I forget what it’s called, but there’s a measure of what people need to live. But it includes a likely more than bare necessities. So included, for example, is having one 5-day holiday in the UK and going out to a restaurant once every 3 months. Not exactly extravagant, but accounting for one or two things that make life worth living beyond the way that these kinds of things often just count you as okay if you’re not actively starving.

This year, in order to maintain that lifestyle as a single person with no kids, the average person would need to be earning £35,000 a year. That’s higher than the median income. Minimum wage is less than £20,000.

Couple that with public services all having gone to shit and it’s no wonder people feel like they do.

Want to stop Farage, Keir? Make people feel like they can afford a decent quality of life. Rather than trying to out-bastard him on immigrants and trans people. Make people feel like they’re doing okay and the hatred against those groups will mostly disappear all by itself and Farage will have no power. But if people feel insecure, that’s when the door is open for finger-pointing and cries of “it’s THEM who are taking your money”, which is the only trick Farage has got.

And Doyle got the inspiration for Holmes from watching doctors diagnose patients

On a course i was once given the statistic that at 30mph 90% of pedestrians die, and at 20mph 90% live.

Now consider (from the same course) that breaking isn’t linear and most stopping happens at the end. So if you’re going 30 and would stop at point x during an emergency stop, then if you start an emergency stop at the same point while doing 40 you’ll reach point x doing 30.

Yeah. I don’t speed, especially in areas with pedestrians.

Imagine how much money she could make if she dyed her hair blonde and claimed to now understand that climate change is a hoax. She’d get her own show on Fox.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of a digital ID. I’ve been saying for years that it’s ridiculous that any time you want to do something even vaguely official you have to take a gas bill with you to prove your address.

What I worry about is the implementation. It seems like it’s going to be a government app that stores everything. What company is going to develop that? Where’s the data going to be stored and how? What vulnerabilities does it have, and how has this been tested? Is biometric data going to be stored anywhere? etc.

If they were to let me store my ID in my phone’s built-in wallet, then I’m happy. I know the security and I’m content that my data is safe and recoverable.

But it doesn’t seem like that’s something that will be possible. So I’m going to object strongly.

I know you’re joking, but Johnny Rotten is unironically a Trump supporter now

There must be some kaizo levels which require you to do this

She’s also been a firm advocate for Epstein’s victims and has repeatedly called for releasing the Epstein files.

She believes the worst conpiracy theories and she’s a terrible bigot, but the difference between her and her peers is that she actually believes the things she says she believes. She’s not just grifting for profit. She ran on a platform of being against child sexual abuse, and she’s still against child sexual abuse.

This is somewhat less notable, as it’s the usual Republican “but this affects ME now”, but she is actually different from the other Republicans in Congress because she has principles that she sticks to. Many of them are horrible principles, but they’re principles nonetheless.

If you like facts then you should know that “Autist” Is a rather controversial term in the autistic community, with many finding it dehumanising, and with a significant proportion of those who use it themselves doing so to “reclaim” it in an n-word-like “it’s okay when i say it, but not when you say it” way.

And if you really do have an autistic daughter, then you might want to do some internal reflection on why you think being “surrounded by […] autists” Is negative enough to use as an insult. Those kinds of attitudes can have negative impacts on children and can lead to internalised ableism. And if it’s not the kind of attitude you would show around her, then it’s worth asking yourself why not.

Outer Wilds. Easily the most profoundly moving experience I’ve ever had from playing a video game. And it does such a good job of starting off - and even remaining, to a degree - a fun, light-hearted story.

If there’s anybody reading this who’s interested in the game, let me say a couple of things.

1. Go in as spoiler-free as possible. The entire progression system is based on acquiring knowledge, and a lot of the power of the game comes from discovering everything for yourself, in your own way.

2. Don’t treat it like a game. Instead put yourselves in the shoes of your character. See something that you think looks cool? Go and look at it. Don’t think “well, I should probably finish this area first…” Explore. Learn. Decide for yourself what your priority is.

Loads of games call themselves open world, but are actually quite on rails. One trigger at the beginning of the game aside, Outer Wilds really is open world. One reason why watching other people play it is so much fun is that everybody really does have a completely different experience while playing it. One person will do something as the first thing they do, then someone else will do the same thing when they’re 80% of the way through. And the game is so well-designed that both ways is equally rewarding.

Sorry, I tend to evangelise for this game a lot because it is, as I said above, a genuinely profound and moving experience.

I think society has long established that we give inanimate objects and constructs gender. Bart Simpson is a he, despite being a cartoon voiced by a woman. He‘s often written by a woman, too, and the animation team will be mixed (although probably leaning male). Yet he remains a he in popular parlance.

Perhaps more akin to this situation, there’s a long tradition of referring to animated singers by the gender they present as. Gem & the Holograms are referred to as female, as are Josie & the Pussycats. Hatsune Miku - possibly the most direct comparison, being the first and most well-known “virtual singer” - is always a “she”. None of these are real people or based on real people.

The first AI band that I was aware of was The Velvet Sundown, which made the news for doing well on Spotify before people realised that they weren‘t real. They‘re very MOR AOR type stuff, at least from what I‘ve heard.

Okay. Note the quotation marks.

Oh she absolutely did. Just like she did the “i never said Hermione *wasn’t * Black” thing, despite having described her cheeks as “pink” on more than one occasion.

But that’s not what the people i was quoting mean. They’re doing the “straight, white, cis, man is the default, and anything deviating from that needs an explicit in-universe explanation”.

There was a thing that did the rounds a while back which was variations on “what race are you? White or political?”, “what’s your sexuality? Straight or political?”, etc.

it’s basically that. Straight guy? Fine. Gay guy? “But what’s the *reason *he’s gay? How is it relevant to the plot?”

Note the quotation marks

Yes, i was explaining why the same isn’t true in the UK, but that that also doesn’t mean that we can just sit back and relax like it isn’t a possibility down the road

Me neither. That’s why i put it in quotes to make it clear i was aping stupid objections.

Brexit isn‘t really relevant to the UK. ATM Reform, the most far-right party, is polling very well. As in „would become the ruling party if an election were called today“ well. They‘re also starting to get defectors from the hertofore bigger right-wing party (whose leader literally just said at the party conference that the UK should have it‘s own ICE squads doing what the US one is).

Some of the fearmongering is overwrought - especially the characterisation of Labour as being equivalent because they are acting in some utterly reprehesible ways in a stupid and doomed effort to court Reform voters - but it‘s a threat that should be taken seriously.

The good news is that the next election is 4 years away. If Trump fails in that time, or if the US gets so unahamdedly fascist that even the most denialist person can‘t deny it and it seriously harms the US on the international stage, then perhaps the British right-wing politicians will fall out of love with trying to ape Trump and the punters will see the warning signs and quietly shift back leftwards (or will crawl back in their holes in an atmosphere of „actually it isn‘t okay to say that out loud“).

I think also we‘ll need the Your party to definitively collapse so as not to split the vote on the left and for Starmer himself to resign and someone like Andy Burnham to take over (although he‘s just flubbed that one) in order to make Labour electable again.

Or there‘s the other option of Labour actually introducing something like proportional representation before the next election and thereby limiting the power of a party like Reform.

Point is, there are ways out of this mess, and there‘s time for it to happen. And we‘re definitely not where the US is, and the idea of a NeoNazi coalition seems far-fetched even under a potential Farage leadership. But at the same time, there is definitely cause for serious concern here in the UK, because there are definitely those in power or near power who would very much like to be where Trump is now.

„But what‘s the plot reason for them being gay? I don‘t mind gay people being in something, but if there‘s not a reason for it, then it‘s just pandering!“

I‘ve spent far more free time than I should have watching let‘s play videos of this. But I‘ve not downloaded it myself because after putting around 200 hours into Vampire Survivors and buying the first two lots of DLC I‘ve burnt myself out on the genre. This has got a couple of twists, not including the fact that it‘s 3D, but in the end it doesn‘t really appeal as something to play myself.