Yes, this is a valid choice. Live amongst your family and friends and everything you cherish, or become a survivalist and abandon all human connection.

You edited to add a lot of projection to your post. I am literally complaining about rent and bills in the city I grew up in and have been living in for 35 years. I have very few extravagances and am typing to you on a 5 year old phone with a small crack along the edge of the screen. You make it sound like I should sell one of my yachts and shut the fuck up. In truth I’m about to lose my contract job at the end of next month and am unsure how quickly I can find another.

Living under capitalism forces you to adapt or perish. I hate money. I hate having to spend time thinking about investments and retirement and savings and down payments and credit scores. Cost of living in my city is insane and I’m terrified that if my income doesn’t increase every year, I won’t be able to keep up with escalating rent and bills. In order to keep my life as it is, I am forced to think like a capitalist.

When everything around me is becoming more expensive, I must also increase my personal profits.

Indie has always been a way to define a category for creators without access to the same amount of money that publishers had historically provided. Now publishers are both no longer needed to release a game and are very rarely taking chances on original games from first time developers.

We’ve gotta figure out some rules for what “indie” means. E33 is a great game, but that budget is estimated to be least $20 million. How many small teams are not being honored because a spot is being taken up by a game that has the same budget as a small AAA project?

Everybody in this space, yeah, absolutely.

Everybody who is informed and has been paying attention, definitely.

Everybody in the voting public of the US, not so much.

American exceptionalism is a real thing. The vast majority of the country has been fed fairytales about how they live in a perfect utopia where things are always getting better. They were taught that they were the richest, strongest, smartest, nicest, and most popular country in the world. Hollywood and the press barraged them with the message that everybody wants to either be them, be friends with them, or they’re an evil person with no understandable motive that seeks to destroy them so that they can take over the world and rule with an iron fist. They won every war they’ve ever fought in, usually showing up to save the day in conflicts that aren’t their own, just because they’re that kind, generous, and always looking out for the little guy. Nothing bad ever happens within the impenetrable borders, and when it does, it’s just a freak accident or a single bad apple.

A shocking number of people began to interpret “American” exceptionalism as something that only applies to the largest part of the population, the straight, cis, white, Christian. Suddenly everyone outside any one of those categories becomes un-American and therefore the evil person who cannot be understood and deserves no sliver of empathy in attempts to do so.

Those people voted for Trump.

Twice.

In 2024 they made up the popular vote. That’s the majority of America. That’s what this country was then. That is “everybody.”

It’s crazy how long it’s taking for people to wake up. It seems like if the election would happen today, Trump wouldn’t win, but that approval rating might swing if his opponent is anything other than a straight, white, masculine, cisgendered man, with multiple children who all celebrate Christmas together.

When will the truth become mainstream? What additional atrocities will need to occur before Trump becomes as universally hated as Hitler? I honestly feel like we’re not there yet. If anything happens to Trump now, it seems that nearly half the country will turn him into a martyr before realizing they are free of the figurehead of a fascist oligarchy.

That’s literally the point of the entire show. Aside from the title implying that, the first paragraph spells it out:

For the last several years Netflix has been quietly banking episodes of a new show called Famous Last Words, interviews with famous people entering their twilight years. The catch is that episodes will only air after the subject passes away. The full list of interviewees is a closely guarded secret, but last week Netflix quietly posted the premiere episode featuring Jane Goodall.

It’s not the team that made Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s the same publisher that also published Thank Goodness You’re Here. That’s the equivalent of two different streaming shows that are both exclusive to the same service.

It’s not. There’s no gameplay here. It’s just streaming weird content.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-key-issues-that-drove-gen-z-protests-that-toppled-nepals-government

I had the same reaction and had to dig deeper.

Turns out this is a rodeo event called Swine/Hog/Pig “Showmanship.” The competitors are making eye contact with a judge, waiting for signals and to know when they’re paying attention to their animal so they’re can rotate them. They’re tapping the pigs both to steer them (always keeping the pigs between themselves and the judge), and to keep the pigs head pointed upwards. They’re trying to show their control over the animal as well as give the judge views of all sides of them, so different aspects can be assessed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/EdTSBID2u2o

The very first person to write was doing so with the intent of it being read. They didn’t make marks that they didn’t understand and then later discover their meaning. Writing makes no sense without reading. These two things happened in unison, one does not predate the other.

Seems like it’s almost time for Arab Spring 2.0: Global Spring.

The audiobook is also quite good. It’s fully cast, so each section is voiced by a new actor who writes the letters in the collection.

Why does this graph not show total registrations? Fuck the Democratic Party. They’ve dropped the ball consistently for too long. I only hope that enough leftists continue to vote in any races that survive this administration.

It’s crazy how predictive this 1990 B-Movie was about our graduating class: https://youtu.be/3w-ph46XYWQ

🌮

Not sure how regional it is, but in Southern California, I’ve heard cajón mean both box and drawer. It might be a specific type of box? Like a wooden box made out of pallet wood.

They didn’t make “back” money, they’re just making money. His friends are the ones telling him to say insane shit that drives the market (or specific targeted stocks like Apple) down, then they buy while it’s low. After a few days/weeks, he changes his mind/can’t enforce his nonsense and the stock goes back up, his friends sell and have nothing but profit. The majority of the shit he does is market manipulation to benefit himself and anyone riding his coattails.

Which one? There have been a few duds, but this is my favorite:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/millennium-falcon-75375

The tax system is so complicated, most people can’t handle navigating it on their own. Most people have jobs where taxes are automatically removed from pay checks and sent to both state and federal tax agencies. However, that amount is just an estimate and once a year (or quarter) you need to file paperwork to confirm whether you over or underpaid and then you either get a rebate (without interest), or you’ll need to send in a payment to make up the difference. That paperwork has been lobbied to remain as complicated as possible so that companies like Intuit can provide services that tax payers find useful and continue to pay for. This is more complicated for business owners, both big and small.