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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Everyone who is alive today is descended from slave owners, thieves, rapists, murderers, conquerors and oppressors. They are also all descended from people who were the victims of slavery, theft, rape, murder, conquest and oppression. If people are responsible for the actions of their ancestors, then we are all guilty of damn near everything, and it’s basically just original sin without all the Catholicism.




  • Seems like the first step should be taxing those personal loans that are being used as income. That seems like a simple fix (simple by tax code standards, I’d still expect such a law to be ridiculously complex).

    I do worry about the unintended side effects a of a wealth tax targeting stock ownership directly. That just gives the rich an incentive to squeeze more value out of their investments in order to cover their tax bill. And it seems like it would likely push private companies into selling out more as they grow since the money has to come from somewhere, thus giving even more incentive to cave in to investors who just want to make a quick buck and don’t care about the long term survival of the company.


  • Because they could sell them as new games.

    Fallout is hot right now thanks to the show, and from a business perspective its kind of crazy that they didn’t plan to have something available to capitalize on that interest. A Fallout 1 & 2 remake or remaster would have been an easier option than a whole new game. And it’s the kind of thing you can outsource to another studio, so it doesn’t have to disrupt their current plans.

    If I were some soulless executive at Microsoft, I’d have been getting this put together the second I saw that the show was a huge hit. I’d be trying greenlight remasters of basically all the games, plus a new non-numbered game in the series that could have limited scope but keep the same basic flavor, and maybe a new game in a different genre altogether. Things that could be handled by other developers and pushed out over a reasonable time frame so we could at least have something to announce before season 2, while letting Bethesda keep Fallout 5 for whenever they finally get around to it.


  • His support in Wisconsin is largely outside of Milwaukee. And his core MAGA base wouldn’t stop supporting him if he showed up and took a shit on their porch. Hell, they’d probably agree with Trump about Milwaukee (regardless of how they felt before Trump said anything) rather take any offense.

    But of course, I also assume that Trump didn’t think about anything like this before opening his noise hole. He just says whatever nonsense passes througg his failing neurons and manages to escape his mouth.


  • On the one hand, yes, these movies are products being churned out for profit by a corporate machine that cares more about marketability than creativity or quality. Anyone signing up for a big studio blockbuster production (superhero movie or not) should know exactly what they are getting into.

    On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with actors in flopped movies pointing out that they flopped in no small part because they are the product of a system that seems focused on everything but the quality of movie being made.

    And it absolutely can be life changing when it works. Just look at the early MCU movies and tell me that they didn’t have a huge impact on careers. Of course younger actors who take these roles are hoping they will be life-changing. You don’t become a superstar by doing nothing but small independent arthouse films that kill at festivals and award shows and are never seen by the general public.

    And finally, I gotta call bullshit on the assumption that you can’t have artistry or depth in movies based on “some fucking universe for cartoon characters.” There’s no reason why a superhero movie (or any other genre film) can’t be more than just a two hour trailer for itself, or a soulless vehicle for merchandise. It’s not the medium that the IP came from that determines the artistic value of the movie adaptation, it’s the people making the movie (and the suits controlling them) that determine whether it will be a cinematic masterpiece or further proof that AI generated movies are inevitable.


  • I learned the term from a dirty limerick in a sci-fi anthology about dinosaurs that I picked up in middle school at a school library book sale. It was told by a telepathic tree which was trying to convince a guy to jack off into a condom and shove an acorn in it so it could reproduce, as that’s how it had been created. It was weird.


  • Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

    I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

    For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

    I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.


  • Sounds to me like a way of backing down from their saber-rattling and threats of invasion while trying to not look like they are backing down from anything.

    [Realizes he’s talked up a war that would be disastrous, win or lose] “We’re not going to do that, it’s exactly what they want us to do”

    Of course, that could also just be Xi being full of shit for diplomatic reasons. It’s not like he’d be bound by this in any way. “We’re not going to be tricked by their provocations” can always be followed by a “but now they’ve forced our hand.”






  • I find it interesting that guys like this who want to start a race war always think that this is the thing that’s going to do it. Like we’ve made it through all the other hate crimes, injustices and large scale protests without erupting into a race war, but one more incident will do the trick.

    Also interesting is how closely his plan is tied to the election. He isn’t just trying to send a message before the election, he specifically thinks that his side needs a specific outcome in the election for his plan to succeed. This plan seems to be a direct consequence of current political environment and the messages coming from his preferred candidate and his supporters.

    Now the article doesn’t actually say which candidate needs to win in order to embolden violent white supremacists. But if you need 2 guesses, you should probably consider going back into the coma you’ve been in for the past decade, you’re not going to like the future.


  • Not for the Dominoes trip specifically, but they were paying for me to be there. I would assume that the local Dominoes got some kind of money out of it.

    I’m not saying that the Chik-fil-a thing is something that would have interested me as a kid or that I would pay to send a kid to it. For one thing, the focus on customer service stuff does make it a bit weirder to me. Just pointing out that I had a similar experience and that it was something I enjoyed.

    Some kids would probably love getting to see what happens in the kitchen, making something, and eating it. As long as it’s safe and age appropriate, and assuming they aren’t actually being used as labor, I don’t see how this is harmful.