Im Less Sad And Just As Cute

The fact that you see this rhetoric of “telegram is the Facebook Messenger of [evildoers]” on both the left and the right should tip you off it is not a partisan or factional issue. Everyone willing to employ surveillance and censorship will treat e2e encryption as the tool of the enemy bc they can’t aspire to control it

Telegram has the option to encrypt communication but it's closed source, and generally not considered to be a good choice for security.

Matrix is a protocol for integrating a ton of different chat platforms via federated servers, also open source. The encryption seems fine, it's based on Signal's mechanism, but it's not as heavily audited as Signal, it's more intended as a generic chat competitor than a secure chat app so while you could do much worse it's not where I'd go first. In particular one thing Matrix does that you may not like is bridging, linking a matrix room to an external chat service. While this is isn't a huge concern, it means that Matrix rooms might be mirrored to or from a less secure service.

Element is a matrix protocol client, so it'll do everything matrix does. There's other matrix clients of varying quality, I haven't checked in on Matrix in years but last time I was there the client situation was pretty dire, Element looks like a significant improvement usability wise but I won't say more.

I used to use Tox, and that uses a well-audited encryption library called libsodium for high security peer-to-peer communication, so as long as you trust your first peer (who you could set manually) you're mostly good. libsodium is widely used and well audited, but very few people use Tox so it doesn't have as many eyes on it as you might prefer.

You can look for security audits of communication software by security experts you trust, places like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are typically a reliable source which cares about encryption, this is their anti-surveillance tool help page, and you can check the blogs of people who work for them

It's important to remember is that Tor is not just for avoiding government surveillance, but is also a good tool to protect your identity from non-state actors.

If you are, for instance, creating an account on White Date to flirt with fascists and try to figure out if they're cops or active duty military, it is probably best to ensure that your traffic to the site is anonymized.

If you are, for instance, pirating textbooks on your school network, it is probably best to anonymize the endpoint of that traffic.

If you are, for instance, the parent of a teen in Texas researching how to provide them gender affirming care, you might want to anonymize your traffic.

Still, the kid’s thumb will have difficulty reaching both so rapid switches are not possible. On the left hand of the switch the stick is above and the dpad below, and the opposite is true on the right. This is a direct consequence of how a kid might use the controller. In most games the left hand controls movement - meaning an analog stick - and the right hand controls discreet inputs - meaning the dpad/button diamond.

Children’s also struggle to reach shoulder buttons and have lower grip width, so the natural gamer grip in which two fingers are resting on the shoulder buttons does not work at all for children. They usually have to use all four fingers to hold up a heavy device. The shoulder buttons go from being the most easily accessed buttons on the controller to the most difficult.

A child’s grip strength is lower, and thus so is their ability to hold a heavy controller comfortably, especially one not designed for their hand size. A single joycon in sideways mode, often used in child’s party games on the switch, is a far better controller size for a child while it is uncomfortably cramped for an adult.

It is not a coincidence that the Switch, which is marketed as a family console, comes prepacked with the controllers that are kid friendly and adult friendly controllers are a secondary purchase.

There are more things you can point out, but in a practical sense you can see these design principles applied by comparing something like Kirby vs Metroid Dread.

Kirby is almost entirely controlled through the face buttons, with only the rarely used defense button mapped to the shoulder buttons, and you can really get by with never using it. The triggers are not used at all. You rarely have to combination press anything. If my memory is correct, the shoulder buttons are never used for any temporary transformation abilities. The difficulty of using new abilities should not be compounded by hard to reach buttons.

Dread on the other hand uses combination presses a lot and ties three critical abilities (free aim, missile use, and sliding) to the shoulder buttons. The omega cannon, a rarely used but critical and time sensitive ability, is tied to the shoulder buttons for the easiest and most intuitive possible use. The stress of defeating an emmi should not be compounded by fumbling with controls.

Okay. They made an accessibility controller with all of the buttons on the face of it. That’s pretty awesome.

1) The word translated as “forbidden” is “toevah.” While that translation isn’t … wrong, it’s sort of like saying “McMansion” means “really big house.” There are a lot of connotations in that word. The specific issue with toevah is that we … sort of … don’t know anymore exactly what it meant. Based on context, it seems likely that the word referred to something ritually forbidden. This part of Torah was written not only as a guide for future generations, but also to say “so, look around, see your neighbors? DON’T DO THAT.“ Thus, if we interpret “toevah” to mean something that’s forbidden to do as a ritual before G-d, then the verse says nothing whatsoever about Adam and Steve and their two kids and their dog–it’s saying you shouldn’t have sex with another man in the Temple as a sacrifice.

2) Following the same “this is ritually forbidden” logic of toevah, this verse may also be interpreted as “don’t do sex magic,” which was a thing in. Like. A lot of fucking cultures at the time.

3) Hebrew is a highly gendered language, and the grammatical gender in this verse is really really weird. One of the “men” in this verse is given female grammar. Why? Who fucking knows, man, this isn’t the only grammatical oddity in Torah. (There are also places where G-d is referred to as plural, and also as female.) One suggestion is that this is a way of creating a diminutive–that is, that the verse should be read as “a man should not lie with a boy.” Now, it’s worth noting that modern secular scholarship has concluded the written Torah was written down around the 6th century BCE, and most non-Orthodox Jewish scholars are like “yeah, all things considered, that sounds pretty legit.”

Do you know what else was happening around the 6th century BCE? What laypeople tend to mean when they say “ancient Greece” was happening.

Do you know what happened a lot in that time period in Greece? Dudes forming relationships with younger boys, like ages 10-15, and using them for sex in exchange for financial gifts, mentorship, etc. While we don’t know just how young some of these younger boys may have been, we do know some were prepubescent. In light of this, and also something I mentioned under the first point–”see your neighbors? DON’T DO THAT,” if this verse is interpreted to say “a man should not lie with a boy,” then it’s pretty clearly “my dudes, my fellows, my lads, don’t be fucking pedophiles.”

4) Because of the grammar I mentioned in #3, it’s also possible that “should not lie with a man as with a woman” is actually referring to a place, not an abstract personhood: a man shouldn’t have sex with another man in a woman’s bed. In the time period, a woman’s bed was sort of like–that was her place, her safe sanctuary. It was also a ritually holy place where babies were made. By having sex in her bed, you’re violating her safe space (and also introducing a man who may not be a male relative, thus forcing her into breaking the laws of modesty). If this verse is read this way, then it should be taken to mean “don’t sexually violate a woman’s safety and modesty.” 5) And as an offshoot of #4, this may be a second verse relating to infidelity. Which woman’s bed is any random dude in 600 BCE most likely to have access to? His wife’s. But laws were administered differently based on whether the person they pertained to was slave or free, male or female, and so on–thus, a man committing adultery with a woman would be treated differently than man committing adultery with a man (especially because the latter would carry no chance of an illegitimate pregnancy).

Not men shouldn’t fuck men