I was watching #Girkin (guy who shot down the Boeing and russian imperial hero) since the start of the invasion, he is canonical psychopath and watching him is like watching Hollywood thriller, but in reality. He is a full-time supporter of russian imperial expansion, but in same time he was criticizing Putin for not being effective in doing this all the way.
Starting from full-scale invasion, he was complaining that Kremlin colonial expedition is too small to genocide the whole #Ukraine, and was demanding from Putin that he should mobilize the whole russian empire into war. After Putin performed partial mobilization, and it appeared that imperial military industry is not able to supply even partially mobilized horde, Girkin turned into anti-corruption activist. So now he is demanding from #Putin to prosecute his oligarch friends, who ruined soviet legacy and made russia technologically depended from West.
Which reminded me of another notorious russian Nazi, #Navalny, who started his political carrier by inciting genocide on Sakartvelo people, and in the end was imprisoned for his demands to prosecute Putin's oligarch friends 🙂 This looks like a pattern. In the empire governed by the cult of violence and death, the main blocker for psychopath dreams to come true is a corrupt government
@Czarnobajewka Girkin is a great example of an archetypal "anti-villain". While an anti-hero is a character with negative character traits but ultimately fights for good, an anti-villain is a character with positive character traits but ultimately fights for evil.
Girkin is fearless, unafraid to stand up to Russia's dissent-hating dictator, and idealistic. Unfortunately, his ideals are "Russian Imperialism".
I love the efficiency of #Ukrainian. The entire question “Did you get enough sleep?” is condensed into 8 letters: “Виспався?” (The answer is ні.) #LanguageLearning
@KevinLikesMaps My reaction has been just the opposite - so many common things seem insanely long. For example, "use" being "використовувати". 7 syllables for one of the most common verbs! And it's hardly the only example of that sort of thing.
@KevinLikesMaps It just feels that many / most common verbs are abnormally long. And they often get even longer when you have to use the perfective (something I really have no handle on). Eg. vs. "Look" you nominally have "Дивитися", but in practice it's commonly "Подивитися". "Cook" vs. "Готувати" vs. "Приготувати". Etc. Even "do", surely the most common verb after "to be" (which #Ukrainian thankfully commonly omits), is 3 syllables, potentially further lengthened by a trailing З for perfective
@KevinLikesMaps perfective is supposed to be "when the subject completely does an action", and imperfective when "it's not completely done". But in practice it just feels so random -like, how often do you do a partial action? Like, when talking about mashed potatoes you're supposed to use "Їсти", but when talking about a piece of pie, "поїсти", because it's harder to define whether mashed potatoes are a "whole thing" and thus whether they're all eaten .... it all just seems so random.
I find it curious that some of the declensions are actually rather reminiscent of Icelandic. Not most of them, but enough that it makes me wonder if they date all the way back to the Slavic / Germanic branching point.
@KevinLikesMaps Yeah - the very reason why we have an Icelandic word for Kyiv - Kænugarður (Garden of Small Boats) - is because our histories were connected, as they were part of the viking realm, and Ukrainian / Rus leaders are mentioned in the Icelandic sagas. :) Things like "Olafr svænski gifti siðan Ingigierði dottor sina Iarisleifi kononge syni Valldamars konongs i Holmgarðe" - "Olafur the Swede then married Ingigerður, his daughter, to Yaroslav the King, son of Volodymyr, in Novgorod".
“From there, I maneuvered to this year’s car listings, checking the box for all-electric and unchecking the box for Teslas. I just don’t like the man. I’ve spent enough years around enough bullshitters that I can spot them a mile away. In his case, I could spot him from orbit, using one of his overpromised, underdelivered satellites.”
@paint@pluralistic Agreed on the first part, mixed on the middle part, and disagree on the latter. SpaceX makes up >80% of the global space launch market. Starlink makes up a huge and ever-growing percentage of total global satellite bandwidth. Calling that "overpromised, underdelivered" "bullshit" is just not accurate.
That doesn't mean he achieves everything he sets out to do (and many if not most are late). FSD being a classic example. But most (hugely ambitious) goals get achieved.
@paint@pluralistic I think it's key to remember that he's not the one out there doing all these things. Tesla alone has nearly 130k employees. His association with these - yes, very real, very impressive - achievements - comes down to a focus to achieve things that are "difficult but not impossible", and then inspiring engineers en masse who want to work on them to apply (Tesla and SpaceX are always top destinations for engineering graduates).
@glitzersachen@paint@pluralistic I agree, and I think it's a growing threat to his companies, that the more people he turns off, the more he risks the company's talent-attraction advantage. But at least historically, he has inspired far more people than, say, ULA or GM or whatnot.
@ct_bergstrom I plan to be active on both. I still have a lot of friends over on Birdsite who "found Mastodon too complicated" (but aren't happy with Birdsite), so I'm crossing my fingers that they'll switch over to Bluesky if they did a good job with the implementation.
To any #vatniks who claim "#Ukraine's genocide of the people of #Donbas" as an argument for the #Russian invasion, and refuse to believe the #UN reports on the (incredibly low) rates of civilian fatalities (on both sides of the Donbas frontline) before the invasion, a simple test:
@Lundemo@nileane@dell Moderation - the act of labeling posts as matching up to certain rules, and then reacting to said rule matching - also exists here on Mastodon.
@jon Reverse-chronological timeline is best for when you are Extremely Online, like me (and the other top percentage of all Rattata, er I mean, Twitter users)
@PavelASamsonov@jon Adn as someone who can't watch it constantly, it really bugs me.
Users should be able to pick their timeline. To sort it by who you interact with most and/or to boost up those who post infrequently over those who are constantly posting.
What shouldn't happen is other people's likes altering your feed. And the fights they're involved in getting into your feed. That's what makes Twitter toxic.
