Conservatives should be listened to on nothing. They have zero credibility. A toddler would make better policy decisions

I think that’s the “two Santa” strategy https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santas-strategy-gop-used-economic-scam-manipulate-americans-40-years/

they’re scum that should not be allowed to hold office.

If they were capable of rising above their quagmire of fear and hate, they probably wouldn’t be conservatives. It’s not about facts or consistency. It’s about feelings. Mostly fear of the out-group.

I don’t think they thought about it very much. It’s like that spongebob meme where patrick has the wallet. Or the Friends one that I don’t know the name of the template. You could go point by point building up a case for why there should be government regulations, but as soon as you say like “regulation” they go “Nope bad”

Though some people really do believe they as a rugged individual will be able to research and test all of their food without an FDA or whatever. If they buy bread that has sawdust in it, they’ll be able to tell, and somehow get a refund, or buy some other bread that doesn’t have sawdust. That seems like a lot of work and optimism compared to regulations and inspections by qualified professionals earlier in the process.

action-adventure game

I feel like taking an extremely turn based game and making it “action adventure” is a weird choice. BG3 was a mega smash hit and turn based. If you want to funnel more players into your tabletop game, you probably want the video game to be kind of sort of like the tabletop. I have doubts about this.

enough people are like me that carrying guns should not be as easy as it is. We can trade counter anecdotes all we want, but I think the frequency of mass shootings and other gun violence in the US supports my position better than yours.

The point of the anecdote was that when people get really mad, they don’t think rationally. If I had a gun, it would have been really easy in that moment to pull it out and use it. That’s too easy.

(Though yes, I did briefly consider picking up his dog’s shit with a plastic bag of my own, and hitting him in the face with it, but by then I had cooled down enough to realize I didn’t want to potentially ruin my life by assaulting a guy on the street.)

Sure, maybe that would help, too. But like any system built by humans you’re going to need consistent, rigorous, investments in education or in a few generations you’ll have idiots tearing down chesterton’s fence. “I don’t see why monopolies are so bad” -> “oh no why is everything so expensive and dangerous??”

Also more public housing. Everyone needs somewhere to live and letting a handful of people siphon wealth out of that isn’t working out for us.

I feel like using stock as collateral to get a loan should count as income or something that gets taxed. It’s not because you technically haven’t realized the gain, but you kind of have in practice.

People over estimate how cool and collected they are.

The other day some asshole was letting his dog shit on the sidewalk and not picking it up. I saw. He saw me see. We made eye contact. He called me a coward and walked away.

In that moment I was emotionally ready to murder him. Just put his smug ass on the ground with his dog shit. Luckily, I don’t carry a gun so I just yelled at him. But if I had a gun on me? No way the scene would have gone better.

I was at a bar once that the men’s room on the upper floor only had urinals. If you wanted to shit or piss in some privacy, you had to go to the bathroom on the lower floor.

Yes, being out and visible is helpful. You can form bonds, and get people off the fence when they see they’re not alone, or you’re just people like anyone else. But as I said, that’s not enough on its own.

To their credit, most of the quests in their games don’t really matter. You get some story details or armor that’s not mechanically that different from anything else. You can just stumble ahead murdering everything that you can target lock and have a great time. I have hundreds of hours in these games and I think there are some “quests” I don’t even know I didn’t do.

Without the plausible threat of action, you will be ignored. Action could be violence (eg: throwing a brick at a cop), or economic (eg: we’re all going to stop working for you, we’re all going to stop spending money at your business). But there needs to be something.

When it’s just “we meet up for an hour on saturday, sing, and go then home,” that’s just not very effective on its own. You can sing and dance, but there needs to be a backing of “If you don’t treat us well, we can hurt you” if you want to be taken seriously.

This guy’s videos are one of the few things on youtube (other than music videos) I’ll watch sometimes.

I’ve got to a couple protests but they feel like they’re just for show. They’re not disruptive. They’re not making clear, actionable, demands. They’re better than nothing. i saw people handling out flyers so maybe some people went to more meetings.

But I feel like there needs to be more specific stuff. Like, a demand that musk be removed from government, or trump be removed via the 14th amendment, or whatever, and that needs to be backed by “if you don’t listen to us, then you don’t get any more labor”. (Violence, I’m told, is less effective, but can also be there in the subtext)

But actually organizing large things is hard, especially when the state and the money are opposing you.

I can’t even get my friends to suffer the mild inconvenience of getting off facebook, nevermind getting off the couch.

People are weirdly, emotionally, invested in meat. Like it’s part of their identity.

I enjoy the taste of meat but I recognize it’s not good for the environment or the animals. So I avoid eating meat. It’s not a big deal. But for some people they act like you’re going to eat them and bury their bones in an unmarked grave.

If people wondered what they would do during the 1930s, now we know.

A lot of people would cheer for the Nazis.

I know I’m not doing enough, and it’s depressing as heck. Most people I know are doing less. No protests. Not talking about it. Just head in the sand.

I think “diffciulty” is poorly defined.

The souls games have a kind of difficulty, but I think what throws people is more the change in kind than degree.

The games are largely deterministic. There’s little to no random factor.

You level up and improve your numbers, but the difference between starting health and the soft cap is typically a factor of five or less. Compare with like final fantasy where the factor is like 50 (a starting HP of 200 to 9999). Baldur’s Gate is typically a factor of ~10. The underlying math in souls games doesn’t provide that big of a buttress.

You don’t get a lot of super moves as you progress. There are some spells or weapon arts that can be strong with the right build (blasphemous blade!), but nothing really like getting Fireball in DND or Knights of the Round in ff7.

This stuff comes together into an interesting cocktail. The game is mostly about you, the one holding the controller. Your stats and equipment matter, but are secondary. This is very different than like old final fantasies where I can hand you my save and you could win any fight (just do quad magic ultima and mimic).

I think a lot of games try to set up paper tigers for the players. They want the player to feel threatened , without any real danger of losing. Most of the Bethesda games, you might have a scene where there’s a death claw or whatever, but you can always pause the game to heal. Most of the final fantasy fights are not a real threat. They wear down your resources, but you’re sitting on a stack of healing items.

I think it’s also worth noting that the fights also aren’t a super long challenge. Most of time, the winning match is over in a few minutes. It’s not like an MMO raid that’s a 30 minute ordeal.

This isn’t my most organized post but I’m on my phone, so editing is hard.