No game has ever affected me as much as Outer Wilds. Out of every life changing piece of art I’ve ever experienced, whether it be film, television, music, literature, or videogames, this is the first and only time I’ve ever gotten chills by the end.

The story isn’t super deep and it isn’t necessarily profound – it’s not really a belief-changer, outside of, perhaps, your idea of what a videogame is – but the experience itself is beautiful and rewarding and I’m not sure it can be recaptured.

Star Wars, DC, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Jurassic whatever, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Godzilla, Halo, Gears of War, Batman: Arkham and every other nostalgia-driven cinematic/televised/videogame franchise relies on shitgobblers. Shitgobblers just keep gobbling.

True, but that just isn’t a maintainable party platform. There may be denial and violence in the short term, but at that point I think the Trumpian wing of the Republican party is in its death throes and is doomed.

I’m not so sure. While I don’t necessarily have a positive outlook on the future of American politics, I think the Democratic party is in a really good spot at the moment. The Republican party is completely beholden to one person right now. They are in a very, very bad spot re: extremism in their party. It’s essentially their party platform. We’re seeing the ramifications in the House, now. Their party is in disarray and is proving they can’t manage to even govern themselves. Meanwhile, Democrats are capitalizing on that disarray by consolidating around abortion access, protecting democratic institutions, and willingness to actually get things done. We can see this in the immigration reform bill that Trump nuked – that was set to be a huge policy win for conservatives and Democrats were willing to push it through.

If Trump loses this election, where does the Republican party have to go? They can’t just conjure up another personality like Trump – I think DeSantis proved that. They’ve alienated their moderate voters in favor of bigotry and disruption of the institutions they grew up with and helped maintain. Either they’re going to have to revert to establishment, pre-Trump conservatism or double down on his insanity, further alienating the moderate Republicans. And where would those moderates go besides the Democratic party, which, while sure, is supportive of gender-affirming care (a knock for them), at least they are still willing to uphold capitalistic, business-centric values (or in other words, socialism for me, not for thee).

If Trump wins, then the Democratic party is still gonna be around and having a field day with all the issues he causes (see: Dobbs ruling). I dunno this may be a hot take but I could see the Republican party crumbling, and Democrats splitting into left and right camps. Maybe someone can check me, because the more I think about it the more I see Republicans as a fringe extremist group and Democrats as capitalists, and then me over here thinking to myself, “How could we seize collective ownership of Amazon and Google’s computers?” lol

Glad he did an episode on this. People need an accessible and digestible way of understanding the threat of Project 2025.

Yeah, neoliberals are destroying the left, but I’ll take them over an authoritarian theocracy.

Ideologically Ubuntu makes me cringe, but I also use Google and a host of other technologies that fuck my privacy, so I guess I have accepted the world we live in.

In the same way that I think it’s noble when people try to live waste free, I think it’s noble to use things like GrapheneOS, or selfhost all your services, or de-Google your tech. But it’s unrealistic for all of the world to live waste-free or customize their tech so as to be private. In the end, the government needs to step in and force these giant-ass companies to behave better, because they are the primary forces pushing forward the destruction of the environment and personal privacy.

I dont really fuck around with the GUI stuff tbh…I’ve always just done ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

I guess my issues with the installer have mostly stemmed around the software raid and manual partitioning. Simply installing on a single drive isnt bad.

Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.

Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.

I mean, yeah, you’re coming to a small community of LOTR fans and accusing the author of their fandom of being racist. I’m not sure what you expect lol.

But yeah there are some dubiously racist characterizations in the novels. There are also some moments of reflection, like Sam seeing the dead Harad soldier:

He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home.

I mean, the book is written from a Western POV, and by a white Catholic guy who was born in the late 1800s. I think the chances were pretty slim of him having a modern outlook on race, gender, sexuality, etc.

Edit: omg on midwest.social too hahaha

Def agree on half-life 2. I even played HL1 before to prep, and weirdly enough enjoyed that more than I enjoyed HL2. Guess it’s hard to understand the hype when you weren’t there when it came out.

I live in a small city about an hour away from a major city. I’m also an hour away from what I would call the boonies – rural, remote areas where owning guns and open carrying is normal. In fact, I’ve seen open carry around here, in the city, quite a bit. It’s pretty normal around here.

I heard a shooting happen in the suburbs near my house when I was a kid. It’s what’s considered the “nice” part of town. An old woman walking her dog was killed. I heard the shot through my bedroom window. Only til I moved into the inner part of the city did I witness guns being shot in the city more often. Most of the times you hear pops, it’s fireworks. A couple times, it’s been guns. Those couple times are pretty freaky.

Every once in awhile I’ll walk past a crime scene downtown, usually something happened like a stabbing the night before. One day I scrolled through reddit and saw a video – a point-blank execution had occured outside the club down the road. That one was disturbing. I think the kid is going to jail for a long time.

The inner part of this particular city is not as safe as the suburbs, but for the most part you should be okay, as long as you’re not looking to start trouble. When I’m walking around town, especially the immediate area I live, my eyes are open. At night, they’re wide open.

Mainstream media is generally propaganda, too, even lots of “left leaning” media.

For example, we don’t hear about the war crimes committed by Ukraine, only ones by Russia.

We don’t hear about how the US was actively working with right-wing groups in Ukraine to overthrow the government in 2014, efforts that helped further fracture relationship between Ukraine and Russia.

Or the military posturing by NATO in a geographically adjacent country to Russia.

War makes us forget nuance and accept simple absolute truths like Russia attacked Ukraine and therefore Ukraine must defend itself.

And for the record: fuck Russia for this ongoing conflict. They are the perpetrators, for sure. But all historical context to this conflict is completely thrown out in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Where are the anti-war democrats? Where are the people looking to end the war, rather than further fuel it with weapons? Nowhere to be found.

You know why? Because war makes too much money. Americans are paying to subsidize the cost of weapons to keep the war going. We the people are funding this.

We say “what are we supposed to do? Just let Russia invade Ukraine?” And then turn a blind eye to Palestinians occupied by Israel.

“I/O error”