GraniteM @ GraniteM @lemmy.world

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117

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1,651

Joined

2 yr. ago

I was waiting for it to transition to throwing raw eggs and gasping.

The point of the LAN party was not to be playing games on your computer, the point was to be playing games with your friends, in person. No matter how good your connection, no matter how good your battlestation and headset, it will never compare to the sheer joy of hunching down over your computer while it's set up on a coffee table, a mass of messily-coiled cables around your ankles, a janky mouse-balled mouse in your hand, as you have the ability to turn and call your best friends slurs and share cold pizza, secure in the knowledge that you're going to go to sleep on a scratchy couch, wake up around noon tomorrow, and start the whole process all over again.

It's not the tech, it's the meatspace community that made it special.

I swear I saw a chart where a DM could roll to choose from a list of heartbreaking things to find in a dead NPC"s pockets. Stuff like the letter from OP, a small stuffed animal, a certificate showing that the NPC was a noteworthy donor to the local orphanage, that sort of thing. Baldur's Gate 3 is absolutely riddled with these things.

Middle... out...

Modesty Blaise

Grew up in a refugee camp. Takes over a criminal gang, then turns it into an international mercenary syndicate that is employed by the British Secret Service. Is plenty good at killing, but prefers non-lethal weapons and martial arts. Has a long-time platonic male sidekick with whom she is emphatically not in a will-they-won't-they relationship; they're just best action friends.

Modesty Blaise is just dying for a modern day franchise of her own, and she could just be Modesty Blaise, international woman of ass-kicking, not "the time they cast a woman as James Bond," or even a Bond spin-off. It's madness that it hasn't happened already.

banished from the land.

The ocean called. They don't want them, either.

There's a quote from Robert A. Heinlein that I like to bring up:

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Replace "Communist" with "Conservative" and the quote works the exact same way. People don't take on awful political views in a total vacuum. Their lives and futures got messed up somehow, and in all probability by vast forces beyond their comprehension, let alone their control. And then they went looking for what felt like real answers, and someone was willing to say to them "I've got the solution to your problems."

On some level, their grievances are real. They just got sold on a lie about what could be done to fix them.

They already shat on every good thing that a previous Republican president ever did, so now it's time to go after Teddy Roosevelt and the national park system!

The Flintstones had a gay old time, not a straight old time.

Also, not mine, but I'm fond of...

"Well of course it's not Adam and Steve, it would never be Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Stephen."

You can absolutely sow chaos into anything, but you will always be wrong if you believe that you can control that chaos.

See also: absolutely everybody who ever went into a professional, legal, or political alliance with Trump, thinking that they were the ones who had finally figured out how to control his bullshit.

That shotgun looks no-nonsense as fuck.

There's no fucking way that a kid raised from infancy like Harry was, in a abusive hateful household that treated him like dirt, would have enough strength of character to pull shit like the "Give it here, Malfoy" scene after having been out of the Dursley household for less than a couple weeks. Think about how the Dursleys would have reacted every time young Harry tried to stand up for himself. It would have been nonstop physical and mental abuse, all aimed at making him more subservient. It would take a miracle for a kid like that to be even vaguely functional as a person, and he certainly wouldn't have the ability to stand up for himself, let alone others.

Back in 2019 when universal healthcare was being discussed during the Democratic primary, the Pod Save America guys addressed the question of "Who will pay for it??!" with...

America only ever has one total medical bill, for all the medical expenses and associated costs that we all use, every year. And even if someone doesn't go to the doctor, then that still eventually adds up to a cost that we all pay, because someday they'll miss work, or die, or they'll get really sick and wind up having to declare bankruptcy, and that's a cost that affects us all, too. There's no way to subtract from that total cost; either people get the treatment that they need, or the cost gets distributed around anyway, sooner or later. So really, the only variable over which we have meaningful control is how much inefficiency is built into that system, and private insurance is an absolutely massive source of inefficiency.

Also, I can't fucking believe that we haven't had a major campaign on the premise of "Never have to think about your insurance EVER AGAIN!" because every goddamn time I have to think about my insurance, whether I've got it, whether it covers what I'm thinking of, whether I'm at the right doctor or not, I feel bile rising in the back of my throat. Having to think about insurance should probably poll at around the same level of rectal polyps, and yet we all have to think about it at some point or other, and it's fucking bullshit.

The bottom is John Walker, the replacement Captain America from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, who went crazy on off-brand super soldier serum and decapitated a man with Cap's shield.

The difference is that Zuckerberg is pretending to be a Totally Cool Dude^TM, whereas Trump is authentically a psychopath manbaby moron. People are very good at detecting inauthenticity.

Just a slight edit.

Can you identify a pitbull?