If Australian Sushi is cultural appropriation, I’d love to hear this person justify “New York Pizza”.

New York Pizza is famous globally and recognised as something different to Italian style Pizza. Is that also cultural appropriation?

It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.

$10 a month to have basically every song ever and never have to worry about YouTube ads. Yes, I use it.

Dance. In a troupe full of girls. Honestly, it was me and 15-20 girls.

Other boys literally called me gay for dancing, while they went and played whatever sports they did and then all went into a locker room and showered together etc.

I honestly never understood how they thought dance was gay. I don’t understand it now.

As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they’d never get in.
2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn’t get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren’t forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. “You can’t make me vote, that’s against the constitution or something”.

I’d be surprised if Reddit hasn’t recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn’t even a big sub.

I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.

This is actually something being debated in Australia. Until a few years ago, Dingoes were considered the same species as the regular dog Canis familiaris. Recent DNA studies have shown them to be distinct, however. So now there’s Canis dingo. Only, Dingoes can interbreed with the regular dog, which normally is the test for them being the same species. Maybe that makes them a subspecies?

So, yeah - even we don’t know what they are. If they were raised by humans, they are happy friendly doggos. If in the wild, then they’re dingoes.

Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You’d think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.

I’ll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you’ve gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I’m not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it’s like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it’s sugar or preservatives in it, I don’t know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it’s 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I’d much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a “I’m better than this person” way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there’s a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone’s worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I’ll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I’m white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I’ve ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don’t seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as ‘good’ by default. There’s a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I’ve been to.

To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:

• Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called “Starfield”.
• They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
• Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
• Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
• Nexus decided they don’t want to host this mod. It’s hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.

That’s about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don’t even play the game. They’re just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they’d just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.