disputed waters

MANILA, Philippines — The United States and the Philippines on Tuesday launch their largest combat exercises in decades that will involve live-fire drills, including a boat-sinking rocket assault in waters across the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait that will likely inflame China. The annual drills by the longtime treaty allies called Balikatan — Tagalog for shoulder-to-shoulder — will run…

[hedgehog-moss]

Just wanted to say I have been internet-less for a while now, due to damage from a thunderstorm, and it's not clear when the problem will be fixed! Hopefully by Monday but that's also what they said last week. At first I was able to find some 3G here by sitting perilously on the very edge of that one specific window on the 1st floor of the barn >

—but this no longer works for some reason. That's too bad because while I waited 5min for websites to load like it's 2001 I could watch the llamas bounce about and the chickens scour the pasture for insects, it was like having a real life Windows screensaver. But this week was very windy so I assume the elusive airborne internet in this corner of my barn has floated away elsewhere.

My next solution was climbing up to the plateau through the woods with my laptop under my arm to go sit in a pasture that's famous (to me and 1 neighbour) for having inexplicably good cell reception. It's funny because I sat nowhere near the road but Pandolf kept patrolling all over to check for enemies while I checked for emails so people driving by kept stopping their car and crossing the pasture to come say hi like, "I recognised your dog from afar!" I've had better luck keeping in touch with people I know via this great new social network called DogRun than via modern means of communication.

The guy who owns the pasture also came to say hi and when I told him what I was doing here, he looked at his phone and went like, wow, there /is/ great reception here, better than at my farm, I could come check my email here too. So this cow pasture is poised to become a trendy new coworking space.

But then I had to make a video call and that exceeded the capacities of even the great 3G Pasture, so I had to drive several km to sit under a tree a few hundred metres away from a village so I can leech their amazing urban 4G.

This is probably how a mediaeval peasant would make a Zoom call, once a week riding their donkey across the countryside to go sit in a field near the ramparts of the nearest fortified village and enjoy their feudal lord-sponsored high-speed connection.

[catsofyore]

"MOMMMMMM. There's someone... something... CAN YOU JUST COME HERE PLEASE." Source.

[boag]

SOOOO true

[bronva]

"Great Concern": Philippines On Chinese Vessels In Disputed Waters

“Great Concern”: Philippines On Chinese Vessels In Disputed Waters

The Philippines’ defence chief today said the reported presence of dozens of Chinese vessels in disputed waters in the South China Sea was an “unacceptable” action that violates the country’s…

[faultfalha]

CNOOC Ltd is on track to start production from its new South China Sea oil field in the first half of this year. The field, located in the hotly contested waters of the disputed South China Sea, is seen as a key piece of infrastructure for the Chinese energy company as it seeks to solidify its dominance in the region.

[bixels]

Portal 2 is still the perfect game to me. I hyperfixated on it like crazy in middle school. Would sing Want You Gone out loud cuz I had ADHD and no social awareness. Would make fan animations and pixel art. Would explain the ending spoilers and fan theories to anyone who'd listen. Would keep up with DeviantArt posts of the cores as humans. Would find and play community-made maps (Gelocity is insanely fun).

I still can't believe this game came out 12 years ago and it looks like THIS.

Like Mirror's Edge, the timeless art style and economic yet atmospheric lighting means this game will never age. The decision not to include any visible humans (ideas of Doug Rattmann showing up or a human co-op partner were cut) is doing so much legroom too. And the idea to use geometric tileset-like level designs is so smart! I sincerely believe that, by design, no game with a "realistic art style" has looked better than Portal 2.

Do you guys remember when Nvidia released Portal with RTX at it looked like dogshit? Just the most airbrushed crap I've ever seen; completely erased the cold, dry, clinical feel of Aperture.

So many breathtakingly pit-in-your-stomach moments I still think about too. And it's such a unique feeling; I'd describe at as... architectural existentialism? Experiencing the sublime under the shadow of manmade structures (Look up Giovanni Battista Piranesi's art if you're curious)? That scene where you're running from GLaDOS with Wheatley on a catwalk over a bottomless pit and––out of rage and desperation––GLaDOS silently begins tearing her facility apart and Wheatley cries 'She's bringing the whole place down!' and ENORMOUS apartment building-sized blocks begin groaning towards you on suspended rails and cement pillars crumble and sparks fly and the metal catwalk strains and bends and snaps under your feet. And when you finally make it to the safety of a work lift, you look back and watch the facility close its jaws behind you as it screams.

Or the horror of knowing you're already miles underground, and then Wheatley smashes you down an elevator shaft and you realize it goes deeper. That there's a hell under hell, and it's much, much older.

Or how about the moment when you finally claw your way out of Old Aperture, reaching the peak of this underground mountain, only to look up and discover an endless stone ceiling built above you. There's a service door connected to some stairs ahead, but surrounding you is this array of giant, building-sized springs that hold the entire facility up. They stretch on into the fog. You keep climbing.

I love that the facility itself is treated like an android zooid too, a colony of nano-machines and service cores and sentient panel arms and security cameras and more. And now, after thousands of years of neglect, the facility is festering with decomposition and microbes; deer, raccoons, birds. There are ghosts too. You're never alone, even when it's quiet. I wonder what you'd hear if you put your ear up against a test chamber's walls and listened. (I say that all contemplatively, but that's literally an easter egg in the game. You hear a voice.)

Also, a reminder that GLaDOS and Chell are not related and their relationship is meant to be psychosexual. There was a cut bit where GLaDOS would role-play as Chell's jealous housewife and accuse her of seeing other cores in between chambers. And their shared struggle for freedom and control? GLaDOS realizing, after remembering her past life, that she's become the abuser and deciding that she has the power to stop? That even if she can't be free, she can let Chell go because she hates her. And she loves her. Most people interpret GLaDOS "deleting Caroline in her brain" as an ominous sign, that she's forgetting her human roots and becoming "fully robot." But to me, it's a sign of hope for GLaDOS. She's relieving herself of the baggage that has defined her very existence, she's letting Caroline finally rest, and she's allowing herself to grow beyond what Cave and Aperture and the scientists defined her to be. The fact that GLaDOS still lets you go after deleting Caroline proves this. She doesn't double-back or change her mind like Wheatley did, she sticks to her word because she knows who she is. No one and nothing can influence her because she's in control. GLaDOS proves she's capable of empathy and mercy and change, human or not.

That's my retrospective, I love this game to bits. I wish I could experience it for the first time again.

[magnificentmicrowave]

here i go posting freak shit at freak hours

[baronmagikcarp]

Making grown adults stick to an arbitrary schedule isn't just something that happens to people with intellectual disabilities. I didn't want to post this on the last video as this isn't about intellectual disabilities but it does relate.

I worked as a security guard in a section 8 apartment complex. The place had a curfew of 10pm on weekdays and 12am on weekends. As security we were expected to ruthlessly enforce this. If someone was out after those hours, even if it was on their own porch just talking, we were supposed to warn them and then write them up and turn it into the office. They could get evicted for this, with no clear indication of how many times it had to happen, and possibly lose their voucher as well.

These were grown ass adults just hanging out and talking in a place they were paying for (section 8 requires them to pay a portion of the rent, so yes, they were paying for it). Most of them weren't even being rowdy and the ones that were usually just took a, "Hey, you're being a bit loud, could you keep it down please?" to get them to settle down. It was a ridiculous rule (curfews always are).

Coincidentally, a lot of my coworkers at the time didn't like working the place. They got yelled at, treated like shit, and had problems every night. I didn't understand because I never had that issue and then I realized why. They were actually ruthlessly enforcing that rule and were rightfully hated for it where I would walk the property about thirty minutes before and have this interaction.

"Hey," I'd say to a group of people on a porch. "I gotta tell you that curfew is in about thirty minutes."

"And what are you going to do if we don't go in?" someone would reply.

"Well, my break is in thirty minutes too and I like a long break," I'd reply with a shrug. "Make of that what you will."

At which point I'd just get a nod, a laugh, or an "Alright" and then I'd go on, finish up my round, take a nice long break, and then wander back around about an hour after curfew. You know what? Never had a problem. Never had to write someone up. Occasionally I would run into someone still out on their porch and I'd just either go the other way so I "didn't see them" or just give them a wave and keep going.

[t00thpasteface]

I would just like to submit this casual reminder: There's nothing in the Bible that explicitly states that a Priest can't have a bratty sub.

[ndostairlyrium]

Wing-it commission for @idolsgf / @blightbear featuring A BABY <3 been fangirling over Bohean for a while, the fact I could draw him sent me over the moon ;u;

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