AngryDeuce

Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.

I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?

And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.

Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.

But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.

And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.

Cest la vie lol

God on the PC end of things youd get like a literal book with some games. Keyboard overlays for controls, posters, all sorts of fun shit.

And then the next one does it…and the next one, and the next one…

Then you discover the only way to buy a dumb TV is by buying through a commercial vendor and costs 10x as much and has none of the fancy features because theyre not meant to be used in home theaters but as digital displays in boardrooms or as fleet tvs for hotel rooms that have their own AV services.

I love the future!

shes got a boyfriend sorry

There was a place near me called Smut N Eggs. Was a bar that catered to graveyard shift, we’d swing there after work at 6 in the morning to kickstart our “evening”. Inside where you would expect to see sports games on the TVs around the bar, they had vintage porn playing. The walls were covered with centerfolds.

The waitress, Michelle or Chele for short, was about 50 years old, had a smokers rasp and the look of someone who’d spent most of her younger years riding on a motorcyle, and suffered absolutely no bullshit. The food was amazing, the vast majority of people weren’t even looking at the screens, they were just digging into their dinner or breakfast at 6 in the morning with a beer or three on the side.

Place burned down years ago…damned shame.

Literally, there was a massive fire near here at the sole grocery store for like a 5 mile radius and it got to the point where the county had to step in and provide a grant for free ubers and shit while the store was being rebuilt because there was no realistic alternative mode of transportation…the other stores weren’t on bus lines and to boot it was high summer, like 90°F and 90% humidity out…the city had already had to roll out cooling centers because seniors were getting heatstroke due to their AC being busted, there was no way they were walking or biking 5 miles for groceries in that or they’d have been dead on the side of the road.

It makes more sense to a European to think of the US less as a country and more as basically the EU. We’re not a monolithic people from coast to coast. Decrying a lack of broad action across the US is like expecting broad, coordinated action in Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Romania and Austria. We’re bound by the same federal laws, but the laws on a state to state basis, literally all laws not explicitly granted to the Federal Government, belong to the states.

The difference between Wyoming and Massachusetts might as well be the difference between Finland and Croatia. Culturally, economically, geographically, different climate, different racial makeup, different religious persuasions…the farther you get from one state, the more different things become…take someone from the upper midwest and have them talk to someone that grew up deep in Southern Louisiana. They’re both speaking English but watch how difficult it is for them to communicate. These are both people that hail from the same country. And that’s even ignoring the fact that there are much higher concentrations of people here who don’t speak even like, emergency English then even countries where English isn’t their mother tongue. Go watch some police bodycam videos and see how often entire extended families have like a token 12 year old that can speak english fluently that is basically speaking for the whole family when the cops are initially rolling up to the scene.

I guess with all that Im just trying to say…people need to ease up on throwing shade at the people of the US as if we are complicit in this because we’re using all our energy to keep our heads above water. This scenario is literally unprecedented in this country, there has never been a time when a single branch of government so effectively demolished the checks and balances that were designed to prevent it from happening. We literally have a domestic military force with as much firepower and resources as the actual military in the form of ICE, the FBI, the police, the National Guard, Homeland Security…little different situation then a bunch of beat cops with batons and riot gear standing at the end of the street to make sure that the protest doesn’t spill over into traffic.

It’s not as simple as people are making it out to be.

It bears mentioning that the large scale protests you see in other parts of the world are often in places where there are strong worker protection laws.

In the US almost every single person is literally one major medical incident away from living in their car, one missed mortgage payment away from living in their car, and one missed insurance payment from not getting the medicine they literally need to survive. Most US states allow an employer to fire one of their employees without any warning or cause whatsoever, so long as the reason for the termination doesn’t fit into one of several small boxes…which they would need to admit for it to be actionable, anyway.

My point being, a big part of the reason why you don’t see protests like you do in say, France, is that unlike France, the people here are largely wage slaves that cannot afford to even miss work when suffering from extreme illness, let alone to take to the streets over that asshole pedophile acting like an asshole pedophile. This has been by design.

Don’t mistake a population of people spending all their energy holding onto the little they have for one that supports this regime. Whether you think their action or lack of action is justifiable, you need to at least admit it’s understandable.

Yeah my wife does the same thing and it similarly drives me batshit lol.

Its even funnier when she’s standing there naked waiting for it to fill complaining about freezing while there is 20 gallons of hot steaming water sitting right there in front of her that, for some reason, she feels she can not sit in until its up around her neck lmao

Dude, this is a static picture lol.

You know how this happens naturally? People fill the tub to just below the the overflow, shut the water off, get in the tub, and then immediately displace the water up over the overflow. Then it drains…slowly…until it’s below the line.

If this was an image we could hear, I’d bet you any amount of money there was a gurgling sound in the background as the water slowly made it’s way down the drain.

The trick is to get in the tub before it’s done filling, then you don’t waste 10+ gallons of hot water down the overflow.

I trust them to not be as bad as the MAGA types. That’s why it’s the lesser of two evils. I know that they’re evil fucks in their own way, believe me.

I want a third choice, I truly do. I’ve long gotten behind third party candidates, and pulled their lever at the voting booth. I voted for Nader in 2000. I participate in the primaries. But at the end of the day, if my candidate of choice doesn’t get nominated, I’m not going to abstain in the general if the choice is between the soulless vampire democrat and the Christofascist MAGAt that is running on a platform of making homosexuality punishable by death. I doubt there is even a majority of people voting for that democrat thinking they’re the next FDR, they just know that by not pulling that handle, they’re possibly going to give the Christofascist the win. We’re choosing the devil we can live with versus the devil we can’t.

Unfortunately, until we somehow get legal mechanisms in place that codify the basic human rights of the people the MAGAts are targeting in these fucking purges (that’s basically what they are), and solidify the ability of the government to make it literally impossible for this kind of shit to happen going forward, this is what it boils down to. I want election reform, I want ranked choice voting, I want the level of representation to be adjusted so that the number of reps in congress isn’t hard locked so that we can have more abilities for niche candidates to achieve the office and break the hold these two parties have, I want publicly funded elections, I want strict rules regarding the media as concerns elections. I have a feeling you and I both have a very similar set of values and ideas as to what constitutes a functional democracy.

All Im trying to say is, don’t take people voting for democrats as endorsement of their bullshit. It’s not that, believe me, it is not that. It’s just the only other realistic alternative, the MAGAt, is so, so much worse, that we have no choice but to hold our nose and do whatever we need to do to prevent that asshole from getting into office…even if that is voting for the lesser of two evils.

So when do we hold the democrats accountable

When weve got the Christofascists in jail where they fuckin belong.

If someone comes at me with a gun while someone else is trying to set my house on fire, im going to focus on the dude with the gun, then deal with the fire. Theyre both a threat, but one is more of a threat than the other.

What you guys are basically wanting to do, to continue the metaphor, is go running around trying to find the hose while youre being shot at. And you know, thats fine, you do you, player. But dont act like its not completely natural and justifiable if most people, like me, would put their energy into stopping the bullets before giving even half a shit about the fire. The fire will have to be dealt with once the bullets stop. The fire will be dealt with, but there are bigger threats right now.

Dude never would I ever have dreamed I’d yearn for the days of 2 minute videos with notepad being used to communicate but here we are.

Im not defending anyone. You notice I literally called them Corporate Whores, right?

What Im saying is people need to use their brain and think strategically about the situation and not be all Pollyanna about it. I’m sure 80% of the people that voted for Kamala didn’t give a fuck about Kamala, I know I didn’t, but the FACT is, every person in a purple state that voted third party likely contributed in some way to where we are now.

You’re on a bus with 100 people and they take a vote for lunch. 40 people want Tacos, 40 want Pizza. The other 20 of people all want something different from everyone else…a few want sandwiches, this guy over here wants Thai food, those two old ladies want to go to a steak house. Are any of those people going to get what they want? No, obviously. It is a mathematical certainty that they will not.

But those 20 people, knowing they’re not going to get what the want, can still at least take steps to not get what they absolutely don’t want. They may not want either the tacos or the pizza, but they probably have a preference between those two. They can at least cast a vote for the meal they can live with, even if it’'s not their favorite. At least they can eat something, and won’t be sitting on a bus fucking starving for the next 6 hours until they stop for dinner.

As you said, people can vote for whoever they want. But here’s what you can’t do…you can’t dig your fucking heels in, refuse to compromise, and then whine and complain afterwards when the bus is pulling into Taco Bell and not Pizza Hut if you fucking hate tacos. You could have cast a vote for Pizza, it might have won, and you could have at least had that and not Taco Bell. It might not have, of course, but at least that was a possibility. The Thai never ever was. No matter how much you wished it were so. No matter how much you cry and complain.

This is like, functional adult sort of stuff. People have to compromise every single day, that’s life.

Thats the thing people that have never gone under or fainted cant conceptualize…its not like falling asleep, its a literal off button.

Ive fainted a few times in my life, as well as been put under, and its like one second youre doing thing, next second youre on the floor, and the funniest part is, at least for me, when I came to after fainting, I felt like I slept for 12 hours…like rested in a way that I never feel waking up from normal sleep.

I read somewhere that the reason cats are so fickle is that they’ve been much more recently domesticated compared to dogs

my kitty crossed over 10 years ago now, but I served her faithfully for nearly 20 years. her behavior was atrocious and she whined for food like you wouldn’t believe but I still miss her and her five pointy ends a ton lol

I wish DisplayPort would become the standard already. It’s superior in every way.

HDMI is the microUSB of the video world and I wish it would die already in lieu of DP and USB-C/ThunderBolt.

First thing I thought too lol

Second I thought was “Prepare three envelopes”

Hell, even just having a completely different conversation can sometimes lead to huge breakthroughs! I’ve seen it happen!

If there’s a realistic choice beyond “Corporate Whores” and “Corporate Whores who also want to institute Christian Sharia law in the US”, and you still support the whores, then yes, I will be right there front and center to call those people scumbags all day long.

However, everyone knows that is not the case in US politics within the electoral mechanisms we’re currently operating under. Through that lens, being the person that knowingly votes for some niche candidate that they know isn’t going to win any election against those two, knowing full well that by doing that you’re making it that much easier for the Christofascists to scrape out a win and continue pushing this morality horseshit on the people…no, you don’t get a pass. Not anymore.

The cost of a dozen eggs is of no fucking consequence when LGBTQ+ society is under assault. The price of a gallon of gas pales in comparison to the fact that ICE is out there literally wiping their ass with the constitution every day and the courts have no recourse to stop them. The fact that your property taxes may be a point or two higher or lower means precisely dick when you’re watching a war be instigated and fought that nobody wants solely to distract the people from the fact that our president belongs on a sex offender registry so his movements can be monitored for the rest of his disgusting life.

I haven’t considered myself a supporter of the Democratic party since they sidelined Bernie, but if my choice is them, or someone that thinks the things I listed above are just fuckin great, you’re goddamn right Im going to pick them. Because at least with them we can stop the fucking bleeding. With the other guys, we’re just counting down until someone decides to trigger a nuke and once that happens elections as a concept are going to seem quaint let alone all the other luxuries we enjoy like running water or a functioning power grid.

Hey at least you guys all have fact checkers in your pockets now lol

Imagine what this was like when we had to go to the library and find a book to prove them wrong lmao