spaduf your content is good. downvoters must be haters.

Just a little post about transparency for your info.

If you didn't know, you can see a list of all of my mod actions at any time by clicking the Modlog link in the sidebar here:

This image shows my entire history of mod actions in this community as of right now:

It's mostly me trying to figure out how stickied posts work lol. I did remove two posts so far. Both times it was just because they didn't have the video duration in the title of the post. I did give them more than a day to edit the title to include it before removing the posts. If that ever happens to you, you're welcome to post the video again as long as the new post title follows rule 2.

If you ever have any questions for me about anything, you can send me a direct message or ask in one of these chat threads (tag me if you do that one, just in case). Either way, I'll do my best to respond quickly.

Thank you all for being here! I'm really proud of the community we're making :)

I will always upvote Technology Connections

It feels like the activity is partaking of me rather than the reverse

Thanks for giving me these words to describe the feeling so well. I don't feel interested and passionate... I feel consumed and dominated.

Now that I think about it, lots of words that describe focus have etymologies that feel appropriately sinister. Captivated, enthralled, enraptured, fascinated, bewitched, mesmerized, hooked - all related to being controlled against your will.

Please make sure the title of the video, the creator's or channel's name, and the duration of the video are in your post title. Rule 2. You can have other info as long as those three things are also included. Thanks!

Local hospital claims the lives of thousands of patients. Will it strike again?

Plenty of people within sexual relationships do sexual roleplaying with each other, to the point that it's a trope. People are definitely interested in sexual roleplaying.

As for why there's no TTRPG market for it, I can think of at least two barriers. One: people generally aren't interested in doing sexual roleplaying outside the boundaries of an already-sexual relationship. Two: people who do sexual roleplaying within already-sexual relationships aren't interested in buying a rulebook for it.

In casual sexual encounters, you'd never be able to expect someone else to know the rules, so even if they were interested, you'd have to teach them on the spot. In committed relationships, the structure of a ruleset is probably not necessary.

I could see there being a successful but small market, within the larger market of sex toys and games, for one-pagers that people in actively sexual relationships could buy to aid roleplaying with fun prompts or genre-specific character concepts.

It's more of a stretch, but there are two groups of people who regularly do improv with strangers/acquaintances in sexual situations. One is porn actors. Kinda silly, but maybe there's a market for a sex-TTRPG-based entertainment property in porn, in the style of D&D podcasts/shows. The other is cybersex chat room users. There could be something that caters to them, and chat rooms could facilitate connections between users that prefer particular systems, like you can do on Roll20 ("LFG").

Man Tommy's issues have issues

That's a complicated question.

I'm going to make an assumption that, for your purposes, you most likely don't have anything to worry about, but still:

Does participating in an online community about anarchism out you on a watchlist? There's no way to know what precisely constitutes a "watchlist" or what criteria US intelligence agencies use to populate them, but we do know that the DOD considers anarchists an "extremist ideology" that constitutes a potential "internal threat." Public communications and documents from US agencies indicate that "anarchist extremism" and/or "anarchist violent extremism" is a threat that is being monitored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

To address the question of violence, we also know that certain methods of surveillance by the US government are notoriously broad, and are not predicated on the commission of a crime, so it's not unlikely that simple suspicions of anarchist extremism could land your data in an NSA database somewhere. However, your data on an NSA watchlist is very unlikely to get you arrested if all you do is talk about the ideology and don't make anything that constitutes a threat of harm. And you're probably in that database anyway for some other reason.

Can you get arrested/charged for crimes? Not to be hyperbolic, but police can arrest you and charge you with crimes for any reason at any time. There's nothing you can do that guarantees you won't ever be arrested. That being said, being arrested and charged does not mean you'll be convicted, and police don't have infinite resources to just arrest anyone and everyone forever.

Still, are there examples of anarchists who have been spuriously arrested and charged with crimes despite being nonviolent? Yes. I've been arrested for nonviolent, legal political protest. I wasn't breaking any laws. I spent a day in jail on a made up charge, then they released me and never pursued the charge in court. Just a scare tactic. That's not an unusual story.

For a more extreme and recent example, anarchists in Atlanta are being charged with domestic terrorism, and one of them was extrajudicially murdered, for their nonviolent protests to stop cop city. Organizers for the legal, nonprofit bail fund in Atlanta were also arrested and charged spuriously with money laundering and charity fraud in a related case.

Two things about those incidents, though. One, these arrests are by local police with a grudge, and so I doubt it's related to a federal watchlist. Two, the victims are actively engaged in organizing for a political protest movement, not just chatting about Bakunin and Proudhon on a forum.

I think you should get involved, talk, and learn more about anarchism, socialism, communism, any stripe of anti-capitalism. I'm confident that you can learn about it and chat about it safely, regardless of whether your data ends up in an NSA database. But you should be aware that getting involved in IRL organizing on the left, even nonviolently (as it almost always is), isn't safe. It's absolutely, 100% worth doing, but political resistance has never been safe, and part of a good education is learning how to protect yourself.

they're gonna love that sweet, sweet liability

AKA scabs

Tried to follow a couple Lemmy communities from Mastodon, but it feeds you every post and comment, which gets unmanageable at any /c/ of reasonable size.

Is there a way that I can follow only the top-level posts from my Mastodon? Maybe I'm missing it.