Was that from Bluesky or somewhere else?

Existing owners can upgrade to the Switch 2 version for $10, gaining better framerates, higher resolutions, and HDR support.

I didn’t realize they had this option. As far as legal routes go, that’s not terrible (assuming there’s no weird downside, like no longer being able to play the original on the switch 1). Free would be better, of course, but $10 certainly beats paying $90 just to play the improved version on switch 2.

High skill ceiling?

More like a high skill floor! Good Lord, I don’t think I’d ever be able to beat that level without cheats, lol.

No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don’t have either, it literally doesn’t matter, lol.

I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

In that regard, fuck Discord.

Does India particularly differ? I think nods still mean yes and shakes still mean no there. They just also have the “noncommittal head bobble” that tends to confuse people outside India (and, presumably, Pakistan).

I sympathize with Gen Z. It’s pretty natural to see your parents’ generation having done way better than you are doing at the same age and feel like you’ve had something stolen from you. It’s a pretty profound sense of loss, esp. when you do look at history and think, “Jesus Christ, do we have to suffer like the Great Depression to turn this shit around?”

So I don’t know if the WPA itself would be considered socialism. I imagine it depends on your working definition of socialism.

What I can say with a little more confidence is that the WPA and a bunch of other New Deal programs were a direct result of pressure from American Socialists and Communists at the time.

I can’t recall if this is apocryphal or not, but the story goes that FDR told a private gathering of America’s biggest capitalists about his plans for the New Deal and told them they were going to pay for it through taxes. When they protested for a compromise, FDR said “this is the compromise. The alternative is guillotines.” But I can’t find that quote anywhere, so I may have made it up.

I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea what my Chucklefuck in Chief means by trying to get rid of voting booths.

But if I had to guess, I think he means literally the booths. As in, no privacy. Just paper on a desk where anyone can see what you’re doing.

If it isn’t clear, this fucker has no idea what a free and fair election is SUPPOSED to look like. He just wants to make sure whatever system we end up with favors him and him alone. And for some reason, voting booths are catching his ire. Maybe he feels insecure not knowing if Melania actually voted for him.

I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

“Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

Survey researchers are well aware of the biases from different data collection methods. Phone polling tending to overrepresent old folks is a a big one. They try to balance that out with various statistical weighting methods, usually by combining with census data or other demographic survey sets.

It’s unfortunate, but yeah we do have about a third of the country going hard conservative/fascist.

This was very helpful to read. Thank you.

I’m sure the media played a part.

But fuck. He was so obvious with his racism, with his desire to be a dictator, fuckin everything.

Fuck.

I don’t think I would say non-voters support this.

But they sure as fuck are complicit in not stopping an OBVIOUS threat to democracy by failing to do the absolute bare minimum civic duty of voting.

Edit: fixed grammar

I don’t think Trump won quite as decisively as it first seemed.

But shit, it’s still like… a third of our country that looked at Trump and went, “yeah sure”.

How the fuck do we fix this? I straight up have no clue. And that means it very likely will devolve into violence. And that is legitimately terrifying.

I think it’s fair to say Russia exacerbated our existing issues. That doesn’t absolve us, as you point out, but it’s not unreasonable to say “Russia won”, either.

We had every opportunity to fix our issues. But nope, we just never really dealt with our history of racism and all the other bigotries (and capitalism, let’s be real). When we tried to make things better, the reactionaries pushed back. First with war, and when that was lost, with law, and when that was lost, with rewriting history. That is a strategy that keeps working. Turns out if you don’t care for your citizens, they’ll eat up all that fake history looking for someone to blame. And that makes us weak to fascism.

So yeah, Russia may have sped up the process, but the roots of our downfall were here all along.

The “respect” and “you should be thankful” comments reminded me of that old (I think Tumblr) post:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”.

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me, I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person.”

and they think they’re being fair, but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

I like this idea, but I don’t know how you build a site to facilitate that without also being super appealing to children and pedos at the same time.

Do you think “frank” means “without nuance or care for how what I’m saying could be misconstrued as bigotry”?

Like, literally the only change I know I’d like to see is “there are some women who” and like… that’s hardly an imposition, y’know? Definitely not a “40 page essay” either.