In poll land Brexit never happened, which set the stage for an uneventful 4-year Clinton presidency mostly famous for an iconic photo-op pres Clinton took with the zoo animal, Harambe, following a G20 summit where Xi boasted of negotiating Putin off a suicidal scheme to invade Kyiv, and also of successfully preventing a near-miss that would have led Wuhan to become the epicenter of a global health disaster. With me stranded here on the other side at the Berenstain universe, excuse me if I don’t get ahead of myself celebrating this poll.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

Human Gore is long gone. This is AI Gore, it says so in the title.

the more things change, the more they stay the same

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

Calling “from the river to the sea” an “inversion of Likud’s manifesto” is a talking point. Take a time machine and go talk to hard line Likudniks of the past 50 years, you will hear plenty of colorful and distasteful slogans, but not that one. For decades pro-Palestinians have shouted it, rallied around it; they own it, no one else. Just like the Israelis own “we need to delete Gaza” - it is not “an inversion of Iran’s call to wipe Israel off the map”.

Add a “refuse” button that pops up a short text box detailing the consequences. The End, credits roll. Problem solved, now they can all go explain to everyone on the forums why this is the best ending

Now of course one could make some damning argument about the state of the tech industry in practice, resulting in one of those bell curve memes with “using SQLalchemy is a sin” on both far sides and “noooo it’s just a name it’s fine there’s no fraud involved” in the middle

Jules Verne wasn’t a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don’t underestimate a keen and observant imagination.

that is so fetch

Makes sense, given the ending of automata. Need to get a whole new dev team now

I’ve always viewed this as a politics problem in disguise.

The cook wants to oust the king. He has no allies and no claim, but swears profusely that once he is king, every person who failed to back him is going to pay. Do you back the coup? What if you say yes and the cook’s assistant, who overheard you, proclaims that whatever punishment the cook had in store for your lack of cooperation, he’s going to do even worse? Do you switch your allegiance to the assistant then?

What if this is a hypothetical cook, who the assistants are speculating they could bring over from abroad and are also speculating would mete out the punishment to end all punishments to his non-backers, because he is petty like that? They haven’t even met him, but they figure surely a petty enough cook to fit this description has to exist out there somewhere, and inevitably someone will find him, and bring him over, and he will surely attain power once everyone understands that this is inevitable? Do you throw yourself behind their coup and challenge the king? What if the jesters overhear you and proclaim “oh wait until you hear about our hypothetical jester, he is even worse than that hypothetical cook” – do you switch your allegiance to the jesters then?

If implicit, empty “once I have power!” threats were horses, beggars would ride

unauthorized bread

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With turn-based RPGs being in fashion again now thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3 I would really like to throw in a recommendation for Wasteland 3. First of all it’s a riot (as the image demonstrates). Second of all it’s well-built and satisfying RPG-wise; usually in this kind of game you get fighters and wizards, and it’s refreshing to deal with a serious RPG system where all the roles are completely different and modernized, like hacker, sniper or brawler. Usually it’s either your characters are modernized or you have a proper RPG system, but not both. Finally, the game is notable for flipping every RPG cozy moral cliche on its head. The usual RPG rewards you by producing outcomes more optimistic and idealistic than what you’d get in reality; Wasteland inverts this, and produces equal and opposite cynical, pessimistic outcomes. Nearly every time you try to negotiate as an alternative to violence, this just results in the other guys shooting first. No good deed goes unpunished and you’ll say “come on, in reality that could have gone better” often. Even most other bleak RPGs respect your choice in some sense: “here, you got what you asked for, the good and the bad”. Wasteland instead says “here, you got what you effectively asked for, you idiot”. The moment the penny drops and you understand that you are operating in a crapsack world and start behaving accordingly, you are in for a very unique roleplaying experience.

The beautiful modern internet! Where one can in one breath complain about the post-truth era, then proceed to get 30 upvotes for making the absurd, maximalist claim that no one excused the Oct 7 terrorist acts – when Iran called those attacks Palestinian self-defence and Students for Justice in Palestine called it “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (those are Reuters links, hopefully we can agree they don’t invent news wholecloth). So what now, are we going to move the goal posts and say that calling something “a win” and “self-defense” is not excusing it?

There are enough valid pro-Palestinian arguments: denying water to a civilian population of nearly two million is a war crime, that’s certainly a valid argument. These attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, and need to be seen in the context of the impossible conditions in the Gaza strip: also certainly a valid argumnent. But this stuff, this blatant misrepresentation of reality, is what makes it to the top of the comment section instead.