gAlienLifeform

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Eh, people don’t buy for the gameplay mechanics most of the time, they buy for what they see in the trailers and read in the descriptions. Being the only videogame available for this IP, having the WB marketing juggernaut behind it, releasing at a time of the year without much competition, coming out on every single platform - it would have been weird if this game wasn’t the best selling one in 2023.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Yeah, and the fact that people basically can’t talk about this game without mentioning it got boycotted because one of the people who makes money from it is a massive piece of transphobic shit is a small step forward all on its own

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

War crime charges are written by the victors

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

James Crumbley’s trial is set for March

e; added a link

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Certainly!

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Seems like generic billionaire privilege to me

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

The internet fractured culture and there is no one thing everyone is watching or listen to anymore and I don’t know how I feel about that

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

“George Floyd” by the Log Bay Ramblers is some nice and direct bluegrass folk music

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Say She She’s “Norma” is all about the end of Roe v Wade

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Sault’s “Foot on Necks” is a great anti police brutality anthem, and a big chunk of all their music has messages like that

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Teddy Roosevelt’s critical race theory was, “It is critical that Americans think Filipinos are subhuman so they don’t mind us stealing all their stuff.”

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

The American government has continued to spend a lot of money

On businesses while not doing much at all for households, leading to fun things like GDP going up alongside rates of homelessness

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Believe it or not, layoffs are lower than average

I mean, believe it or not the rate of people dying from infectious diseases decreased in 2020 compared to where it was at in 1918

Like, I guess I’m glad we’re doing better than 2008 and 2020 and other meltdown years like that, but with years like that weighing on the average better than average doesn’t mean much

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

True, we have given a lot of federal money to state and local police departments

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

The US was one of very few countries (I believe only Japan did the same) to pump significant stimulus money into households

When did we do this? I don’t remember significant stimulus money

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

… administration officials say Mr. Biden is keenly aware that prices remain too elevated for many families, even as key items, like gasoline and household furnishings, are now cheaper than they were at their postpandemic peak.

And yet there is a general belief across administration officials and their allies that there is little else Mr. Biden could do unilaterally to force grocery prices down quickly.

Ugh, I swear every single issue with this administration is just “We understand there is a problem, but you can’t expect us to do anything about it!”

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

I am so incredibly fucking tired of hearing this bullshit excuse over and over and over. Yes, Congress sucks and should do more, no, that does not excuse the Biden administration’s unwillingness to play hard ball with investigations and law suits and executive orders and the million and two other things they could be doing.

“But the courts would ju-”

I don’t care and neither do a lot of other voters. If a court throws your executive order out, change a superficial word or two and issue it again, and make them throw it out all over again. If a court enjoins you from doing something that needs doing, put on a silly hat and keep doing it, and tell the court “no, this is totally different, I’m doing it while wearing a silly hat, your order didn’t mention anything about this silly hat.” And when they enjoin your silly hat, get a silly wig and keep doing what needs doing.

Under our current laws a determined executive branch can move a hell of a lot faster than judicial or congressional oversight can, they just need to be willing to go for it. Until I see dozens of attorneys for federal agencies sitting in jail cells for contempt of court, don’t tell me this administration is really trying because they’re just not.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

a) a democratically elected authoritarian government is not fascism. If I said “throw all the Mormons into prison camps and conquer Alberta for their tar sands, and if a court tells you no break out the silly hats and insinuate the judge is mormon” that would be fascism.

b) I’m not okay with it, but compared to sitting around wringing our hands while things get worse it seems like the lesser of two evils.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

I agree with holding those we elect accountable, which is why I’m holding Biden accountable for the fact that his administration hasn’t been trying hard enough to help people. I breezed last it for the sake of the conversation here, but I absolutely believe our legislature can and should do more, and there’s some things even I will admit are going to require congress (e.g. I think we really need higher taxes on the wealthy and I don’t think there’s anything the president alone can do about that), but there are tons of things the administration could be doing that they’re not.

I know you and I are only two people but shouldn’t we encourage dialogue and finding common ground?

I’m not sure exactly what this means in the context of this conversation, but I like answering this question when it comes up,

Yes, I think we should encourage dialogue and finding common ground, and actually I think I am, just in a more long term way. See, I have tried debating with Republicans to change their minds, and I have tried negotiating with Republicans to see if they would be willing to support policies I want in exchange for policies they want, and I have seen elected leaders do those things as well, and, well, look at how that’s turned out for us. So, I have become deeply convinced that they either can’t or don’t want to empathize with us or be fair to us, they just want to dominate us and take all the stuff they can consume and own. With that being the case, I think the only way we get them to behave better is to make them believe that it’s in their own interest to do so. Put another way, I think in the short term we need to make it so unbelievably painful for them to keep being bigoted and selfish that they’ll want to act tolerant and charitable whether they genuinely feel that way or not. Long term, we’ll all find that it’s a lot easier to just skip to the part where we treat each other with respect instead of going through the effort of fighting each other first, and I think that’s the only way this world gets better.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

The Tax Foundation is an international research think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1937 by a group of businessmen in order to “monitor the tax and spending policies of government agencies”. The Tax Foundation collects data and publishes research studies on U.S. tax policies at both the federal and state levels. Its stated mission is to “improve lives through tax policy research and education that leads to greater economic growth and opportunity”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Foundation?wprov=sfla1

Yeah, I think me and them have some fundamentally incompatible worldviews

Either way, a couple of checks years ago doesn’t seem significant to me

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Good point, and it’s not like those cages we throw migrant families into are free

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

That old New Deal can make Society Great again

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

I think you’re right, we even agree on

would rather see congress do their jobs

I just think things have gotten too dire to keep waiting for that to happen

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Meanwhile, in the Middle East

“Hey, did you hear America blew up some of our people and stuff?”

“What else is new? Whatever, let’s go try to hijack another cargo ship.”

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Your healthcare provider, Facebook the website is only a tiny fraction of the surveillance network they’ve built

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Perfect setting for a videogame where you could find Leland Stanford’s pocket watch as a legendary item that gives your character bonuses to saving rolls or something (he had a reputation for incredible dumb luck)

On a related note, everyone should read “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World” and, like, among other things, the crazy animal torturing experiments that went down at the stock farm of the Standford University founder because California oligarchs have always been deranged like this and it has weird impacts on all of us

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

I found a Times of Israel article from a few days ago, they’re kind of a mouthpiece for the Israeli government so I wouldn’t trust them to accurately report on anything that might make Israel look bad but it seems like they’re basically echoing the OP

web.archive.org/…/saar-says-hell-start-work-on-fi…

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Sure thing, thank you for asking the question, we need more critical readers on the internet

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 months ago

Maybe this mirror of it will?

archive.is/nB7Db

But I’m guessing it talking about the claim only ~9% of the time officers were able to confirm a firearm was present on the scene.

Don’t think that shows up, this article is previously unpublished stuff I believe

For at least nine months, between October 2017 and July 2018, Scott DeDore tracked ShotSpotter’s accuracy in identifying confirmed gunshots. DeDore regularly shared his findings with Chicago police and ShotSpotter, and even attempted to hone the tool’s precision by working alongside the company to install additional sensors, documents obtained through public records requests show. Over the course of those nine months, according to the records, ShotSpotter correctly detected a gunshot in 63 of 135 instances in which a person was struck, an accuracy rate of about 47 percent.

One month after DeDore sent his last available report, then mayor Rahm Emanuel signed a new three-year, $33 million contract with ShotSpotter (the company has since rebranded as SoundThinking). It covered 12 police districts—100 square miles—and made Chicago the company’s largest customer at the time.

These records represent a look into a small corner of Chicago’s southwest side from more than half a decade ago. But they offer a unique window into ShotSpotter and its role in an increasingly surveilled city. And they came at a time when the city was reinventing its policing strategy. Six years later, Chicago is again at a crossroad, as a new mayoral administration “reimagines” public safety and mulls the fate of ShotSpotter when its contract expires in mid-February.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Give him a tiny dude on a horse charging the windmill for a nose and you’ve got a good metaphor for how wading into some comment sections feels

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Yeah, the closest Trump gets to genuine charm is when he accidentally starts to resemble a goofy Saturday morning cartoon show villain, “Ah, I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for my nincompoop henchmen! I tell you, it’s impossible for supervillains like me to find reliable evildoers these days, why is no one talking about this?”

Like, he’s not trying to be charming, he’s trying to threateningly project power, but he’s so bad at it it comes off like a joke.

gAlienLifeform , 6 months ago

Few decades from now there’s gonna be a four part PBS special narrated by Ken Burns about the impact those games had