Democrats will continue to give sternly worded remarks all the way up to their appointment with the gallows, so brave!

When They Go Low, We Go Die

Chapter 3

Marjorie smiled with great satisfaction as she looked at the crowd and began to check the rifle in her arms to make sure there was a round in the chamber.

2 men with giant beer guts - who each wore different flavors of Punisher-style skull masks and were covered head to toe in pointlessly elaborate tactical surplus gear as if they were cosplaying their favorite Call of Duty characters - began dragging another elderly man up to the makeshift platform.

The white-haired old man was dressed in a finely tailored dark blue suit with a little American flag lapel pin next to his tie. It looked so similar to the one that so many others in his cohort had adorned for probably the last 20 or so years, but he had been blindfolded by the men before being brought before the stage so he couldn't see how many others still wore it or who had switched to the golden lion that... "the others..." now wore exclusively.

The octogenarian ghost of a man feebly began to speak (not shout) loudly in protest as if trying to reason with whomever might be in charge, but the 2 pig-like men grinned and said nothing. They began tying his hands behind him against a wooden pole covered with small holes, indentations and spatters of red. As the grinning pigs both stepped away from the geriatric man secured to the pole, the mob just below him roared with wild bloodlust over his inaudible words drowning them out over and over again with : "USA! USA! USA! USA!"

Marjorie laughed and took one hand away from the rifle to quiet the crowd so they could hear the old man's words :

"Point of order, Mr. Chairman! Point of order! I'm reclaiming my time! I'd like the gentle-lady to put down the firearm she just picked up, Mr. Ch-"

...he was cut off with a loud and sudden BANG as he slumped into a dark puddle of red slowly expanding across the stage floor.

The crowd roared and resumed its repeated chant...

...and another blindfolded well-dressed elderly figure was walked up to the pole.

They sabatoged him in 2016, too… 2020 they had learned how to just do it better.

Right before Super Tuesday they got scared the DNC types made calls and then it was over.

The neo-liberals who took over the party completely after Reagan would rather lose to Trump than let Sanders, or Warren, or AOC, or anyone else who’d actually even slightly joke at the possibility of forcing the billionaire class to finally start contributing instead of leeching.

I will vote for Biden, just like I did in 2020, and Hillary in 2016… but they won’t change and if they lose they just blame the left anyway.

Right. And the republicans on their best day would be doing any genocide and imperialism more than even the worst neolib on their worst.

Remember the embassy in Israel was moved by Rs. The Rs got us in to Afghanistan. The Rs got us into Iraq. The Rs caused the Great Recession. The Rs caused the US to have an even more terrible response to COVID, indirectly leading to the preventable deaths of a million people.

Voting for ANYTHING that gives the Rs more power is objectively a more terrible thing.

Again, shitty, but real world.

The non-cynic answer : she’s not charismatic. She’s not a genuine person. She memorizes talking points and is pretty terrible at everything else. There are several baggage issues related to her past politically that poison her for the left. Namely her time as a prosecutor in CA.

The cynical answer : there are too many old stupid racists + misogynists for her mediocrity as an orator (do NOT compare her to Obama - who was a master orator) to overcome.

Seriously, Gretchen Whitmer is probably the best alternative the DNC would be willing to entertain (I’d prefer an AOC or even my man Bernie - since although he IS old, his brain hasn’t turned to lukewarm cat shit like Biden’s seemed to be on display today)… but they’ll probably instead desperately try to pivot too late to Newsom since he’s a neoliberal wolf in progressive sheep’s clothing… like Obama was.

Smug rich beltway liberals completely detached from reality now get to feel stupid for a second and bewildered as they try to pivot to blaming this again somehow on “tHe LeFt!” (Aka mild social democrats everywhere else in the world)… but otherwise they think they’ll be okay, regardless of if a D or R is in charge (since they STILL don’t seriosuly take the threat of Trump and the far right rising everywhere) since at least they didn’t let some filthy FDR-type who might DARE to raise their taxes by like 0.5% after 6 years or whatever… like Bernie or Warren or Whitmer or Bowman or AOC even get to compete for the primary nomination.

They have doomed the rest of us… and possibly themselves depending now on how successful “Project 2025” is at completely permafucking us all back into the dark ages as the world burns hotter every fucking month.

I still can’t believe that 3 years after January 6th - where they fucking saw some of those goons with fucking ZIP ties - they think they won’t put be up against the bloody poles by mobs whipped up into a frothing frenzy by their demagogue-emperor god.

Because they aren’t the only ones, because Trump and any R is worse.

The Ds may cut off a finger, but the Rs will eat your whole goddamn family and make you watch.

Both suck… but sitting out or voting for anyone who has no chance is inviting them to feast.

I’d much rather DeSantis and Haley not be on any ticket…

How about we have Newsom be the Republican and AOC be the Democrat, since that’s a little more accurate if you go by pure policy assessment.

Oh man… in all my years I have only seen one… (and it was this year!)… but it was not a presidential one… it was an AMAZING Republican primary debate in Colorado.

I WISH they got these guys to be the moderators. Would have fucking bashed Trump.

on stage looking like a faded graphic tee.

Name a time when any third-party candidate won the presidency please go ahead. I’ll wait.

And if you can’t come up with one of those name me a time when a third-party candidate resulted in the party changing its actions the next time around for the better…

And if you can’t come up with anything for either of those, then what evidence do you have to prove voting 3rd party would help further accomplish?

It fucking sucks and isn’t fair but it doesn’t change reality.

Reality shows that if you vote for third-party, you make the worse candidate win.

Hillary lost in 2016 arguably because the DNC fucked over Bernie. And what did they do in 2020? Fuck over Bernie harder. They don’t “learn their lesson” or change their behavior for the better.

If you want good people to win, your only option is to fight harder during the primaries and to protest and to run for office yourself… not give the ol’ 🖕🏻 only to have the helicopter blade reduce it to a bloody stump moments after you initially excitedly raised it to the sky to say “fuck you” to the people who won’t even look back while you’re lifting it up.

I hate both parties, but I understand what the rules of this shitty game are.

I’m am not living in a fantasy world where doing what feels the most like “sticking it to the man” (but is just an excuse to be lazy and ineffective rather than doing something hard like volunteering to help the campaign of whoever is most closely aligned with my positions in order to push them more toward the future I want) is what results in the most tangible benefit to my interests overall as a voter.

I hate MS Teams so much.

Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn't burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.

This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible... and then there's guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War... who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.

Nintendo's biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don't seem to "get" the internet... so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.

FDR threw 200,000 Americans into concentration camps.

Yep... Congrats, Captain Obvious. Guess what? All presidents are shitty. He also helped us push to start building "the bomb" after Pearl Harbor.

• Truman helped pass the Marshal Plan to rebuild all of Europe... but also dropped those 2 atomic bombs on civilian cities, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
• LBJ got us in to Vietnam proper. But he also pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act.
• Obama passed the Affordable Healthcare Act, but increased drone strikes 10-fold.
• Eisenhower gave us the Interstate Highway, but went along with anti-left coups all over South America (lots of the other presidents also did this sort of stuff, too, unfortunately)
• FDR passed social security, helped get us out of the Great Depression, passed the GI bill, made electricity accessible to rural areas, gave us the Warren court - AKA the only non-conservative Supreme court in the last 100 years (Miranda rights, Brown v Board of education, right to attorney even if you can't afford it, etc.)

So I count FDR on the RELATIVE (not absolute) "good" side of US presidents... who are all shitty overall to lesser degrees at best.

The irony of this statement

Sorry, but could you clarify?

The problem is the idea of working on games sounds amazing... and it allows them to pull in a constant fresh young pool of eager workers willing to completely destroy themselves to make their mark on the world and release something they're passionate about...

And all these publicly traded ghoulish-MBA-run companies would rather have more cheap inexperienced "Pikmin" type workers to throw at endless "copycat-chase-whatever-concept-is-popular-and-constantly-pivot-toward-the-popular-right-now" type game projects than experts in their field with dozens of titles under their belt, decades of design, or artistic, or programming experience.

😄 oh right. I guess I meant I don’t want to hear someone say how she’s just as good as Obama was… because she isn’t.

As long as the US has a two-party system where the third-party mechanically ONLY acts as a spoiler candidate - see Ross Perot for Bush in 92, Nader, Stein, whoever you want to fucking name… whichever THAT 3rd party candidate is most closely aligned with are the ones that get screwed the most.

Voting third-party is about as stupid a fucking thing you can do outside of not voting at all.

Voting third-party is the worst kind of dipshit gesture - like raising your middle finger to flip someone off while a helicopter blade is spinning inches above you. Voting 3rd party means you effectively give another vote to the candidate you want the least.

If the US had ranked-choice voting, then voting for a 3rd party would make sense, but both parties know that this helps them stay in power and so as long as they keep it the way it is, our ONLY choice with a demonstrably positive outcome of any kind is to try and fight super fucking hard in the primaries and hope to God that we can squeeze someone through before dark corporate PAC money missiles or the ring-leaders in the DNC recognize what they are before being able to stop them.

It’s how we got AOC, and a few others from the squad… and it’s how we were even able to see Bernie get to push Biden just a TINY bit more left than Biden would have been otherwise.

If you want to tell them to fuck off… then show up and volunteer and phone bank and knock on doors for the best candidates you can find DURING THE PRIMARIES.

If someone really awesome makes it through to the general… then great!

But if they don’t, hopefully they were strong enough presence (thanks to brave volunteer supporters who wanted to say “fuck you” to the shitty party leaders) to force the right-leaning Democratic members to lean a little bit more leftward than they otherwise would have been (like Bernie helped make Biden do… as much as he could).

Shitty framing.

They don’t want to pay for the luxury of being able to have an engineer on call 24/7 by paying 3 people to cover a full 24-hr spread of time.

They want to pay one guy a shit salary without overtime and be able to work them 24/7/365.

Said this in another thread :

First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.

Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…

So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.

Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.

I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.

This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.

To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.

Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).

In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.

I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.

TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.

Demagogues like Trump are nothing new… and are only able to gain ground when a population is angered by the inaction of others in power to ease their real material suffering.

Medical debt, unaffordable housing, price-gouging, a lack of upward mobility or the ability to afford retirement or having children… all these things make it easy for demagogues to offer scapegoats.

Really - to beat Trump, we just need a firebrand populist who will try to pass legislation that helps the average American and - when unable to pass specific such legislation that would alleviate real tangible problems faced by the overwhelming majority of Americans - would use the bully pulpit to loudly push for the change they support are unable to enact - letting their voters know where to direct their anger and power.

Only genuine populism can soundly beat fake blustering demagoguing populism, because fake populism is designed to only emulate real genuine populism rather than offer up actual solutions to problems faced.

People want universal healthcare, they don’t want wars, they want to be able to take care of themselves and their family, they want the corrupt punished and justice for the citizen harmed by the giant multinational corporation’s greed driven pollution, waste, or lack of safety.

Fake populists only offer fake scapegoats and vague gestures. A real populist loudly and accurately points to the root of these issues.

You want to beat Trump? Then we need Biden to have been this his whole time in office… and to be this now.

The fact that the White House is focusing now more on pushing for anti-deepfake porn measures - only because billionaire Taylor Swift has been wronged by it - rather than making it so Americans can avoid losing their homes, jobs, or medical coverage - is ammo for lying demagogues to then disingenuously blame such problems on trans-kids and illegal immigrant workers.

This may just an old interwebz man talking, but I'd say "Don't worry."

It's not a 1:1, but this is similar to what happened with Digg in the mid 2000s. I was there. I migrated from there to Reddit - specifically because Digg had decided to ignore its vocal user base and fundamentally change what the site was.

It ultimately resulted in this :

Ever since the pandemic, curbside pickup has been the norm at our house for groceries.

We use Kroger, not Walmart, but I had a recent experience relevant to share.

I was out running an errand and my spouse asked me to go grab a couple items from Kroger since it was nearby.

I hadn’t been inside the store in like a year, so I was surprised to see gates at the door that opened and closed upon approach and walking away.

Also, while shopping, at some point suddenly the wheels on the cart locked up, causing me to bang the ever loving shit out of my shins on the cart frame. That’s when I got to learn about the new “anti-theft” wheel lock tech being used on all carts now.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wanted to flip the goddamn cart over and kick the absolute shit out of it… but I knew that wouldn’t help.

…But if I read a story about someone going and drilling holes in every single one of those cart wheels, or setting fire to them all, or breaking the gates, I would laugh.

I imagine as soon as someone gets something worse than bruised shins and brings a lawsuit against these stupid companies, we will see these stupid things go away… but until then, I’m not fucking stepping foot inside any store that has that bullshit.

Hmmm, weird.

Anyway, cross-posting one of my favorite random comments from some other cool person I saw in a thread the other day :

Android :

• LibreTube
• NewPipe
  • NewPipe x SponsorBlock
  • BraveNewPipe
  • Grayjay

iOS :

• Yattee with this guide

Web :

• Piped
• Invidious
• ViewTube
• Tubo

Desktop :

• FreeTube

TV :

Android TV - SmartTubeNext

Apple TV - Yattee with this guide

Just add this line to the "My Filters" section for the uBlock Origin extension.

1. click the extension in your top bar
2. click the "gears" icon/button
3. click the "My Filters" tab and add this line :

www.youtube.com###content > .ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope

My original mastadon post has screenshots with red guide marks in case this is confusing:

https://mas.to/@JDPoZ/110736154436202944

My heart : "YES!!!!!"

My brain - which has seen what people like, for example, the Wal-Mart heiress who literally ran someone over that then died never spent a moment in jail... : "No."

Hmmm, weird.

Anyway, cross-posting one of my favorite random comments from some other cool person I saw in a thread the other day :

Android :

• LibreTube
• NewPipe
  • NewPipe x SponsorBlock
  • BraveNewPipe
  • Grayjay

iOS :

• Yattee with this guide

Web :

• Piped
• Invidious
• ViewTube
• Tubo

Desktop :

• FreeTube

TV :

Android TV - SmartTubeNext

Apple TV - Yattee with this guide

Car seat adjustment, above seat vehicle interior lights, steering wheel adjustment, door handles, door locks, main rear view mirror, climate controls for vents and seats, car starting, and trunk and seat releases should all have controls that can be operated either directly or with physical buttons.

If there is ALSO a screen driven element, that’s fine, but this stuff needs to work without a screen.

This stuff is not being done for the sake of UX. It is for saving money at the expense of consumer safety.

NVIDIA Shield Pro (the 2019 model is the latest version) with a couple of customizations STILL is the absolute best for avoiding ads.

It is the most powerful outside of the latest model AppleTVs, but with the added benefit of being completely customizable.

Personally, I HATE ads, so I use a combination of customizations to eliminate them completely.

1. A custom “launcher” - this is a little weird to wrap your head around if you’re not familiar with Android OS devices, but it basically means “replacing” what you see when the device turns on. A few years ago, Google couldn’t help themselves and started adding more and more advertisements to their “home page” for the Shield’s default launcher app, so I switched to the “Wolf” Launcher and have never changed, though I would probably recommend “FLauncher” now since you can still (at least last I checked) get that directly from the Google Play Store without any “side-loading” (which means to install things from non-Google sources)
2. I love YouTube, but hate ads, so I downloaded and installed a 3rd party YouTube client called “SmartTube Next” - which although DOES require a side load installation, COMPLETELY ELIMINATES ALL ADS, AND in-video sponsorships, and even intros and other annoying filler content in some more popular videos.

The side-loading part makes things a little more scary/difficult to setup but I promise it’s worth it and there are always updated videos online on how to do this safely and securely.

I just set up like 8 of these things a few weeks ago for my brother and he loves it. Nothing is laggy or slow, no ads, and it integrated into his Smart Home stuff effortlessly.

One last note - a custom launcher can replace the default one (rather than run alongside it) by grabbing and installing “Launcher Manager” - another side-loaded app.

This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”

Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.

I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.

I lost that when it became clear he was just the “vibes” guy in 2020 - never holding any clear positions even when pressed where “middle ground” doesn’t really exist for people.

I know it sounds a little silly to blame this on one person, but honestly think it’s Elon’s fault.

A bunch of tech-bro CEO types idolize him and are jealous - thinking he is cool for getting to “say whatever he wants” to the public, his detractors - Hell… even the SEC… and he “gets away with it.”

Not only that, but he has gotten to present to cheering crowds on stage for companies people still mistakenly think Elon both founded and runs single-handedly like Tesla and SpaceX… and he has been positively referenced and guest appeared over the past decade in Marvel films and other “cool” pop culture like South Park and Rick & Morty.

…And so when Elon just said “fuck you” publicly to a bunch of his workers by firing a bunch of them… The Elon wannabes loved it.

Worse - they are influenced by his actions. Some have even openly said it.

So not only do people like spez go and fuck over their devs, their users, and advertisers… but the folks at the heads of lots of companies are doing the same. For example - and I don’t know if it was mentioned here but - Plex recently fired like 20% of their workforce.

I remember being angry at people saying it was “too on the nose.”

Job offers?! HA.

You’re thinking too small. This has a fucking Adam McKay / Social Network Fincher movie adaptation written all over it.

If Zhong has not already been contacted by a hundred different ghost writers or publishers offering to write a book + movie / mini-series adaptation of his story, I’d be surprised.

This shit is just a more modern Catch Me If You Can / Wolf of Wall Street type situation - but with an arguably more sympathetic character - who gave his friends 10s of thousands of dollars to go on shopping sprees.

The amount of money he’ll make just from the royalties paid out for an adaptation of this would be enough to at least make back some significant portion of the money he stole.

Same as that piece of shit still doing speaking engagements from The Wolf of Wall Street.

People eat that shit up.

The craziest thing to me about this whole situation is how Unity even came into being.

I was in school learning Unreal back when it was an absolute trash fire - pre “UDK” days when Epic was splitting their time between working on their engine and making the next Gears of War game.

Unity was this breath of fresh air that made it so the interface made sense. No more “clicking the 3rd green checkmark” to import your skeletal mesh that you generated from your $2,000 software from Autodesk with a plugin that barely works made by desperate people in forums…

Unity's main initial release (version 2.5)...

...was not only BEAUTIFUL by comparison to the "Unreal Editor..."

...software from around that time, but it worked with interchangeable file formats and eventually native program files like PSDs.

They are the main reason that Epic got scared, lowered their stupidly high price of ~$1,000,000 to license their game engine, and started really redoing the whole UX to the point that it actually wasn’t cryptic arcane magic but on par with and sometimes even above what Unity offered… and they helped make the entire indie game industry able to hire folks with skills in an engine that wouldn’t break the bank and that everyone could carry over.

It used to not be like that. I worked at a studio with 20 guys and they had their own engine… and the original engine programmers were all gone. It was like trying to do maintenance on a commercial jet liner while flying it and never having been given a manual but just a few guys with second-hand knowledge.

It’s so goddamn maddening to see them completely destroy themselves like this. It’s some Star Wars prequel “you were the chosen one” type meme shit.

I’m happy that Godot was there to fill the gap, because I hate to think what would happen were Unreal not to have any competition with the 3rd party engine market again… but Unity… man… it never was “as good” as Unreal visually, but it had gotten to a point where it was “close enough” that everyone used it.

Now though? I can’t ever see any studio wanting to risk using it again at the chance they get greedy again and try to rug pull small dev houses.

Rural America will vote against it because rural America doesn’t “feel” the things done by politicians pretty much ever anymore.

Until the federal government does something as big and tangibly felt as FDR’s “Rural Electrification Act” - they will continue to see big cities as the sole beneficiaries of governmental legislation.

Unfortunately for all of us, propaganda works best when those who ostensibly are “on your side” refuse to make the shaky rich allies who pay for their fundraising efforts angry in order to better convince would-be constituents to support you.

*pre-2010 Digg

Digg after that was no longer competition. It was an ad-riddled trash-fire which drove a massive number of its users away to places like reddit... including myself... who just kinda did something similar with reddit.

Not defending Sony, but I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make a game that can have hundreds of thousands of players playing multiplayer matches simultaneously all over the world, but it needs a lot of infrastructure, and network support and other expensive hard to do stuff that you can’t just shit out like it’s Flappy Bird.

The problem is is they probably needed capital and support to get it off the runway, and Sony attached strings to the capital and support they gave them.

Now that it’s a hit, Sony is trying to flex its legal power via said strings - I’m guessing - and probably have all but threatened this relatively small dev with pulling the rug or taking them to court if they don’t follow orders.

TL;DR - Making games is expensive. Sony probably offered the small dev with limited resources a Faustian bargain and now the Devil is calling for his dues. They probably never had a choice.

Random, I know, but there’s actually a weirdly perfect jab at this in the new Fincher movie “The Killer.”

One of the protagonist’s sniper nest positions is literally in an old “WeWork” office that has basically become abandoned / derelict. Fincher made sure to have the logo visible on a door in an establishing shot.