Very much so (and there's at least one patient gamers community around, because I've posted to one).

The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I'm antisocial enough that that doesn't appeal to me anyway, so I'm not missing anything there.

Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it's easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.

And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

News flash for wealthy authoritarian parasites around the world, because you all seem ignorant of this fact:

Declining birthrates are a direct result of the simple fact that more people all the time decide that they have no desire to bring children into this world, and that in turn is a direct result of the fact that you've turned this world into a warped, corrupt, toxic, authoritarian shithole.

You have no one to blame but yourselves.

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.

It's become obvious over time that one of Trump's primary strategies in life is assigning his failures and faults to other people. He lives in a sort of permanent fog of projection.

I wonder who he's trying to fool though. It's so constant and seemingly effortless that I suspect that it's really mostly for his own benefit - that it's not just the story he's telling other people, but the story he's telling himself.

Since the Heritage Foundation just overtly declared war on American democracy, complete with a thinly veiled threat of violence and bloodshed, it's just that much more important that news like this is spread as widely as possible.

The fascists riding Trump's coattails aren't even hiding their intentions any more. We must not let them succeed in destroying the few remaining vestiges of American democracy, and the first step in that is keeping that loathsome lunatic Trump out of office.

This is what I was waiting for.

Faced with a black/asian woman, the Republicans just aren't going to be able to help themselves - their hateful bigotry is going to keep rearing its ugly head.

The key moment is going to be when Candidate Lardbucket himself lets some of his own racism and misogyny fall out of his festering gob. That's going to be glorious.

No surprise there.

After Knesset members actually got up and angrily defended the supposed right to rape Palestinians and the finance minister lamented the fact that the rest of the world would condemn arranging for the death by starvation of 2 million Palestinians, there's pretty much no low left that's too low for the Israeli government.

So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it's such a poorly run site that it's not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.

Just the first of many, MANY more to come.

The Republican plan, rather obviously, is to take this election by whatever means necessary - fairly, or if that fails fraudulently, or if that fails by judicial fiat, or if that fails by force.

That's the biggest reason I don't even call this a revolution. It's a coup.

Obviously because he's a weak candidate (and has been from the very beginning) in what might well be the highest stakes presidential race in US history.

The debate didn't suddenly create some notion of his weakness as a candidate - long before the debate, his prospects were already shaky at best, and the Dem establishment had already had to resort to basically trying to guilt trip people into voting for him.

All the debate did as far as any of that goes is drive home the point that people have been trying to make from the beginning - that he is and always has been a weak and uninspiring candidate at best.

And I'd say that rather obviously, if anyone's repeating the mistakes of 2016, it's the Dem establishment.

And on a bit of a side note - in response to the author's smugly self-congratulatory view that the voters are mindless automatons who just blindly do as the media tells them, I would just like to offer up a hearty, "fuck you."

I was hoping for that.

He's a lame duck now. That means he's free to pursue policies that will add to his legacy, and without having to give even the tiniest shit about what the establishment and the donor class might think about it.

I dunno... in a way, that's representation in its purest form - angry, stupid Republicans have one of their own in office.

Two days and they already reek of desperation and fear.

I'm often reminded of a bit on Top Gear years ago, when they were talking about "turbo" as a marketing tool in the 80s, when you could buy "turbo" sunglasses or "turbo" watches or "turbo" after-shave.

She's bludgeoningly obviously compromised. All the way through, her rulings, and the timing and circumstances of them, have not been made in the service of enforcing law, but engineered to benefit Trump.

So really the only question is whether or not justice will prevail. If this is still in any sense a nation of laws, she'll be removed (and hopefully sanctioned for her rather obvious bias and/or corruption).

But to all appearances, this is not a nation of law...

Are we actually asking if an utterly vile, demonstrably corrupt, entirely self-serving psychopath who's overseeing a genocide, a violent incremental land grab and repeated attempts to provoke wars with four different neighbors has "finally lost America?"

Every time I think this timeline couldn't possibly be more fucked up, it shocks me yet again.

On brand.

It's oddly appropriate that those who are most focused on the supposed inherent moral imperative to have children are so often such awful parents.

They're like five year olds...

They're sort of like the old Italian man in Catch-22:

"I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American."

The only difference is that, as you note, NYT's focus is on their own gravitas. Their goal isn't merely survival, but to maintain their image as an authoritative voice in national affairs. And they do that in large part simply by currying favor with whoever currently has the biggest coattails.

Just another step toward making used-to-be-Twitter a safe space for cowardly fascists.

It's a hosting site for free ebooks.

The site admins don't provide any of the ebooks themselves - they just host files that are uploaded by whoever wishes, and provide for downloads for whoever wishes. (Not that that alters its legal status - just by way of explanation).

It's notably popular among college students, as a source to download free versions of obscenely overpriced textbooks.

Even with my deservedly low expectations for Republicans, it's astonishing how little integrity Vance has.

Hot take - while it's obviously greedy for the publishers to be charging for this, the real problem is the idiots who are paying.

I know it's sort of trite, but every time I see one of these stories, it reminds me of how difficult it was to convince my dad to stop driving.

Even as cynical as I am, it astonishes me that the Republicans have become entirely up-front about the fact that they don't really give a shit about the American people and are only interested in how policy decisions affect them personally.

It's not just the case that they'll institute harmful policies if they can blame the Democrats for them or oppose beneficial policies that they can't claim credit for themselves, but that they do it openly and obviously.

And their wholly emotion-driven supporters remain completely oblivious...

It's especially amusing that Trump is reduced to a sniveling ball of cowardice by someone the Republicans keep trying to characterize as a "DEI hire."

A former prosecutor and attorney general against a compulsive liar and grifter who can barely manage a coherent sentence? Yes please.

Imagine Israel, of all countries, crying to the UN, of all organizations, about a purported "flagrant violation of narional sovereignty, international law and Security Council resolutions."

I laughed out loud when I read that. As if that isn't exactly what Israel does virtually on a daily basis, and has done for decades now, and while thumbing their nose at the UN the entire time.

Setting aside constitutional issues, think about how insane and delusional you have to be to decide that the fact that a significant number of people are protesting your policies means that protesting needs to be prohibited punished.

...a perfect, brilliant, beautiful statement that I make...

Doesn't anyone else notice how often he makes these cringily exaggerated statements, and more to the point, recognize how clearly they illustrate the staggering depths of his delusions?

That's still the thing I most notably don't get about Trump - the man is obviously profoundly mentally ill, so why and how is he even taken seriously? How in the world is it even possible for such a painfully obvious gibbering lunatic to not only run for public office, but quite possibly win?

Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!

Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!

The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.

I'm so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.

Take note that this is from the government that the MAGA Republicans support.

This, to them, is honor and strength - to invade a sovereign nation, then threaten to drop nuclear bombs on them for daring to fight back.

That's the world the MAGA Republicans want - one in which they and their allies are fully entitled to do whatever they want to whoever they want, and the only choices others are to be granted are to submit or die.

Populism is a reactionary movement. It doesn't just spring up out of nowhere - it comes to be specifically if and when there's a relatively common perception among the people that the government no longer serves their interests.

The solution then is simple and straightforward, at least in principle - all it takes is for the government to institute the necessary reforms to win back the trust and support of the people.

The problem comes because all too many politicians don't have the necessary empathy, integrity and/or determination to actually do that.

So they have nobody to blame but themselves.

Right, but it's not really a matter of what did they expect from just standing idly by as Israel brazenly tried to provoke military responses fron Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, since we're in this bizarre post-truth timeline in which governments and corporate media just blithely pretend that none of that happened at all

All of the versions of this story that I've seen so far either pass over Israel's provocations entirely, or try to bury them by just mentioning them in passing, in passive voice, and with no assignment of responsibility.

The stock phrase is "Iran vows retaliation after the killing of..."

The mid-phrase shift from active to passive voice is propaganda 101.

I'm GenX. I've spent my entire life watching the Boomers fuck things up, then having to wade through the debris they leave in their wake.

I'm not expecting that to change now.

It's safe to assume that the "uncomfortable" part is that he's either going to have to admit to soliciting sex with minors or perjure himself, and neither one is going to end well for him.

Well of course they're going to.

They've been blatantly backing Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and why wouldn't they?: They're ideological allies. They all want the same thing - moralistic and militaristic kleptocratic autocracies that will stand against the threat that progressivism poses to their unearned, undeserved and grossly destructive privilege.

It's not an accident that Tucker Carlson flew over to fellate Putin, or that Trump and the MAGA Republicans have undermined support for Ukraine at every turn, or that they've expressed increasing hostility toward NATO at every turn. As part of their fascist coup, the hard right wants to ultimately entirely switch sides - to ally with Russia and against Europe, since Russia represents everything they admire and Europe represents everything they hate.

Of course Russia is going to assist in that.

"Election deniers" is an inaccurate description.

They're fraudsters and seditionists, pure and simple. All of their efforts in 2020 were to effectively overthrow the US government by fraudulently handing the election to Trump, and since they failed, all of their efforts since then have been to try to make it so that they can succeed in 2024.

I'm an American, so yes - in a heartbeat.

Broadly, I wouldnt much care where it was, just so long as it was somewhere that was not being actively transfomed into a plutocratic/christofascist autocracy.

And in fact, there's virtually nothing that I want more at this point in time than to get the hell out while I can. I fully expect that if I don't, I'm going to end up in prison or dead, just like so many other vocal dissidents under so many other authoritarian regimes.

And this neatly illustrates the grotesquely destructive delusion that lies at the heart of religious fundamentalism - it's ultimately, and I'm tempted to say without exception, an attempt by overtly evil people to place the blame for their evil on others, or on society as a whole.

The underlying issue is not that other people feel lust, for instance, but that they themselves feel lust, and they consider that to be so shameful that their self-images cannot tolerate the idea that it's a part of their own makeup. It must and can only be, to them, a thing that's been imposed on them by "evil" people or an "evil" society, so the solution, to them, is to stamp out that "evil." Solely in the belief, ultimately, that if that "evil" could somehow be made to not exist, it would no longer plague them.