Check out some Doom Eternal speedruns. (I guess 100% speedruns so you aren’t seeing people glitching through the game.) That game is actually extremely fast-paced. Good players are swapping through all fifty of their weapons every 4 seconds. Come to think of it, I wonder if the need for gore kills is a consequence of me sucking. (I think the chainsaw for ammo is unavoidable, though.)

As you said, it doesn’t matter because you don’t live in anything resembling a swing state, but for those of us who do: please vote strategically. Vote for whomever you like in the primary. (And DO vote in the primary, for fuck’s sake!) Vote for Bernie Sanders. (I did!) Vote for the DSA candidate. (I often do.) Vote for the green party, or libertarians, or write in your cool uncle. Whatever! The primary is your time to vote for who you really want. But when it comes to the general election, please vote for the left-most nominee of the party that has a realistic shot at winning. It doesn’t always feel good, but there are exactly three options in a first past the post general election:

1. Voting for the party that can win.

2. Voting for the other party that can win.

3. Not participating. You might think your write-in or third party is distinct from Option #3. I regret to inform you that it isn’t.

If we were to do this for a decade or so, the GOP would evaporate and the Dems would eventually split into a neoliberal pro-business party and a progressive pro-labor party. Do I want Newsom to be the nominee? Fuck no. I hate that prick. But if he’s the one running against Marco Rubio or whoever? Yeah, I can hold my nose and fill in that bubble.

If we fail to do this, we only empower fascists. Look around.

(And BTW, the party more likely to give us Ranked Choice so we don’t need to do this is, you guessed it, the Democrats…)

I didn’t like the mandatory finishing moves either, and to be honest, I didn’t finish the game, but I got a lot further than DOOM 2016 and I thought the gunplay felt really snappy and satisfying in the way the OG games did. The levels were diverse and I actually liked the platforming puzzles, but I’m also the kind of guy who played surf maps in CounterStrike and strafejump races in Quake, so I’m predisposed to that sort of thing.

Oh well. They made a thing and it’s not for everyone. I wonder if you’d like The Dark Age. I haven’t played it yet.

Renting can be a good option, especially when you consider the way equity vs interest are structured in the first few years of a mortgage. It’s 99% interest at first, and then it slowly inverts year-over-year, which sure feels like renting my house from the bank for the first ten years… but I can’t call up the bank and make them fix my electrical, plumbing, or appliances.

It would be nice to see a ban on renters snapping up existing properties, and a limit on how long single family newly constructed homes can be kept as rental properties.

It’s a long series of mistakes. Not finishing off the Confederacy, not putting Nixon in prison for Watergate and sabotaging peace talks with the Vietcong, not putting Reagan in prison for sabotaging negotiations during the Iran Hostage Crisis. They’ve been crooks for a century and there’s only one solution.

I just don’t see why they had to make X Men woke? Why does everything have to be about a persecuted minority group finding its standing in a society that fears it?

(tee hee)

And also Instagram and whatever other Zuck products are in your life. I’m happy they wasted so many billions of dollars setting of virtual Mii meetings lmao…

What didn’t you like about Doom Eternal? That one was widely praised.

Japan is honorary Western.

(So is Korea.)

It really depends. There are great examples like DOTA2 and Path of Exile, and miserable examples, like every crappy gacha game.

Riot is kinda in the middle for me. Shame they nuked 2XKO after not telling anyone about it or catering to the people they neglected to tell about it.

Four legs good! Two legs bad!

The president isn’t supposed to go after anyone. His DOJ is supposed to enforce the law, and they had indicted thousands of J6ers in what seemed to be the lead-up to The Big One, where charges are brought against the ringleaders. You can say they did this too slowly, but it was literally the biggest case the FBI had ever prosecuted. Spare us this both sides crap.

Seems to work fine in Scandinavia.

I’m a progressive. Fetterman is in the Senate because of grassroots support from Progressives. That Democrats stumped for him only proves that Democrats will support whomever they need to support to defeat Republicans. Progressives like me thought Fetterman was the man before the stroke made him a Republican. (I didn’t know about that whole racist shotgun interaction in 2020 though.)

I remember people liking him because he was an asshole on our side, sticking it to Republicans. I guess an asshole on your side is still, at the end of the day, an asshole. In other words, by no means should Democrats nominate Gavin Newsom for president.

I want the latter, and tariffs are not the only way go about protectionism. There is also subsidization, which is how the US has maintained its defense and agriculture industries. If we want stuff made domestically, we’re going to have to pay for it. Subsidies are generally preferable to tariffs because they can be paid through progressive taxation instead of regressive taxes on consumers.

As much as I liked the “massive brain damage causes conservatism” narrative following Fetterman around, I’ve been hearing more and more that he was always a duplicitous asshole.

Our country needs a way to recall public servants when they betray constituents. Six years is too long to wait.

“We can’t let the environment be a deciding factor” is a preposterous take. There’s practically nothing more important that preserving the environment. Even the Chinese are looking beyond their borders for raw materials these days. If it costs more to extract raw materials in a way that doesn’t fuck up the environment, then subsidize it and pay for it. We can fund the subsidies with a carbon tax.

There are always trade-offs. All polymers deteriorate when exposed to that kind of thermal cycling and chemical exposure. A metal alloy fit for the job can last forever.

Workers in Detroit might get paid union wages, but many auto factories have relocated to the South where they can underpay and abuse workers much more easily. I just did some quick googling and it seems like being a factory worker in China isn’t bad compared to in the US. They work in highly automated, clean, air-conditioned spaces like would be found here. Dirty conditions and manual labor are no longer compatible with today’s automotive quality requirements. Low level workers make modest wages, but they employ a bunch of engineers and technicians just like here in the US, and they have subsidized cafeterias and some provide housing or stipends for housing. You might criticize the expectation of working significant overtime, but I’ve worked in factories which had mandatory overtime in the US, so that sort of structural coercion isn’t unique to China. Compared to a “right to work” state, Chinese workers have stronger protections from being laid off or fired. The main downside seems to be lax enforcement of safety standards. If the government doesn’t notice something unsafe on its own, there isn’t a Chinese version of dropping a hint to OSHA.

Now further upstream in the supply chain? No thanks. That’s where you’ll find abysmal working conditions. Just remember there are good reasons our government wants us to believe everything sucks for workers in China.