“The Democratic Party is more invested in trying to maintain control than it is in trying to win an election in November,” said one DNC member.
First time?
“The Democratic Party is more invested in trying to maintain control than it is in trying to win an election in November,” said one DNC member.
First time?
I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?
No, wait, I’m thinking of a different guy…
I love how reality manages to combine the most comically exploitative parts of cyberpunk fiction with literally none of the intense, vibrant, or interesting parts. It’s just a dull, gray, sexless, post-industrial dystopia with ugly cars, chronic obesity, and fentanyl addiction. And now surge pricing.
American corporations want an “easy” war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh…we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.
I know they said they’re wrapping the story up with this season, and I think that’s fine, but the quality of the show has impressed me so much that I really hope the studio, Fortiche, finds other big projects to work on after this. Either additional League stories with their own spin, like Arcane, or some independent content. I’m a huge fan for animation and certain parts of Arcane are just gorgeous.
Yeah, it’s the age old song and dance of “People on the left were mean to me for five minutes so now I’m going as hard as possible to the right for the rest of my life.” The person I feel the worst for in all this is El-P. Dude’s a decent guy and now his name is forever attached to a guy whose current ambition seems to be being Diet Kanye.
There’s a lot of “older” rappers that aren’t really with the times and you’ll see them releasing music that is explicitly complaining about “cancel culture,” even though they’re not victims of it and are still very successful. I used to be a pretty big Run the Jewels/Killer Mike fan, but the track “Talk’n That Shit!” from his 2023 album, Michael, is just generically mean and kinda hateful, with lyrics like
***** talk to me about that woke-ass shit (yeah)
Same ***** walkin’ on some broke-ass shit
You see, your words ain’t worth no money, I ain’t spoke back, bitch
All of you ***** hang together on some Brokeback shit
I’ll let you fill in the blanks or look up the lyrics yourself, because I’m not looking to catch a ban from posting rap lyrics, but needless to say it’s just “fuck you woke people, you’re all gay.” Like, there’s very little artistic merit to a song like that.
Dude used to write music that punched up, but then he went on NRA TV and talked about how he would kick his kids out of the house if they ever protested in favor of gun control legislation (he’s a huge 2nd Amendment advocate) and now he’s suddenly “anti-woke” because a bunch of people on Twitter told him he was out of touch and closed-minded and that if he really wanted to deliver this particular message, he probably could have selected a platform less comically heinous than one almost exclusively watched by alt-right lunatics. So he decided to prove them wrong by being even more out of touch and closed-minded.
He’s telling them they better “cut the malarkey” or else he’ll say something else that makes him sound comically old.
One thing I will never be sorry to see go is the age of pathetic power users who steal content from others and repost it ad nauseam for their own social network capital. Because those people are getting out competed by AI, who are stealing stories from those users, as well as stories posted by other AI. And thank you, writing is a small hobby of mine.
I would imagine IP bans would be useful. Although the issue with this is that you run into the problem other websites are having: people who are valid users that are on VPNs get caught in the filter of IP bans because botnets also use the same VPNs.
What is this cursed place?
Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through. In August of 2010, the site went through a major redesign that also fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It’s hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as “user content.” No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable. It triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it’s where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the Founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.
And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.
Morgan Spurlock was not a great person (history of sexual misconduct) and his documentaries are deeply flawed, but Super Size Me is how I first learned about the federal corn subsidy, which contributed to the process by which fast food gradually became a calorie drenched bizzarro version of itself. So that’s something.
Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
And also with less of the whole “they’re doing this to manipulate people into believing…things” and more “people want quick and superficial information so that’s all that’s being produced and since it’s easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that’s all the internet will be.” The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.
Wikipedia says that Overwatch and Apex Legends are each part of the “Hero Shooter” genre (boy does that sound like an uninteresting genre). I’m guessing there are greater subdivisions of play structure that matches what you’re describing, but it all sounds like an uninteresting blend of character based FPS, like multiplayer Borderlands. I guess that’s where modern gaming is, though, since these really took off after 2016, which is solidly after my “hardcore gaming” days were mostly over.
Deadlock sounds like the name of a no-budget indie horror game that would release on Steam for a dollar. Not a big budget Apexwatch or Overlegends or…whatever you call this style of game.
I’m emotionally incapable of accepting that other people dislike things I enjoy and I perceive their criticism of those things as personal attacks. When they tell me that this is a personal problem that I have and that I should learn to accept that people are complicated and that enjoying something someone else does not is perfectly valid and shouldn’t impact my sense of self-worth, I piss and shit myself and tell them that they’re calling my baby ugly. Because that’s how I think of the mindless entertainment I consume: as the closest thing I’ll ever have to children.
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
If anyone enjoys the game, that’s great. Nothing I say should take away someone else’s fun, but from my perspective, if you let another person’s negative perception of something you enjoy diminish your enjoyment of that thing, the only one who has “yucked your yum” is yourself.
I consider myself a pretty big science fiction fan. I’ve read a ton of science fiction novels, both old and new. I enjoy Star Trek. Love Star Wars. I like a lot of science-fiction themed video games, like Zone of the Enders, the original Bioshock, Borderlands, Prey (both the original and remake), Halo, Metroid, Half-Life, Fallout, etc.
I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created. I consider the overly sleek aesthetic of everything, from the ships, to the weapons, to the armor hideous. I consider the characters underwritten. The political entity that runs the galaxy is an uninteresting and derivative bureaucracy. The conflict between the various member races and their respective histories are far more interesting than the looming conflicts of the giant undead space robots looking to destroy the galaxy. And as a game, the gameplay is repetitive and uninteresting. Many of the enemies eventually just become damage soaks. The weapons and abilities are generally forgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever had less mentally impactful combat in a game before (as a note, I consider this a general issue with third-person shooters). And the inventory management in the first game was painfully terrible. I remember getting to the end of the game and having to spend an hour to manage my fucking inventory right before the last fight because I literally ran out of space and at a certain point all the crap you’ve collected just becomes worthless and pointless to have.
I played the first two games. I hated the first one when it came out and still hated it when I revisited it years later. I did like the incredibly janky Mass Mobile, as it was so poorly implemented that it was hilarious to watch it bounce off of random pieces of landscape like it was made of rubber. The second game I also really disliked because of the bifurcated Paragon and Renegade oppositional morality system that seemed really popular with that era of RPGs. And I didn’t even bother with the third. The games are just dull and frustrating, and I’ve never understood the love people have for them.
Yeah, I remembered that, as well. I have an HD album that I bought a while ago and downloaded as a zip file. I looked again just now and it only gives you the ability to download file by file unless you use their client. That’s remarkably shitty.
Accusing criticism of Biden and his viability as a presidential candidate on “Russian bots” is purely a silencing tactic: a way of dismissing criticism rather than engaging with it by asserting a specific intent behind that criticism that reduces it to a tool of a foreign adversary as opposed to a genuine set of concerns by members of the electorate.