At least they got to discover the wonders of porn before the end.

When Aliens Attack?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t even the dumbest thing he says today.

The problem is that we have so little media that is both trusted and trustworthy. That so many people don’t actively seek out reliable information and think critically about it. Many just find a source that confirms their bias and feeds their emotional state, while others just passively absorb from those around them and on social media. And once you’ve bought the lies and misinformation, anyone that tries to tell you the truth becomes suspicious, because you know they are wrong.

And because the never ending stream of bullshit is both a lucrative industry and a source of immense political power, there is a vested interest in keeping it highly polarized and partisan. They have to tie it to your identity and tell you that this is what your country stands for, so that you know that everyone who disagrees is an enemy.

Anti-vaxxers are nothing new, but they were never so openly embraced by a political party (to say nothing of those who have claimed that vaccines are suddenly against their religion, discovering a prohibition that no religion has ever had prior to 2020). They don’t care how many people will suffer or die because of their actions, as long as they can benefit from it politically. Sadly, this is a fairly consistent theme on the right.

I’ve just been hoping for the long shot that a plane carrying both of them will go down before the electoral college meets. If it also takes Musk, Johnson, Kennedy, and a bunch of others from his inner circle, so much the better.

They love authority figures telling other people what to do. Freedom is me being free to do what I want and you being free to do what I want.

Oil and gas which need to be extracted from deep underground so we can burn them: a gift from God.

Wind and sunlight which come to us for free and never run out: somehow not a gift from God.

The alarm app I use allows for playlists to be used as the alarm, and I have a different one set for every day of the week. It’s not quite as effective at preventing me from tuning it out, but that’s balanced out by the fact that I have to solve puzzles and math problems to turn it off. Combined with an alarm clock that has a light that slowly turns on in a simulated sunrise and it’s pretty effective.

I used to have a TV which had a setting that would turn it on and go to a specific channel at a set time. I would set it to go to the history channel every morning because they would play random stuff from their archives in the morning, so it was impossible to get fully desensitized. One day I’d wake up to the history of candy, the next day it’d be the history of stealth aircraft, the next day it’d be the history of the klan (that was not the best way to start the day).

Back when I worked in an office I would put up badass president pics Fourth of July. Too lazy to find them, but stuff like Kennedy riding a robot unicorn on the moon, FDR in wheelchair themed power armor, Roosevelt gunning down big foot in a forest fire, etc.

At home, the only significant decorating I do is for Christmas. There’s enough misery out there, and I choose to embrace the joy and the appeal to the better side of our nature. So we have lights, fake candles, and so on, and we put up a tree that gets a new ornament or two every year which fills it with memories. And as a finishing touch we hang a banner declaring “All creatures will make merry under pain of death”

Needs more Clancy Brown.

He’s not relying on Ukraine’s allies running out of money, he’s betting that they’ll lose interest and/or vote for pro-Russian stooges before he loses the ability to win the war.

They’re trying to portray it as something that was done from the very beginning, as opposed to something they only pinned down in preparation for the 3rd game in the series. Nothing wrong with them getting through two games before writing out their bible, but that doesn’t make for a very compelling article.

“A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”

So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.

That’s why you start by printing more printers.

One of the things that sets the original apart from a lot of other open world survival craft games is that it was designed to be a single-player experience. Hopefully they can make it work well for both solo and co-op, but that’s a tricky balance.

One thing I’d really like to see is for creatures to be able to damage structures, and to balance that by having defenses to protect those structures. Being able to throw together an invincible fortress in seconds made some of the dangerous areas a lot less threatening.

Rockets are literally on fire.

Also pretty sure that creating a voter registration site that only appears to register voters in swing states (while gathering their data so you can follow up with only the ones you want to target) could also lead to criminal charges if the matter were to be pursued.

I expect it to be a buggy mess that has lots of potential and doesn’t deliver on half of what it seems like it should do. Then after a year or two it will finally be patched into being mostly stable and mods will have reached a point where it can mostly be turned into the game I actually want. However there will be a few creative decisions that I absolutely hate but which are so unnecessarily locked in that even mods can’t fix them, so I’ll have to just accept them as an irritant that I will do my best to ignore.

The long term effects of authoritarians consolidating their power and eliminating the last remnants of democracy and the rule of law is that it no longer matters if any of us are left or right. I’ll take having a system that can still be changed over being trapped in under dictatorial rule but taking comfort in the fact that I’ve remained ideologically pure.

And no, choosing the best viable candidate doesn’t just lead inevitably to a shift to the right. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be talking about people on the right endorsing someone to their left. The fact that Democrats have chosen electable candidates when Republicans chose Trump loyalists and MAGA nutcases is the main reason why Republicans have underperformed since 2018, and why they keep sabotaging their own efforts fighting with their own party members. Their most recent victories are largely due to courts they packed with right wing judges, something that will only get worse if they win, but which will be gradually undone if they lose.

But this is an argument that’s always raging on this site. That particular dead horse has been reduced to a fine paste. I doubt anyone’s going to be swayed at this point.