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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yes because I don’t expect every friend of mine to be a licensed psychiatrist capable of diagnosing and prescribing medication. Heck, even a lot of medications use that exact same qualified language in their advertising because the human body and mind are incredibly complicated and inconsistent things.

    It’s like when I get a cold and my mom tells me to keep my fluids up. It helps and shows she cares even if it’s nowhere near as good as antibiotics. And yes of course I already know to stay hydrated. Just like I know how the weather has been and I remember the story she tells me 4 times a year of that time my older sister broke the neighbor’s window with a basketball.

    Lashing out in anger at those trying to reach out and help you isn’t going to make you feel better even if their advice isn’t perfect.



  • I can at least understand that line of thinking. He spent a lot of his first term golfing. He didn’t build the border wall or repeal the ACA or do a lot of what he promised his supporters he would.

    Still not an excuse. He did incredible damage in his first term and I expect this one to be worse.

    And he’s not even saying he’s going to do Project 2025 but I expect him to.


  • I would blame any Democratic candidate if they DIDN’T try to pry whatever “moderate” Republicans are left from the party. As long as they don’t compromise on policy in order to do so. Once again in asking: where did Harris do that?

    Also if you’re trying to use the >4,000 US Soldiers who died in the Iraq war to make some sort of emotional appeal it’s not working. The fact that you’re going with the 4,000 number and not bringing up the 200,000 Iraqi civilians who died is a pretty strong indicator that you don’t actually care about human lives.

    The economy recovered from Covid better than any other industrialized country. And you’re absolutely correct that tax breaks don’t lower prices… I have no idea what compelled you to say that. Tax breaks for the working class would grant them more income to purchase goods and services- the policies aimed at reducing inflation and in particular lowering the prices would be different policies. Things like having a strong FTC that rejects the mergers between the handful of grocery stores chains. Increasing the minimum wage. I could go on and on but really anyone informed knows that Harris’s policies would be better for the working class while Trump’s policies are going to be benefit the elitely wealthy and crush everyone else.

    The thing on abortion is pretty wild speculation, and is really crazy when you consider that women have already started dying in states that have banned abortions. Like you in waiting for data, but unless we see a bunch of ballots voting for Dems in state and local elections and and either abstaining or voting for Trump, this isn’t a valid explanation.

    “At the end of the day the message was… (A bunch of Republican talking points)” Isn’t answering my initial question of what the Harris campaign did to turn right. Seems like you’re just continuing to parrot Republican talking points on what they want people to think about the Harris campaign rather than living in reality.



  • I keep seeing that claimed everywhere. I’ll admit that I make an effort NOT to consume political ads (or ads in general really) but I don’t remember anything right-leaning from Harris outside of supporting the status quo for Israel and Palestine.

    I did hear ads on the radio in stores supporting making billionaires pay their fair share and lowering taxes for the working class. Ads attacking Trump for giving tax breaks to billionaires and wanting to cut Medicare and social security benefits. Ads supporting pro-choice and attacking Republicans for wanting to ban abortion. It’s possible that there were ads for different demographics, but the same radio station was also airing right-wing ads with incredible amounts of transphobia- dead naming and misgendering individuals and claiming they were criminals coming for your children.

    It’s entirely possible I missed something because there’s just way too much election content for one person to read, but I really have no clue where the narrative of the right turn is coming from.


  • I did see recently some ads from right-wing PAC’s that were shown in different swing states- some portraying Harris as an enemy of Israel in predominantly Jewish areas (I know Judaism =/= Zionism but if you were trying to direct ads to Zionists that’s probably the closest you can get) and others portraying Harris as a genocidal supporter of Israel in areas with higher Palestinian populations.

    Something that always surprises me is just how effective such dumb advertising is to the average person. I’m not even claiming to be some superhuman immune to propaganda, but political ads always seem particularly low-effort yet seem to control the outcomes of elections.


  • I remember in the weeks following the announcement that Biden would step down and endorse Harris people dug into her voting record and revealed that she was one of the furthest left-leaning members of the Senate, up there with Sanders and Warren.

    Now that she’s lost the election all of a sudden so-called “progressives” are claiming she lost because she was basically a Republican.

    The GOP’s strategy was clearly to promote voter apathy and drive down turnout for people more likely to vote Harris, and it worked. Trump finally won the popular vote- and he did so with about 6 million fewer votes than what Biden got in 2020.

    Far too many progressive, and maybe even moderate Dems and independents, really believed all the nonsense. “Both sides are the same”, “you’re vote doesn’t matter”, “there’s no way Trump can win”, “Bidenomics is totally what caused the global inflation and we are just going to ignore that post-pandemic inflation in the US was the lowest of any developed economy”, “she’s a cop”, etc. Heck, maybe there is even some misogynist or racism on the left that may have hurt Harris. And now instead of just trying to dig out way out of decades of neoliberalism we’re just escalating to fascism.

    I blame everyone. The GOP and Trump of course. The billionaires (the loud ones like Musk and Bezos, but also the quieter ones like Thiel and the Walton family). Russia of course. The spineless politicians and government officials who refused to put Trump behind bars. The DNC for the shenanigans they’ve been pulling with primaries for the past several elections and for planning to run a walking corpse in 2024 instead of setting up a real successor to Biden. All of the people who voted for Trump and the other Republicans. All of the left-leaning folk who didn’t turn out for Harris. The decades of the GOP undermining democracy (really starting with pardoning Nixon, the whole Regan administration, the hanging chads in 2000, Mitch McConnell taking over the courts, etc).

    The only comfort I have is that I know I did my part and voted.





  • I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

    Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

    Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

    People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

    Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

    There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

    Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

    Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

    Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

    Gonna be weird.



  • Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.

    I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.


  • What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

    How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

    As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

    Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

    The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.


  • I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

    It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

    So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

    You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

    And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.


  • I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

    I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

    But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

    Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.