• 18 Posts
  • 2.81K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • That’s just it, the subject does have rights. I’m not sure why you think they don’t.

    While truly public photos have distant different rules, these weren’t public photos.

    Neil Zlozower is a specialist in music photography. While I don’t expect anyone to know that without looking, it is easily available information.

    If you don’t know what that means, it means that musicians are his collaborators, not some random people he snapped pics of as they walked down the road.

    The photos in question were taken under contract. Ozzy agreed to the terms, or Zlozower wouldn’t have been able to take them. The pics with Randy Rhodes may be famous, but that doesn’t mean that Ozzy can just up and decide to use them in violation of that contract.

    This isn’t some random asshole that had a small 110 camera in his pocket and caught a few pics. He was a professional there to take pics, and everything was agreed on, and signed, before he took the first one.

    Now, what that agreement was, I have no clue. But, and this is the important part, it absolutely would have included usage rights. Most of the time, such contracts don’t include the subject of the photos being able to use them commercially. And that’s what the lawsuit is about, the photographer is saying that the usage was commercial, and violates his copyright.

    Now, if you want to say that isn’t the way things should be that’s a different issue. But that’s the way things are, no matter what anyone’s opinion is.


  • Gotta frame the ideas first.

    A human right is something that should be inalienable. It would be something that, when violated, suppressed, or interfered with, would cause some degree of problem, regardless of the country or other geopolitical framework.

    A civil right is a right which would similarly cause an individual some degree of problem, but only within a given geopolitical framework.

    As an example, voting. In any state, it should be a right that every individual human have a say in their own governance. But voting is only one possible expression of that underlying right, and wouldn’t be applicable in all settings. That it is the most direct and obvious expression is separate.

    So, no, I don’t think the right to be forgotten is a human right, as it only matters within limited contexts. But it should be considered a civil right.

    Now, if anyone doesn’t like those terms, fine, feel free to use your own. They’re just what I use in my head for organizing ideas, not some kind of official thing.

    The only reason the distinction matters is that we currently live in a world where not everyone agrees on what are and aren’t human rights. When a given culture outright rejects things that another holds central, there’s not going to be consensus. That’s not to say that the consensus would be right, but if everyone agrees on it anyway, then the distinction ceases to matter because they’ll effectively be the same thing.


  • Yeah, it looks like they were more into being quiet and non interactive.

    Generally, I would have said it differently because I’m an old fart and not afraid to say “hey, could you chill on the questions, I’m not up for it.” Not only am I fine with being direct, I also don’t feel the need to be snarky.

    So obviously, I’m also not likely to ever have to respond to such a statement as theirs.

    So, what I think would be the ideal response is different from how I would actually respond.

    In your place, I think something along the lines of “cool, no problem” would have been best. It lets them know you got the message, but doesn’t push back on a stranger for being a bit of a dick, which can be risky.


  • Well, like I keep reminding my teenager, teenagers are idiots.

    They can’t help it. Their brains are still cooking in puberty juice

    Every single person you’ve ever known was an idiot as a teenager. The only questions are how big of one, and was it obvious to everyone around them or not?

    But, yeah, that general kind of idiocy is pretty common. “I’m so random! hahahahah!” It’s a thing. Back in my day, we didn’t have the benefit of the internet, so we had to be loud when we were being idiots for attention.

    The meowing part is just a variation on a theme that runs through teenagers where a vaguely inoffensive noise is used often enough and long enough to become offensive to the ear.

    An example of teenage stupidity: back in high school, me and one of my friends had a pact. At any point, one of us could call out “Merry Christmas!”. The other, regardless of when or where it was, had to respond with “shitter’s full!” The price of failing to do so? Nothing at all, it was just two idiot teenagers being idiots. The staff at school were smart enough to ignore it and eventually we stopped because we moved on to other stupidity. Well, for a while; the last time we ran into each other was a year ago, and we were in our late forties, but I called out Merry Christmas, and he sure as fuck yelled out that his shitter was full.

    I never said adults weren’t idiots too ;)


  • Plenty, though it’s a general thing rather than some rigid code. And these are my rules, not necessarily things that everyone should be doing. When it comes to that, Wheaton’s law covers everything well enough lol.

    First, in full honesty, I sometimes will break my rules and engage with assholes, trolls, or other bad actors out of sheer boredom to entertain myself, and I’ll often throw all my other rules out the window if they’re enough of an asshole.

    So, my number one rule is honesty. I refuse to lie. For one, I’ve come to value the freedom of being exactly who I am too much to fuck around. For another, I’m too fucking old to keep track of bullshit, so I’d fuck up eventually anyway. Now, I’m not saying I’ll never wrap a truth up in fancy clothes for entertainment sake, I enjoy telling stories for my own fun and I’ll tell them in a way that pleases me. The facts are always true, though the way they’re expressed might make it seem otherwise.

    Like, I sometimes break out stories about my friend Spider. If I just say that he mouthed off in a bar and got me into a fight, that’s fucking boring. If I say that he pulled out his penis because the was worried he broke it, that’s less boring, but telling the story in one line is a waste when describing said penis is so much more fun. Same with my stories about my cousin, Fucking Ryan. I’m not ruining a good story by writing it down using minimalism, I’m going to tart that bitch up and make it a ride, you dig? It’s all true, but if I say Fucking Ryan stole a hamburger from me, that’s not as entertaining as describing the ketchup leaking from his pocket.

    Second, if I choose to answer a question, I try to answer it to the best of my knowledge, without too much in the way of judging that it was asked. You ask about how to tell if you broke your dick, the answer is going to be about how you tell, with no more than a return question about why you need to know. That is negated when the person asking is a douche, where I will give them shit about them being a douche, but I’ll still answer.

    Third, I try to remember that I’m talking to other humans. Sometimes the bots and ai generated stuff makes that hard. Other times, I fall into the trap of reacting to what’s on the screen rather than the fact that a human put it there. This is the rule I fail to follow the most. A lot of the time, that doesn’t matter because humans are assholes, and some of the shit they say is worth some backlash. But I try to take a second and think about what might have caused someone to say something shitty that is out of character even if I don’t know them.

    Which leads into the fourth. There’s a limit on how many slaps I’ll go into a slap fight. I figure that if I can’t either redirect the person into a real conversation in three or four comments that also include not taking their bullshit, it isn’t worth continuing. That means that I may tell someone they’re acting like an asshole, but I’ll also be trying to get them to break out of it and move on. Believe it or not, it works. Not all the time, but it amazes me how often just telling someone they’re being a dick, and that I’m just another human trying to interact makes them stop and think for a second. Works best with folks that are already attacking an idea instead of a person, but are just being dicks to the person as a side thing.

    What it all boils down to is extensions of Wheaton’s law. Ways to not be a dick, or to be less of a dick.


  • Alright, number one, you’re a fucking douche. I’m going to answer anyway, but grow the fuck up and stop being a walking pimple.

    I got interrupted a dozen times writing this, so don’t expect it to be smooth from paragraph to paragraph.

    First, attraction isn’t inherently drawn to youth, even when people are young. Youth can be attractive, but it isn’t universally so. So, your premise is flawed from the foundation. Attraction is complicated.

    One of the major components of it is how our brain looks for viable mates, on a primitive baby making level. That means part of what we look for is about fertility and probably viability for child rearing.

    That’s actually the reason some teenagers will be attractive to anyone and everyone; they simply look like they’re fertile and developed enough to be a parent in that primitive, animal level where common sense doesn’t exist.

    However, most teenagers don’t look attractive to most adults, and sometimes not even to other teenagers. Why? Because our brains expect a certain degree of development before it starts the arousal cascade. If you can’t impregnate the potential mate, they aren’t really a potential mate.

    For the female body, for women that are going to look fertile and viable as a parent, the body hits the range of looking right typically in the late teens to early twenties (using the Tanner scale as the basis), but extends well into middle age, even for the kind of woman-attracted people that are ageist. Why? Because people are really bad judges of age tbh. Even post-menopause, not every woman looks past fertility.

    Conversely, showing signs of aging doesn’t mean you’re past fertility. Ever run across someone that’s dealt with addiction, had a hard life, and you think they’re old? You can abuse your body hard enough to look old in twenties. I’m talking discolored, wrinkled skin, patchy hair going gray, all of the stereotypical crap that’s not only caused by actual aging.

    So, that’s part of it. People are attracted to things other than youth.

    I’m getting some meatspace interruptions, so this is a little scattered, but that’s the idea.


    Second, a lot of what we think of as pretty, or beautiful in terms of features and secondary characteristics is formed before puberty. It’s even fair to say that some aspects of it form way before, even before we form accessible memories.

    The faces and bodies we’re exposed to growing up don’t tend to be mostly teenagers. So our foundation of beauty preferences under normative development aren’t either.

    Third, you underestimate the power of being hot for teacher, or hot for Stacy’s mom (or Stiffler’s), or your friend’s mom.

    Horny kids, particularly horny teenage boys, they see that hot mom, teacher, grocery store clerk, nun, nurse, or whatever, they’re a giant pulsing cock. So every woman is a fantasy potentially. If/when they have positive interactions with these adult women, that builds a layer of positive associations in the brain saying “this type of look is good”, and that is very easy to link such sexual feelings.

    As we age, we also tend to be most exposed to age peers. So we date age peers more. Which means those layers of positive feedback age with us. That’s part of why teenagers will think someone is hot even when they’re covered in acne, smell like an axe body spray truck hit them, or maybe look like Tammy Faye Baker is their makeup artist, are underdeveloped and look like babies. That’s who they’re around, so they ignore the stuff that’s unattractive on average.

    So, an adult finding another adult attractive enough to masturbate to isn’t unusual at all.

    And then, it’s about sex too

    Tony young men know that young women are going to be unlikely to have sex with them. So do young women that are into women, but I kinda get the impression you’re a guy, so I’m leaning towards that in all this. So, when a young dude sees a MILF, the M in MILF becomes really important because, when it comes right down to it, if they’re a mom at all, there has been jizz inside her. Tracy that sits next to you in trig, or your 101 course at community college ain’t fucking you and may not be fucking anyone. But Tracy’ mom? She puts out! At least once.

    That may seem weird, but on a subconscious level it matters. And it keeps mattering. Even when you’re old and gray, and wanting a nice fap, who are you going to fantasize about? That damn near infant that can’t even buy a drink, or that fine-ass woman that has had a decade to learn what she wants and might be willing to tell you about it? I’m picking the one that is going to be more likely to be a good partner, though not every adult man would.

    And that’s also true. Plenty of guys my age think the way you do, that barely old enough to vote is somehow more desirable because the skin is more elastic.

    But here’s some truth for you. I’ve been fucking since I was 14, off and on. I’ve fucked some of the same women as adults that were girls when I fucked them as a teenager. Without fail, every single one was better with age. In my twenties, fucking women from the same age range you idealize, on up to a couple in their fifties, I can say that youth does not a good fuck equal.

    Oh, there’s more athleticism during the college years, yeah. But serious, making your toes curl good sex? That takes practice. I’ll trade the extra bounciness of youth for the ability to communicate in the bedroom every single time.

    Those “barely legal” age range models? Yeah they’re pretty. But not more pretty, just younger.

    Seriously here. You’re probably a guy. You need to reflect on yourself. You gotta grow the fuck up. If you don’t, then by the time you’re my age, you’ll be the creeper drooling over practical children compared to you, and still not getting laid. You don’t want to be that guy. Nobody likes that guy.



  • That’s not necessarily true though.

    The degree of monetary value comes from the person in the picture, but the photographs have value on their own. Maybe not much, but it’s there.

    Whether or not anyone likes the capitalist system that’s behind needing to decide who can profit off of a photograph to what degree, the subject of a photo is only partly responsible for the photo.

    Taking a picture of a cactus is indeed different from that of a human, but you can see that a human being in the picture doesn’t automatically change the value of it as art.

    Portraiture, live photography of events, those are skills. It absolutely is not as simple as pushing a button. Even now, with digital cameras that can make some of the adjustments on the fly, a photographer getting a good image is more than luck.

    That’s why, when doing portraits and event photography, there’s contracts in place. It is entirely possible to hire a photographer and have ownership of the images. It’s expensive, but it’s possible. You or me? We ain’t taking pictures of Ozzy and having them be worth much of anything at all to anyone else, including Ozzy. Our images would only be monetarily valuable because he’s in them, and maybe not even then. A selfie at a back stage event? You aren’t making shit off of that

    A professional photographer, taking high quality images of famous people absolutely brings value to the end photo. There’s a reason why rich, famous people will hire them and negotiate contracts with them, and it isn’t because they’re too lazy to handle a camera, or don’t have flunkies willing to do the work.

    Again, if we wanna debate the merits of capitalism and it’s impact on the arts, that’s a fascinating subject. But this lawsuit, within the current legal paradigm, is perfectly valid. The photographer has rights to the images, Ozzy doesn’t. If Ozzy had wanted those rights, it is possible (in general) to do so, either at the time or afterwards.

    Maybe you haven’t run across it, but there’s actually a lot of people into portraiture as art. They’ll gladly pony up thousands, or more for what they consider great art photos of people that aren’t famous at all. Even Anne Geddes (the photographer of the baby bee image) has fans of her stuff willing to pay tidy sums, and her stuff is essentially fluff with little complexity. Well executed fluff, but still. You get into the serious portraiture photogs and you’re talking sometimes hundreds of thousands for prints, though it’s kinda rare to go that high afaik.


  • Well, yeah, there’s a difference “under the hood”, as in how the brain is processing things.

    But, on any practical level, dogs learn parts of human language.

    What’s really interesting is when you discover that dogs can tell the difference between “let’s go to” specifics. If you’re getting them to go for a walk, they start engaging in pre-walk behaviors. If you’re getting them to go to the car, they’ll engage in pre-car behaviors. Most dogs I’ve interacted with at that level, they can understand a ton of subordinate words like that.

    I used the above examples because my corgi had both of those combinations down (though I didn’t use let’s go), plus a few others. I’d tell her “time for a walk”, and she’d go get the leash, bring it to me, and wait for it to be put on.

    I’d tell her, “time for a ride”, and she’d go get her seat belt harness, then wait for it to be put on, just with less enthusiasm lol. Rides weren’t always to places she wanted to go

    But the cool thing is that I didn’t intentionally teach her any of that. I’d get the leash while telling her it was walk time, call her to me and have her sit while I knelt down. She drew the connections and started getting the leash before I could. The harness part came later, and I did teach her the word for that item, then to go get it, which led to her figuring out the rest.

    Dog vocabulary is limited. I can’t recall the numbers, but there are only so many words they can keep and reliably remember. Their grammar if human language is also limited in that they don’t “understand” that “let’s go” has a specific function as in that it’s saying “let us verb”. The “let’s go” is a word to them; you could say shit weird, like “walks gonna get” that makes no real sense in English, but they’d still learn what you meant by it and start getting ready to go for a walk.

    It comes down to complexity, tbh. You, as a human, could learn more than a handful of words in Spanish, and eventually speak in whole sentences with clear grammar. A dog can’t. There’s a limit to how much they learn a language vs learning that some human grunts mean something.

    See, dogs have language in the absence of humans. You see feral dog packs, and they’re communicating constantly. Tails, ears, body, scent, all of it combined with vocalizations form a language of its own. It just isn’t as complicated as human language. Even the most complicated animal languages that have been studied don’t come close to human. But language isn’t solely our gift.

    So the dogs are indeed like you with your grasp of Spanish currently. They understand a pidgin form of human, and we learn pidgin dog. Mind you, most of the time they’re better at human than we are at dog. Learning to understand tail movement, as an example, takes more time and exposure than people think. Did you know that the direction of wagging matters? It’s a thing!



  • The only time a mod account being active matters is when the community isn’t being moderated.

    As an example, one of my meat space friends mods two or three communities, and never posts, and hasn’t left a comment in something like a year. But he still checks in daily, despite the communities being low traffic.

    On the opposite end, I’m running my mouth all over lemmy daily, but none of the communities I mod have any activity at all because there’s no point to them, which means I never check them any more. So I look like an active mod to some eyes, but he doesn’t. That’s despite neither of us having ever had to take a mod action at all.

    If there’s a community already established, and it isn’t active, try posting there for a while and see if it becomes active a lot of people actually scroll all because it’s more interesting on average. So new posts to a dead community can draw eyes, and maybe lead to activity from others.

    If that doesn’t work, starting another one is worth the effort.

    That being said, sometimes, if the community is on one of the bigger instances, starting the same thing on a smaller one can work out well



  • Man, if only you knew. Maybe you do, I dunno.

    But the scale they’re using doesn’t even begin to cover it all. There’s some things that show up as a smell in poo, like diabetes in particular where you get a fermented fruit smell underneath the usual scatole forward smell.

    There’s medications that make some unpleasant odors, with opiates being one of the more subtle but distinctive ones. Fish oil for cholesterol is unmistakable. Antibiotics throw the entire digestive tract into chaos, so there’s a span where poo can smell kinda neutral before the bacteria rebound, and then you get some weird mixes. Poo can smell like a dead body that’s starting to bloat (and gods, that smell is one you’ll never mistake as anything else) after antibiotics. Which isn’t surprising that cadaverine is possible, but when it’s the predominant smell, it’s crazy until you run across it enough times that you don’t literally run to your charge nurse thinking something’s wrong.

    What’s really fun is when you run across someone that’s post-antibiotic, has a ton of medications that generate smells, and eat bad. I once smelled what I thought for sure was a dead, rotting skunk. Which I have smelled before, so it isn’t a random comparison, it smelled almost identical. That one hit me one morning going into a patient’s home, and I was dreading trying to sort out how to handle a dead animal stinking up the place, because who handles that for the patient?

    But I went to check the patient first, of course, and it was them.

    Those biochemical factories in our intestines are amazing, and horrible.






  • Well, not sure what you mean for certain.

    However, nerve blocks are used to reduce pain, or reduce nerve signals.

    The pudendal nerve services the general pelvic floor, iirc. I know that it can get impinged and end up causing a wide range of problems, with chronic pain being the most common.

    By injecting the nerve and surrounding tissues with medication, you can reduce or even eliminate that.

    Back before ultrasound, you’d have to palpate to feel the site to know exactly where to inject. The image shows the approach used to do so. Afaik, nobody does it like this nowadays. It’s all done with imaging, with ultrasound being the default to the best of my knowledge.

    In other words, if yo junk is burning, taking a finger up the ass and a needle in the taint might actually be better.