It couldn't happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

Amazon has become an expensive version of Wish.com.

If North Korea wants us to know something different, they could tell us themselves. Or, even better, let the people talk to foreign journalists without handlers and threats of repercussions.

Otherwise, we're forced to wonder about how weird it is that it seems like every news organization in the world is dead-set on spreading lies about this one, tiny, geopolitically insignificant country (and no, being able to launch toy rockets into the ocean once every couple of years does not make them geopolitically significant). Like, why did the BBC and RFA and Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera all get together in a dark, smoky room and cook up a conspiracy to defame North Korea, of all countries? Why not, say, Thailand, or Malaysia, or Morocco, or something?

I was just commenting on that I don’t think that aggression against -lets call them- consevatives, neo-Nazi’s, right wingers, whatver, works or is wanted

I've been nice to them and trying to politely educate them for over 20 years now, since W was in office. I've convinced a grand total of 2, and in the meantime, 30 million worse ones have arisen.

Fuck them. I'm done assuming they only hate me because they're uneducated. They hate me because they get off on hate, and all the education in the fucking world doesn't matter to them. So I treat them like scum, and their arguments like jokes, because they are.

Don't like it? Too bad. Cry more, salty.

Right? Where has this article been? They’ve been denying it since the 80s.

Over the entire course of my life, the New York Times has never once been on the right side of an issue the first time. They only come around 5-15 years after the obvious public sea change. Same with the Washington Post.

Doc went corporate, and is now HMO. He's rich now, because he charges the other dwarves a monthly premium, but somehow their coverage never actually covers anything that's wrong with them.

Dopey has been replaced with Trippy, after discovering the healing powers of psychedelics.

Between climate change, the housing market, and stagnant wages, Happy found he needed some extra assistance to keep up the positive attitude. Fortunately, Trippy "knows a guy". Happy now goes by Xanny.

Bashful, after being diagnosed by HMO, changed his name to Social Anxiety. He can't afford medication, since HMO won't cover the brand-name drug to treat it (only the generic that didn't work and made him fat). But at least he has real diagnosis now, and he's working on it through on-line pay-per-session therapy from a company he heard about on a self-help podcast.

Grumpy spent years doomscrolling through Reddit and Twitter, and now knows The Truth about Them. He is now known as Ragey, and frequently encourages the other dwarves to Do Their Own Researchy.

Sneezy became a pariah during the COVID-19 pandemic, as everyone assumed he had it. To fight against that stigma, he changed his name to Allergy. Nobody believes him.

Sleepy discovered that the best way to not have to deal with any of the others was to lean in to his shtick, and is therefore still Sleepy (and hasn't been out of bed since 2016).

35% of the population turned out to vote.

So 65% 60.35% [edited to account for the provided evidence of voter suppression] of Floridians weren't sufficiently motivated to try to change the government after living through a first DeSantis term.

Yes, yes, I know, "voter suppression", "disenfranchised", etc. I'm sorry if I have a hard time believing that 65% of FL really super-duper wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by systemic corruption; that would put Florida in the same ballpark as Somalia in terms of governmental autocracy.

At some point, we just have to cut our losses and scram. That's why I left Arkansas, and am now squished into a tiny, overpriced, neglected little apartment with a roommate in a blue state, slowly working on replacing all my stuff.

Desperately trying to get my ass out of the south right now. Been working on it for almost a year. I was about at the point where I was going to just load up my car and drive until I hit a blue state, and figure out the rest later. Better to be a refugee now, before the brownshirts start bringing out the bloodhounds.

Fortunately, I think I have something lined up now (tentatively), but god damn it's terrifying down here.

Walking into an argument between two (or more) other people and saying something that feels totally measured and rational that ends up pissing off both sides and making them all come together in being pissed at me instead.

I market it as "I'm a uniter!", but 85% of the time I have no idea how it happened and it's completely on accident.

Yep… people usually interpret “free speech” as “freedom from the consequences of my speech,” but it’s never meant that.

It's not even that complicated. To these people, "free speech" only means that they believe they should be allowed to scream literal slurs when they want to make someone feel afraid or worthless. That's literally the only thing they really want to use "free speech" for.

I don't know much about ficus, but I know if someone did this to a silver maple or a ginkgo, it'd be a death sentence for that tree. There's almost no foliage left to even photosynthesize with, and the surface area of the cut ends is massive; it'll take months to seal up those wounds, during that whole time, the tree is losing water. If it managed to survive just the environmental issues (water, heat, light, etc), it'll be extremely vulnerable to diseases and pests. Unless ficus are the tarragon of the tree world, they look to me like they're doomed. Universal should have just cut them down, for all that.

Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.

By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they'll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?

The main advantage of solar combined with batteries is that it will help regular people instead of a huge company. A decentralized energy production would also help in wars or with natural catastrophies.

Oh, right. The "the only solution is to completely topple capitalism and government and nothing else will do" circlejerk.

Unless you actually believe solar panels aren't manufactured, marketed, installed, and maintained primarily by the electric companies, in which case, it's the "I refuse to do any actual research on my positions" reddit circlejerk, with a dash of the "what do you mean that not everyone can live an off-grid mountain-man life?" circlejerk.

"We own concentric circles" - Trader Joe's lawyers

We need to go 0 carbon yesterday. If you can assure me that in the 12 years it'll take to build a nuclear plant we can have built an equal GW-amount of stable renewables that can serve the same area with the same 100% uptime, sure. But every moment we rely on any amount of oil/gas/coal to cover the renewable gaps is another moment we won't get back in the fight against effectively permanent climate change.

Just like with literally everything else involved in the climate change equation, we needed to have been phasing out oil/gas/coal for nuclear 10-15 years ago. But because we dragged our feet and listened to the pleasing lies from the fossil fuel industry, we're fucked now. We're just fucked. Our kids are fucked, our grandkids are fucked, but maybe we have a chance to un-fuck the future for our great-grandkids, but only if we stop dicking around and actually DO SOMETHING EFFECTIVE. Like ditch all the fossil fuel plants right the fuck now. Can renewables completely replace all the fossil fuel plants? No? Then we need fucking nuclear.

I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It's a chat program. It's designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It's easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It's the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.

The kind where Ken goes off on a super-badass special forces mission and says "Take a bullet for ya, babe," as he leaves the house.

in true Calvinist fashion it doesn’t matter what choices people make, there’s no action one can take to change their position.

Exactly. Like how all the "self-made men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" slag off on AOC for having had to work a real job once.

Nobody. They are the Supreme Guardian Council, which is why I will only ever refer to the so-called "chief justice" as "Ayatollah Roberts".

It's a fine argument for people who grew up during a time when "colored people" was the less racist way of referring to POC.

Like, maybe this guy's great-grandfather, seeing as the NAACP was named in 1909.

But, to be a bit more charitable, his grandfather probably used the term (it peaked in usage in the 1960s), and maybe his father, if his father was one of those people who stubbornly resists change. But Rep Crane himself was born a decade after "colored" had gone from the least racist term to a decidedly mid-level racist term (after social shaming began to be applied to the more racist ones).

In my late 30's, I finally managed to untangle myself from an abusive marriage in which a lot of fights over the last couple of years were about me not wanting to have sex often enough. I assumed that the high-anxiety, high-stress relationship was killing my libido, so after I'd taken a little bit to recalibrate myself after the divorce, I started dating again.

It went fine, I was reasonably "successful" (as such things are often measured from the male perspective), but every time I had sex, I left the event feeling distinctly unfulfilled. It's hard to describe. It was something I thought would make me happy, but, at best, it left me kind of empty, and, at worst, I'd spend the next couple days fighting off anxiety.

So I decided to get my testosterone checked (it was normal) and get some therapy. At some point I realized that I hadn't been on a date, much less had sex, in over a year, and I was fine with it, and, most importantly, that apparently wasn't normal for guys. I noticed that all of my friends would complain up a storm if they hadn't gotten laid in longer than about a week and a half, and that there were always these very confusing threads on AskReddit or AskMen where guys would say things like "I might be able to go 6 months without sex for a million dollars" or whatever. Whereas I was over here having to look back at old text messages just to find out exactly how long it had been since I last had sex, because I hadn't been keeping track.

I had one more hookup (Feb. 2021), got the same kind of empty feelings afterwards, and decided that, while the act itself was enjoyable, all the complicated unwritten rules and rituals around sex just made it not worth it, especially considering I never got the happy-fuzzy-euphoric feelings everyone else talked about. I wasn't getting the same payoff that all my other guy friends said they were getting, and instead of thinking they were full of hot air, I decided to take their word for it.

So after some research, I started identifying as sex-indifferent gray/ace.

It's not a perfect label; I do experience sexual attraction, but it's not powerful enough to be a motivating factor. Sex is kind of like mowing the lawn, in that it's not awful, and sometimes it can be relaxing or enjoyable under the right circumstances, but I'm not leaving work early because I'm excited to mow the lawn when I get home. And if someone said "Hey, you never have to mow the lawn again!", that would be pretty good news. Sometimes I miss the smell of freshly-cut grass, but on the whole, it's just one more big thing I no longer have to worry about.

My current girlfriend is also ace, and it works out wonderfully. We cuddle, we hold hands, we laugh, and we never have to argue about sex. Life is much simpler. I'm reasonably happy.

The Arkansans have figured out a way around the new no-porn law.

Are there ghosts? Because I'll pay a premium if there are for sure ghosts.

I want this to get ported to PC so bad.

I left right before High Isle came out, but nothing I've tried since has really caught my attention the same way. Even GW2, as awesome as it is, and as many QoL features it has that I deeply missed in ESO, just... isn't the same.

Did they ever get the Champion Points re-worked into something that doesn't suck? I hate the way the green constellations worked, particularly; whose idea was it to say "Nobody harvests, chest-hunts, fishes, and searches for crafting recipes at the same time, so obviously it's silly to let players equip all those bonuses at once"??

Even if not, I think I might drop Netflix and re-up my subscription. If just to remind me why I left, maybe?

Games are like an interactive movie and there’s a ratio of moviness to gaminess and this one leans heavier on the moviness side.

The last Final Fantasy game I played was 8, and it was exactly because of this. They stripped out almost all the "game" bits (although they did give us a really cool card game minigame) and turned it into basically a movie you could occasionally interact with. The battles were mindless (there was no reason not to use your strongest summon every round, because it was both more effective than anything else and because it was totally free to do so), the "equipment" system was entirely optional (which was good, because interacting with it required mega-grind), and overland travel was a total afterthought. It was more of a "game" than anything Tell Tale put out, but that's a low bar, since Tell Tale only produces movies that sometimes throw in an attention check in the form of a quicktime event.

It was a real shame, because I had entirely switched system allegiance from Nintendo to Playstation just for FF7. Then the followed it up with 8, and it was obvious where they were taking the franchise. So I'm not surprised to see, all these years later, that the newest FF game is even more of that.

I’d be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.

On the other hand, feature parity means that the full potential of the X because everything also has to run on the S. So all the things that the X can do that the S can't will, probably, not be used much, if at all, going forward, just to avoid this kind of hassle.

Great deal for people who bought the S, but sucks shit for people who paid a couple hundred bucks more for the X, for features that simply won't be utilized.

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that's not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How's that?

Getting access to all the weapon skills is so much faster, which makes trying out new builds a thousand times easier.

Not having to find and speak to the quest giver before I can do the quest is great. I like just having to get into their radius without having to track them down before and after.

I'm a big explorer, so I really appreciate the rewards for exploring the maps (and the compass pointing me towards the things I missed).

The jumping puzzles are amazing.

The free mount not being a boring-ass horse is pretty cool. Mounts having different abilities is also cool. Not having to spend 120 real days upgrading your mounts is really nice.

Getting experience from harvesting and crafting. Not having to spend real-time months researching things to craft them.

Underwater exploration. Yeah, underwater combat is kind of a pain, but it's still cool to have the option.

The directed story mode complete with boss fights in instances that can be done solo.

Classes are all totally different from each other; there are no "meta" skills for a specific role no matter what class you're playing (eg, unstable wall, aggressive warhorn).

Enough skill points in the game to learn every skill and every specialization, along with the ability to switch builds on the fly just whenever (without having to go back to a shrine and pay to do it).

I'm not sure how I feel about having a centralized auction house. A lot of my endgame in ESO was shopping and flipping valuable things from one trader to another, but I have to admit it's really handy to just be able to go buy a bunch of crafting materials in any city for the lowest available price.

Like, I could just keep going; there are so many things, both little and big, that I love about GW2. But for some reason, I just can't get into it. Maybe it's that it levels me up so fast that I don't get to really enjoy the view and learn the class. Maybe it's because the elite specializations change the class so dramatically that most of what I did learn during leveling is immediately obsolete at 80. Maybe it's because the combat feels kind of clunky due to being a weird hybrid of action combat and tab targeting. Maybe it's how complicated the buff system is, that I can't really wrap my brain around all the different boons and when I need them. None of those are really big deals, just quirks of the game that make it unique, like all games have. But it's not doing the same thing that ESO did for me.

We'll make a deal.

Our schools will teach more about the horrors of the atomic bomb, and their schools will teach more about the horrors of Unit 731. I think that's a fair trade.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn't adapt to tune it out. It's loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It's not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It's so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I'd be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like "Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They've been dead for three years" and my brain would go "Oops, sorry," and I'd stop hearing it for a while.

No, absolutely not. By Reddit standards, this was a tiff. Maybe a smaller tussle. Definitely not a kerfluffle.

Besides, part of this is a "me" problem. I'm still adjusting to not having to come out of the gate swinging the first time I sense hostility. Did I respond to an energy? Sure. Did I respond to an intentional energy? .....eh, maybe, maybe not. Did I go from 0-100 too fast? Probably. What I'm saying is, I see how I could have handled that better. And the fact that you took the time to engage with me over it is a big positive for the platform.

If this is true, then another danger is it (community, server, platform, etc) becomes an echo chamber.

There's a middle ground between being an "echo chamber" and being forced to put up with the same 10 different bad-faith bumper-sticker sealion questions over and over again for all eternity.

I come to Beehaw when I'm just dead-dog tired of having the same arguments over and over again, when I'm sick to death of hearing what the alt-right thinks about any given issue, when I'm just fed up having to defend my identity and my beliefs from crypto-facists who think they're being subtle when they imply I shouldn't exist and wouldn't exist if they had their way.

I know what "the other side" thinks. Dear God, I can't escape hearing what "the other side" thinks, about everything from the international politics of war to beer cans. I'm well aware of the "discussion" they want to have, I've had it eighty thousand times over the course of my life and it's always the same theme and the same tactics lightly reskinned for whatever outrage bait they read about on Facebook last week.

For example, their opinion on "kids getting trans surgery" is exactly the same pile of nonsense as their opinion on "partial-birth abortion" was 25 years ago: "We're going to take an extreme situation, that almost never actually happens precisely because of how extreme it is, that only ever takes place after months or years of agonizing decision-making between parents and entire teams of professionals with advanced degrees and decades of experience, and pretend like it's the primary form of this issue and happens on a whim."

I'm over 40. I've heard it all. I know what their opinions are. Fuck, I know what their opinions will be on shit that hasn't even come up yet, because it never changes. They never shut up about their opinions. So no, I'm not worried about getting into an "echo chamber". I like finally having a little bit of soundproofing between me and the "(allegedly) silent majority".

RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody's really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.

The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I'll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.

To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It's not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it's going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).

I apologize for being a little annoyed right now. I feel like I'm being moderated for defending myself against their escalation.

The top level comment from the mod was not aggressive or accusatory.

My response to that top level comment was measured and nuanced, with specific examples of real events and an analysis of the mindset behind those events.

Their reply to me included all caps, excessive punctuation, extremely bad-faith arguments (the actual religious views of every single one of the names they dropped are incredibly complicated, not just "was Christian"; again, one member of that esteemed list literally believed he could turn lead into gold with magic), and that's assuming calling the question of critical thinking outdated and childish ("2010 New Atheist") is not an aggressive escalation.

Furthermore, you told me to disengage, and then the mod continued to engage. I'd appreciate it if they received a similar request, because right now it feels like you're holding my arms behind my back while they get to keep punching me.

How about texting? Does texting work?

I did report it. The problem is many of these arguments come clothed in the fabric of politeness.

Yup. And Beehaw is already doing the thing I predicted they'd do back during the Reddit blackouts: They allow polite genocide endorsements but warn/suspend/ban people who tell those people to fuck themselves because we're not "being nice". Shocked Pikachu when Beehaw ends up being no different from shit-just-works.

That's great news! Keep us posted on how things go, so those of us who are maybe-not-quite-that-discontent-yet can use you as a guinea pig. :D

You do realize that solar panels are usually installed and maintained by small companies and not multi-billion dollar companies, right?

According to whom? You? Every solar panel installed in my county was done by local contractors on the behest of either the electric company or Tesla.

i don’t know why you out of hand dismiss this as a possibility.

Because there's no evidence.

"65% of all the eligible voters in Florida were prevented from voting due to direct governmental interference and extreme voter suppression" is a fantastic claim. One might even call it an extraordinary claim. One for which I would expect to see some fairly extraordinary evidence. I can't just wake up in the morning and decide to believe something because it fits with my preconceived biases, especially not something directly involving almost 14 million people.

Are you actually expecting me to believe that 14 million people tried to show up at the polls and were turned away, without any evidence whatsoever? That's a Q-level conspiracy.