OpenStars

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

The result may surprise you: about 50/50, based on polls. These people relate their thoughts and experiences and explain why they feel as they do.

Honestly though, "get on board or STFU" is not a particularly compelling pro-democracy bumper sticker, nor is "meh, what are you going to do?"

All we want is for someone to keep it 💯 - the percentage, not the age.

                    I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


                III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


                  IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


                V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
            For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
            Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
            For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.one/post/16476649

For the good of the republic and to demonstrate new leadership before the election.

Lays out an argument about how to navigate the difficulties ahead, addressing the challenges that would result.

Jon Stewart is outstanding, but also this video seems like one of his better ones. Aside from gun issues specifically, part of what makes this great is his calling the for-profit media sources out for their hypocrisy and willful ignorance, and callousness to the lives of innocents including our children.

Originally a light-hearted post poking fun at and doing a survey to gather input, but it has turned into a thought-provoking deeper dive into what it really means to be someone that people would call a "tankie". Note that to some (die-hard conservatives), we all are "tankies" on the Fediverse, but is there a meaning beyond the pejorative of merely "holding a belief that I do not personally agree with"? Come and join the fun, or read about the community consensus even long into the future?

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.

This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.

Recently I have been thinking about Shining in the Darkness.

I never played it when it first came out, but I love to go through series back to their OG titles and often that leads me to dungeon-crawlers:-) - Phantasy Star, Wizardry, etc. A lot of games I'll just hack so as to speed through them more quickly, but dungeon-crawlers I like the slow pacing & grinding - it helps calm my mind, especially like during seasons of the year when I may have trouble sleeping:-).

The UI is really crappy - like looking in the inventory doesn't even show which items are equipped or not - but probably for its time it was revolutionary, or something. Anyway it's functional and that's sufficient. Oh and the graphics are not on par with modern games, obviously. But it's old, so... who cares? :-P

What I like most about it is that tripartite balance between the three hardcoded characters. There is something about that... - like Kirk + Spock + McCoy in Star Trek - that somehow speaks to the human condition. In this case your main character does the deep cuts necessary to win the boss fights (even barehanded he does far more than the others when you get them, he's so strong!), and your mage support Pyra can really dish out the broad damage to a group (especially with the cursed whip, the only really worthwhile cursed item in the game for long-term use) or even all enemies, and your healer Milo splits the difference with his own magic spells + multi-targeting weapon. Milo can become your MVP with sufficient leveling and the Boost spell from Pyra - and he's so speedy that I'll give him the Sword of Light if Pyra's whip + that can kill things for zero MP at end-game.

Dragon Warrior/Quest had a similar concept - 3 hardcoded character slots, each with pre-defined names (not sure about the main one?) and back-stories for them; where the main guy was a straight warrior, then a Prince as a hybrid attacker+spellcaster, and finally a Princess offering more spells, though the latter two would swap as to whose was more powerful throughout the game iirc. Anyway, Shining in the Darkness may not have been unique, but they just did it so very well that it highly stands out in my mind in this aspect.

Shining in the Darkness also offered SUPER high resell value for items - something like half or even three-quarters of the value? So rather than my usual tactic of skipping over items to purchase so as to save gold overall, in this game I would intentionally slow myself down and buy every single one of the gear items, and thus experience gear that otherwise might never see any use at all in the game. I think it is more enjoyable that way.

I think I really enjoy the idea of a leveled-up Pyra being able to use her whip to great effect. She thereby breaks the trope of "oh I'm a weak wizard-man/woman and can only cast spells, maybe do nothing at all from the back row when I'm out of MP", and that adds a dimension to the game of deciding when to use a spell vs. using the whip to hold off on using your MP for as long as you can (despite MP-draining floors!:-P). Likewise using her cursed whip offers its own set of trade-offs: more power at first, for less control if the enemies did not die after the first turn - which if she was not a spell-caster would definitely not be worthwhile, but since the effect only happens after she chooses to use a physical attack, again offers up a whole new element of strategy to the game. Milo's multi-attack weapons have similar trade-offs - if he's a high level and Boost + Slow are/or used, it becomes REALLY powerful, plus being able to hit+kill up to 3 enemies in normal mobs also helps a great deal - and too the use of a "shield" that boosts attack power at the cost of defense.

Running contrary to that is the idea that while you may be able to mop the floor with all the common mobs, when you open up a chest and get a "boss" type monster, you have to be REALLY prepared! It is the maximum difficulty of an area that matters most, not the minimum or average. But even here... that facts leads you to behave more cautiously overall, which then ironically wraps around to encourage boldness in the short-term, as in go in and do a bunch, then get out and return, not try to limp along and then have your ass handed to you unexpectedly.

Perhaps I enjoy the reminder that while it is good to excel in life, it is also necessary to find balance, maybe with the support of others, or even just within ourselves:-). And this game was all about balance, in every aspect of it, which I very much appreciated.