No shit, my big long comment up top there? Was very nearly just "Fuck Manticores". 3 Manticores in a row on the way to the Necronomicon can get stuffed.

My experience so far with Queen's Domain:

Pre-game - "I loved Lunacid and people say this is like Lunacid. Hell, Steam is giving me a discount since I already own Lunacid."

Phase 1 - turn music down to .1

Phase 2 - Remember what kind of game this is, set expectations. This is a Kings Field and Kings Field moves sllllloooooow.

Phase 3 - "Oh wait, wow I have a lot of combat options"

Phase 4 - "Air Dash Sword go Brrrr"

Phase 5 - "Holy shit, how do I get all the way over/up/down/across there?"

Phase 6 - "This Mimic is going to haunt my nightmares forever"

Phase 7 - "Is this Boss a Blue Whale on armored chicken legs?"

Phase 8 - after climbing Tower of Knowledge "Wait, the map is HOW BIG?!"

Phase 9 - What do you mean I'm less than 10% done?

Phase 10 - Holy shit is my GOTY going to be a retro throwback to a game I never actually played?

I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.

But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.

LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.

And I find 20m easier to say than 65.61ft? Sorry, am I missing a joke? Sometimes it's hard to Poe's Law the Americanisms.

I think this might be a regional euphemism thing. Like when Southern people say "Bless Their Heart" instead of "Fuck that guy". "I know you're are better than this" is a polite and inviting way of saying "No way you're that ignorant".

Its not new I don't think, but my book club read "The Last Murder at the End of the World" by Stuart Turton this year and I loved it.

I am shocked but not surprised that Trump has decided Ukraine is at fault for the skyrocketing cost of fuel. The only really "surprising" part is that he didn't try to blame Biden.

Presumably, there is a wheel or dartboard, or bingo ball dispenser full of Trump's perceived enemies somewhere and when a problem becomes too big to ignore or gaslight Americans about, they just pull it out.

I'm too old for it to be PS2, but "Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators". Spent at lot of time on that for a game that is an ad for McDonalds.

I disagree - I could easily be unhappy in that scenario and I think I'm pretty normal*. I get that normal is subjective, but I'm not like on medication, or in treatment for anything.

I think I would immediately be really insecure about having to buy sex and how the only reason people love me is my money and I'm incapable of intimacy from a genuine place. I think I would immediately feel shame at having purchased a Ferrari while not knowing anything about cars. I think I would feel guilty having a big house to live in all by myself, and probably would never buy it to begin with.

That isn't to say I couldn't make myself happy with money -I could give a fuckton of it away to worthy causes and basically feel good about myself immediately despite not really working very hard or personally accomplishing much. That feels like a cheat code to me. "Yeah, I didn't lose twenty pounds this year like I wanted or write my novel despite having tons of free time, but I gave away a Billion Dollars to cancer research and another Billion to RAICES and another Billion to the ACLU and another Billion to the Trevor Project. So basically, I'm fucking awesome." But even then, I think over like a decade or similar, the lack of personal involvement would eventually make me embarrassed.

I think that's why hiring sycophants (or now building them from AI) is such a popular remedy for the obscenely wealthy. A chorus of voices to drown out your own insecurity about how you didn't earn it, didn't use to better yourself, didn't find real happiness. And why reality checks drive these people nuts.

So, let's just start with the "Fuck ICE" because its obligatory at this juncture.

But aren't they allowed to do racial profiling, thanks to Kavanaugh Stops? America has legalized that horrific practice. And while racist slurs ARE deeply unprofessional to be sure, and revealing of the hatred at the core of their actions, - these guys SHOOT people dead in the street, and starve/beat detainees in tiny cells. Also, when doing their "job" correctly, they end up deporting innocent people to countries they've never lived in. They kill and torture at worst, and ruin innocent lives at best. Is America really so ass-backwards someone is going to get some of them in trouble for "no-no words"? Please tell me this is a media problem and someone, somewhere is actually doing something useful, I just don't get to hear about it.

Mixed results at best. Violent solutions have to be overwhelmingly successful, incredibly thorough and over fast. Otherwise, the problem drags on in quagmire. Generations of hatred and endless, cyclical violence that solves nothing.

And arguably in the modern world, direct violence is incredibly inefficient. Propaganda and having a country tear itself apart from the inside is easier, cheaper and poses way less risk. It's people's willingness to jump to violent solutions that makes them malleable to a more stochastic approach and actually leaves them more vulnerable in the long run.

Also, violence against certain groups is plenty dramatic but is counter to the most pleasing narrative, so it also gets left on the cutting room floor. There's an entire genre of post on the Internet of people being amazed at things they were never taught, that never got a movie or TV show made about it. Black Wall Street, The 1945 Firebombing of Tokyo, Battle of Blair Mountain, the Samar Campaign. And that's just shit the Americans did.