I'm pretty sure the opposite of "critical thinking" is "free thinking", at least based on all the "free thinkers" I've spoken to. I assume it's short for "free-of-critical-thought... thinking".
loobkoob
joined 2 years ago
She's also an evangelist, pro-conversion therapy, a TERF, and a staunch defender of Suella Braverman. She thinks LGBTQ rights charities teach "extreme ideologies that don't have a basis in science" and she felt that, when COVID was in full swing, focusing on protecting the elderly only had a short-term effect on the "longevity of older people" and that the government should have instead focused on the "long term impact of lockdowns on young peoples' lives".
She's a piece of work.
The last thing I saw regarding him was him being unable to comprehend how secret rooms in Metroid work. It was painful.
Does kbin have a negative reputation (or any kind of collective reputation, really) like Facebook/Meta and Hexbear? Or are you just mentioning it because it bridges the gap between micro-blogging and the "threadiverse"?
I'm a kbin user and I can't say I'm aware of what its reputation is in general. But I also just don't tend to get into the inter-instance politics all that much.
I don't think it's trying to touch on monetisation at all, let alone minimise it. It's just mocking the gameplay loop in Mario and Sonic that involve you run around picking up coins (or rings in Sonic's case) for no apparent reason.
I don't know if it's perhaps a regional thing but, in the UK, "being patronising" is used pretty much exclusively in the pejorative sense, with a similar meaning to "condescending". I don't think I've ever heard (in actual conversation) "being patronising" used to mean someone is giving patronage, in fact - we would say someone is "giving patronage" or "is a patron" instead. We also pronounce "patronise" differently, for whatever reason: "patron" is "pay-trun", "patronage" is "pay-trun-idge" but "patronise" is "pah-trun-ise".
It seems the pejorative use of the word dates back to at least 1755, too, so it's not exactly a new development.
It's Tom Cruise. It just comes out of the Mission Impossible budget. And he insists on driving the train himself.
In all seriousness, though: this was the small scale test - the nuclear bombs designed for wars have much higher payloads. It's not the sort of thing that can be tested in labs.
For me personally, the plot doesn't matter all that much anyway. What I love is Douglas Adams' prose - the plot's mostly just a vehicle for that - and I feel that doesn't really translate to film. The perfect example:
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
It's funny. It's succinct. It's very descriptive. It doesn't just tell you that the ships were hovering, it draws comparison to bricks which conjures up images of blocky, inelegant ships, and it gives the impression that the way they're just stationary in the sky is somewhat unsettling or surreal. I think it's quite impressive how much such a short sentence manages to convey really!
Translating it to film, and having shot of some blocky, inelegant ships hanging in the sky, doesn't manage to capture the same humour or feeling that that short sentence in the book does, at least for me. And it's the same throughout the whole series, but that line is probably the easiest example to bring up. Some books translate really well to film and the imagery in the film ends up being far better than what I could imagine myself on the fly, but that's not the case with Hitchhiker's Guide at all.
The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series has a fair amount of narration so the prose still shines through in that.
I had similar issues with the various Dirk Gently adaptations, too. And I find I have the same issue with screen adaptations of Terry Pratchett's work for similar reasons. Without Adams' or Pratchett's wonderful prose, it often tends to feel very B-movie-esque to me.
BBC/HBO did a TV adaptation of the full series, aptly called "His Dark Materials". I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did the books, but it was a good adaptation (and much better than The Golden Compass).
The books won a bunch of awards and were very well received when they released. The first one, Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US) came out in 1995 so it was fairly popular for a few years as the "premier" young adult novel, but it ended up being dwarfed in popularity by Harry Potter once that released (as did, well, everything else on the planet).
I think the books were a little less popular and well-received in America. In part because Philip Pullman is a British author, so obviously he got more attention here in the UK. But also, quite a few Christian groups - particularly in America because, let's be honest, most evangelical Christian groups are American - took issue with His Dark Materials' world and themes. It doesn't paint the church in a good light at all, and the series' God analogue, The Authority, is pretty tyrannical. Although, funnily enough, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was one of the biggest supporters of the series - he felt it basically highlighted the dangers of dogmatism and attacked the ways religion could be used to oppress rather than Christianity itself - so obviously not all Christians were offended by the series.
Anyway, yes! Not only is the world fantastic (and it only gets more interesting and wild as the series goes on) but it also handles the characters really well. The way it handles the main characters - children who age into teenagers throughout the series - developing feelings for each other and discovering sexuality was done in a really thoughtful and age-appropriate way (for the characters and the audience). It addresses some interesting philosophical concepts, too, including some religious ones - I'd say the spirit, the body and the soul is a pretty key theme throughout, albeit not necessarily in the same way Christianity approaches it
I'd start by reading the books - Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - and then watch the TV series. He's also written other books in the world - some novellas, and (currently) two out of three books in a second trilogy called "The Book Of Dust".
If they're just doing it for money, I agree that it feels pretty desperate. But I get the impression that a lot of them do Cameo because it's a fun way for them to interact with fans, and because it's nice for the fans to be able to get something like that.
Regardless of their reasoning, it sucks that people abuse it. Expected, of course, but it still sucks.
Yeah, it has real "Orphan-Crushing Machine" vibes to me.
It's also essentially you declaring that you don't really mind if Trump gets in. If you were opposed to Trump, you'd actively try to stop him gaining power again. If you're not voting in a way where you try to prevent him gaining power, sure, you're not actively supporting him, but you're still willing to sit by while fascism rears its head. That is what people are judging you for.
To pick an extreme analogy: if there's a child drowning and you're in a position where you could easily save them but choose not to because you saw that child being mean to someone once, no-one's going to call you a child murderer but people are going to judge the hell out of you for being "the guy who doesn't save drowning children".
So yes, vote abstinence is an option. But I'd argue what's more a part of your "civic duty" is to prevent fascists rising to power when you personally have a say in preventing that.