That’s why I kind of agree with “the dumbest thing (some troll has) ever heard speculated”. musk clearly has enough dirt that it has kept his head attached after all the “president musk” memes.

Musk and some more background people likely saved the Trump campaign from financial ruin. He couldn’t be rid of them if he wanted to.

His campaign is over. He is president now. And he can do whatever he wants… and has been doing exactly that.

My sister speculated that somebody (probably trump…) uploaded something far worse than “the pee-pee tape” to twitter and musk inherited that when he bought the site.

But even that only goes so long and… trump has SCOTUS backing to send seal team six after whoever he wants.

We would get them on spaghetti and meat sauce days. And we loved it because the spaghetti was so nauseating due to being consistently overcooked and the sauce having almost no seasoning.

…

Okay, I think I just answered my own question as to why people love the olive garden breadsticks.

Fuck the police.

Bring cameras and make sure the world sees a skinhead with a bandage over his swastika beating the shit out of a 50 year old senator.

But that would obviously involve politicians who aren’t hedging their bets on when they should take their gold and flee the country.

Meh. Even back in the 90s and 00s they were trash. My grandmother loved olive garden for some reason or another (I assume horrifically racist) and even as a kid I remember “… this is the exact same breadstick I had at lunch on tuesday?”

Don’t get me wrong. Bread is awesome and worth all the horrors of carbs. But olive garden has always had mediocre breadsticks (I want to say there were periods where they had actual bread that was decent though?).

I know it is obviously not the point but:

the olive garden breadsticks thing has to be astroturfing, right? Because that shit is mid as hell. It is barely better than school cafeteria breadsticks. At least red lobster (?) cheddar bay biscuits have flavor.

Yay, one of my favorite genres.

In terms of the most bubble gum of it all (even if he actually does touch on some really awesome topics and concepts): Brandon Sanderson. We all lucked out that that man didn’t get a job at Wizards of the Coast because he has made a career out of writing like twelve TTRPG fluff books per year and they are mostly all great. Basically all of his books heavily emphasize the Systems (magic) but the Cosmere books go above and beyond since the source of “magic” is kind of the overall meta plot.

And if Sanderson is bubble gum then Harry Connolly is shards of broken glass covered in fentanyl being handed out by a guy in a van outside an elementary school. His most “famous” series is Twenty Palaces that… was so hard for normies to get into that it kind of sent him into a depression and killed the series (there is one chapter in the third-ish book that is one entire run on sentence and it is AMAZING. But I fully agree with every single editor and beta reader that it was a bad idea. And, legend goes, it is what made his publisher and agent drop him). In that universe, spells are almost sentient creatures and their power is directly proportional to how many people know them. And while they are horrifying, they don’t have shit on the creatures from the void which are just referred to as “predators” for every reason imaginable.

As a very early bits (will spoiler tag but it is like the first ten pages of the first book):

The good news is that Harry did a kickstarter a few years back and is going to finish off the series… eventually. He also has The Great Way which is “What if generic low magic fantasy but zombies. And then magic” which also very much depicts magic as an Other that corrupts its users. Nowhere near as good but probably a lot more enjoyable.

Now that we are all depressed and horrified: Stephen Aryan’s Age of Darkness/Age of Dread are technically more about gods than magic but tend to focus on magic using viewpoint characters. Most of the books are either the result of a potentially extinction level event arising from magic or the expected backlash when the people find out about that. And… going farther into that gets into spoiler territories. I am not sure if it is exactly what you want, but it is close.

And as an honorable mention: The first 2-4 books of Steve McHugh’s Hellequin series is almost exactly this. Nate Garrett is a super powerful sorceror. And if he uses his magic too much, it will be corrupted and he’ll turn into a monster. And many monsters (like gargoyles) are a result of exactly that. And, as his magic power increases with every book, he gets closer and closer to the point that his magic gains a personality and it is a scary one. That said, McHugh quickly realized he can’t write Goku if going Super Saiyan ends the series so he pivoted pretty hard (and then pivoted back a bit later…). I think it is still an awesome series (at the very least: It is the kind of series where the protagonist grabbing a glock and taking out a death squad of klan members is a massive hype moment and hope spot) but I really do wonder what would have happened if the original premise had continued.

And for another honorable mention with an even bigger asterisk: Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books. For those not aware, Carey is basically THE go to guy for writing stories from a ridiculously Other perspective. His Luciter and Sandman runs in comics are endlessly praised and The Girl With All The Gifts became a movie that existed. In between that, he wrote some urban fantasy about an exorcist named Felix Castor. Magic itself tends to (maybe) not be corrupted and is more of an incredibly well defined, if intentionally nebulously sourced, plot tool for the mysteries that Felix is solving. But, light spoilers, it is intrinsically tied to the ghosts and demons (yup) that have arisen over the past decade or two. The books are more focused on human crimes (uhm… lots of content warnings there, by the way) with the demons and devils being an overall meta plot that comes to a head at the end of the initial run. That said, in 2023 he released a novella continuing the series that very much makes it clear that the origins of magic are being investigated and… it is almost definitely going to meet your criteria. So they don’t count NOW but in a few years it will almost guaranteed be a perfect fit.

First: how much of that was “second screen viewing”? I and countless others tend to just put a youtube on the side monitor while working or doing other activities

But the most important thing: This is no different than watching TV back in the day. Basically any millennial has memories of just turning on the TV after school/work and watching Seinfeld or Friends reruns (replace that with the tv show of your country). That is really no different than turning on youtube and seeing that The Algorithm thinks you should watch a Brooklyn 99 compilation. And that is no different than popping in to do a few void relics in Warframe or a couple ranked matches in call of duty or whatever.

And… that is no different than spending 20 hours or whatever to read the latest Sanderson doorstopper (I read on my kindle and I genuinely don’t want to know how long that book was because I stayed up until 4 am during the final mad dash stretch…).

Which gets to what the “content creators” have already realized. It isn’t a competition over what show you are going to watch or what game you are going to play. It is what you are going to do that night with all media being equal.

So it is very good to be aware of how you have been spending your free time (even if I think you are misinterpreting data). But it is also important to understand what you are actually replacing it with. I have old clan buddies from my UT days who talked about how they stopped watching TV… but they watch youtube instead. Or who had a mid-life crisis and are working toward being just as good at frigging Apex Legends as they (thought they) were at UT and so forth. Hell, one buddy basically goes on a long hike every single night after work. And while he is definitely the healthiest among us… The reality is that that is still just “comfort entertainment”.

Personally? I’ve spent the past few years being more mindful of what I do in my spare time. That isn’t to say I stopped watching comfort youtube or even rewatching Seinfeld. But I make it a point to set aside time to learn new skills. AND… probably more importantly… I set aside time to expand my experiences. CRPGs are fricking LONG and even the best studios (Owlcat and Obsidian) have pacing issues. But I also know that I will get a whole lot more out of the thought provoking moments from 40 hours of Pillars versus 40 hours of even Dwarf Fortress. Same with books. I love Sanderson and suspect I may have found even more entertainment from trying to analyze author’s intent more than the plot of Wind and Truth (and I LOVED the plot of Wind and Truth). But it is still a comfort read. Whereas even something like Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass is a much less entertaining book but is also one that stretches my brain far more.

musk sieg heil’d on stage. There is no cover.

… how fucking racist do you have to be to get kicked out of musk’s nazi regime?

That data is largely worthless. Mostly because so much of it has leaked so many times over the past decade or two. That is why so many people have a special tax code or whatever.

The real “value” of having access to the treasury is not the data itself. It is the ability to change that data in a manner that directly defies congress, the budget, and everything else.

Last I saw they still have two “special employees” with “read only” access. So he still has “read only” access

But also? They already made code changes. And while I doubt they would be able to do anything meaningful, it is not hard to add another user account or an ssh tunnel to get through the “air gap”. And it would not be beyond musk et al to call that “hacking”.

I don’t know what nonsense internet beefs he is in right now but I know there is someone dropping “bombshells” every day. I would be wary of associating yourself with that dumbfuckery.

Hasan Piker is formerly an intern (and nepo baby) at the young turks who struck out on his own and gained pretty large fame around the 2020 US election because of his open support for Sanders and general willingness to watch and React to political content with a heavy emphasis on (American) socialist stances.

In recent years a lot of us have mostly written him off as a tankie due to his initial stance on the war in Ukraine and his ongoing stance toward the genocide in Palestine. Most of the “genocide joe” takes and the like were regurgitated endlessly by him. He has still done a lot of good during that period (his coverage of the SAG strikes were spectacular) but… yeah.

That said, he is still probably THE biggest pundit/Voice on the left and him covering the protests would go a long way toward making ordinary people aware of just how fucked everything is.

Its why I think all the “Early access bad” people are fucking idiots.

A lot of games abuse EA, no arguments there. A lot of games also just rush to 1.0 so they can do a console release and then abandon the game (the Time at Portia devs did that with like three kickstarters?). And then you have the labors of love like Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud or Project Zomboid that basically will always be EA (although Qud hit 1.0, finally).

Not to mention studios like Amplitude who use EA in the best possible way. They have a vertical slice of the game and they work with the community to figure out what features to add or rebalance. It isn’t always perfect but it genuinely feels like they are listening and it is great.

There are many layers to this.

At the highest? It shows politicians there is public support for something. Many politicians still think there will be elections in 4 years (hell, probably not even 2) and will make it a point to act so that they don’t get primary’d and so forth. We already saw shades of this with congress realizing what signs their checks and protesting musk dismantling the treasury two days ago. Albeit, the outcome of that is very much “okay, we’ll keep most of the foxes out of the hen house but not all of them” but… baby steps.

The next level is to show the american people there is support. That said… the news media basically refused to cover any of the protests. THAT said, I assume the usual talking heads on twitch et al did (although I think hasan is still on vacation and making videos showing he is bigger than a Japanese person?). It is well worth remembering that a ridiculous number of people didn’t even realize biden wasn’t running last year.

And then we start getting to the point where lemmy admins will nuke stuff. So I’ll just cut off after this point. Cops and fat white kids who want to shoot some n****rs are going to act sooner than later. That will be caught on camera.

Except that isn’t what happens with stuff like this. It isn’t reflecting “the values and prejudices of the people” at the time. It is reflecting them in the modern day.

The problem with KCD1 wasn’t that it depicted low tech people (which it didn’t. It very much went the route of “alchemy is science”) or even the very questionable views on women (that is a very complex topic). It was the insistence that medieval Czech was a land of white people (and a specific phenotype at that…) and blah blah blah. When the vast majority of historical evidence is that medieval Europe was a mixing pot (there is a reason that terms like “moor” existed and plenty of people brought servants, slaves, and even wives back from the various crusades and Crusades).

Which gets back to “the dark ages” being about a lack of records more than anything else. But people interpret “Well. there is no record of an arab being in this entire country for 300 years!” as “The white men kept the brown folk out” rather than “Well… there also aren’t a lot of records period. But if you look a few miles to the east you DO see records acknowledging this as though it weren’t a big deal”

Which also lines up with the lead dev being a piece of shit chud who was a loud voice during gamergate.

And it also left a REALLY bad taste in the mouth of people (who give a shit) who read any of the discussion on this and saw WAY too many people talk about how it is important to have a game about Czech that remembers the glory days back when everyone was white and strong and blah blah blah.

And, as a quick aside: KCD1 is still the most bog standard power fantasy fantasy there can be. The combat is more or less “What if you took two HEMA seminars?” and is still star wars kid slicing through plate mail. And it is especially funny because the “historians” that were consulted? No, they weren’t medieval history specialists or even HEMA specialists. If memory serves, it was a guy who specialized in WW1 tanks. And, while people can obviously have multiple passions, it really showed. Also, you are the son of a blacksmith (?) who bangs his way around Bohemia to become bestest friends with the king and blah blah blah.

Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima. I genuinely love this game even if there is zero chance I ever finish it (I can’t stand ubi open world games and it is more ubi than ubi has been in years). Yes, it is 500% written by a white guy who studied the blade. But it is well acted and well “directed” and really feels like I am playing a Kurosawa film. That said, it definitely depicts the Mongols as violent barbarians who outright use civilians as target practice and do nothing but <REDACTED> and pillage because violence is fine but the other thing triggers ratings issues.

And in the sense of needing a villain that justifies Jin giving up the pretense that samurai were anything other than violent warlords in armor? It works. But if you actually look at politics and cultural shifts in Japan over the past few decades, you’ll see why it was very well received that All Mongols are Barbarian Monsters and so forth. It is the same problem as depicting “generic brown people” in “generic Middle East” as more or less slobbering zombies to be mowed down.

Which gets back to the key point. Pretty much all of these “We are just depicting the <blank> period as it was” isn’t doing that. It is portraying things through the lens of the modern day which is something that is accepted amongst historic fiction writers (more on that shortly). So if they crank up the whiteness? There is a reason.

Now, I said I was going to talk about historic fiction writers. If you ARE interested in “what things were like”, I STRONGLY recommend authors like Miles Cameron (I think that is his pen name for SFF, but they redirect to the same site). Historic fiction can be awesome and the best stories are the ones that need to have a footnote or appendix of “Yo, this ACTUALLY happened.” because of how wild it is. And you’ll find that the writers who actually put the effort in to cite things tend to have much more nuanced depictions of both sides (because it is incredibly rare to have a genuinely evil empire) and are a lot less focused on racial purity because… that shit wasn’t a thing once we got past “The people on that side of the river all have red hair and are evil. I hear their wives and daughters are hot though…”

Iron Galaxy was semi-unique in that they basically existed as the company you go to when you need to contract out some support work. Think Bluepoint but the idea is that the end customer never realizes that this wasn’t made by a time traveling Rare from the 00s or whatever. Whereas they basically just stay afloat from a constant stream of low-medium price deals.

The leadership are dipshits and have made it a point to show it many times over the years (and Giant Bomb/Jeff Gerstmann have always done a great job of covering for them…) but it was a solid company that was pretty loved in the area and the industry (leadership aside).

So for IG to be going under is a REALLY bad sign for the health of the industry as a whole. Because this wasn’t “Hey, we have an excellent track record of new IPs and always release our games on time and under budget”. It is “Hey, we have an excellent track record of letting you sell more copies of a sure thing”.

And “voting” favors developers/celebrities with userbases to flood the system. This was a well documented problem and many of the indie devs of the era complained. The influencers of the era could get anything greenlit. Amazing games like even frigging Mount&Blade were in an endless struggle. And let alone the truly new developers who just had a game and a dream.

Also: I am pretty sure you are just showing your ass, but people who make “furry hentai games” aren’t inherently “pieces of shit”. Valve 900% needs to improve the filters to let people who don’t want to see it ignore it (Will Smith is basically the only person who knows how to hide it, it seems) but those games deserve to exist just as much as the latest call of duty.

It is at least a comfort during these horrific times to know that the fbi-cops are going to learn that they have just as few rights as “civilians” when it opposes the will of the State.

Everyone gets their start somewhere.

And you can be sure that the old hats are making sure to record and broadcast everything. So when the jackboots inevitably see a black person and start unloading with “rubber bullets” and tear gas, people will see.