embarrassing

That’s an odd way to spell “incriminating.”

Sort of on-topic - I disable the music in most first person open world RPGs.

It started with Oblivion. I first disabled it because I didn’t like that the combat music is triggered as soon as you’re detected by an enemy - it feels like a cheat. But the thing I discovered was that it did wonders for immersion, because suddenly the only sounds I heard were actual in-universe sounds - footsteps, wind, flowing water, animals etc.

After playing like that for a couple of years, I got the urge to listen to the music again, so I re-enabled it. And it was very weird, because I had gotten so used to only hearing in-universe sounds that I kept subconsciously trying to place the music in the world - like there was a symphony orchestra in a forest clearing nearby or something. I had to turn it off and have never turned it back on.

I’ve never even heard the Skyrim music - I disabled it right from the start.

The only exceptions are game music that actually is in-universe, like the music played over your Pip-Boy in Fallout or over a car radio in GTA.

They’re not “settlers” - they’re state-sanctioned terrorists.

weapons company

That’s the most important bit.

An awful lot of the otherwise inexplicable international support for the utter evil Israel is visiting on Gaza exists solely because it’s profitable for a handful of corporate parasites.

Which is its own sort of evil.

Which won’t make the slightest bot of difference because the Trump kakistocracy will just keep appealing until it gets to one of the corrupt courts (the Supreme Court if all else fails) who will, as they do, tell whatever lies might serve to rubber-stamp whatever he wants. And then the treasonous insurrectionists will just keep right on indiscriminately disappearing immigrants, legal residents and full citizens whenever they want for whatever reason they want.

Although this is worse than even I cynically expected, I was certain we were going to end up facing something along these lines, just because I’m Generation X, and we’ve spent our entire lives wading through the debris and garbage the Boomers have left in their wake every step of the way.

While I sympathize with the author, he can rest assured (sort of) that nobody’s going to come after him or his “dinky little free WordPress site.”

The goal is far more sinister than that. The actual point is simply to establish a precedent that people can be prosecuted for online content that is not in and of itself illegal. Sexual content was just a way to get the religious chucklefucks on board, and to hide a dangerous precedent behind a merely controversial mask.

The ultimate goal is simply to establish the precedent that a government can criminalize the dissemination online of content that’s entirely legal in and of itself. Using this ruling as a precedent, governments can and will criminalize whatever content they want, and it should go without saying that the content they’re going to most certainly criminalize is any and all content critical of themselves.

So the author can likely relax. There will undoubtedly be a few test cases so that they can get appealed up to a court that’s corrupt enough to uphold the government’s position and further cement and/or expand the precedent, but that’ll be it, because then they’ll turn their attention to the far more important (to them) task of silencing political opposition.

Huh… less politically correct equals subject to manipulation. Imagine that.

Almost as if “politically correct” just equates to truth.

Right - that’s essentially what I’ve presumed it is.

It’s sort of passive eugenics, with an amusingly ironically stacked deck.

They apparently aren’t actually confident that whites are the strongest, because before they started gutting healthcare, they went out of their way to put minorities at a disadvantage.

It’s most likely that that’s what all the DEI uproar is about, and specifically why it’s been so capricious and poorly implemented. The goal is to make employers afraid that if they hire minorities, they’re going to get sued by Trump and have to try, and likely fail, to prove that it wasn’t DEI, so they’ll just avoid hiring minorities in general. So then, by crippling Medicaid (and even attaching a work requirement to it if they can get away with it), the kakistocrats will have arranged things so that jobless people will die, and minorities will be more likely to be jobless.

And the whole thing not coincidentally provides the additional benefit of compelling people to be employed, no matter how shitty and poorly paid the job is, which is what the wealthy parasites need to maintain their ill-gotten and undeserved privilege.

I grow more convinced every day that one of the explicit goals of the Trump regime is to kill people.

It’s not just that the combination of greed, self-interest and overt mental illness on display in the regime leads to deaths, but that, at some level, there’s a very deliberate goal of killing people (notably minorities - gender and sexual as well as ethnic and racial), and that the specific lunatics put into specific positions - most obviously Kennedy - are there because their brains are broken in such a way that even left to their own devices, they’ll kill people.

Yes.

The pressure is mounting. The overt harm that the billionaires do merely by their existence - merely by holding wealth that could instead have served to keep the poorest people sheltered and fed - becomes more obvious with every passing day and every newly unhoused and unfed American.

But, psychopaths that they necessarily are, the billionaires are unwilling to give up any of their wealth, and in fact are instead looking for any opportunity to increase it. Always.

So, to them, the solution is simple - we need to kill as many poor people as possible, so they won’t be around being poor and making billionaires look bad.

And to all too many of them, that much the better if most of the dead are minorities.

It turns out that their Great Replacement conspiracy theory was projection - they insisted that there was some sort of conspiracy to eliminate whites because they were working on their own conspiracy to eliminate minorities.

It’s simple really - eliminate DEI and, more to the point, put a chill on hiring minorities generally, then cut Medicaid (and if possible, institute work requirements for the little bit that’s left) so that people without jobs have no healthcare and monorities are more likely to be without jobs. Then just sit back and smile as millions of people, with minorities overrepresented, die.

That’s exactly what they’re very deliberstely doing, right now.

Almost.

The expectation is to work as many hours as you can, buy the cheapest groceries, bring them home to the cheapest apartment you can find, and just sit there until you die.

I watched it in person, sort of.

I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.

And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.

Occam’s Razor says that if nothing notable has changed even under Trump, then it’s likely that the simple fact of the matter is that the allegations were mostly true and it’s just that the CIA, as opposed to Trump and his minions and lackeys, won’t lie on his behalf.

Regarding your tangent - I think that individual brains work in relatively fixed ways that are established early on - likely at least in part genetically, then refined mostly in infancy and early childhood. There’s a fairly wide range of things a brain can do, but even beyond likely genetic inclinations, there’s not enough available energy or time for individuals to develop all of them, or even generally most of them. And once established, I think they’re fairly fixed - the individual brain already has a number of set paths that it follows and specific regions that are most well-developed, and the body focuses on maintaining those rather than building new ones.

And a lot of the things that we recognize as distinct fields are actually comprised of multiple abilities.

So yeah - you end up with seeming oddities like mathematicians also generally having some artistic/creative ability and business majors generally not having any. The underlying abilities that make mathematics a rewarding field necessarily include abstract thinking, while those underlying business do not - business thinking is necessarily very concrete.

And it’s s perennial problem when people who are especially skilled in one particular type of thinking believe that that means they’re skilled in “thinking” in a broad sense, so able to meaningfully comment on things that are actually entirely outside of their skill set - like tech bros pontificating about art (or my personal biggest pet peeve - research scientists pontificating about philosophy).

I didn’t get it right off.

“National anthem of the internet” was the clue I needed.

That’s an entirely predictable move.

It’s all about incrementalism.

This whole “loneliness epidemic” thing is almost enough to make me feel sorry for extroverts.

Almost.

But you know - as an introvert, I’ve spent my entire life dealing with smugly well-meaning extrovert assholes who think my introversion is some sort of problem that needs to be fixed, so now that society is shifting in my direction - now that living my life without having to subject myself to a bunch of spiritual vampires demanding my attention is easier than it’s ever been - I just can’t really find it in myself to care that they aren’t coping so well with it. Almost, but not quite.

I’m sort of looking forward to a techbro trying to condescendingly tell me that Crime and Punishment is about a man who goes to prison or The Stranger is about a guy who randomly kills another guy or One Hundred Years of Solitude is about a Mexican family.or Moby Dick is about a whale.