Good. The Penguin was great, but it was great because it was well crafted. The writing, the acting, the cinematography, it was experts given the tools to do something great. Gotham is a fantastic setting, and the sheer number of worthwhile characters makes anything they do potentially fascinating.

The mask is off.

Of course! You’ve hit the nail on the head, in that anyone can get used to anything if you grow up with it. Your brain wraps itself around your environment, and the language and descriptions you grow up with are the framework for your understanding of things.

It’s like naming colors of the rainbow. The number of discrete colors you see depends on the number of discrete names your language has for those colors. Roy G Biv is just one method of delineation. Some languages don’t separate blue and green, or red and orange. We actually see millions of colors, but our brain structures categories based on the words we have to describe them.

We use base 10 numbering, because we have five fingers on each hand. Imaging what the metric system would look like if 360 million years ago, some polydactyl mutant managed to win the evolutionary tournament of reproduction, and we all had an extra thumb on the opposite side of our hands. Baseball gloves would look super weird, and we would have a duodecimal metric system where 100 cm could be evenly divided by three or six, but not five, and a foot would be 10 inches without changing either length.

It’s my go-to controversial opinion when I want to practice arguing against a consensus. Most people who have an opinion on the matter think that they are being rational about it, but in my experience people have strong emotional responses to feet and inches because of the psychological trauma of math tests in primary school.

You think about feet and miles, and you probably think of a worksheet with word problems, with Henry and Jessica travelling on two trains going in different directions. Or maybe your mind goes to a detailed chart you have on a refrigerator magnet for how many pints of milk you need to buy for 16 guests if 60% of them put two tablespoons in their coffee every day for a three day weekend. You’re probably angry just reading that sentence, and I know it raised my blood pressure writing it. You don’t actually need to do that math, you just buy a gallon of milk and run to the store if you need more. It’s not even really easier if it’s liters of milk and 35 mL per coffee.

And that’s for people who live in the USA. I’ve also found that people outside of the US resent Americans for using such an objectively inferior system. It reinforces the perception of an arrogant, impetuous, lazy and selfish nation of obliviously uneducated consumers forcing the rest of the world to accommodate our obstinate fat-ass ignorance.

So either way, people who have an opinion probably have strong emotional reactions to that opinion being challenged.

Sure, so Imperial units aren’t like one set of cohesive measurements, they are based on units of measure that can be easily estimated without a measuring tool. A foot is about the length of a foot. A cup is a cup. A mile is a thousand paces. 0 degrees Fahrenheit was the coldest outside temperature in the place where Fahrenheit lived, and 90 was the temp of a human body.

All of these measurements were standardized and adjusted for accuracy and precision when standards were determined, but the idea was that people didn’t need to have a set of calibrated instruments with accurate measurements marked on them in order to use them. Most people didn’t carry rulers and graduated cylinders around, and even though those things are widely available now, you still probably don’t carry them with you. They are in your house, in a drawer, waiting to be used only when certainty is required.

And even the conversions are meant to be functional without tools. When they standardized the length of a foot and an inch, it could have easily been adjusted to be 10 inches to a foot. 12 was used because it is easier to divide 12 without accurate markings. If you have a string that is 12 inches, fold it in half to get 6 inches, fold it again to get three inches. Or fold it in thirds (three equal lengths) and you have four inches. Fold that in half twice over again and you have an inch. Likewise, a gallon is 16 cups, because 16 can be divide in half 4 times to get a cup. Conversion by division means you don’t need to have as many different tools. A pound of sand and a balance can be used to find an ounce of sand without any additional tools, and you could probably get pretty close without the balance.

It is rarely important to be able to convert inches to miles. The ratio between them is arbitrary, because they are meant to measure vastly different things. Both are length, but an inch is the ground covered by a worm in a single contraction, and a mile is the ground covered by an army after a thousand paces. It’s dead simple to convert milimeters to kilometers, but how often do you actually need to do that accurately?

100 degree F is very hot outside. 0 degrees is very cold. Upper third is beach weather, be careful about overheating. Lower third, might snow, be careful about freezing to death. Water boils over a fire, and that’s about as accurate as you need to be most days. Modern digital tools and electronics have simplified all of these processes. The only time people actually need to use Imperial conversion rates is in school when you learn (and are tested on) how many feet are in a mile or how many BTUs it takes to raise the temperature of half a cup of water by 7 degrees. Of course that’s going to suck because it’s like mining for coal with a garden trowel. That’s not what it’s meant for. But you also wouldn’t use a backhoe to plant petunias, either.

I grew up using both Imperial and metric. Both have their uses, and both have pros and cons. Personally, I hate trying to describe the weather in Celsius. The differences between too hot and too cold are crammed between -20 to 40 degrees. What kind if scale is that? The difference between 38 and 43 is life threatening. Why should the boiling point of water be relevant to choosing between a sweater and a tee shirt? I don’t need to find the joules it will take to defrost 17 grams of ice on my car window. The benefits of the metric system are not relevant to my everyday existence, nor are the disadvantages of the Imperial system.

Base 12 and base 16 are superior to base 10 for use without measuring tools. The only reason we use base 10 is that we have 10 fingers.

If metric were objectively superior, then we’d all be using metric time as well. But it’s easier to divide hours and minutes into halves and quarters in a base 60 system.

“Narco-terrorists” isn’t a thing that existed until Trump and Hegseth wanted to murder people on a boat with missiles from the stratosphere without involving any available legal system.

I feel like kinks ought to be private anyway. Sharing them feels intimate in a way that is a violation of shared civil spaces. What people do in private doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but if your kink requires making me uncomfortable by telling me what you’re into, I have every right to decline to be a part of your sexual gratification.

To be clear, I’m not talking about LGBTQ+ communities or people who like to wear revealing clothing. That’s not a kink. But if you’re dressed like a puppy and being led around on a leash with a visible erection, then you should be a little bit ashamed for involving me without my consent. There are private spaces for private conversations and private activities. I should be able to ride the bus without getting jizzed on by a masturbating homeless man.

The three levels of lying, Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

People share statistics like they are proof of some conclusion or another. It’s a half-assed way of pretending their prejudices are supported by data. Racists like to share shit like “Black Americans represent 12% of the adult population, but 35% of the prison population” in order to imply that black people are inherently more likely to be criminals.

Of course, they won’t come out and say “white people are superior because they are more civilized” because that would be an odious and distasteful statement. But they will imply the fuck out of it, because these people don’t understand the relationship between statistics and evidence. A single statistic in isolation can be twisted to mean anything you like.

The very same racial disproportion could be used to concluse that systemic racism in the judicial system is more likely to convict black people and sentence them more harshly. In reality, it proves neither conclusion by itself. You have to control for socio-economic factors and prosecution rates and population density and education levels and employment numbers and and and.

The more statistics you have, the easier it is to selectively control for a desired outcome. But from a scientific perspective, there is nothing biological or psychological that is inherent to any particular “race” because the concept of race is mostly a conglomerate of prejudices to begin with.

The Imperial system is easier to use for every day things. Metric is good for science and engineering, when precision and conversions are important, but for things like estimating, baking, driving, and weather, Imperial units are functionally more useful.

Humans can’t make a utopia. It simply isn’t possible, because satisfaction always requires sacrifice. The closest we can get to utopia is a world in which every person has their basic needs met, either through personal effort or collective effort. Food, shelter, safety, healthcare. If those needs are met, every person is fully free to pursue their own destiny without fear of mortal danger. Some people will still try to take advantage of others, because some people are never satisfied. So it will never be a utopia. But it will be objectively better than anarchy.

Oh yeah, getting banned puts you in a weird in-between space where you basically have no control anymore. Makes me want to just avoid participating altogether.

I never bothered deleting any of my comments, but my understanding was that the best way to get rid of them was to use a script to automatically edit the text content to some static message like “This comment has been removed by the user in protest.”

I wasn’t banned, I just hate the official app and the overwhelming number of bots and ads. So I gave it up, and Lemmy fills that commenting niche for me. My account is still live on reddit, though. There’s like 12 years of old comments and sometimes I like reading through them to see how stupid I used to be.

… All of us? That’s like a societal problem. In the most abstract sense, bad people do bad things for personal benefit and are rewarded. Are you proposing a solution to it?

Well… it keeps working, so why would they do anything else?

Crazy how much they’re talking about him like he was the last conservative statesman, like he wasn’t a corrupt partisan oligarch willing to murder for his own personal profit. Like, he didn’t become a better person, that’s just how bad the Trump era has gotten.

That’s not an exaggeration in any way. New York and Chicago. There are other cities with some public transit, but anywhere with a) jobs, b) decent schools, and c) reliable public transit will also be prohibitively expensive.

Except it’s not merely a cult, it is the entire history of the development of our nation. Our infrastructure is built on the idea that space is plentiful, and everyone has their own car. The very concept of suburban America is predicated on at least one car in every home. Communities were built without walking access or public transit. Commerce was congealed into vast campuses consisting entirely of parking lots and three-story office buildings. School districts consolidated into massive centralized buildings where thousands of students arrive via hundreds of big yellow busses, some traveling for hours each way.

Even if you wanted to break free from the “cult,” there’s like two cities in the entire USA where you could live, work, and raise a family in a decent school district without a car, and they would be some of the highest cost of living areas in the entire world.

My favorite story from the cast is when Jason Alexander was talking with Larry David about a particularly unlikely scenario, saying he was having trouble relating as a character to something that would never happen to anyone. David said “What are you talking about? This happened to me.” It was then that Alexander realized that George is Larry, and he stopped doing George as Woody Allen.