So here's the thing: Kamala Harris did not make mistakes while campaigning.
This is actually pretty easy to notice, if she'd made mistakes while campaigning would be talking about her failure with a certain demographic group or failure with a certain state. We aren't. She was just less popular than Trump in a general sense.
Kamala Harris failed for two reasons, and the one that was her fault was because she was not, in any way, going to solve any problem for the American people. To be clear, neither is Trump, but she wasn't pretending to, because Democrats have long since given up on actually doing anything that the American people want.
The Democrats will not learn that lesson, of course. They are paid way too much by corporate interests to not learn that lesson. A huge chunk of them seem to think an ideal world is Democrats and Republicans barely indistinguishable, directly in 'the middle', aka, exactly where corporate interests want them.
The voters are not happy with that, they have not been happy with that since... Well, that's arguably the reason that Obama won, but he didn't really change anything that would have gone against the corporate interests, he just did health care, a thing corporate interests _wanted_. And then we got Trump, when it became clear that nothing else was going to happen. And that is why we ping pong between corporatist interest Democrats who don't do anything, and an insane criminal lunatic who doesn't do anything.
Democrats won't notice that, they will of course blame the left, I've literally already seen a post on this site for that. And in an extremely odd and convoluted way they are correct, but they want to blame the left activists, when in fact the people who failed to vote for them are the entire giant swath of the American population who would vote for Democrats if they thought Democrats WOULD F*CKING DO ANYTHING. Instead, they either fell into misinformation and voted for Trump, or they just didn't vote.
(The other reason she failed was the media, which completely just decided act like Trump was normal that electing a convicted felon was normal, that he wasn't almost incoherent, that he wasn't literally threatening them, etc.)
Yeah, blame the lefties, not the candidate who promised to put Republicans in the cabinet.
It turns out that the voters who wanted Republicans in the cabinet already were voting for someone who promised to put even more in there.
Harris promised absolutely nothing, and the American people very much want. The Democrats are too beholden to corporate interest to actually do change, so the American people voted for the liars and lunatics instead.
I didn't say racism, I said bigotry, and if you think Black men can't be bigots, you...well, you've apparently never spoken to Black women, for the most obvious example of misogyny.
Anyway, you chopped off the second half of what I said, 'or completely clueless and negative information voters'.
The Judge delayed the sentences to 'avoid any appearance of affecting the outcome of the presidential race'.
Call me crazy, but I think a candidate being convicted of felonies should, in fact, affect the outcome of a presidential race. I feel while a felony conviction may sway voters, it is indeed entirely proper for that to sway voters!
I like how we have all these guardrails to make sure the legal system can't invent bogus charges to sway elections, and very much forgot that sometimes, apparently, candidates can actually be committing a sh*tton of crimes all over the place, and it would really be nice to actually wrap that up conclusively before elections so it _can_ sway them.
And now we've got the opposite problem, the judge is going to know that the person he is sentencing is supposed to be the next president, which a) means he's going to have to fit that sentence to the circumstances instead of the same sentence everyone would get (And Trump either having to work within it or getting it modified), and b) knows that the convicted will be in a place of power, able to harm him. (And has a history of doing that, and has at this point threatened to do it.)
I'd call that a conflict of interest except the premise of a conflict of interest is that it's specific to the person, whereas 'Trump will be the next president and have the power to harm them if they piss him off by trying to enforce the law against them' is true for literally everyone.
So, I guess the question we all have now is who will control the House, and how many times will Trump be impeached if it's Democrats.
Actually, first I guess we have the question 'What happens if the president elect is serving a felony sentence?' Because the apparent President-elect is going to be sentenced on November 26th on 34 felony counts in New York.
I wonder exactly how many Trump voters know that, and understand that. I wonder how many Trump voters are motivated by blinding hatred and bigotry, vs. just being completely clueless and negative information voters.
And the entire news media that has spent years normalizing Trump and pretending things were normal during this slow slide into fascism can burn in hell. Which Trump has promised to put them through.
I guess we had a republic, for as long as we chose to keep it.
I don't know, I'm a little numb right now...I actually had already internalized that the world was doomed thanks to our complete inability to do anything about climate chance, but I assumed we had decades there and I would probably be dead. But now we're getting unrestrained Trump, and I have to start planning for the personal safety of me and a lot of my friends.
Harambe was slightly interesting and sad news that turned into a absurdist meme.
P'nut is being talked about in a political context, where people are, apparently seriously, saying that it says something about 'Democractic overreach'.
I live in Georgia. It is illegal to own a squirrel as a pet here. It's illegal in most states to own squirrels, and the few that allow it require domesticated squirrels of a specific species purchased from breeders, not wild squirrels. If it's an example of government overreach, it's a government overreach we all signed up for.
I don't know, I just read a quick summary of it. Maybe no one is being serious there, maybe this is another 'dicks out for Harambe', where everyone involved feels slightly bad for an animal dying, and kinda wishes there was another way, but knows the response is stupid and they're just all joking. Maybe it's sarcastic"Look at the government overreach! (But, yeah, you can't collect any random animal from the wild as a pet, duh.)"
OTOH, the Republican echo-chamber has indeed taken extremely stupid positions before.
It's just as well, the 'brand' Democrats come up with during the primary is always nonsense anyway, and it's basically 'We will nominate whoever's turn it is'. The only real exception in decades was Obama, and his brand was basically just charisma. But even there, once they get into office, they govern as generic Democrats.
which to this day still deploys doctrine built on willful misinterpretation of Scripture.
'Wilful misinterpretation of scripture' is pretty much the definition of all of Christianity, the only distinction is what part and in what way.
Although sometimes they pick the same one. Pretty much all Christian denominations have managed to come up with some extremely weird fanon about some character named Satan and a place named Hell that seems to be a bunch of unrelated concept glued together from a dozen different pieces of scripture (With a bit of Dante thrown in.) in a pretty odd manner that no one would actually come up with when presented with just the text.
The difference between Jews and the other Abrahamic religions is that our relationship with God is community wide rather than as individuals and everything is supposed to be done as a group rather than alone.
I think you both have been a little too propagandized by evangelical Christians there. Plenty of strains of Christianity emphasize that sort of thing. Catholicism, yes, but plenty of protestant ones, too. As does Islam, as far as I understand.
But evangelical Christians have loudly spent decades yelling about 'a personal relationship with Jesus', and at this point the media pretty much seems to think they are the only Christians that exist.
No Jaybird, I don't remember any point where we've removed or even threatened to remove a churches' tax-exempt status because one of the pastors wrote an op-ed about how they were voting.
I'd actually be interesting what you think Harris' biggest mistakes are? I can think of a few things that might be mistakes, but none of them are very big.
Harris has actually run an _astonishing_ campaign, and at best any mistakes are just...'Maybe she should have done this thing instead of some other thing'. Like, we were talking about her not doing Joe Rogan the other day...if that's the level of 'mistake' we're talking about, I have to suggest it's not a particularly big one.
The fact we've spent the last few days before the election talking about a gaff that the right is pretending _Biden_ made is evidence of that...the right can't even _invent_ any Harris mistakes.
Trump has sorta the opposite problem, in that he's made a lot of massive mistakes, a lot of them not as a candidate per se, but as president and just as a human being. If we have to stick to 'mistakes within the context of the election', the recent rally is the most obvious one. If we don't, the actual mistake that will take him down is appointing the judges for Dobbs.
I think it’s as simple as women in the UK not having to chose between defending their reproductive rights and the rights they have carved out to sex segregated spaces more generally.
*LOL*
There is no UK history of carving out rights to sex segregated spaces, in fact, there _is_ no right to sex segregated spaces in the UK. None whatsoever. Zero. Not a single solitary right, in any circumstances.
The fact you have been misinformed so badly means the people you are getting information from are transphobes, which I can tell because you are using literally their phrasing.
Actually, transphobia is working very badly in the UK also.
The reason that is harder to see is that pretty much all elected officials decided to embrace it because it came with buckets of money, and the large newspapers are owned by the people pouring those buckets of money.
There's absolutely no evidence it's popular among the actual voters.
Who the hell is "P’nut the squirrel"? *google* Jesus Horatio Christ, the Republican echo-chamber is dumb today. You can't own wild squirrels in most states. How about we worry about the _dogs_ being killed by the cops before the _illegal_ pets?
Anyway, in 2020 I didn't make a prediction, because I had no idea how 2016 had gone so wrong, but at this point I'm willing to go again and...boldly take the exact same position as a bunch of others:
Dobbs mattered more that people think, and the polls are wrong, the assumed voters are incorrect. I'm not going to try to guess individual states, not even my own, but this race is not going to be as close as people seem to be thinking it will be.
From what I recall correctly, the “traditional audience” was screaming something to the effect of “nobody wants a looter shooter” from the get-go.
Looter-shooter is _also_ one of the current pillars of video gaming. It is a pillar that is hated by basically everyone who is not a fan of the genre because it is the place that commodification of gaming hits most hardest and they are basically designed as a skinner box to put money into and get cocaine out of, but that doesn't make it not a pillar. It's just the worst possible one.
Maybe this discussion would be better off served if you actually explain what time you think 'traditional' refers to. Because looter-shooters have been giant since Borderlands, a 2009 game, and really exploded in 2014 with Destiny. Which, ironically, is almost the exact same timeline as the hero-shooters. Hero shooters started in 2007 with Team Fortress and then exploded in 2016 with Overwatch.
I have to suggest that making games in gigantic genres that started a _decade and a half ago_ and have had a juggernaut lead them for a decade are not, in fact, aimed at a 'modern audience', and are about as traditional as can be in the world of mass market games, which is arguable only about three decades old at a commercial level. (If we date it to, let's say, Doom and Myst.)
The actual problem here is that two of the games you listed came at the king, and they _missed_. Very very badly. Concord missed so badly it basically instantly phrased out of existence!
In fact, since you blame MBAs in that other post, you are correct there, and haven't even mentioned that the problem isn't just the MBA-ization of the games (Which affects all of them), but the fact that only an idiot would even attempt a looter-shooter at this time, or half-hearted hero shooter. Anyone who actually understands the industry would realize the sort of inertia the current leaders have, how invested the players are, and how hard (and expensive) they would be to dethrow, and make something else.
But the defining feature of MBAs are 'I do not know the industry I am in but everyone considers me somehow important enough to listen to'.
Yeah, it’s practically Tomb Raider.
...you do realize my point was that I don't know what you're talking about WRT to the audience, which means by agreeing with me, it appears _you_ don't know what you're talking about? What?
Let me repeat: Why are you talking about the audience of Star Wars Outlaws? Who do you think that audience is, why do you think that supposed audience is relevant to the failure?
The failure is pretty clearly a) the game wasn't great, and b) the publisher did a bunch of stuff clearly intended to wring ever bit of profit out of the game, like DLCs that were really just 'pay more to enable content' and stuff like that, which turned a lot of people off what was already a mediocre and unoriginal game that already was extremely expensive.
And you are correct, Tomb Raider is almost the definitional way to do action-adventure right. And was wildly successful, not just the reboot but really the entire series has done pretty well. Is that because you think they aimed at the right audience?
“Star Wars fans who are sick of fanservice” or something like that
I don't even know how to objectively qualify fan service, I would argue it is "references and things that are includely merely to cause players to say 'I recognize that", which, again, isn't something that would seem to impact _sales_.
Honestly, the way that game was described makes it sound like one of the _less_ fanservice games, as they talk about how they are exploring organized crime in the universe, saying explicitly that's where the canon doesn't delve into much and that's why the set the game there.
That seems much less fan-servicing than, for example, 'You are one of the only living Jedi and will fight the Empire and run across movie locations and characters and help rebuild the Jedi order and be implied to be very important to things that happen in the movie', like Jedi Fallen Order and, hell, half the Star Wars games did.
But maybe it was full of constant fan service, with scenes from the movie happening constantly in the background, and the main plot being about some unnamed person needing smuggled lightsaber parts and it turns out it's Luke. I dunno. But it really seems unlikely that would be able to even hypothetically impact sales (Because it wouldn't be known before playing), much less actually doing so.
What impacted sales it that there was absolutely nothing exciting or interesting about it, and it was clear it was just a money-grab, and player shrugged, decided to wait until it was $15 on Steam, (Where they will buy it but never play it) and reinstalled Rise of the Tomb Raider instead.
Yeah. Ron Desantis is operating an extremely overtly anti-democratic platform, directly rejecting things that voter have voted for in voter initiatives, and now threatening media that are airing and printing ads about those voter initiatives.
This is on top of using taxpayer money to oppose those things and other stuff that is less overt.
I actually pick pot legalization over abortion as my example because that is something _even his own party_ wants. He doesn't want it, and thinks it doesn't matter even if voters have directly codified it into law using the process laid out in the Florida constitution.
It is harder to point out a clearer, explicit disconnect between the will of the voters and the government than how Ron Desantis is governing Florida.
Probably the most common single fix used for all of those collectively — other than a full vote by mail system — is the permanent no-excuse mail ballot list.
Georgia has discovered a new and exciting way to fail at that in this election, which is to not send out ballots early enough as required by law, resulting in a judge demanding the court send them by priority mail and that they get accepted several days after the election.
Which is going to super fun when Trump almost certainly sues over it if he loses here.
Incidentally, they didn't get sent out in time because Georgia early voting is basically happening so much it's broken the system. It's beaten 2020 by 50%.
And yes, it's still 55% women. Although, to argue a counterpoint, it's more in 2020 Trump counties than 2020 Biden counties...but...I'm sitting here thinking about what conclusions I should draw from that, and _my_ conclusions are 'women are voting early so as to not vote with their men'.
For people not here, Georgia voting is _very_ insecure in a privacy sense. The screens are very poorly shielded, and then you grab your paper ballot with the information printed on it and stand there in public reading it, I guess, and then go up and run it though a scanner in front of someone and anyone else at one of the other scanners. It is horrifically not-secret, to the point I really feel there need to be lawsuits over it.
And it was like that in 2020, too, so...starting to wonder if women have figured out the best way to vote in secret is to just do it in advance.
There’s lots of reasons to vote Trump in this election, but that is the biggest one: we can punish the libs who have made a routine of lying and maneuvering around the intentions of the American people, thereby restoring trust of the government among Americans and allowing us to accomplish things that would not have been possible before.
The lack of self-awareness here is boggling.
Hey, question: What exactly do you think is happening in Florida with Ron Desantis and the pot legalization voter imitative?
Do you think Desantis is upholding 'The intentions of the American people'?
I didn't say anything about taxing on _having_ wealth.
BB is lying and claiming 'The wealthy are taxed more that people think'.
The wealthy are actually taxed _much less_ than most people think, because their money is increasing in ways that are not taxed at all instead of 'earning income'. The amount that their income is taxed is meaningless, hell, at this point the amount that _capital gains_ is taxed is meaningless, because of that trick where instead of selling assets, they just get banks to loan them money based on those assets, which allows them to defer actually coming up with the money and paying any taxes to whenever it is best for them...or just when they die.
So, I think a good polling question would be to point out that his wealth has _increased_, and asked how much in taxes they think Bezos should have paid _for that increase_. You know, the way people inherently think income taxes work, that when you get more wealth you have paid taxes on it, because that's how it works for them in all but extremely specific circumstances.
Not a single on of them will guess that because of how Bezos' wealth increased, he paid basically no taxes on it.
Also: A chunk of Amazon's success was it using the lag of state laws and court decisions to avoid paying state sales tax. State sales that that, incidentally, was actually legally required to be paid. It's just, in the early internet, states generally regarded out-of-state purchases so rare that the buyer was supposed to collect and send in the money, and usually didn't bother and no one cared. And even after state laws fixed that, Amazon argued it didn't have to follow state law in states it wasn't located in. And Amazon tried to avoid having a 'physical presence' in a lot of states to avoid it...they at one point considered trying to operate off a Indian Reservation to disclaim all sales tax.
I suppose that my take on Concord is that gaming was better back when games were created by people with some combination of schizophrenia and autism who had a goal of bringing their gnostic fever dreams into a playable state who were ruthlessly managed by psychopaths who had a goal of making money hand over fist.
Changing that setup into one where games are created by people with degrees in gaming design and others with degrees in computer drafting being ruthlessly managed by people with degrees in business management will give you slop.
What the utter hell does that have to do with the claim it was aimed at 'a modern audience' instead of 'a traditional audience'? How is your claim here even _vaguely_ possible to express in the sentence 'There’s a current bit of drama involving video games that, instead of catering to a traditional audience, have pivoted to catering to a more modern audience.'
Your claim now is about who makes the games, not who they are targeted at. (And you also seem to think you have said something about who funds it, although I cannot tell the difference between ' ruthlessly managed by psychopaths who had a goal of making money hand over fist' and ' ruthlessly managed by people with degrees in business management', as I am fairly sure the second is merely a subset of the first.)
I’m going to digress and talk about video games for a bit. There’s a current bit of drama involving video games that, instead of catering to a traditional audience, have pivoted to catering to a more modern audience.
A good number of these games have failed somewhat spectacularly (Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is reported to have lost $200 million, Colin Moriarty reported that Concord lost $400 million, Star Wars Outlaws looks like it’s set to lose $200 Million) and, of course, the blame is put on the players for not buying it, not spending money on it.
Hey, Jaybird, what was the biggest game of the year in the year Suicide Squad came out? To spare you having to remember, it was Baldur's Gate 3.
Hey, Jaybird, what would be the more 'traditional audience'? The looter-shooter Real Gamer(TM) crowd, or a fricking _turn-based_ D&D game, which admittedly is old school, but I'm sure is old school in the way it predates 'traditional gamers'. In fact, Baldur's Gate 3 was directly aimed at the 'modern audience' of the resurgence of D&D players under 5e...and old school RPG players that might have played BG1 or BG2, or NWN, and also are not really the 'traditional audience' of games.
Suicide Squad failed for the very obvious reason it a) wasn't very good, and b) betrayed the series it was part of which means a lot of people were extremely disappointed and angry on top of that. It was aimed at exactly the 'traditional audience', it's just the right audience said, seemingly correctly, 'this sucks'.
And Concord is a game also _exactly_ aimed at a traditional audience, specifically, at Overwatch players, one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. What exactly do you think a 'traditional' gaming audience is? How is it not _Overwatch players_? Overwatch is one of the pillars of 'Real Gamer' games! (Honestly, it's so big and successful it's one of the pillars of the entire industry, period, and I say that as someone who has literally no interest in playing it and has never even watched a video of someone playing it, much less played it myself.)
Star Wars Outlaws shows why you should not spend huge amount of money on an absurdly-overpriced mediocre action-adventure game with a lot of stupid stuff like season passes and requiring an internet connection, and I am literally baffled as to what you think is going on with the 'audience' for this. It's an action-adventure game! The audience is 'people who play single-player action-adventure games', a group I am fairly sure has existed quite some time and continues to exist.
The publisher, Ubisoft, basically ruined this one by adding all the crap that no one wants in single-player games, with everything locked behind paywalls for a game that starts very expensive. Also, it didn't really do anything new at all that would justify even the original price.
What different audience do you think it is aimed at? 'Stupid people with too much money?'
You very deliberately refuse to actually define any words you use whenever you talk about video games, so you can pretend anything is an example of anything.
Getting unearned media from someone who has millions of listeners, many of whom are likely low propensity and low information voters who the other guy really needs to show up, has some obvious upsides.
Joe Rogan listeners are almost the definition of low information. Possibly even negative information.
'Team Blue' is not trying to arrest Trump, _the justice system_ is (in a general sense) 'trying' to arrest Trump for the absurd number of crimes he's done.
No one is running for a political office on the promise of arresting Trump.
Honestly, that's why I doubt it's going to be any experienced left-ist protestor: Those people actually understand op-sec.
The right are complete and utter dumbasses about it, as evidenced by how many took their actual personal cell phones to do a coup, which they planned out on social media. They do not understand how to actually treat law enforcement as a _threat_, because, because a huge chunk of the time when right-wing actors are acting lawlessly, the cops are right there as part of the lawless crowd.
So when they cross the point that the authorities do indeed act against them, they have no idea what to do, they didn't bother to plan or prep at all, they just assumed law enforcement would just very carefully avert their eyes and mutter about free speech.
Now, it's also possible it's some pro-Palestinian protestor who is incredibly new at this, I won't say it couldn't be them, but it's not anyone with experience doing protests that could actually result in arrest...and the right, even the lunatic neo-N.azi right, is usually operating with at least tactic understanding that the cops will not go after them. (They're the Right Sort of people even if they have not good ideas.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “History Was Made in 2024 Election, Now What?”
So here's the thing: Kamala Harris did not make mistakes while campaigning.
This is actually pretty easy to notice, if she'd made mistakes while campaigning would be talking about her failure with a certain demographic group or failure with a certain state. We aren't. She was just less popular than Trump in a general sense.
Kamala Harris failed for two reasons, and the one that was her fault was because she was not, in any way, going to solve any problem for the American people. To be clear, neither is Trump, but she wasn't pretending to, because Democrats have long since given up on actually doing anything that the American people want.
The Democrats will not learn that lesson, of course. They are paid way too much by corporate interests to not learn that lesson. A huge chunk of them seem to think an ideal world is Democrats and Republicans barely indistinguishable, directly in 'the middle', aka, exactly where corporate interests want them.
The voters are not happy with that, they have not been happy with that since... Well, that's arguably the reason that Obama won, but he didn't really change anything that would have gone against the corporate interests, he just did health care, a thing corporate interests _wanted_. And then we got Trump, when it became clear that nothing else was going to happen. And that is why we ping pong between corporatist interest Democrats who don't do anything, and an insane criminal lunatic who doesn't do anything.
Democrats won't notice that, they will of course blame the left, I've literally already seen a post on this site for that. And in an extremely odd and convoluted way they are correct, but they want to blame the left activists, when in fact the people who failed to vote for them are the entire giant swath of the American population who would vote for Democrats if they thought Democrats WOULD F*CKING DO ANYTHING. Instead, they either fell into misinformation and voted for Trump, or they just didn't vote.
(The other reason she failed was the media, which completely just decided act like Trump was normal that electing a convicted felon was normal, that he wasn't almost incoherent, that he wasn't literally threatening them, etc.)
On “2024 Election Day Live Stream, Reaction, Open Thread”
Yeah, blame the lefties, not the candidate who promised to put Republicans in the cabinet.
It turns out that the voters who wanted Republicans in the cabinet already were voting for someone who promised to put even more in there.
Harris promised absolutely nothing, and the American people very much want. The Democrats are too beholden to corporate interest to actually do change, so the American people voted for the liars and lunatics instead.
"
I didn't say racism, I said bigotry, and if you think Black men can't be bigots, you...well, you've apparently never spoken to Black women, for the most obvious example of misogyny.
Anyway, you chopped off the second half of what I said, 'or completely clueless and negative information voters'.
"
The Judge delayed the sentences to 'avoid any appearance of affecting the outcome of the presidential race'.
Call me crazy, but I think a candidate being convicted of felonies should, in fact, affect the outcome of a presidential race. I feel while a felony conviction may sway voters, it is indeed entirely proper for that to sway voters!
I like how we have all these guardrails to make sure the legal system can't invent bogus charges to sway elections, and very much forgot that sometimes, apparently, candidates can actually be committing a sh*tton of crimes all over the place, and it would really be nice to actually wrap that up conclusively before elections so it _can_ sway them.
And now we've got the opposite problem, the judge is going to know that the person he is sentencing is supposed to be the next president, which a) means he's going to have to fit that sentence to the circumstances instead of the same sentence everyone would get (And Trump either having to work within it or getting it modified), and b) knows that the convicted will be in a place of power, able to harm him. (And has a history of doing that, and has at this point threatened to do it.)
I'd call that a conflict of interest except the premise of a conflict of interest is that it's specific to the person, whereas 'Trump will be the next president and have the power to harm them if they piss him off by trying to enforce the law against them' is true for literally everyone.
"
So, I guess the question we all have now is who will control the House, and how many times will Trump be impeached if it's Democrats.
Actually, first I guess we have the question 'What happens if the president elect is serving a felony sentence?' Because the apparent President-elect is going to be sentenced on November 26th on 34 felony counts in New York.
I wonder exactly how many Trump voters know that, and understand that. I wonder how many Trump voters are motivated by blinding hatred and bigotry, vs. just being completely clueless and negative information voters.
And the entire news media that has spent years normalizing Trump and pretending things were normal during this slow slide into fascism can burn in hell. Which Trump has promised to put them through.
I guess we had a republic, for as long as we chose to keep it.
I don't know, I'm a little numb right now...I actually had already internalized that the world was doomed thanks to our complete inability to do anything about climate chance, but I assumed we had decades there and I would probably be dead. But now we're getting unrestrained Trump, and I have to start planning for the personal safety of me and a lot of my friends.
"
I think you pasted in the wrong link there.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The Night Before the 2024 Presidential Election”
Harambe was slightly interesting and sad news that turned into a absurdist meme.
P'nut is being talked about in a political context, where people are, apparently seriously, saying that it says something about 'Democractic overreach'.
I live in Georgia. It is illegal to own a squirrel as a pet here. It's illegal in most states to own squirrels, and the few that allow it require domesticated squirrels of a specific species purchased from breeders, not wild squirrels. If it's an example of government overreach, it's a government overreach we all signed up for.
I don't know, I just read a quick summary of it. Maybe no one is being serious there, maybe this is another 'dicks out for Harambe', where everyone involved feels slightly bad for an animal dying, and kinda wishes there was another way, but knows the response is stupid and they're just all joking. Maybe it's sarcastic"Look at the government overreach! (But, yeah, you can't collect any random animal from the wild as a pet, duh.)"
OTOH, the Republican echo-chamber has indeed taken extremely stupid positions before.
"
It's just as well, the 'brand' Democrats come up with during the primary is always nonsense anyway, and it's basically 'We will nominate whoever's turn it is'. The only real exception in decades was Obama, and his brand was basically just charisma. But even there, once they get into office, they govern as generic Democrats.
On “Final Thoughts Before November Fifth”
'Wilful misinterpretation of scripture' is pretty much the definition of all of Christianity, the only distinction is what part and in what way.
Although sometimes they pick the same one. Pretty much all Christian denominations have managed to come up with some extremely weird fanon about some character named Satan and a place named Hell that seems to be a bunch of unrelated concept glued together from a dozen different pieces of scripture (With a bit of Dante thrown in.) in a pretty odd manner that no one would actually come up with when presented with just the text.
"
I think you both have been a little too propagandized by evangelical Christians there. Plenty of strains of Christianity emphasize that sort of thing. Catholicism, yes, but plenty of protestant ones, too. As does Islam, as far as I understand.
But evangelical Christians have loudly spent decades yelling about 'a personal relationship with Jesus', and at this point the media pretty much seems to think they are the only Christians that exist.
"
No Jaybird, I don't remember any point where we've removed or even threatened to remove a churches' tax-exempt status because one of the pastors wrote an op-ed about how they were voting.
"
I'd actually be interesting what you think Harris' biggest mistakes are? I can think of a few things that might be mistakes, but none of them are very big.
Harris has actually run an _astonishing_ campaign, and at best any mistakes are just...'Maybe she should have done this thing instead of some other thing'. Like, we were talking about her not doing Joe Rogan the other day...if that's the level of 'mistake' we're talking about, I have to suggest it's not a particularly big one.
The fact we've spent the last few days before the election talking about a gaff that the right is pretending _Biden_ made is evidence of that...the right can't even _invent_ any Harris mistakes.
Trump has sorta the opposite problem, in that he's made a lot of massive mistakes, a lot of them not as a candidate per se, but as president and just as a human being. If we have to stick to 'mistakes within the context of the election', the recent rally is the most obvious one. If we don't, the actual mistake that will take him down is appointing the judges for Dobbs.
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*LOL*
There is no UK history of carving out rights to sex segregated spaces, in fact, there _is_ no right to sex segregated spaces in the UK. None whatsoever. Zero. Not a single solitary right, in any circumstances.
The fact you have been misinformed so badly means the people you are getting information from are transphobes, which I can tell because you are using literally their phrasing.
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Actually, transphobia is working very badly in the UK also.
The reason that is harder to see is that pretty much all elected officials decided to embrace it because it came with buckets of money, and the large newspapers are owned by the people pouring those buckets of money.
There's absolutely no evidence it's popular among the actual voters.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The Night Before the 2024 Presidential Election”
Who the hell is "P’nut the squirrel"? *google* Jesus Horatio Christ, the Republican echo-chamber is dumb today. You can't own wild squirrels in most states. How about we worry about the _dogs_ being killed by the cops before the _illegal_ pets?
Anyway, in 2020 I didn't make a prediction, because I had no idea how 2016 had gone so wrong, but at this point I'm willing to go again and...boldly take the exact same position as a bunch of others:
Dobbs mattered more that people think, and the polls are wrong, the assumed voters are incorrect. I'm not going to try to guess individual states, not even my own, but this race is not going to be as close as people seem to be thinking it will be.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
Looter-shooter is _also_ one of the current pillars of video gaming. It is a pillar that is hated by basically everyone who is not a fan of the genre because it is the place that commodification of gaming hits most hardest and they are basically designed as a skinner box to put money into and get cocaine out of, but that doesn't make it not a pillar. It's just the worst possible one.
Maybe this discussion would be better off served if you actually explain what time you think 'traditional' refers to. Because looter-shooters have been giant since Borderlands, a 2009 game, and really exploded in 2014 with Destiny. Which, ironically, is almost the exact same timeline as the hero-shooters. Hero shooters started in 2007 with Team Fortress and then exploded in 2016 with Overwatch.
I have to suggest that making games in gigantic genres that started a _decade and a half ago_ and have had a juggernaut lead them for a decade are not, in fact, aimed at a 'modern audience', and are about as traditional as can be in the world of mass market games, which is arguable only about three decades old at a commercial level. (If we date it to, let's say, Doom and Myst.)
The actual problem here is that two of the games you listed came at the king, and they _missed_. Very very badly. Concord missed so badly it basically instantly phrased out of existence!
In fact, since you blame MBAs in that other post, you are correct there, and haven't even mentioned that the problem isn't just the MBA-ization of the games (Which affects all of them), but the fact that only an idiot would even attempt a looter-shooter at this time, or half-hearted hero shooter. Anyone who actually understands the industry would realize the sort of inertia the current leaders have, how invested the players are, and how hard (and expensive) they would be to dethrow, and make something else.
But the defining feature of MBAs are 'I do not know the industry I am in but everyone considers me somehow important enough to listen to'.
...you do realize my point was that I don't know what you're talking about WRT to the audience, which means by agreeing with me, it appears _you_ don't know what you're talking about? What?
Let me repeat: Why are you talking about the audience of Star Wars Outlaws? Who do you think that audience is, why do you think that supposed audience is relevant to the failure?
The failure is pretty clearly a) the game wasn't great, and b) the publisher did a bunch of stuff clearly intended to wring ever bit of profit out of the game, like DLCs that were really just 'pay more to enable content' and stuff like that, which turned a lot of people off what was already a mediocre and unoriginal game that already was extremely expensive.
And you are correct, Tomb Raider is almost the definitional way to do action-adventure right. And was wildly successful, not just the reboot but really the entire series has done pretty well. Is that because you think they aimed at the right audience?
I don't even know how to objectively qualify fan service, I would argue it is "references and things that are includely merely to cause players to say 'I recognize that", which, again, isn't something that would seem to impact _sales_.
Honestly, the way that game was described makes it sound like one of the _less_ fanservice games, as they talk about how they are exploring organized crime in the universe, saying explicitly that's where the canon doesn't delve into much and that's why the set the game there.
That seems much less fan-servicing than, for example, 'You are one of the only living Jedi and will fight the Empire and run across movie locations and characters and help rebuild the Jedi order and be implied to be very important to things that happen in the movie', like Jedi Fallen Order and, hell, half the Star Wars games did.
But maybe it was full of constant fan service, with scenes from the movie happening constantly in the background, and the main plot being about some unnamed person needing smuggled lightsaber parts and it turns out it's Luke. I dunno. But it really seems unlikely that would be able to even hypothetically impact sales (Because it wouldn't be known before playing), much less actually doing so.
What impacted sales it that there was absolutely nothing exciting or interesting about it, and it was clear it was just a money-grab, and player shrugged, decided to wait until it was $15 on Steam, (Where they will buy it but never play it) and reinstalled Rise of the Tomb Raider instead.
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
Yeah. Ron Desantis is operating an extremely overtly anti-democratic platform, directly rejecting things that voter have voted for in voter initiatives, and now threatening media that are airing and printing ads about those voter initiatives.
This is on top of using taxpayer money to oppose those things and other stuff that is less overt.
I actually pick pot legalization over abortion as my example because that is something _even his own party_ wants. He doesn't want it, and thinks it doesn't matter even if voters have directly codified it into law using the process laid out in the Florida constitution.
It is harder to point out a clearer, explicit disconnect between the will of the voters and the government than how Ron Desantis is governing Florida.
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
Georgia has discovered a new and exciting way to fail at that in this election, which is to not send out ballots early enough as required by law, resulting in a judge demanding the court send them by priority mail and that they get accepted several days after the election.
Which is going to super fun when Trump almost certainly sues over it if he loses here.
Incidentally, they didn't get sent out in time because Georgia early voting is basically happening so much it's broken the system. It's beaten 2020 by 50%.
And yes, it's still 55% women. Although, to argue a counterpoint, it's more in 2020 Trump counties than 2020 Biden counties...but...I'm sitting here thinking about what conclusions I should draw from that, and _my_ conclusions are 'women are voting early so as to not vote with their men'.
For people not here, Georgia voting is _very_ insecure in a privacy sense. The screens are very poorly shielded, and then you grab your paper ballot with the information printed on it and stand there in public reading it, I guess, and then go up and run it though a scanner in front of someone and anyone else at one of the other scanners. It is horrifically not-secret, to the point I really feel there need to be lawsuits over it.
And it was like that in 2020, too, so...starting to wonder if women have figured out the best way to vote in secret is to just do it in advance.
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
The lack of self-awareness here is boggling.
Hey, question: What exactly do you think is happening in Florida with Ron Desantis and the pot legalization voter imitative?
Do you think Desantis is upholding 'The intentions of the American people'?
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I didn't say anything about taxing on _having_ wealth.
BB is lying and claiming 'The wealthy are taxed more that people think'.
The wealthy are actually taxed _much less_ than most people think, because their money is increasing in ways that are not taxed at all instead of 'earning income'. The amount that their income is taxed is meaningless, hell, at this point the amount that _capital gains_ is taxed is meaningless, because of that trick where instead of selling assets, they just get banks to loan them money based on those assets, which allows them to defer actually coming up with the money and paying any taxes to whenever it is best for them...or just when they die.
So, I think a good polling question would be to point out that his wealth has _increased_, and asked how much in taxes they think Bezos should have paid _for that increase_. You know, the way people inherently think income taxes work, that when you get more wealth you have paid taxes on it, because that's how it works for them in all but extremely specific circumstances.
Not a single on of them will guess that because of how Bezos' wealth increased, he paid basically no taxes on it.
Also: A chunk of Amazon's success was it using the lag of state laws and court decisions to avoid paying state sales tax. State sales that that, incidentally, was actually legally required to be paid. It's just, in the early internet, states generally regarded out-of-state purchases so rare that the buyer was supposed to collect and send in the money, and usually didn't bother and no one cared. And even after state laws fixed that, Amazon argued it didn't have to follow state law in states it wasn't located in. And Amazon tried to avoid having a 'physical presence' in a lot of states to avoid it...they at one point considered trying to operate off a Indian Reservation to disclaim all sales tax.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
What the utter hell does that have to do with the claim it was aimed at 'a modern audience' instead of 'a traditional audience'? How is your claim here even _vaguely_ possible to express in the sentence 'There’s a current bit of drama involving video games that, instead of catering to a traditional audience, have pivoted to catering to a more modern audience.'
Your claim now is about who makes the games, not who they are targeted at. (And you also seem to think you have said something about who funds it, although I cannot tell the difference between ' ruthlessly managed by psychopaths who had a goal of making money hand over fist' and ' ruthlessly managed by people with degrees in business management', as I am fairly sure the second is merely a subset of the first.)
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Hey, Jaybird, what was the biggest game of the year in the year Suicide Squad came out? To spare you having to remember, it was Baldur's Gate 3.
Hey, Jaybird, what would be the more 'traditional audience'? The looter-shooter Real Gamer(TM) crowd, or a fricking _turn-based_ D&D game, which admittedly is old school, but I'm sure is old school in the way it predates 'traditional gamers'. In fact, Baldur's Gate 3 was directly aimed at the 'modern audience' of the resurgence of D&D players under 5e...and old school RPG players that might have played BG1 or BG2, or NWN, and also are not really the 'traditional audience' of games.
Suicide Squad failed for the very obvious reason it a) wasn't very good, and b) betrayed the series it was part of which means a lot of people were extremely disappointed and angry on top of that. It was aimed at exactly the 'traditional audience', it's just the right audience said, seemingly correctly, 'this sucks'.
And Concord is a game also _exactly_ aimed at a traditional audience, specifically, at Overwatch players, one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. What exactly do you think a 'traditional' gaming audience is? How is it not _Overwatch players_? Overwatch is one of the pillars of 'Real Gamer' games! (Honestly, it's so big and successful it's one of the pillars of the entire industry, period, and I say that as someone who has literally no interest in playing it and has never even watched a video of someone playing it, much less played it myself.)
Star Wars Outlaws shows why you should not spend huge amount of money on an absurdly-overpriced mediocre action-adventure game with a lot of stupid stuff like season passes and requiring an internet connection, and I am literally baffled as to what you think is going on with the 'audience' for this. It's an action-adventure game! The audience is 'people who play single-player action-adventure games', a group I am fairly sure has existed quite some time and continues to exist.
The publisher, Ubisoft, basically ruined this one by adding all the crap that no one wants in single-player games, with everything locked behind paywalls for a game that starts very expensive. Also, it didn't really do anything new at all that would justify even the original price.
What different audience do you think it is aimed at? 'Stupid people with too much money?'
You very deliberately refuse to actually define any words you use whenever you talk about video games, so you can pretend anything is an example of anything.
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Joe Rogan listeners are almost the definition of low information. Possibly even negative information.
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'Team Blue' is not trying to arrest Trump, _the justice system_ is (in a general sense) 'trying' to arrest Trump for the absurd number of crimes he's done.
No one is running for a political office on the promise of arresting Trump.
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Honestly, that's why I doubt it's going to be any experienced left-ist protestor: Those people actually understand op-sec.
The right are complete and utter dumbasses about it, as evidenced by how many took their actual personal cell phones to do a coup, which they planned out on social media. They do not understand how to actually treat law enforcement as a _threat_, because, because a huge chunk of the time when right-wing actors are acting lawlessly, the cops are right there as part of the lawless crowd.
So when they cross the point that the authorities do indeed act against them, they have no idea what to do, they didn't bother to plan or prep at all, they just assumed law enforcement would just very carefully avert their eyes and mutter about free speech.
Now, it's also possible it's some pro-Palestinian protestor who is incredibly new at this, I won't say it couldn't be them, but it's not anyone with experience doing protests that could actually result in arrest...and the right, even the lunatic neo-N.azi right, is usually operating with at least tactic understanding that the cops will not go after them. (They're the Right Sort of people even if they have not good ideas.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.