I can’t believe people still argue over whether or not Balrogs have wings when the text unambiguously says they do. You can have wings and also have a shadow that looks like wings.

His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings.

...suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall...

Like two vast wings but then he explicitly says its wings were spread, clearly stating it has wings. To be the most generous you could try to say the wings are made of shadows, but based on the text they’re clearly still wings.

Yes, Balrogs have wings.

Programming and Linux. Oh boy, what to pick…

Terminal text editors: VIM vs Emacs is the main debate there. (There are others but these are ones people argue the most about)

Linux Distros: Arch, Debian, Mint, CachyOS, …

Init Systems: Systemd vs OpenRC. Honestly, probably the most toxic debate on this list.

Programming Languages: Python, Shell, but the heated one is C vs Rust

A non-exhaustive list of ones I couldn’t think of a category for:

• Tiling vs Floating Window Managers
• Chromium vs Gecko-based browsers
• Bash vs Zsh vs Fish

I love computers and Linux, but man, the amount of toxic in-fighting and gatekeeping is a real turnoff. Just use what you want. At the end of the day, we are all nerds doing what we love.

Should the hobby continue to be about both the act of printing and tinkering with printers, or is there a reasonable place for people who want “3D printing” as a hobby but not “3D printers” as a hobby. As part of this, is it okay for a company to lock down its firmware and prevent people from using their printer over a network without going through their software first?

Bambu Lab has made remarkable progress in “mainstreaming” 3D printing but they’ve done so at the expense of a lot of the “soul” of the space. Unlike many of their consumer-facing predecessors and competitors, they are closed-source and proprietary. They make a good product, but you don’t get to have control over it the same way you do with other brands. And that just means other brands are likely to follow suit, now that Bambu Lab has shown it to be an effective strategy.

I mourn the loss of common purpose the hobby once had, but at the same time I do think it’s a natural progression for something new and complex to eventually become consumer-grade. Look at how computers have evolved into rectangles we keep in our pockets.

Star Trek (Voyager): Was it murder to split Tuvix back into Tuvok and Neelix?

I’ve got a long and complex possible solution to offer regarding this ethical clusterfuck, and I’m willing to elaborate if someone’s interested to hear it.

Edit (possible solution): Voyager’s database should include the Enterprise D’s information regarding Riker’s duplication incident. While Voyager’s crew already found a way to separate Tuvix, they could’ve searched for a possibility to repeat that process and then split back the copy Tuvix a few milliseconds into the original Tuvok and Neelix before said copy became self-aware.

Cooking:

Aioli is made with oil and no egg. If it includes egg, it is a mayonnaise.

Many people just call everything “aioli” these days, even if it’s technically a mayonnaise.

Synthesizers: digital vs analog.

Common opinion holds that analog (specifically oscillators, but also filters and even VCAs [voltage controlled amplifiers]) are warmer and more natural sounding while digital are cold and harsh.

The thing is, digital emulation of analog hardware has become virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, but there is a certain segment that refuses to believe their $5000 Minimoog can be so easily replicated by software (realistically I doubt Bob Moog could tell the difference anymore).

Of course some also choose to argue which is better, which is just ridiculous because they both have their uses depending on what kinds of music you’re composing or just what sounds you’re trying to make.

Mycology is full of them which are mostly the result of genetic sequencing and the good old “where do you draw the line between species” question but a recent and high visibility one is the Collybia shift.

Before genetic testing, Collybia was a genus characterized by smallish pale-spored mushrooms with convex caps, no ring, and gills which are broadly attached to the stem (the simplest shape the average person would imagine for a mushroom), this became one of the classic “statures” of mushrooms “Collybioid”. As we sequenced Collybia species, they were slowly moved into other Collybioid genera like Collybiopsis and Gymnopus. Eventually this resulted in most of the Collybioid mushrooms being moved out of Collybia, leaving only the earliest-discovered mushrooms in the genus which were tiny parasitic mushrooms that weren’t really Collybioid at all.

Here’s an average “Collybioid” mushroom Gymnopus sp.

Then things got worse, a recent paper did a study on genus Clitocybe which is another genus which has a classic stature named after it, “Clitocyboid” which refers to smallish pale-spored, funnel-shaped, mushrooms with gills that run down the stem. This paper discovered that nearly everything we had been calling “Clitocybe” actually belonged in Collybia meaning that most mushrooms in Collybia are now Clitocyboid instead of Collybioid. This has resulted utter chaos which has some mycologists considering invoking the “common usage” rules in taxonomy to put the new Collybias back into Clitocybe to make things less confusing. This chaos has been compounded by the fact that iNaturalist has already accepted this name change, but only for the mushrooms explicitly studied in the paper and not their known relatives which has resulted in the Blewits being split between Collybia and Lepista (which itself was a recent name change from Clitocybe that everyone was still adjusting too).

Average nondescript Clitocyboid (no ID because these are nearly impossible):

A Blewit, AKA Clitocybe/Lepista/Collybia nuda:

Punk/metal/goth/hardcore subcultures and the nature of gatekeeping, poseurs, “selling out”, politics, social causes, and scenes that started out as youth culture now approaching 50yrs of development and have oldheads who never left as well as their grandkids joining up. For the most part the 90s “sell-out” idea that finding mainstream success is betrayal is gone so long as the band continues to be who they always were, some bands are naturally talented and will breakthrough into broader appeal. Gatekeeping can keep a community safe from predators trying to gain access to spaces where youth and intoxicated adults are just trying to have a fun time without having to fear exploitation. Sometimes youth come in trying way too hard and miss the point, sometimes the oldheads forget they were try-hard kids at one point too and are missing the point. In the past year I’ve run into a 65yo in the pit next to sweaty teens and watched a Millennial mom take her 5yo daughter to the edge of the stage and gently lower her into a crowd of tattooed, mohawked, crusty strangers who came together and made sure she floated safely to her dad. Also seen some boneheads get their shit rocked, so for all the debates and bickering we’ve never forgotten what’s really important. Best time I’ve had in the scene in nearly 20yrs.

In the Sonic fandom, there’s a debate over which is the “authentic” Sonic: the Western version or the Japanese one. It’s not about design, but rather personality, values, and attitude.

The thing is, the differences between the two are very subtle. Unless you’ve been in the fandom for years and have seen enough material on the subject, they’ll seem exactly the same to you.

My opinion is that “It doesn’t matter”~♪. At this point, there are countless versions of Sonic (the classic, the modern, Sonic SatAm, Sonic X, Archie Sonic, IDW Sonic, Fleetway Sonic, Sonic Boom, Sonic Prime, Movie Sonic…), all with their differences, but in general they share the, let’s say, “essence”* of the hedgehog, and that’s what matters.

*(If you’re not from Latin America, you won’t know how funny it is that I used that particular word)

I collect coins, and there’s always debates about what a coin is.

For those who don’t know, a coin is usually defined as an object with legal tender status somewhere; as opposed to a token that has a face value but is issued by a non-state actor; and a medal, which is anything that looks like a coin but doesn’t have any face value.

Now, aside from the expected debate over what is and isn’t a state, there’s also the issue of NIFC (not intended for circulation) coins. Many mints sell coins that are legal tender, but are never put into circulation, some people (often those that could be characterised as “old school”) take the position that as these aren’t intended to be used as legal tender, they aren’t really coins.

It doesn’t help that there are tiny island nations like Niue and Samoa that will basically let companies make anything legal tender if they pay them. This leads to the rather silly situation where a batarang, and a literal statue of hogwarts, are technically “coins”. (I’ve been told this is done as a import tariff dodge as the USA doesn’t charge import taxes on coins)

Furry Fandom:

How we represent ourselves as a fandom.

Some groups want the fandom to be more clean and family friendly. Some want it to remain weird and not always as family friendly as it currently is.

Some are more okay with using things like cheap plastic animal masks as bases for fursuit heads. Some people don’t want that type of stuff and would rather see bases be either hand made or use something like a sports helmet or mask to build the base around.

Some are okay with us becoming more mainstream and companies like Netflix taking a little more interest in us. Others want corporations to stay away from us.

As for me, you can guess my stance just by the fact of me being here on Lemmy. I’d rather see a base use something not quite as corporate as a cheap plastic junk mask as a base. I would also rather keep our fandom a little less sanitized and more weird to keep the corpos from coming in and turning our fandom into a heavily censored industry.

Recently got an allotment. No dig or not seems to be a fairly big one right now. It sounds nice but I don’t have the same Amazon addiction as some people so I don’t have 100m² of cardboard that I can lay across the plot.

Buying a shitload of cardboard and mulch isn’t an expense I am interested in right now. Over time I do want to move towards more perennial and larger plants so there won’t be much digging required anyway other than when replacing something. Or tubers/bulbs that you have to dig to harvest and plant anyway.

in VX circles there’s been a debate for at least 20 years whether it’s better to use copper or aluminium foil to isolate duractance attenuators. obviously aluminium is more of a nuisance because you have to add ridges to the foil, but it’s a lot cheaper. where it gets annoying is when the copper purists start talking about “ripple current” and “second laplacian instabilities” and “metallic saponification”. like bitch, you are not running anywhere close to that kind of linearity on your shitty little taped-together Gravitias-5. or 4.9, i guess. pfft. just get a hobby knife and crease that aluminium.

anyway i recently started a VX community at !deltahunters@feddit.nu, swing by.

Are tabs worth two spaces or four?