But it also makes it a lot easier to accuse the Democrats of being the real problem and holding up the entire government because of it so trump has no choice but to rape the country like he raped those kids. Also the Democrats stole his second term so he deserves a third.

…

Cop history aside, I actually do like Kamala and think she did an AMAZING job of trying to salvage the shitfest that biden et al left her with. But she is already a failure, she is brown, and she is a she. She would need to run the greatest campaign ever to even stand a chance in the United States.

That said… I do darkly worry that the Democrats might have trouble finding good candidates for POTUS since there is a non zero chance that seal team six gets sent after them because it is an official act…

Skimmed the article but this seems like a huge advert for my “Correlation does not imply causation” shirt

But yeah. Noticed this even growing up. Depending on when you were born you may be significantly older or younger than your school group which has emotional maturity implications which have “kids are monstrous little shits” implications. Same with how the fall and spring kids tended to have big parties while the winter and summer kids didn’t since the former was too cold to go outside and the latter couldn’t just give an invite out to the whole class.

And it stands to reason that adult men would be more impacted by this due to the whole loneliness epidemic. Lots of unresolved issues from growing up that just keep snowballing.

It is hard to tell but either Nintendo are still being insanely stingy with devkits or they are actively snubbing any studio with ties to Tencent. So… that is gonna be a big impact for a lot of the “This already exists on X and now it is getting a Switch 2 release” “nindies”.

Studios like Digital Extremes have been pretty open that they can’t “port” their switch 1 games (in this case, Warframe) to take advantage of the hardware because they just haven’t gotten a devkit no matter how much they ask. I saw speculation that a lot of the studios being open about this are affiliated/owned by Tencent to a significant degree, but it is unclear if that is “Nintendo hates Tencent” or “Tencent owns a significant chunk of the world and the studios that are financially stable would risk openly complaining”

Good on you even if I hate Patreon’s usability for just about anything

But if you haven’t already, I would recommend doing some research about why so many writers/creators have stuck with substack. I want to say Aaron Rupar actually talked about this and I would be shocked if the 404/Aftermath crews didn’t. I remember reading and basically nodding my head and acknowledging it was all way above my head but… these are the people who would both know and care.

Yes, this has come up repeatedly over the years.

The problem is that it is really the only viable platform for independent articles/blogs these days. That is already a ridiculously small potential audience (people who can read AND people who are willing to pay for content). Cutting out the one platform that got any traction is as good as quitting.

It is similar to why businesses (which is what we are talking about) couldn’t leave twitter until like a year and a half ago or whenever bluesky went open sign ups. Yeah, it is a platform owned by nazis and infested with them but… it is also the only way to advertise said businesses and have any hope of surviving. That said, once bluesky gained traction there is absolutely zero reason to not, at the very least, diversify (preferably dropping musknet entirely).

For Substack? Ghost is an increasingly viable platform. But just look around here for any time someone posts a link to a 404 media article and you get “Ugh. Fucking scammers want to rugpull and steal all my personal information” for… wanting ANY email to be used for a free account to just limit the impact of bot/ai scraping.

Its less that “more people are ok with Nazis than we want to admit”… especially considering many of the people on substack are talking about said fucking Nazis. The problem is that “fewer people are willing to support independent media than we want to admit”. It is the same logic of “if I like a youtube channel I’ll give them money on their patreon” that is patently flawed.

Curious what you are referring to.

Because I am referring to when this exact same thing happened to them. Christofacists went after the payment processors who cut off business with Pornhub over claims of CSAM and revenge porn with lots of fabricated victim stories to get the public on their side. Most studies showed that Pornhub had considerably less of both than facebook or twitter (and this was like early 2020s so not even the current hellscape of musknet). But Pornhub did comply and actually instituted REALLY good checks and rules regarding uploads (basically consent forms for ALL participants in a video) and… still can’t accept credit cards.

Did I miss something else regarding why they now only accept bank orders and cryptocurrency?

The canary was when the exact same thing happened (with much greater impact) to pornhub.

Nobody cared. and Pornhub Corp STILL can’t use credit cards and are dependent on bank orders and cryptocurrency.

And I can’t see a lot of developers going out of their way to prioritize this. Because it is easy to say you are sex positive. It is another thing to actually stand with smut and risk getting attacked by all the same groups.

Also, you know what else is a de facto monopoly? Steam! (cue all the usual suspects). You know what people will never stop whining about? Games not having Steam versions.

So yeah. Gamers Rise Up?

Stab yourself once while rummaging around and you never do that again. Stab yourself under the fingernail while rummaging around and you might burn a whole building down.

If you do any kind of precision work (e.g. electronics, glasses, changing the battery on a kid’s toy, etc) I strongly encourage getting a proper precision driver and bit set. I like ifixit but there are knockoffs that come from literally the same factories for a lot cheaper. Those tend to come with a bit that is literally a sim ejector pin AND a box that keeps everything organized and together.

The absolute best thing any adult can do is buy a GOOD set of allen wrenches. Good hand feel and solid construction combined with MUCH longer levers and it makes building furniture/whatever a joy.

Bonus points if you also buy a set of cheap hex head blades for your ratcheting driver of choice.

These days? The ikea/whatever allen keys get tossed in the recycling bin faster than I can remember if those are actually recyclable.

I mean, considering the cops are just going to play on their phones and actively stop people from trying to rescue children (Uvalde was more fucked up than most people remember), it makes sense to consider alternatives.

In all seriousness, this is actually a ridiculously hard problem and a horrible “solution”. Drone weapons work best against unaware/unattentive enemies in a target rich environment. While a bunch of russians are goofing off and not even bothering to close the hatch on their tanks you fly forward with a couple pounds of explosives duct taped to the drone and detonate when you get in range.

Against a shooter who is already having an endorphin high from murdering a bunch of kids and is on high alert for if/when the cops will stop their fun? They’ll hear the motors echoing through the hallways even louder than the kindergarteners bleeding out and crying for their parents who have been handcuffed for daring to try to help. They’ll shoot more kids in the time it takes the drone to get to them and children gasping for breath will likely die as their airways close up from the pepper spray bombs. Or the drone will hit a kid anyway since aiming those at high speed needs VERY good reflexes and skills.

Again, we all know the actual way to reduce the number of children murdered in school shootings. But clearly The Second Amendment is more important than the death of a few thousand kids.

And would just lead to outsourcing even more or encouraging a shift toward “AI” instead.

There are different dimensions here. For the purpose of “hey, maybe don’t glaze the christofacists” it is number of complaints. For the purposes of “Hey, maybe there is a better way than paying these CSRs” it is metrics such as calls resolved per hour and average time per call.

Complaining, yes.

Weirdly bragging about wasting half an hour complaining?

Yeah…

Assuming that was true, (presumably) OOP was just wasting their own time AND hurting the CSRs’ statistics because that is going to be the same “someone complained about X” in the logs/reports.

Christofacism.

Gasp?!!? The game about being ground up by capitalism and the abuses of power mad men got blocked?

Sounds about christian.

The ones from first party studios (which Team Cherry is not) that are near completion will be, the teams fully fired, and then phil spencer will talk about how MS needs more studios like them and that those are some amazing games and have you seen any Palestinians lately because he has some friends who want to know.

But Silksong and most of the third parties are probably fine. They don’t have to worry about MS killing them because too many people thought of uninstalling windows last week.

If this is the kind of person that you don’t trust to have not installed some kind of spyware to track you: List it on facebook marketplace and move on. There are ways to compromise a machine that persists between formats and, quite honestly, you don’t seem like you would be able to assess that.

Aside from that? Most Linux distros are distributed as live CDs (that you burn to a USB stick). That will let you delete all partitions and start fresh and some will even have ways to rewrite over and over to completely wipe the drive. Then just install Linux on top of that. You can probably just google/youtube “reformat computer and install linux” for a step by step.

Maybe I am just noticing it more these days (see: Wuchang) but holy crap are the community manager originated “talking points” so ridiculously transparent while also being disturbingly effective.

Ain’t NOBODY ever gave a shit about Kyle Crane. That is right up there with “The Iconic Hayden Pierce’s Hat” in the ubi-verse.

That said: I would like it to be good but I still think 2’s biggest mistake (aside from the hilariously bad story which… 1 wasn’t much better) was that there just isn’t that much water in the “parkour around zombie city” genre and all that wingsuits added was another case of being frustrated when we couldn’t do something we should be able to do (the grappling hook in 1 had similar problems). And apparently they are going for 18 hours of story in Beast? That… is a bold move.

Which is a problem the movies themselves increasingly did by having cannon fodder cenobites to add action or a sense of hope.

Hellraiser, at its best, is about despair and helplessness where the only way out is to destroy your own humanity.