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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.workstohmmm@lemmy.worldHmmm
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    5 hours ago

    Only if your sub is cool with it, but they need to know going in that either option is likely to chafe and dig into the sensitive skin around their wrists, possibly even causing bleeding depending on how much they strain against them. Definitely not recommended for a first time if you don’t know what your own responses to stimuli are likely to be.

    Much better to use a soft hemp rope, around a quarter inch thick or more, and make sure you’re binding with safe knots. You can’t just go in with any old naval knot or whatever; there are specific bindings that are safe for use on people; look them up. Always check your bindings to ensure a safe amount of slack (you should be able to easily slide a finger around any part of the wrist or ankle for proper circulation) and always make sure you have a set of EMT clothing shears handy in case something goes wrong. No, kitchen scissors are not good enough; EMT shears have serration, and specially shaped blades, in order to cut through heavy fabric or bindings easily.

    Also please don’t use duct tape, there’s literally no way to have it bind but also have sufficient slack. You will impede circulation. Just a terrible idea.














  • The problem is that his payout, like the rest of his fortune, is in exceedingly overvalued Tesla stock. So using that to finance Twitter means selling, and every time he sells the price takes a hard dip because Tesla investors know they’re standing on a soap bubble and they are extremely nervous about it bursting. Any sudden uptick in sales pressure is liable to cause a small avalanche of investors abandoning ship.

    The process of buying Twitter alone cut his net worth by half because of how much it cratered the Tesla stock price.





  • I’m not sure I fully agree there. I think it’s absolutely accurate to say that Andor didn’t need to be Star Wars. Like, you absolutely could file all the serial numbers off and get a show that works in more or less exactly the same way.

    With that said, I think Andor absolutely benefits from being Star Wars, in a couple of a ways.

    The first is that they can skip all the broad strokes world building. We don’t need the concept of the galactic empire explained to us, or the general structure of how the senate works, and so on. The big pieces are all in place, so they can get straight to the small scale world building instead. This would be a solvable problem if you were creating something new, but its definitely nice that they get to skip straight to the important bits this way.

    The second, bigger benefit (IMO) is the juxtaposition created by the tonal shift. Something that’s very notable about Star Wars is that the tone and the content are often rather at odds with each other. George Lucas is on record as saying that in his mind the Rebellion were the Viet-Cong (with the obvious implication that the Empire is the USA). That’s some fucking heavy shit. Luke’s adoptive parents get brutally murdered by agents of the state, for absolutely no crime at all, and this inspires him to take up with a group of, well, terrorists. I mean, this is literally the same as a young Palestinian joining up with Hamas. Star Wars is about some really, really heavy shit, but it also starts with the line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” This is a fairy-tale about magic space wizards, but also a story about insurgents blowing up a massive military installation, and eventually performing a coup and assassinating the head of state.

    Over the years, the story around Star Wars has leaned increasingly into the “magic space wizards” side of things. It’s seen as a family friendly property, something for kids to enjoy at Disneyland. The creators of Andor set out to intentionally shock the audience by creating something that leans hard away from that family friendly image. Andor is a fucking dark story, about desperate people adopting brutal methods in the face of brutal oppression.

    And they’re not just doing that for shock value. The point of this is to tell a story about the ways in which we idealise “rebels” in one breath and condemn “terrorists” in another. To many people, Luke is a hero, but that young man who joins up with Hamas is a monster. Reality is complicated and messy. Hamas are a real political group, with a real ideology, and despite the monstrous oppression they face, some of that ideology really sucks. Their targets aren’t “Storm Troopers”, they’re often civilians, or conscripts. On the other hand, many of those conscripts behave in ways far more monstrous than anything the empire is ever depicted as doing.

    Andor is a story about fascism, about the absolute necessity of resisting it, and about the monstrous personal cost that resistance can demand of us. By setting that story against the backdrop of a “family friendly” property I think it really does a lot to drive home the disconnect between our ideals of resistance and the cold, hard reality.