Yeah that sounds reasonable. Well shit, GW2 is back on my list! …I’m balls-deep into nursing school right now, so probably not a great time to dive into ANY game that’ll keep me distracted for longer than like a 10 min study break… which is the opposite of what an MMO is lol. But, bookmarked in brain.
Oh, nice. How does it work now? Can you hop around between different gamestates, or are they just done putting out new stuff and the game stays as-is going forward?
This is what killed GW2 for me. Go offline for a month and you’ll miss shit forever. Otherwise great game, but I hated how episodic the story was.
I grew up in a rightwing household, and unquestioningly drank the koolaid until my late teens. The right’s bullshit eventually became impossible to ignore, so I dove right into the ‘both sides!’ trap and rode the Libertarian train for a while.
It became really easy to articulate what I didn’t like about the right; describing what was bad about the left was just echoes of Fox bitching about things like them voting on emotion instead of logic… but no real examples.
Around my mid-twenties I finally realized ^that was projection; then 2016 happened and holy shit they’re running Trump and Hillary?? Easily the two most hated candidates in my lifetime… against Gary Johnson - an admittedly goofy personality but likeable and most importantly not crazy, THIS IS THE LP’S TIME TO SHINE! …yeah they got 3% of the vote. We won’t ever see better conditions for a 3rd victory, so, pipedream shattered.
Guess I’ll have to just pick a lesser evil, so let’s see what we have to work with…
there’s the red team. Burn through our fossil resources with reckless abandon. War, war, war, and more war. Shave social services down to nothing so we can claim ‘fiscal responsibility’ which is good I guess (hey! eyes down here, we’re done talking about the war part), a blatant integration of religion and politics, and they want to make life as miserable as possible for my gay/colored/female/nonchristian friends. Fuck, that’s pretty bad…
Alright, next we have the blue team, which is the opposite of all those things, at the exceedingly high cost of… getting cockblocked by the red team when they try to implement those things… and… well there was that time Bill lied about getting a blowjob- outrageous! Surely the red team does a better job of keeping it in their pants… *checks* …uhh, nope! Fuck, I’m starting to become aware of my own cognitive dissonance and it feels like absolute shit.
So I start voting one issue at a time, crunching both options against eachother and choosing the one that’s best for the US. That way there’s no bias and I won’t be part of this tribal bullshit plagueing our politics… Weird, when I ignore affiliation and vote on policy alone, my ballot becomes solid blue. What are the odds of that?! Next election, solid blue again. And again.
My desire to be ‘independent’ on label alone is pretty much gone at this point, and I’m being more and more vocal about supporting leftwing policies. Family isn’t a fan, but they hit me with the shit OP is poking fun at - I only shifted blue because I’m poor! Once I make more money, just you wait and see, I’ll come crawling right back.
Now, I’m not rich or anything, but I’m (finally!) not living paycheck to paycheck. During all ^that I wandered into the military which gave me access to all kinds of socialized resources which have enabled me to get where I’m at now and have made a pretty significant improvement on my life. The thing that pisses me off about those socialized services is WHY THE FUCK DOESN’T EVERYONE HAVE THIS?! So wearing camo for 4 years for some reason got me this VIP tour of what we should should be doing for everyone.
I was a late bloomer, I got there. I haven’t missed a single election since 2016, big or small. Solid blue. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll even look up the voter registration of candidates for nonpolitical positions like judges, and red is a deal breaker.
The better off I become, the more blue I get. The notion of red-shift with income is trash.
…and a swan-dive into fascism is preferable to that because…?
Our political model is janky as fuck. I don’t need to explain the pitfalls of a two-party system to you - I already know you fucking hate it or you wouldn’t be eyeing a 3rd in the first place. I hate it too. But a two party system is what we have, which means you have three options:
Red (fascism)
Blue (not fascism)
Let the other voters choose Red or Blue for you (abstain or vote 3rd).
Which of those options will do the best job of accomplishing YOUR goals?
What even are your goals? 3rd party as POTUS? You gotta lay the groundwork first. 2016 was the perfect stage for a 3rd party victory within our current model: we had an absolutely hated candidate running on both of the big two; a voterbase just as sick of the status quo as they are now; a Libertarian with a genuinely likable personality, some solid policy stances, and who managed to shift the “crazy” that Libertarians were reputed for to an honestly charming variety of “quirky”, and a surprisingly steady stream of coverage by the media. We will never see better conditions for a 3rd victory in our current model.
So how did the Libertarians do with that perfect storm? 3%. They got fucking 3% of the vote. How do those conditions compare to today’s? Red is running that same hated sack of shit Trump; but Blue couldn’t find a candidate hated as much as Hillary if they tried to - to the contrary, Harris is churning up optimism like I’ve never seen before. The die-hard Reds and Blues aren’t going to change their votes over that, but the folks in the middle are going to be far less inclined to vote 3rd than they were in 2016. 3rds have gotten pretty much zero media attention this time around. They literally do not stand a chance to beat even 2016’s 3%, let alone enough to actually win.
Your only way to the top is to change the political model into one that’s more favorable to you; and the easiest way to do that is to keep not-fascism in power long enough to get the general population pissed off enough about not having ranked choice that it starts making its way into bigger and bigger elections. Your next-easiest path to victory is insurrection… that most likely both fail and get yourself killed, so please don’t do that. Your least-easy path to victory is to allow fascism to take root, as that will push the model even further away from your reach: if that happens it’s game over for everyone except the fascists.
If you see a different option that’ll lead to a 3rd victory in our current model, I’m all ears; but if not, you still need to set the stage with favorable conditions, to include preventing the stage from being burned to the ground.
The Dems will preserve a political model that’s at least malleable. 3rds will need to work together to push ranked choice more and more into voters’ field of view.
Republicans will swan-dive into fascism, in which case 3rds (and everyone else) are fucked.
Dems aren’t going to help 3rds directly, but any one who wants the possibility of a 3rd party victory later is committing political suicide by failing to vote blue as a means of buying time. Voting 3rd when that 3rd has no potential for victory is self-destructive.
I’ve heard and experienced WAY too much supporting anecdote to just wave it off as confirmation bias. Official statements by telecoms and such be damned, this shit is 100% happening.
For me personally? I mean shit like this. Love it ^_^
For you, I have no idea what kind of music you’re into, but there are a ton of options for instrumental.
Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
Instrumental-only music?
Well you were right. That definitely rubs the wrong way lol.
Thank you!
If you don’t like that, you’re really not going to like what they call downvotes …
Don’t leave us hanging like that!
Spyware, now in rainbow!!
This song gets under my skin. Those monotonal long notes just never stop.
70% of this song is
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
and
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
rips ears off
“Dreamcast” is probably the single best gaming console name of all time, too.
“Yay I get to run around outside for a few minutes! I hope I can breathe well enough to keep up with thi–” *dies*
— Pugs
It didn’t become one of my favorites until after I saw the vid. I’d heard it prior to that, and took the stage thing literally - like, okay, you’re performing on a stage… that’s what you do…? Then I watched the video and “Oh. Oooooooh. Oh shit!” It’s a metaphor, and they pull ZERO punches. Extremely critical of humanity, but without being whiny or doomy (well… in a ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ kinda way: it doesn’t feel doomy but the actual message… yeah…). And they pulled it off with fucking marionette puppets somehow without making it feel silly. HOW?!
So damn good!
One of my favorite songs is The Stage, by Avenged Sevenfold, and I honestly think the THX sound has a large port of it. First 30 seconds are basically just a solid THX sound… huge nostalgia hit hight out the gate. The rest of the song is fucking epic on its own, but that first bite is just… chef’s kiss
“Pro life” strikes again.
Please spread these articles like wildfire so people actually understand the impact of their vote. This shit needs to stop.