I never played BioShock 2 or Infinite, but I watched full playthroughs of each, and I thought infinite was great! Different to be sure in most ways, but it was a neat expansion of the world and themes hinted at in the first two games.

I seem to remember a lot of sideline criticism when it came out that boiled down to “NPC sidekick not love interest but hot so I don’t like game”. I thought, and think that is ridiculous, and fortunately I think that criticism has faded with time because Elizabeth is such a positive part of the game, from my view.

I should play through the BioShock games…

I don’t follow this, how has this person voting 3rd party in 2016 led to facism starting in the 80s? For that matter, how has 3rd party voting led to facism at all? I’m very much struggling to make sense of this.

By definition, an agenda is “a program of things to be done or considered” which does not equate to wanting to do something. It more closely resembles a daily planner or task list.

So in as much as you and I have an “agenda” when we get out of bed, you are right, the person submitting the PR did likely have an agenda of waking up and going about their day. There isn’t a ‘woke agenda’ at play here, however, as the person I replied to seemed to imply.

Along with potential reasons mentioned in this post, right wing folks also have fewer obvious places to go troll now that twitter is just filled with them and Hershey’s or whatever. Perhaps they are coming here looking for trouble specifically.

It’s also possible they’ve always been here and have just found more reasons to engage recently. Either way, the amount of bad faith discussion and derisive language is frustrating and upsetting.

I have just been blocking individuals if I find myself getting frustrated, but I also took a long break from social media because I felt like the discussions about Gaza were bordering toxic, so I’m not sure my approach is sustainable.

Imagine you have been purposefully targeted for harassment or excluded from activities in the past due to your preferred pronouns or perceived gender. Seeing “he” with that context would likely feel excluding, which is a reason someone without an ‘agenda’ would want to see it changed.

If I’m reading that right, that could also say that Instagram is suppressing anti-israel content? It’s just saying that in comparison to Instagram tiktok is showing more x, y, z. But Instagram is absolutely not a neutral point to measure from.

For starters there’s different demographics on each one, but I’m sure you could adjust for that, maybe the study did. But I don’t think you can adjust for the impact the US government has on Meta. I don’t believe for an instant that some US agency isn’t manipulating algorithms or requiring certain tweaks to steer discourse just like they did with US news outlets.

I had a very similar experience but just kinda glumly stuck with the broken experience in that in between, and just played what I could get to work. But now with proton, specifically the ge version, there’s isn’t a game that I can’t play (that I have wanted to play). It’s pretty amazing how quickly the changes and improvements to gaming on Linux have come.

I also have an AMD system now, which might be a big part of why it’s so painless now.

Second for guild wars 2, the world is huge when you first start playing, and though the initial levelling experience can feel like it takes a while, once you have hit the cap you can go pretty much anywhere. The story is pretty linear, though, so if you want a deep and complex story it might be better to look for a single player game.

I’d also say the combat system in Guild wars is fantastic, it’s simple enough to pick up and not have to stress about playing the game, but if you want to engage and get better there is so much to learn about and improve.

I don’t think that the last part is true. Community justice (even) in our broken society doesn’t really favor the powerful. The gut reaction I see is to help the underdog in a situation, not the oppressor. Sometimes an individual read of a situation can be complicated, leading to mistaken outcomes, but the intent is to end the negative situation.

Tangentially that makes me think about the difference in intent. A group of people expelling a bigot from a train is that group trying to fix a bad situation, let the oppressed person know they are not alone, and to let the oppressor know that are not welcome there with that behavior. The police may also kick someone off the train but their actions are punative, they exist to enforce a heiarchy and punish, they aren’t there to help the oppressed feel like they aren’t alone, and they are only letting the oppressor know that they aren’t welcome there, but as long as the cops aren’t nearby it’s ok.

As for structuring a more just society, we could imagine one without the implicit power imbalances, one without an arbitrary heiarchy of authority figures dictating right vs wrong. I know it sounds like I’m describing anarchy (I am) but also kinda a democracy? Like everyone gets a say to make decisions, and a group of equals decide together how to live their lives. Breaking down our current heiarchies to get there is the hard part, obviously, and I think it’s a generations long societal struggle. Hopefully we all live more justly than our parents until we arrive somewhere better than where we left.

Sorry this was very stream of conciousness, I hope my thoughts came across somewhat effectively.

The Americas are, as a continent, the site of mass genocide at the hands of Europeans. The intent was to eliminate the native peoples and their cultures, and this intent is both clear and the genocide is ongoing.

This is the big stick philosophy you say you support, it commits atrocities on other human beings in the name of expansion, extraction, and recognition, and unfortunately the philosophy dominates many of our ways of life.

That doesn’t mean it’s good, or right, or that it is the only way. We should hold ourselves to the standard we want to live by so we can break the cycles of abuse, and we should talk to each other and educate one another so we can deliver the best version of ourselves.

Consider that not all people have always lived with modern ideas of property, nations, and hierarchy. These are, in the grand scheme of human history, pretty insignificant when faced with the vast array of societies and beliefs shared by people over thousands of years. All that is to say domination is not inevitable or necessary, we can choose to do otherwise and all be better off for it.

You can play with no survival mechanics on peaceful mode, but then there’s no mobs. I’m sure you can mod out hunger though for that og feel, theres a mod for everything.

Interestingly the supreme Court has always been super political, dating back to the early 1800s when they were just some dudes riding horses around the country to make appeals decisions and then meeting in some random building in New York.

Check out the way, especially early on, Congress would pack the courts and cut seats when they didn’t politically align with presidents. They did this because the court was making partisan political decisions and they didn’t want the president to be able to dictate who was making those political decisions.

Or in the early 1810s when the court mysteriously started supporting business interests in pretty blatant ways.

The way they differ today is that they have more sway (sometimes people would just ignore rulings) and there’s no legislation being done by Congress to actually shape law, so the supreme Court is doing all the legislating for them.

Look up the Throughline podcast from NPR if you’re a podcast person, they have done a couple very potable episodes on the supreme court. One on how they came to be this way, and the other on the shadow docket (which is integral to how they came to be this way).

Caususes are a way some state political parties choose to pick out their favorite party candidate for the November election.

In most states they have a primary which is just a normal election by US standards. In a few, including Iowa, they gather in a physical room and move from location to location to physically show who they support.

That means if I’m “caucusing for Bernie” I’d go stand next to the Bernie crowd. This ends when a certain candidate has a majority (I don’t remember the exact amount). So people move from candidate to candidate as they see theirs isn’t winning or as they are persuaded by others there.

Every state has their primary or caucus on a specific day, so yesterday was Iowa’s day, and it’s often very cold this time of year in Iowa. This year it’s pretty brutal, high of 3°F and low of -3°F today (-16C and -19.5C), and it was colder a few days ago.

I got to travel to Brussels recently and it was a short visit but so great! It’s really cool to see the obvious new work and the areas they haven’t gotten to yet.

This article got me looking at the street view comparing 2009/10 to now along some of these new pedestrian areas. it’s amazing how not only does the street change, but where there were a bunch of banks with no canopy there’s now restraunts with covered seating areas and little parks with trees and flowers.

Along bd Anspach is where I was looking if anyone was interested.

Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it’s a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).

Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their ‘blond’ coming in closer to a medium.

People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.

In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don’t stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their “signature taste”. This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.

Unfortunately it’s really hard to know for most of early history because people didn’t write down or tell stories about that mundane stuff. We do have lots of documentation from colonizers in North America as they interacted, observed, and tried to convert the native peoples though.

I’d recommend looking to the great lakes region in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest reaching down to northern California since the Europeans wrote a lot about them. Some people had slaves and owned property and some did not, and some built their society around a system of social capital, where collectively being good to each other was a way to pay each other back for wrongdoing.

It’s honestly absurd how many different ways people lived before us, and presumably, will after us.

Is that true? That sounds like something someone would just say with no factual backing. I read a fair bit recreationally about pre European societies and I haven’t seen some universal truth about screwing each other over for some action.

There were and presumably are many societies that treat procreation and child rearing completely differently than we do today. Once you stop looking at your neighbors kids as “theirs” and seeing them as “ours” there isn’t much drive to compete with them.

Wow, that’s crazy! I certainly did not have that experience with my lockup, but it was in a parking garage behind a second locked gate, so fairly secure.

I guess that just becomes part of your risk assessment for biking places then! I know in my situation I’d have to lose an awful lot of bikes to make the cost of a car worthwhile, but I’d really rather not lose any.

I recently read about a system used by some groups in North America (I think, geography could be off) where people were held accountable by independent arbitration and a cultural expectation of reparations.

It’s hard to say how well it worked, the Europeans were idealizing the “exotic natives” and the communities were proud of their community and could have exaggerated it’s success. But they did this for a long time.

From what I understand, if I robbed your home, made off with your dog, and in the process hurt your mother, my direct community of family and friends would meet with your direct family and friends and hash out a way to make things better. My family and I might be on the hook to return the things I took, help you with repairing some clothing, and should you or your family need help for a period of time we would be obligated to help. If we couldn’t come to an agreement someone else from the community who was not involved would come to help decide.

Obviously this is primarily focused on preventing these things from happening in the first place. I don’t want my friends and family to be indebted to others, and through helping your friends and family, we might end up closer, making whatever caused the problem less likely to occur again.

As to how exactly we do such a thing today, thats tough. We have many complicated societal problems that make many feel disconnected from everyone around them. One thing is for sure though, police do not prevent crime, they do not solve crimes, and they sure don’t police evenly. We desperately need to try something different, and maybe a first step, in a weird way, is trying to connect with the people around you.

You aren’t kidding, I have spent the last five days banging my head against cruciball 11 with the vanilla Peglin. Feels like a lot of rng and less about choices as it goes on.