I really appreciate the effort you put in, here. Also, I thought the Nickelback guy was Dax Shepard for a minute.

Thank you; I made the alex jones connection right after I commented. Feels like it also works as a grim joke at the usa’s expense!

As someone who voted for her, I’m completely on board with never seeing her or hearing from her again. She utterly failed — lost a (mostly*) free and fair election to a demented fascist idiot who’s destroying the country. Enough of the responsibility for our current situation rests on her shoulders that she can fuck right off forever, along with Biden, the Bushes, the Clintons, Mitch McConnell, Joe Lieberman, Newt Gingrich and all the other neocons, neolibs, and corrupt, amoral, greedy, misanthropic assholes that got us here.

She might survive as a politician if she took responsibility for the loss, and pushed for change in the Democratic party. Hopefully, she’ll do that, and not follow Clinton’s example. Seems unlikely.

• There was probably some amount of fuckery, but if the margins were as wide as they should have been, they couldn’t have pulled it off.

I’m unfamiliar with this medal, but can only assume it’s intended to commemorate the US losing the information war. Seems a bit macabre.

I wasn’t aware that they’d done a miniseries adaptation! Adding to my watchlist, thanks.

I hated Myst as a kid. Not just because I disliked the gameplay, but because its inexplicable popularity heralded a shift in the adventure game market. Instead of more Sierra or LucasArts-type games, there were, for years, scads of shitty, boring Myst-likes.

I do have them tagged as “nazi trash”, so that checks out.

I was on the ride last summer, and the only name that I remember being mentioned is Davy Jones, of mythical locker fame. They did add him to the ride in 2006, but he was created for the movie in 2003.

Sounds like you’re just lucky!

I thought this had come out already? All the garbage is blurring together.

I tried to get into Fallout 4 for the second or third time recently, and have just given up, and uninstalled it. It’s the simplified dialogue that ultimately robs it of any meaning for me. Nobody has anything very interesting to say, and the player just has a few one-word prompts to respond with. I don’t suppose that’s any different in Fallout: London? I imagine they’d have had to go to unreasonable lengths to change it.

The sentence can be interpreted either way.

I had similar feelings about this post. Reminds me of a pansexual family member of mine who claims that everyone is pansexual, really, if they just get over their hang-ups. I’m all for people being who they want to be, and feeling free to express themselves. I dislike the patronizing implication that if I don’t want to wear a crop-top and skirt, it’s because I’m not sufficiently enlightened or liberated.

I don’t think that was at all OP’s intent, to be clear—just thinking out loud as it were. I appreciate your thoughtful response.

Yeah, I tried Black Flag a while back—because I’d heard good things—but just couldn’t be bothered with all the busy work. I did really enjoy Mafia 3, The Witcher 3, RDR2; I’m not anti-side quest by any means. I think I need a more compelling story, and that’s never been AC’s strong point (based on ~3 AC games I’ve picked up and quickly dropped over the years).

This is something I do, so I’ll take a crack at it—though, bear in mind, it might be total bullshit.

It’s a defense mechanism. Many popular things are—in my estimation—objectively terrible. Every time something utterly devoid of merit (and often actively detrimental to the public good) is generally agreed to be a popular sensation, the connection I feel to my fellow human beings takes a hit.

I want to believe in people—in society. But I’m clearly a judgmental sob. So maybe by avoiding the popular things, I’m trying not to further my own alienation.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but what the fuck is normal? Nobody’s really normal. Even the so-called neurotypical are riddled with undiagnosed disorders. Normalcy is just a social fiction. Don’t let it limit your options.

I think that you’re probably right. I also think I may be projecting a bit, and conflating my country’s apathetic embrace of fascism with my own executive dysfunction. Seems all of a piece. Anyhow, thanks for the words.

The headline is a little ambiguous, but he didn’t give in; they relaxed the dress code.

The thing is, it can be really hard to accurately assess why you feel an aversion to things, and whether or not that aversion is misplaced. I can come up with scads of seemingly reasonable objections to, for example, going to the gym. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t benefit from it.

Overcoming an innate aversion that you’ve convinced yourself is a part of who you are can be life-changing.

The big caveat there is that knowing things doesn’t change the world. Scads of people are acutely aware of the problems facing society—maybe more than at any time in history. Vanishingly few feel empowered to do anything about it.

I’m not pro-ignorance by any means; education is the silver bullet. But we urgently need to find better ways of translating our spectacular surfeit of knowledge into individually actionable mechanisms of social change.