He can’t even unite both sides of his face.

After reading that, some wild and ungrounded part of my brain: Putin used the Russian version on him of whatever Vance used on the Pope!

I play it when I’m really depressed.

I would say that I enjoy the game and feel that the developers have invested a lot of effort into building a panacea of a game that is sort of low stress and maybe a little repetitive, but it gives me something to do, and I can set goals for myself that are… well, absolutely batshit.
My current goal(s) are to get my settlements to S tier (pretty close on this one), swap all my frigates over to supply ships (If you repeatedly assign the same ship to the same sorts of missions, it will level up just that stat, so you can have a supply ship that has a high combat stat, etc), and build resource bases so that I can automatically collect every kind of automatically collectible resource in the game. I’ve also visited about 20 universes, and think it might be fun to put a resource collection base in each universe (that I have the patience to visit) and then just go hang out at the anomaly so folks can use the teleporter to fling themselves to universes unknown.

The what?

Edit: What the fuck?

In this case, it’s just me having a ‘Spider-Man meme’ moment with your comment and being excessively cavalier/silly in my response.
Medical diagnosis’ should not come from anonymous people on the internet. I could be a dog, for crying out loud.

You have Hyperactive-type ADHD and Anxiety. (Possibly)

So mote it be. (Maybe)

Awkwardly gestures prophetically.

I agree with you, and your point is valid, but the larger context is that it probably doesn’t matter.

The U.S. has been fucked since… well, probably when it didn’t prosecute Nixon, but definitely since 2011.

Apologies for the WP link - I’m sure better people than I could have provided an archive link. It doesn’t present a paywall to me (or even an Adblock warning, which is interesting…)

Several nations have tried to restore democracy after populist strongmen. It was never the same.

Short of pushing all the way through and becoming something else entirely, I don’t see how the current system can be fixed. And I don’t have much faith that ‘something else entirely’ would wind up being better for the people of the U.S., given that its media and all of the leading political figures are in the pocket of the oligarchy, some of whom have already prepared to rewrite the U.S. constitution (the Koch’s) and are salivating at the opportunity to implement a government that is even less useful to the populous (read: even more friendly to their interests).

My point with sharing this is basically… well… despair. I guess my horrible, mediocre comment can be summed up as “The U.S. is fucked, so it might as well keep choosing the lesser of two evils. Sorry. 😕”

Within the last day or so -

Burning the flag, renaming DOD to Dept. of War, trying again to deport Kilmar Abrego, signaling they’re going to ban the COVID-19 vaccine, and attempting to sue California to prevent their redistricting while allowing Texas’ to proceed.

Is this more of the gish-gallop that Bannon described that they’re pulling to overwhelm the news cycle so that a few of the bullshit things they’re pulling don’t get overturned, or are they specifically looking to push out some stories, like Trump’s obvious failing health, Epstein-related stories (inclusive of the latest on Gislaine), or possibly the redistricting one above.

Ugh. They’re up to more bullshit than usual, but the signal to noise ratio makes it hard to discern what.

Increasingly, I’m reminded of this: Paul Bunyan vs. the spam bot (or how Paul Bunyan triggered the singularity to win a bet). It’s a medium-length read from the old internet, but fun.

The promise of money — even diminishing returns — is too great. There’s a new scraper spending big on resources every day while websites are under assault.

In the paraphrased words of the finance industry: AI can stay stupid longer than most websites can stay solvent.

Well…

Stewart dropped a line that made Hasan pause: maybe Democrats just need “the right reality host” to take over the party.
Hasan’s reflexive response — please, no more reality hosts — came with one notable exception: “Unless Jon, you’re thinking of throwing your hat in the ring… we can talk about that.”
Stewart laughed. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t wave it off. He just leaned back, smiled, and chuckled.

As another commenter brought up, when the idea has been suggested in the past, Jon has unequivocally and instantly shut it down.

Big “Hmmmmm” vibes here.

I should have said reaffirm to capture my intended meaning there.

It’s not that he would change the scheduling, but change the handling of it. Right now the federal government more or less takes a strategy of non-enforcement at the intra-state level, but I could see Trump choosing to selectively meddle after reaffirming its schedule I status.

You know, I posted that comment sort of unthinkingly, but you are right.

There’s a book called “Why does he do that? Inside the minds of angry and controlling men” that’s on my reading list. (A good summary of the book is available here)
The author repeatedly highlights exactly the point you brought up - that abusers will wield therapy language to perpetuate their abuse. He instead suggests the only real way to change abusers (who are not necessarily the same as sociopaths, mind you) is to put them in programs tailored to abusers to more or less make them realize how much they need to learn empathy, and equip them with the ability to use that empathy.

I mean, the alternative was to crumble.

I mean, fuck. I was just thinking it through -
In the U.S., Most millennials started out in the wake of the war on drugs and the damage it did to communities. From there, you have the racial tension of the 90’s, the death of truth with Fox News, the rise of school shootings, 9/11, the start of the rightward/authoritarian swing of the U.S., the ‘08 recession, citizens united, loss of democracy, COVID, another recession, inflation, housing insecurity, the loss of the illusion of democracy.

I remember back in 1999, when I was a kid, hearing folks talk about how in just a few years weed was going to be legal and so was gay marriage. I remember thinking that the future was going to be bright and not some authoritarian hellscape. Now there are license plate readers at the grocery store parking lot.

I mean. If we didn’t know how to manage the feelings we have about the future we were promised and lost, and all the trauma we’ve experienced along the way, I guess we’d all wind up driving Dodge Rams with U.S. Flags on them.

Every millennial I know is in therapy.

I do not associate with people who decorate their vehicles that way. I find they act like sociopaths.

Ergo, people who put flags like that on their cars are in need of therapy.

I’ve declared it to be true. Spread the word.

Expecting Trump to declare cannabis to be a schedule I drug, cancel the plans to reschedule it, and begin federal raids on legal dispensaries within California to harm their economy.

Bonus points if he collects state purchasing records (nationwide) to selectively threaten/silence people based on their social media history.

I’ll refrain from correcting anything else, to not be a dick.

Always a good call, besides, why be a dick when you can be ridiculous?

I’m not a mathemagician or a physexiest, so it’s safe to assume my assumptions are wild and my calculations suspect.

• Blue whales weigh between 90,000 and 180,000 kg. Let’s go right in the middle at 135,000 kg.
• A deviantart post from 2014 says Blue whales are as dense as water (approximately).
• According to an online calculator, seawater weighs 1,021kg/m^3 (I figure whales are salty, because of climate change and the centuries of being hunted to near extinction).
• If we assume that weight equals volume, then the same calculator puts our whale at 132.1m^3
• And, obviously, that doesn’t work for my porpoises. So we grind the whale into a slurry, and freeze it into a ball. Using an online tool to find the radius of a sphere from the volume, we come up with 31.6, which I assume is meters.
• Doubling that (in my head!) to get the diameter, we’d wind up with a ball that is about 63.2 meters across.
• Using this online calculator of unknown provenance, we put in a diameter of 63.2m, a velocity of 9.8m/s (earth’s gravity!), an angle of 90 (because our masticated and spheroidified whale would of course be dropped from space like a cartoon anvil), and selecting ice as the material, it says the crater would have a radius of 324 meters, with ejecta spread about twice that.

Not enough to destroy the whole thing, but enough to wipe out St. Peter’s Basilica, and do a lot of damage to the rest of it.

I’m not mad at you at all. I’m mad at the motherfuckers who think they have a right to my attention.

But to respond - it’s not better, because either option is detestable. I reject both.

You correctly called it that we’re answering different questions. I reject the question you’re answering, because I do not accept advertisements in my vehicle, that I own, as a foregone conclusion. You accidentally’d a step in accepting their bullshit.

I literally would rather threaten legal action, or show up outside their advertising executive’s house with a megaphone to try to sell them some scammy bullshit while they expect privacy. Maybe I’d even read off the advertising I get on the console. (Not that I’d ever buy a RAM truck, but still.)

New Business Idea: Buy unzoned property that can be used to block scenic overlooks around the homes of scummy advertising executives. Put up billboards.

Absolutely fucking not.

My attention is not free and they have no fucking right to my attention.

And second, fuck them for thinking they do.