It’s pretty simple really.

The big reveal is a huge wtf to my brain.

The Jubilee is a time of celebration for Catholics.

Traditionally, the Jubilee is held every 25 or 50 years and is a time to celebrate progress, free slaves (back when slaves were legal), forgive sins, etc etc.

In a great celebration, it makes sense to add a bit of pop culture flair. It’s also common to focus on children and youth outreach during the Jubilee and an anime character does a lot for that.

As for Luce herself. The Jubilee is also a time of great pilgrimages. It’s recommended to get your 'once in a lifetime’s visits to Vatican City (or other local holy sites: Santiago de Compostela, Fatima, Guadalupe). As such, Luce is modeled after the image of Pilgrims: Pilgrim staff, raincoat and dirty boots.

Her eyes are of the seashell, a Catholic sign for pilgrims. The seashells guide pilgrims to holy sites (if you’ve ever been on the Camino, all the next locations are marked with Seashells).

I’m expecting that Luce (thanks to the seashell eyes) will count as an official signpost for the next year of pilgrimages. She’s got incredibly well thought out symbology here.

Edit: I should also note that the raincoat has the 2025 Jubilee of Hope flag on it.

In case you didn’t get what that green spot on the raincoat was.

Pascal programmers are confused.

Kung Fury still has the best spine joke.

Then the next Billionaire with a massive ego and huge budget comes out and makes another one.

Or we get Jack Dorsey making a new company for a 3rd time.

My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.

Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.

Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.

Your post could fit on Mastodon

EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).

People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.

Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).

Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.

At least in the USA, it is known as the Robber Barron period as the extremely wealthy monopolized everything.

https://taxheaven3000.com/

I thought Patrick Boyle was a rap specialist music major?

My local radio station claimed that a Parliament member of Ukraine gave friendly fire as a reason.

It’s not confirmed by any military source yet though.

1. Anti-federalism – Deep rooted distrust of the Federal Government has been around since the dawn of the USA, though its often been part of the minority.

2. Know Nothing / Native American Party – 1850s era movement. Protectionist, isolationist, nativist. Originally they popped up as anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, but overall the concept is that immigrants suck. The modern concept is: “I know nothing”, about the movement. The overall idea is that even in the 1800s, it was bad to look like a racist bigot, so you’d keep your support for these causes secret. Everyone in the party knows that “the Know Nothings are larger than everyone expects”, but no one really knows how big the movement is. And that’s the point.

3. America First – 1930s saw the rise of Fascism vs Communism in Europe with the dawn of the Spanish civil war. The “America First” movement focused on isolationism and even pro-German / Nazi slant mixed with religious fervor. This was pushed by tech-gurus of the time: Charles Lindberg (airplane entrepreneur, first Trans-atlantic flight, etc. etc.), and the Christian Front. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden).

4. NAFTA – 1990s free-trade by Bill Clinton opened up Mexico and Canada as incredible trading partners. However, local industry / local steel lost out as companies started to shop in Mexico for material. As Bill Clinton was a huge pusher of NAFTA, the anti-NAFTA political group consolidated under Republicans. This is likely where the bulk of blue-collar workers is coming from, especially because Trump started adding Tariffs / anti-globalism concepts back to the forefront of American Politics.

Some more recent context:

1. Trump has been building his brand for decades as a very rich, very macho straight-talker. Even in the 80s and earlier, there’s a large number of Hotels, Casinos, Resorts, Golf Courses (etc. etc.) that have relatively high reputation among Americans in general with Trump’s name.

2. Trump reads from the teleprompter in “another voice”, openly showing his disdain for public speaking and the political system. Anyone who has lost faith in the political system loves this. Trump pretends that the teleprompter is forcing him to talk and its all just a “through the motions” thing. Then Trump obviously goes off teleprompter and talks about different concepts, the “real stuff”. (Or so goes his branding). This simple trick is enough to get the gist to his followers: don’t listen to what I say (because I’m being forced to say this politically correct crap). This means that Trump’s true actions are only limited to the imagination of the listener.

3. Trump is playing and leaning into the borne again Christian role. From a religious perspective, the “former enemy / former outsider” coming into religion is a common story and religious love it. Trump was openly a Democrat in the 90s / 00s before switching into Republicanism.

The “bulk” of Trump’s political style is Know Nothing + Macho + anti-political correctness.

First hit on Google was this list made by some Redditor: https://www.reddit.com/r/Betamax/comments/z8cun4/films_that_only_exist_on_betamax_or_alt_editions/

In any case: the big advantage of Betamax (and VHS) was how easy it was to get home-recordings done. An entire generation of family photos / family events (birthday parties, etc. etc.) are on Betamax and likely lost.

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Flash still got it good.

Consider the entire generation of 1970s and 1980s Betamax footage that is basically lost today.

When format wars snap to one side: VHS vs Betamax, HD-DVD vs BluRay, Flash vs HTML5, QuickTime vs DivX… The losing side basically loses a ton of footage.

For the most part, we know how to play Flash right now and mostly how to upconvert it or otherwise archive it. That’s not true of all formats.

Foil here. Tall people suck to fight against. Skilled tall people were straight up impossible.

And I at least have right-of-way to deal with tall people. Eepee don’t got that, its all stupid hand-jabs or foot-jabs (as far as I can tell as a Foil-ist, lol).

This user has a strange post history.

that short fencers are usually quicker and dodge easier.

Lulz.

No. It’s that shorter fencers must doge quicker to compete.

In my days in College, as a 5’9" average guy, I wasn’t much faster than anyone else. And without any reach I couldn’t keep up vs the taller people either.

Just being shorter doesn’t make you faster.

And a tall guy is usually bigger than a short one, so he’s a bigger target - and then there’s his juicy belly right on a convenient line of shots for a short fencer.

Just gain some flexibility and squat down deeper. The good tall fencers could hit me in my belly consistently despite me being shorter.

And while squatting down, your tall legs are longer anyway so you can lunge deeper when you do this maneuver. We shorter fencers cannot.

I mean, when people point out that Joe Biden is a Neocon who supports Israel and USAs rightful dominant place in the world… Erm I agree with that and want to vote for him.

I’m a Neocon. And proud of it and can defend a lot of my positions.

What pisses me off about the new wave of conservatives is that it’s all reactionary. There is no guiding philosophy.

With regards to neoconservatives: I know we get a bad rap since Bush. But events like Ukraine show the importance of us being the stalwart defenders and stepping up to challenges around the world.

But thats the thing. I’ll tell you that while proudly wearing my colors as a Neocon. This ‘Libs of TikTok’ bullshit is just fucking awful politics. We can’t actually work or talk around our issues when people are pretending to be on the wrong sides of debates

Politics shouldn’t be about ‘owning’ the other side. Politics should be about effectively communicating our beliefs to each other, especially our disagreements. And finding compromises where possible.

Anyway, it’s Joever to some extent so I guess all in on Kamala. She’s still acceptable to my philosophy if only because Trump + JD Vance is such a bad choice. So y’all got my vote this year, at least temporarily.