It’s quite common in trading card games for there to be disagreements between players on how different cards interact with each other during gameplay. Judges are just rules experts with the ability to mediate those situations.

Nothing will change until they fear for their lives.

This isn’t corruption, it’s autocracy.

I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how patriotic they are while this guy walks free.

They’ve already shown what they are willing to do when they are defeated at the ballot box. All it takes is the slightest provocation and they march on the capitol to overthrow the government.

Winning in 2026/2028 is not going to be enough. The last gasp will be when the party is completely stamped out and outlawed, like the Nazi party was in Germany.

Likewise. I used to get 3-4 cold DMs or connection requests from recruiters per week just a couple years ago. Now I maybe get 1 per month.

It’s nice for me specifically, but definitely a symptom of the times and worrysome for anybody trying to find a job in this economy now while also having to compete with fucking AI slop generators doing all the menial and entry level work.

I swear, this time I’m going to build tall and do a federation-focused, fanatic pacifist ethic! Honest!

10.5 hours later - I’m becoming the crisis whether I like it or not.

I’ve been waiting 20+ years for Republicans to wake up. They will never wake up. So many uncrossable lines have been crossed and yet they still maintain their momentum and people fall over themselves to vote for them in elections.

The problem is twofold:

1. Most people are chronically unaware or ignorant of who represents them. Even terminally online political junkies often don’t do any research into the candidates they vote for, and they don’t follow up on whether or not their campaign promises were fulfilled. They lock in and vote R all the way down the ballot. To be completely fair™ and balanced™ - Democrats are also guilty of this and will happily vote for the D all the way down the ballot which is how we end up with progressive candidates running 3rd party in primaries losing to DINO incumbents.

2. There is too much disconnect between which parties in government are responsible for which policies. Many people believe the president has far more power than they actually do. In reality, outside of executive orders and appointing SCOTUS judges, the largest political impact a president has is to be a veto on legs. Congress are the ones who truly hold the power, but because you are represented by one U.S. house representative for your district and two senators for your state, it’s easy for people to think that their vote for those seats, win or lose, has little impact in shaping national policy. But even when their party has a majority (albeit slim), Republicans rarely draft any kind of legislation that is aimed to help their constituents or fulfill their campaign promises. People never check their reps voting records to see that they barely show up for their jobs, and that when they do, it’s usually to cast a deciding vote against something that would help their constituents tremendously if passed. It all circles back around to people not bothering to do research or follow up with their votes in any way.

Voting to a lot of people is a team sport, and if their team is winning then all is right with the world. The bad things are happening because the others caused it, or are preventing it from being fixed. It can never be because they made a bad decision and voted in someone terrible into office. It’s always someone else’s fault. If good things are happening, it’s because they made the right decision all along and they are succeeding in spite of opposition - no need to even bother checking if the guy who represents you voted in favor of the good thing or not!

Please bind to my receptors, kthxbai

I owned a Virtual Boy back in the day and… yeah. It sucked. I bring it up every time people think Nintendo are infallible - they do have shit ideas from time to time.

I also owned a PSP and I just didn’t use it much. I know it’s a well beloved console but I didn’t really like anything that I played on it.

The Wii was just okay, I just got tired of the gimmick too quickly, and the library was just atrocious. If you don’t like movie tie-in games, you miss out on like 3/4ths of the entire catalogue of titles.

I think I’m just tired of console gaming at this point. The only reason I would buy a console is if it were a mobile console that I can take with me when I want to game away from my PC, and so far the only companies that are interested in developing mobile consoles are Nintendo and Steam.

Because Republicans believe in nothing and will blame anything and anyone but themselves for the problems they create.

Blatant corruption, but MAGA still gargle his balls daily.

I understand that there’s no such thing as an issue that 100% of people will agree on, as insane as that sounds. There will always be people who are contrarians, ignorant, misinformed, or completely detached from reality, possibly a combination of several of those things, but… I really would like to know what goes through people’s heads when they are surveyed and a question like this comes up. I want to know what kind of life experiences lead a person down a path that makes them answer “No” to this question.

What I meant by that is the ability to access the entire world interconnectivity - obviously cutting those cables would not affect domestic internet access but people who live elsewhere would not be able to access content hosted overseas in gulf states.

I don’t think Iran cares if their citizens can access the internet or not. I presume their military uses satellites for that sort of thing so they won’t be negatively affected by it.

The rest of the world, on the other hand, gets their access to worldwide connectivity held hostage.

The Oregon Trail generation!

Missed out on that one by a couple years unfortunately, though I feel more of a connection to those who had a pre-digital childhood like myself than I do to the iPad babies of today.

Warhammer 40k Mechanicus

I think it’s concept art, or maybe some promotional art. If you Google image search for it, it’ll come up on the first page.

The old YT player was perfect and nobody will convince me otherwise.

Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.

If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell “Source?!” and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.

However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn’t line up with their narrative, it’s hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being “fake news”.

The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it’s a meaningless victory.

Yeah, forget about playing dumb or figuring out ways of getting away with it, I’d be like “I dunno, who are you?” so when they tell me I can immediately cut contact with them.

If they play games like this for just texting other women they won’t be mellowing out if you decide to get serious.

I honestly thought that their response to blue states gerrymandering their own districts in retaliation was for them to finally give up the game and try to advocate for a national ban, like we’ve been trying to do for years unsuccessfully.

I never imagined the actual response was going to be to speedrun cancelling elections that they know they are about to lose so they have more time to redraw their already gerrymandered maps to be somehow even worse than before.