I guess we’re all too busy watching number go up to actually manage anything. For them it’s their stock prices, for me it’s my seed ratio!

They also care about ruining trans people’s lives in any way possible. I’m sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven’t thought the bathroom thing through, but don’t forget the other reason they’d be happy to put passing trans men in women’s bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women’s toilet, you think they’re going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that’d just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they’re least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.

If it were that simple they would have done it by now

Next week: Trump claims to be an Eldritch being that coalesced out of Jesus’s anger while up on the cross over 2000 years ago

I love chonky flapjack so dang much

Go big or go home. “Russia starts using nukes and us government blames ukrainians for it”

At the point where we’re making lab-grown dinosaur meat, I suspect the cool factor is way more important than silly things like efficiency. T-Rex meat all the way babyyy

Wait, was that a bug? I always figured it was just based on how insanely difficult it is to keep cities clean as they grow massive. You can still easily hold on to those cities, even very distant ones, by recruiting lots of peasant units to garrison the cities. The security bonus is based on the number of men you have garrisoned versus the number of civilians, and since peasants are the largest units by manpower, they grant the biggest bonus. You wind up with two rows of peasants that are only useful as bait in an actual battle, but give plenty of security bonus to offset the max squalor penalty.

Edit, actually it gets even easier if you keep recruiting peasants as a sort of population control even after the garrison is full. Send excess peasant units to your most recently conquered cities to maintain control and free up militarily useful units from just standing guard, and for certain cities with super slow population growth you can disband the units as they arrive in order to boost the civilian numbers. It’s a makeshift, but effective way to transfer population from overcrowded cities to the empty ones.

Literally none. DEI straight up means treating everyone the same. They’re working on giving it some fucked up negative connotations the same way they have with “woke” and “critical race theory,” but if you look at the history and reality of where those words come from and what they mean, it becomes clear they’re playing with language, trying to avoid looking racist to the general public while still implementing racist policy.

If by “this,” you mean the reference towards Tubman, then you’re wrong. Talking about the accomplishments of anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian man IS promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion! DEI is a good thing! Opposing it is explicitly racist!

Ehh. The broad strokes had the potential to be interesting, but the presentation and details are awful. Actually watching the prequels is such a chore, with 75% of the time spent thinking “why,” 24% “ooh pretty” (though a lot of the CGI hasn’t aged well), and maybe 1% is an actual “hmm yes interesting.”

Palpatine and populism had a chance to be interesting, but it’s mostly done completely off screen, with lots of assumptions needing to be made by a viewer who needs to already have an understanding that this is the future Emperor. The closest we ever get to seeing the true corruption of the Senate is Palpatine’s speech denouncing the Jedi, and even that winds up being carried hard solely by Palpatine’s actor.

They completely ignore the moral, logistical, and spiritual questions raised by usage of a clone army. Coverage in EU and Disney doesn’t count in a discussion of the prequels, but even there it’s rarely explored. You’d think the whole point of clones vs robots would be to raise interesting questions by way of contrasting the two, but no, it’s just so you don’t have to feel bad watching the armies blow each other up.

Anakin and Padme. Good God.

There’s so much more but honestly I don’t want to write more of an essay. Apologies for the YouTube link, but this is a video I really like about what made the Jedi so special in the originals. I think most of the problems in the prequels parallel their mishandling of the Jedi–a superficial understanding that Thing Is Cool, but then missing the point thanks to a formulaic, blunt, needs-to-be-marketable approach to making the movies.

I dunno, they’re more bearable than the sequels. I can even enjoy watching them; I grew up on them and can put on the nostalgia goggles to get through them, but under any examination they completely fall apart.

Because as everyone knows, political change only happens spontaneously, without any organization in the lead up, and people are famously fired up by sitting around at home until we all get the magic signal to go cut politicians’ heads off

I did not but I’ll give you an upvote anyway

Not sure which of the cabinet said it first, but for anyone wondering–this isn’t satire. The “which 24 hours” is a real line Trump supporters are regurgitating.

When you absolutely have to visit Reddit for whatever reason, you should use an alternate frontend. The one I’m familiar with is called libreddit and functions similarly to nitter for twitter. You can do a search to find a large list of instances, but all you do is replace the “http://reddit.com/” part of the URL with the name of the instance. I usually use eddrit.com or safereddit.com

The key to having fun with the gonarch fight (and other huge chunks of Xen too, like the Gargantua chase and Nihilanth) is to discover that the jump pack is broken and if you hold your crouch key, it tricks the game into thinking you never touched the ground. So you never lose momentum and can infinitely slide around at a thousand miles an hour, boosting your speed every time the jump pack recharges a bar. If you’ve never learned Source airstafing, the wide open first stage of the gonarch fight is a great place to start.

I do agree the gonarch was changed to be a ridiculous sponge though. Its regular health bar is set a bit too high anyway, but on top of that it’s actually invulnerable through the whole sequence between the first and last stages of the fight. Which would be fine, except they didn’t do anything to communicate that to the player! It still bleeds, it still makes pain noises, and the only way to figure it out is to waste a bunch of time dumping ammo into it. Very silly oversight.

I’ve always known the average voter is a huge idiot with a tiny attention span, but articles like this really put into perspective how bad it is. How the fuck do you manage to forget the COVID pandemic? Did everyone really buy the “Chinese bioweapon” propaganda in order to avoid blaming Trump or something?

Trump was awful before and already ballooned the debt once. How do you not expect it to happen again?

Judging by the spiral on the side, rolling up the flag

I’m not disagreeing in a general sense, but it’s funny to make that argument here when this info basically fell into the journalist’s lap. Very little actual journalism went into making this story possible

I’m probably just old but it’s always faster to type :) than it is to find the 🙂, same goes for every emoji really.

Also they convey slightly different emotions