Yes - they will sacrifice public lands to the oil industry. And the mining industry And the lumber industry. And any other industry that pays them sufficient bribes.
And when the people can’t take it anymore and finally try to stand against the wanton destruction, we’re going to learn first-hand why all those Cop Cities are being built.
Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and it’s long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.
Exactly as noted in the article, it’s not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because it’s not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. It’s not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and that’s exactly how it should be treated.
Most similar to Advance Wars:
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis
Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation
Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon
Just in general:
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2
Drill Dozer
Golden Sun 1 and 2
Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town
Guru Logic Champ
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Zero Mission
Medabots RPG
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
A great many people in the US, Trump supporters certainly included, are experiencing uncertainty living in an economy in which the lifestyle earlier generations took for granted gets further out of reach every day - in which they find themselves ever further in debt with less all the time to show for it, and in which they’re one catastrophic illness away from destitution.
Trump has cynically exploited that uncertainty by beating the racist, and especially anti-immigrant drum. People are primed to find somebody to blame for their misfortunes, and he’s provided them with somebody.
And yes - to the degree that they’ve responded to his rhetoric, it’s because they were already racist enough that when he led them in that direction, they willingly followed. So as far as that goes, yes - racism really is a driving force. But their racism isn’t just some atbitrary thing that appeared out of thin air - for a great many, it’s a specific reaction to a specific set of circumstances, and those specific circumstances are largely economic uncertainty.
It’s sort of akin to people with chronic respiratory problems ending up hospitalized during a period of high air pollution, then other people arguing about whether to blame their respiratory conditions or the air pollution. Rather obviously, “or” is the wrong conjunction - it should be “and.”
And by the bye - that whole dynamic is a good part of the reason that Musk and Thiel and many other billionaires are supporting Trump - because they and their actions comprise the lion’s share of the real reason that that economic uncertainty exists, and Trump is not only determined to hide that fact, but to self-servingly make it so that they’ll be free to cause even more harm.
Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.
But they don’t really matter. They’re just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk’s weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don’t give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they’re funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.
This isn’t a culture war. That’s just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it’s not a war that might happen - it’s a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don’t do something, we’re going to lose it by forfeit.
All I see here is a selfish extrovert who resents not being able to feed off of enough other people’s energy, so is degrading and belittling introverts and trying to frame the issue as some sort of “war” that needs to be fought.
To which I have to respond, in the baldest possible terms, fuck you.
Huh…
It’s almost as if forests have evolved to be part of a complex system…
Almost as if there was an entire era in the history of the Earth that was dominated by plant growth and evolution, potentially even directly in response to the existence of an atmosphere notably rich in carbon compounds…
Wait - so now I can avoid Google and that means I automatically get to avoid Reddit too?
Hell yeah!
It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us
That’s exactly why I don’t cut them any slack. Their dumb choices don’t just harm themselves - they harm me and all other gamers, insofar as they’ve made it so that publishers can get away with putting out unfinished, buggy, unbalanced crap.
Sure - the gamers might spend a while ineffectually bitching on forums and handing out 1 star reviews, but that’s just meaningless noise. The ONLY thing that matters to the publishers is whether or not people buy the game, and those dunderheads not only buy the game - they line right up to buy the next one too.
Or, now, line right up to pay extra for early access to the next one.
Hot take - while it’s obviously greedy for the publishers to be charging for this, the real problem is the idiots who are paying.
Nailed it.
The internet has essentially come full circle.
In the early days, search engines were of dubious quality at best, and the only way to find really good sites was to just poke around and keep your eyes open and hope to stumble across them.
And it’s really pretty much exactly the same today. Search engines are of dubious quality at best, since virtually all of the sites to which they might point us have been warped by money-grubbing corporate owners and/or buried under a flood of morons, assholes and bots, but once again, there are great sites and communities to be found if you just poke around and keep your eyes open.
It’s almost as if the old internet has been recreated in little gaps and out-of-the-way corners of the new one.
That just says to me that no near future Monster Hunter game is going to be worth playing, since that focus just means that gameplay and story are going to be sacrificed in favor of graphics and gimmicks.
This is what an utter lack of integrity, ethics, scruples and reason looks like.
So… by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.
At a “non-profit” (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.
Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We’re watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.
Imagine Israel, of all countries, crying to the UN, of all organizations, about a purported “flagrant violation of narional sovereignty, international law and Security Council resolutions.”
I laughed out loud when I read that. As if that isn’t exactly what Israel does virtually on a daily basis, and has done for decades now, and while thumbing their nose at the UN the entire time.
Nothing is stopping them from doing it, and the only reason it might not be already happening is the possibility that nobody has cared enough to bother yet.
And by design nothing much can be done about it. That’s the nature of a decentralized platform - it’s explicitly set up to share content, and that’s what it does, by default. And there is no central authority that can control access to the fediverse as a whole. And that’s pretty much that.
And personally, I don’t care. I’ve never bought into the nonsensical idea that the stuff I post in a public forum is in any meaningful sense my property after I post it.
Rereading Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!
I’ve just been getting burnt out on the literal insanity of the world and most notably of the people in positions of power, and needed a complete diversion. I had been reading Haruki Murakami 's 1Q84, but I just couldn’t stay with it - too many loathsome characters. So I set it aside and pondered what to read instead, and Discworld just seemed the obvious choice. I read the entire series over the last ten years or so, so it’d been long enough that I could at least reread the earlier ones. And this time through, I can skip the ones I didn’t like so much (like pretty much all of the Rincewind books). So I started with Equal Rites, then went on to Mort and Wyrd Sisters and am now on Guards! Guards! And it’s just as good as I’d remembered.
Because if we were made of antimatter, then that’s what we would have declared to be matter, and it would still be the case that the stuff we’re not made of would be the antimatter.
I keep wondering why we don’t see more of this.
IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.
They’re not going to solve the problem alone, but they’re such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.