Do gooder derogation. Someone does something good and then you feel bad about yourself. Then instead of trying to self improve, you lash out.

Big sad sack of shit maneuver, really.

6th grade is reading for plot. It’s able to read the story and understand that the hobbits brought the ring to Mordor, and Aragorn fought in Gondor.

Anything about symbols, themed, subtext, unreliable narrators all comes later.

they reach critical mass, shit will actually get fixed and no neoliberal or maga will ever hold a major seat of power agai

People are pretty stupid and would probably fall for maga bullshit again

RFK should be removed from office along with all of his goons and sycophants.

And yet somehow people keep voting for Republicans. Republicans make everything worse. Even for the rich, in the medium term, when they have sick workers or get shot dead on the street.

Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.

“I’m a Grok guy,” said Vance. “I think it’s the best. It’s also the least woke!”

What a fucking idiot. Really wants everyone to go back to sleep

Being an adult in the sense of being responsible, feel pretty good about. Pay the bills. Feed myself. Go to work.

Being an adult in the sense of having no fun, or tightly restricted fun, not so much. Still go see live music and play video games.

I did have a coworker that was both a picky eater and didn’t cook. She’d order seamless (GrubHub) for most meals. That’s got to be like… $30/meal, two meals a day so $60, seven days a week, ~$400/week? My monthly food budget is like $200. Plus she’d go out drinking. Guess that adds up. That’s like $100k over five years.

She also had an expensive gym membership she didn’t use and was too shy to cancel.

Some of my peers should be rich enough to retire, but fell victim to lifestyle inflation. Sure they’re making $250k/year, but they moved into a $5k/mo apartment, go on expensive vacations, and just do whatever in their day to day. I don’t know where their money goes. Maybe they are secretly investing.

Meanwhile I live like a goblin on less

I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don’t because they’re primarily concerned with profit.

That aside, “it brings joy” is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn’t say that’s a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don’t think I’d want to encourage that in children.

I worry about how I would raise a child in this landscape. Two of the people I know with kids, the kids don’t care about video games. One of the kids is super into iPad games, and that feels like a haazrd brewing.

Maybe I’d try to stick to real games for any child I was responsible for, but I don’t think that would survive impact with peers.

Physical cards last for years. Maybe the online game will be around in ten years, but maybe not.

I have most of my magic cards from my youth. They’re a thing I own. I can do what I want with them- play the game, use them for decorations, sell them. Digital shit is transient with few options for the buyer.

Yeah, but I guess megacorps like Warner Brothers are even more obscene than elder gods.

https://shadowofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Shelob

Business Idiots. Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about how many business leaders are out of touch with users and their own products. They live in their own little pocket dimension with each other, and only really care about shareholders.

Yeah, display port worked fine. It was when I plugged the second monitor in to HDMI I realized the problem. And then couldn’t get online to search for issues.

I had to tether the desktop to my phone over USB to get a network connection.

I later installed pop!_os , tested all that stuff, and it worked out of the box.

After booting, test WiFi, BT and audio functionality.

This is an important step. One time I boldly just installed without testing anything in the live session, and discovered that HDMI and Ethernet didn’t work. Woops.

It’s like do-gooder derogation. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation )

Someone doing something good? Fuck them. They think they’re better than us?? Where do they get off??!?

A lot of people are trash and are emotionally invested in both the way things currently are, and that they are a very good person

One of the shadow of Mordor games made sexy shelob and it was bad.

They’re conservatives. There’s a couple succinct ways of summing up conservatism.

“There must be in-groups for the law to protect but not bind, and outgroups for the law to bind but not protect”

That’s pretty much it. They want to be able to do what they want, unbound, but still be protected.

There’s also “No one tells me what to do. I tell you what to do.”

They want to do what they want. Shoot guns. Litter. Drive a big car. Whatever. But they want to tell you what you can do. Don’t do gay stuff. Don’t ride a bike. Don’t do that religion.

They are, at their core, bad people. Depicted honestly they would be a villain in a children’s book. They might be friendly to their neighbors, but at the core they treat outsiders badly. It’s funny because many of them identify as Christian, but the “love your neighbor” + “the outgroup is also your neighbor” part didn’t make it in.