Toxicity is self-concentrating in really anonymous online spaces.
The cause of and consequences of The Man-o-Sphere in a nutshell. People get drawn in by the promise of gamified easy answers to relationships (via PUA community, evangelist trad-life influencers, and other self-help gurus). But it’s a bait-and-switch, with “advice” drifting from “how to find an easy relationship” into “why women are awful and you should hate them.”
Your house gets to have a yard?
M2F transition drug
Kids in 1990s thinking they’re going to be counterculture badass: “I’m gonna to sell dope every day. Get rich, diamonds on my teeth, pimped out ride, straight to Hollywood and Vine. Ain’t no pig gonna fuck with me, clack-clack-clack!”
Kids in the 2020s thinking they’re going to be counterculture badass: “I’ve created a series of dropsites across the city to clandestinely request Estracil. Laying low, blending in, and building a network of allies who can smuggle people out of the country if they’re targeted by the police.”
the kind of phenotype that will produce the most offspring
That’s only beneficial when your children are an asset to community survival. Predators tend to produce fewer offspring, because every new member of the predator cohort is an eventual rival. Prey species benefit from large populations when the populations’ role is to terraform territory or otherwise synergize with their kin. This is a big fundamental difference between animal and plant reproduction, since plants generally benefit from more members of the species in the immediate area while animals have a soft ceiling on their population tied to how much food / shelter is available.
One could argue that the human habit of terraforming and the synergy enjoyed by a large population of active brains in a small area puts us more in line with plant species than animals.
The Survival of the Fittest trope is flawed on a whole host of levels. The idea that you want a small number of apex predators as a survival mechanic neglects all the instances in which a very large number of prey species perform significantly better.
While technically true, you’re neglecting that a lot of these agencies employ quotas and performance awards and other metrics to track and promote the more hustler-mindset goons while dumping the less enthusiastic. That’s been at the heart of the DOGE campaign - finding and removing anyone who might potentially obstruct the administration’s agenda in any agency suspected of hosting opposition bureaucrats.
The purges guarantee the admin can bring in loyalists, more dedicated to the optics of the administration than the role of the office. The performance metrics produce a high rate of false positives in investigations, arrests, and prosecutions. But that’s not a bug in this system, its a feature. The “oops I’m bad at my job” strategy of internal disruption isn’t a bad one on its face, but it is also not one higher ups aren’t fully aware of (and often unjustifiably paranoid about). When the fascist regime begins to fail and starts searching for scapegoats, some of the first they pounce on are the incompetent or unenthusiastic agents on the inside.
That’s a big reason why mid-level bureaucrats best serve the system by exiting it entirely. Simply leaving an empty desk does more to clog the gears than doing a mediocre job in the role. And you’re not around to take the heat when a Trump AG feels the need to arrest a judge or prosecute a prosecutor for failing to torment local residents fast enough.
We’ve surpassed evolution for fuck’s sake
We’ve become self-aware, but the evolutionary impulses persist. Ecological pressures don’t vanish because you begin to understand them. We can adapt rapidly - even within one or two generations - to enormous changes in the ecology. But these are still responses and they still exert evolutionary pressure on the population.
Nevermind that most people still don’t actually understand evolution in a manner that benefits them individually. The idea is only useful at the social level, via community-spanning collective actions and policies.
But then you introduce parasitic organisms, which prey on the more selfless and mutualist functions of complex species. And you end up with a cyclical rise and fall of survival strategies.
Predator organisms proliferating in periods of organic wealth and collapsing when they’ve depleted the reserves.
Meanwhile, prey organisms trade their mutualist reproductive impulses for traits that are defensive and alienating from their kin… until the predator collapse, at which point they can open up again.
Optional survival varies with the historical movement, which is driven by the strategies that preceded that moment.
Fitness isn’t a solved problem, it is a constantly moving target.
there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.
Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.
That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.
Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.
Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.
$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.
What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.
Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.
I also hate Cathoclicism
Typically anally, yes.
If you truly believe there should be investigations, you have to accept when the results of the investigations
That doesn’t logically follow. It’s like insisting OJ wasn’t guilty of murder, because the criminal case didn’t stick. But he was guilty of “wrongful death” because the civil suit did stick. What kind of conclusion do we draw when the police fumble the bag and private investigators continue to turn up incriminating evidence?
And even then, you can both have an investigation (even one that turns up culprits) and still have a cover-up.
There’s even a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”[
I mean, good luck getting across the country without any airplane tickets.
Antisemitism has lost it’s meaning.
You can go on Twitter and find some ripe fucking comments. The hair brained “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” conspiracy-theory angle of antisemitism is alive and well. It’s just got nothing to do with Israelis butchering any Arab or Persian they can get in their crosshairs.
Any time you raise your voice against any kind of powerful people, it’s discrimination why?
Associating Jewishness with Powerfulness is a nut of a lot of the conspiracy theories.
The game is always to conflate “Israelis are being called powerful because they are Jewish” and obscure “Israelis are being called powerful because they have a strong military and the full support of the US national security apparatus.”
Remember when the Israelis were caught red handed by an Al Jazeera camera crew bombing the Gaza City hospital. And then we had a weeks-long struggle session of media figures asserting that it was unclear whether Hamas had actually bombed the hospital themselves. And then the IDF bombed the Al Jazeera offices in Gaza. And then the IDF very deliberately and explicitly bombed the Gaza City hospital over and over again. They kidnapped the chief surgeon, shoved him into a torture prison, sodomized him until he was uncontrollably bleeding, and released him to die of his wounds several days later?
And this was all under the Biden Administration, back when our policy was ostensibly about ending the violence?
Fucking crazy times. I wonder if Amnesty International is going to get tarred as antisemitic over this statement or if the Israelis have given up caring in their orgy of bloodshed.
If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.
~ Emma Goldman
Incidentally, a lot of US districts have made voting increasingly difficult to the point of illegality.
But I rarely see Votey types grapple with that fact. They either dismiss the disenfranchised as lazy/stupid or ignore this cohort entirely.
Me protest voting didn’t matter.
It’s funny, because I’m deep in the beating heart of blood red Texas. But every time I fail to vote for a Bill White, Henry Cuellar, or Kamala Harris, I’m told it is my fault that Democrats can’t keep control of Congress, the Presidency, or the Courts.
When I ask for a candidate that isn’t shamelessly corrupt and favorable towards genocide, I’m told that I’m a purity troll who has been tricked by evil Chinese/Russian/Iranian bot farms into opposing The Most Progressive Ballot Since FDR.
After I campaign for candidates I like, I’m a do nothing heckler. After I march in rallies, I’m told I didn’t show up for minorities or women or immigrants. After I donate tens thousands of dollars to sympathetic campaigns, I’m told that there’s no place for broke loser dropouts in the party.
Can’t imagine why liberals keep losing, though. They’re such a progressive Big Tent party.
https://mainleaf.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-market-a-video-game/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-0
As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.