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No, wanting to see the night sky isn't a twee retvrn to ghibli-ass take. It's not a matter of some anprim impulse to dismantle industrial society for ~nature aesthetics~, it's an extremely visible symptom of environmental degradation that gets downplayed because the externality seems trivial to most people: "Oh no, the night sky, what ever will we do without it."

But it actively disrupts light-sensitive circadian rhythms in plants and wildlife, which disrupts foraging patterns, reproductive and hibernation cycles, and contributes to wildlife population declines. It's not the major contributor to those declines, but it's an additional point of stress in an ecosystem already stressed by climate change and other forms of industrial pollution. And so much of it is wholly unnecessary.

I don't think people realize how far-reaching the problem is, either. That light isn't just confined to the places people use. You don't escape it by just taking the bus to the edge of town. That light carries, in some cases for hundreds of kilometers. Death Valley has some of the darkest skies in the US, and yet, the dome of light above Las Vegas is visible on the horizon over 250 km away! Anywhere within 50 km of a major urban center, just about anywhere in the world, never gets darker than a night under a full moon.

And this is very much a recent problem too. Before the switchover to LEDs, it was relatively expensive to light places. That meant actually accounting for the energy use and making sure it was being used where it was needed. That light was also warm-colored, so it didn't travel as far. With the decreased cost of lighting, it became standard to light places like daytime whenever they might be needed. Lighting didn't get safer, it just got more thoughtless.

The reason you see astronomy-types sounding the alarm most loudly is because they're the ones who have been seeing the full effects of light pollution and its encroachment on dark skies. It's a hobby for me too, but it's partly because I'm a night owl who grew up in a small town with nothing else to do. I used to be able to clearly see the Milky Way horizon to horizon when I grew up in the mid-00s. The last time I visited about five years ago, I could only see it overhead. The population has fallen by like 10%, but the skies are brighter. I can tell when the college decided to leave the football stadium lights overnight. I can tell where the car dealerships that added overnight display lights are. I can even see when trucks with the fuckass LED light bars are coming over a hill from 5 km away.

the worst console in our history is now playable with a subscription and a paid peripheral btw

please dont think about the fact that we still have legal slaves because of our demonic IP defending practices put people in so much debt that they will not pay it off to us in their lifetime

excellent question

Gary Bowser, an old disabled man, was released from prison in 2023 following a 14 month stay after Nintendo imprisoned him for working with a third party company that made modification chips for consoles, during which Nintendo filed a civil suit against him, with the court deciding he owed $14m to Nintendo in damages. He will be paying it off monthly for the rest of his life.

here is how he describes being arrested:

surprised at how many people are mad at me for bringing this up, and going out of their way to justify or dismiss Nintendo's violent state-backed abduction-at-gunpoint of a 50 year old man over some fuckin ROMs. i thought we were all already, like, on-the-level about how insane that is.

"god forbid we enjoy something for once" in response to criticism of Nintendo forcing someone into a lifelong debt after over a year in prison is crazy, when what youre so desperate to enjoy unbothered is a re-rerelease of a 17 year old game and a subscription service to play a console whose entire legacy is how terrible it was.

And what happened? He made a public apology, and they let him gracefully exit the company, finishing the series he was working on at the time.

A trans woman says some stuff on her personal social media account that certain people don’t like and they shitcan her the same day and start canceling orders for any new issues of the series she wasn’t even half done with yet.