I can’t blame them for not understanding the significance of human communications infrastructure, but I wish they wouldn’t set up camp in poorly tended mailboxes. Granted, ants are worse about this by some distance. (I’ve also had to deal with small birds while delivering)

All things considered, though, they’re cool if you give them an appropriate berth

Seibu Kaihatsu’s Dynamite Duke (1989), a pretty novel hybrid Cabal-like/Beat-'em-up with a lot of love put into it. The arcade version’s got a pretty slick art direction, the environmental destruction vfx rock, and the animation’s pretty slick. The whole thing’s got that passion project charm to it. Unfortunately, Cabal clones were only really in vogue in that late '80s/early '90s space, and the beat 'em up gameplay isn’t fleshed out or consistently applied enough to be satisfying in a post-Final Fight, post-Streets of Rage world. I’d like to see something like it, but there’s no way to bring Duke into the world of modern game design practices without drastic reformulation at a minimum.

Notably, Seibu had really high hopes for Duke, being a passion project and a intended magnum opus. Unfortunately, lukewarm reception brought in poor returns, the company slipped into dire straits, and they were forced to make something simpler and lower stakes as a hail mary. That title - a simple, Toaplan-esque shooter nobody had any real faith in - turned out to be Raiden, which would become a darling in arcades, pushing 17,000 units solds worldwide in the first year after release, and becoming the fifth highest grosser on the Japanese market in 1991. (Beating out some offerings from much bigger players like Konami)

It’s like they’re trying to destroy everyone’s trust in them. Can’t even toe the whole “Villain with good publicity” line effectively.

Been listening to a fair deal of Remember Shuffle? lately. Despite how badly the decade stuck in my craw, I still kinda forgot just how downright vindictive the pop culture of the ‘00s could be. Kinda makes me think the relative absence of personal malice is part of what made Jackass something often imitated but never replicated - For the most part, you got the impression the hosts genuinely liked each other’s company and enjoyed fucking around with one another.

My friend in the region’s painted a pretty grim picture. I’d heard scuttlebutt about one of the local opposition figures getting hospitalized twice?

The State of Franklin

I miss Wesley Willis.

The whole “paperclip machine but for humans” thing always stood out as weird to me

Watching that in my high school electronics class was a early radicalizing moment

Imagine where we’d be if this stuff was allowed to mature in the 2000s alone

The think tank ghouls are the worst. If I had it in my ability to just wipe the Heritage Foundation, Focus on The Family, and all those other consortiums of reaction from the earth…

In a weird way, the development of advanced communications and coordination technology has only made it harder for anything to change in a significant way .

I was wondering about that. Illinois has a history of local moguls having overwhelmingly dumb politics (The Oberweis family, the Uhleins) so I assume that goes for most places?

I have no regard for etiquette and will freely just shit talk the other guy under any and all circumstances. If anyone has a problem with this, they are free to try and stop me

If blocking ads means they lose out, then i’m fine with them losing out

THE classic example of why internet freak show juvenalia can go real bad, especially on a long term scale.

There are very fundamental flaws with the idea that some people have done things that make them acceptable targets for random people’s aggression. Best case scenario, a dozen different people deciding to take their frustrations out on them for personal satisfaction similtaneously ends up going nowhere. Worst case scenario, you get…eh…this. Some people shouldn’t be paid much mind, and that’s for the good of everyone involved. (Or anyone who could possibly be involved.)

In more of a political theory sense, a core precept of right wing culture is the idea that there are “acceptable targets” that society at large needs protection from. They’ll often point at people they think “deserve it” as justification for their own existence and propagation, out of a stated fear that if they were to become normalized society would be significantly marred. Often times these acceptable targets are unsympathetic characters who’ve done something wrong and the scorn they draw from conservative elements can come off as very intuitive to a uninitiated passerby: Ultimately, their existence and the antisocial tendencies right-aligned actors see them as embodying are used as a “trojan horse” of sorts to attack anyone who even be characterized as having anything in common with them. With lolcows as examples to point to, the right and those that feed into the right have ammo to turn against anyone too visibly autistic, too visibly gay-coded, too visibly trans, kind of a “loser”, or ultimately just a bit too geeky in general. There’s a broader critique of conservative fixation on “D*generacy” to be made here.

The gutting of the humanities and other things generally written off as “frivolous” kind of terrified me. There’s something that feels distinctly wrong about these attempts at destroying and anyone that even might turn an introspective gaze on society itself. Like they don’t want anything that might foster self-awareness accessible to the layman.

Am I gonna have to pay for a vpn that actually lets me fake being outside the ‘states? I usually self host on a VM host to avoid incurring expenses, but it seems like that’s not really an option here. Seems like I might have to go for a AWS instance running PiVPN or something.

Yeah, that’s kind of what I was wondering. Turns out you can’t really do much useful with a self-hosted local VPN, but I like having the option of using one be something my VM host server provides.

I wanna try at some point, but my work schedule means I probably can’t make the time commitments.