UnderpantsWeevil

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It falls victim to the old SciFi trope “The only way to beat a Good Protagonist is with an Evil Protagonist”. And like all the Picard-Era movies, it has a habit of forgetting what made the television series gripping. Perhaps because it’s always afraid of doing something with a character that they can’t undo with a handwave by the time the credits roll.

Be Me

Log into Highly Competitive MOBA / Team Shooter Game

Rank: Mud

Get slotted into a team of 8-year-olds, Alzheimer’s patients, and people on disability after falling off a ladder at work.

Lose to a team of 9-year-olds, Parkinson’s patients, and people playing the game on a second screen during an office meeting

Oh gee, I wonder how it feels to be The Best Player In FlobsKnight: Cry of Obligation, kicking dirt on little old me!

Win against a team of 6-year-olds, people in a coma, and players with no arms learning to use the control with their toes

I am the greatest FlobsKnight player on earth!

Rank Up: Dry Grass

Quality of opponent improves slightly

Never win again

Janeway was the best starship captain as a kid

Definitely feels generational. I’ve got a friend who is a Janeway diehard. But she didn’t really get into it until Voyager.

Picard will always be my captain of choice, but that might have its roots in watching the show as a little kid with my very bald father whom my mom teasingly referred to as “The Captain” when the show was on.

😏

Pretty sure that was just Star Trek Beyond, the movie where the crew defeated a horde of ravenous space insects by blasting Beastie Boys hit single “Sabotage”.

In the early iterations of the 1960s smash hit Star Trek, audiences were shocked and titillated to see a white male officer in a romantic relationship with a black woman officer.

This continues to be shocking today, as modern audiences are not ready to see any (fully clothed) woman in any form of Sci-Fi media doing anything at all.

Stop trying to optimize experience gains for fucking making me have to play 20 hours a weeknto unlock the battlepass I already bought within the 3 month window. Seriously, fucking stop, I have other things to do in life too.

The worst part about all these games. It’s like your weed guy blowing up your phone telling you its time to smoke another J. Only a group of sales guys coked off their asses could have come up with this as a marketing gimmick.

I have no interest in playing against hackers or no lifes who run everything with Potato mode graphics and swest skins who play 24x7 and have 2000 crown wins by day 2.

The truly crazy part about this group is that it is increasingly just bots. Like, not even proper “professional gamers” anymore. Just scripts running on a server built by a madman.

Guterres also pointed out that fossil fuels still get almost nine times the government consumption subsidies as renewables.

The problem, as always, is not the technology but the politics.

each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained

You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.

hed did a bad thing that one time

Far more than the one time. He had a whole routine about exploiting overseas labor to perform humiliating stunts.

If you want to pirate Brave Browser, I don’t think anyone will mind.

And why does it seem like they all hate Pewdiepie?

He took a fascist turn during Trump 1 and never really recovered his image. Got into a bunch of weird exploitative shit, not unlike Mr Beast. The most notable being when he tested the Fiverr service and paid five dollars to get Indian freelance actors to laugh and show a sign saying ‘Death to all Jews’.

After that, he started getting deplatformed and his following fell off considerably. So, like a bunch of other has-been YouTube starlets, he decided to get even more edgy and reactionary, further poisoning his image. It’s the same death spiral Russell Brand and Rob Schneider took.

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

I would sooner download a tire fire.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

Economic downturns tend to cause social unrest which legitimize expansion of the security state.

In this case, it appears that a fascist dictatorship is deliberately inducing the downtown to justify expansion of the DHS.

Naomi Klein laid out how this has happened in the past (particularly in the former Soviet states after the break up of the USSR) in her book Shock Doctrine. The pattern has also been laid out as a counter-insurgency strategy in Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method.

But the nut of it is that you tend to get both.

They want balkanization?

Yes. That’s a lot of what the “Freedom Cities” push is about. Create a network of autonomous enclaves where a single billionaire or board room effectively operates as a tyrant. Govern everything through permissions-based digital infrastructure (id badges to enter and leave any building or use any transit service, credit scores determined by years of service and employer approval rating, all property rented from the local oligarch, all residents are just at-will employees). It’s a pure technocratic Company Town model.

I want Balkanization because I think it would break the federal government’s kneecaps

Part of the insanity of it all is in how guys like Musk and Theil and Zuckerburg and Bezos don’t see any inherent value in a public federal system. They consider federalism an impediment to their vision of techno-feudalism and they see the money that the federal government uses to staff and support itself as resources wasted on a bureaucracy better managed by the private sector.

They are Anarcho-Capitalists in the most literal sense.

The Network State: How to Startup a Country

It’s so much more ambitious than that. They explicitly want Balkanization and formalized oligarchy along the Singapore/S. Korea/Hong Kong/Philippines model.