Vampires are the ultimate bad-boy romantic aesthetic. How skilled at romance must a woman to wrap an immortal being around her finger? In that sense it’s kinda empowering.

Right now, werewolf romance novels are rather popular on reddit romance novel communities. This is the exact same kind of dude as a vampire except you also get animalistic boinking.

Pretty much, yes. Having read both, the horny energy is exactly the same.

I think allos (myself included) ship other people so we can live vicariously through them. I don’t have time or energy for a romantic relationship RN, but watching others get together is kinda fun.

This practice is kinda harmless for fictional characters (and romantic subplots are usually the norm in said shows), but can definitely make IRL aces uncomfortable. Sorry about that, we should probably stick to fictional characters only.

I think vampires (specifically the hot mysterious dude kind of vampire) are popular mostly because they fulfill a certain niche of romantic fantasy. This niche used to be filled by the plethora of romance novels, which are mostly consumed by women. Today, romance novels have been supplanted by many more types of content, including stuff about vampires. Also, you can’t really blame normal, horny people for thinking about banging anything. R34 is a thing for a reason.

Scott Ritter’s house was raided by the Biden admin, so he is understandably pissed at them. Scott Ritter also knows people in the Trump administration personally, so he clearly hoped that he would have more influence over Trump and co’s actions. He has never ‘glazed’ Trump. He had hopes Trump would follow through on his peace plans.

Now that he sees that isn’t the case, Scott is also becoming quite vocal at criticizing Trump. He has repeatedly come out against the Houthi airstrikes.

Other tools do exist for using the mouse with your keyboard, but this is the first one I’ve ever found that brings up a grid and lets you click in the grid.

Other software lets you move the cursor left, right, up, down, and click, but that will never be faster than just switching to the mouse. I’ve used some before and they feel like a painful crutch.

Instead, Mouseless lets you click immediately in any location, making it even faster than switching the mouse. You can practice clicking with it using https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/aim .

I bought this. The dev has a Mac version and just came out with a Windows beta version. It’s super useful. I can completely eliminate my use of the mouse if I want to, which helps a ton when working on my laptop since I don’t really like using touchpads.

The lifetime license for the software has per-country pricing. In the USA, it’s priced at $20, which is pretty good for such a useful tool. I’d much rather pay a lifetime license than a subscription.

This belongs in Technology, not GenZedong.

Not any messaging app funded by the NED’s software funding arm, the Open Technology Fund:

Current funding: https://www.opentech.fund/projects-we-support/supported-projects/

Past funding: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opentech.fund%2Fprojects-we-support%2Fsupported-projects%2F

Agree. I assume Disney pushed this through simply because they already put money into it, and they saw that they still managed to make money off of live-action Ariel.

In theory, casting non-white actors helps to sell their movies to a more global audience, thus making more money. In practice, I think global audiences prefer companies to put more effort into actually telling their stories rather than just shoving them into white stories.

It’s just to get more views and clicks. Notice how many more views the video got compared to his usual reporting.

I don’t think he really cares either way other than to discuss its performance in China.

His day job is working at Shanghai Daily, a Chinese state-owned English language newspaper. Reports on China is his side project.

I don’t really see how him commenting on China’s lukewarm reception of live-action Snow White counts as anti-woke or whatever (BTW the term ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ sounds so fucking stupid, meaningless, and lacking analysis). China has no history of using Africans as slaves, so it has literally no stakes in American interracial conflicts. I also don’t think Chinese people have any obligation to watch Disney slop, and would much prefer their ticket money funds Chinese culture and films than Disney.

It’s just kind of funny how a character named Snow White for their white skin can somehow be cast as a non-white character. It’s sort of fundamental. Ultimately, Disney’s live-action princess remakes are just cheap, low-effort moves to try to use non-white faces to capture a broader audience and appear falsely progressive with no actual regard to the art, culture, or fighting actual racism.

This remake has the same issues that casting a black person for Ariel did. Instead of writing or adapting a new story for a Latin American princess, or an African princess, from the original culture, they instead decide to shove them into a white European story as if non-white cultures have nothing of worth to write about.

Also remember that a lot of people, including Chinese, are boycotting this movie because of actress Gal Gadot’s pro-Zionist views. That is definitely a good thing.

See my comment with resources on the topic.

Here’s a great overview of the current political conflict in Taiwan from someone living there: https://m.youtube.com/live/DU0LSsWBtx8

The pro-US DPP is losing popularity because their independence stance is hurting the economy (because China is Taiwan’s largest trading parter, so cutting it off for the US is fucking stupid). All the DPP does is yell about independence and the China threat while Taiwan’s econony is stagnating and living costs are increasing.

In response, a former DPP-aligned mayor Ko Wenje broke away and founded his own party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019. The party positions itself as centrist, but in practice votes with the KMT more often.

In the most recent 2024 legislative elections, the DPP got 51 seats and lost its majority, the KMT got 52 seats, and the TPP got 8 seats. Because in practice the TPP votes with the KMT, the DPP essentially does not have control of the legislature anymore. However, the DPP still controls the presidency and executive branch, winning 40% of the vote in the 2024 presidential elections.

In response to the KMT and TPP’s success, the DPP used the executive-controlled prosecutor’s office to arrest Ko Wenje on dubious corruption charges. This had resulted in massive protests against the DPP in Taiwan, denouncing them as anti-democracy.

The DPP has used its US connections to institute a media blackout on the topic. Notice that these protests have almost no visibility in the international media and are only reported on by a select few Taiwanese news outlets. ^{[1] [2]}

This is fucking hilarious. You would think that the Trump ICE would at least be able to judge whether the person looked fucking white or not as a filter for whether to arrest them or not. Apparently not.

Hopefully she gets out and advocates for the others. Being a wealthy white woman, her voice has a lot more influence.

Have you watched Red Dawn (2012)? Same plot, except the invaders are East Asian communists with Russian help. The producers wanted to show the movie in China, so they changed the communist villains from Chinese to North Koreans. Of course, all the actors still look Chinese, though.

The sheer audacity to think that Chinese people wouldn’t know. Of course, the movie performed extremely poorly in China.

Kessler syndrome is only a big problem for higher orbits where air drag is miniscule. Low-earth orbit refers to a rather large band of space below an altitude of 2,000 km. Objects at the upper end would be much more problematic than at the lower end, since atmospheric density falls off nearly exponentially with altitude.

SpaceX actually says that StarLink is deployed at 550km, much lower than normal.^[1] While this is to decrease latency, it also means their satellites will naturally fall out of the sky in 5 years without periodic boosting of altitude.

Even if Kessler happened at their altitude, we could all just wait a few years for the trash to fall out of the sky. In fact, the more everything smashes together into tiny pieces in said orbit, the faster the problem would solve itself after since as objects get smaller, their surface area to volume ratio increases, which means drag would affect them more per their mass.

Thx @knfrmity for some fellow rocketry knowledge. Just because Elon Musk is a capitalist pig doesn’t mean that his company’s evilness can transcend the laws of physics.

I do believe these satellite internet constellations in LEO are inevitable. They are a massive force multiplier for the military, and also provide insane soft power via low-cost internet across the globe. China is building their own Qianfan constellation to compete.

No company can control how their satellite falls, except make sure it lands in the general area of the Pacific Ocean. China has the same problem with deorbiting rocket stages.

There are plenty of other things to nail SpaceX on, such as blowing up Starship prototypes near populated areas without safety assessments, but this is not one of them. These Starlink satellites are being deorbited on purpose for retirement using the booster engine, but pointed to push them into the atmosphere. By doing so, SpaceX can make sure leftover debris lands in the Pacific, away from people.

Once the satellites are in low earth orbit, their future deorbiting is inevitable. Any concerns about vaporized satellite metals harming the atmosphere should have been assessed before putting them up there, though I don’t think anyone made noise about that issue until now.

I don’t think this counts as SpaceX’s fault. Y’all need to read up on how low-earth orbits work. Otherwise, we all look like space illiterate Luddites.

Satellites in low-earth orbit (e.g. the International Space Station) still encounter some air resistance. The atmosphere doesn’t just end; it technically continues out to the moon, thinning out along the way.

Previous kinds of satellite internet relied on satellites in geostationary orbit, which is far enough away from Earth for air resistance to be a non-issue. Unfortunately, they also suffer from time delay as internet signals travel between it and Earth.

SpaceX’s StarLink and China’s Qianfan solve this by placing satellite internet in low-Earth-orbit, removing the delay by being physically closer. ^[1] However, you need thousands of low-orbit satellites to provide full internet coverage across the Earth because since each satellite is way closer to Earth, their antennas oversee way less land area.

Since they’re closer to Earth, they also experience significant air resistance which slows their orbit and will cause them to eventually fall down and burn up in the lower atmosphere. To prevent this, StarLink satellites have thrusters to re-boost their orbits. Once the fuel for them runs out though, they still have to fall down.

TLDR: This is inevitable. China’s internet satellite constellations will have the exact same problem once deployed.

You have nothing to be ashamed of. Shame on them if they think they’re better than you just because their parents got lucky or came here on H1B visas.

I’m a Chinese American student also, DM me if you’d like to talk.