And it’s about as “broad spectrum” as it gets, going from literal shortwave radio (very active for this weapon), all the way up to the most sophisticated AI we have at the moment I’m writing this,

And every possible communication technology between those two extremes is also used for this purpose.

The crazy part is I think for all of the sophistication, it all just boils down to a numbers game. Reach enough people with enough bullshit enough times and their minds change. It’s flat out that simple.

Smart observers will realize this saga is a story about the effectiveness of modern media at distorting reality. Americans aren’t just magically, uniquely shitty people. We had a coordinated disinformation engine, truly a superweapon, trained on our population for a long, long period of time.

Shit works pretty great, and the world will see more of it.

Edit: strongest bit of evidence is probably just how the target group got their world views completely rewritten. Hard to really document properly, ya kinda just have to witness the dramatic shift firsthand. People got reprogrammed within a single generation. The same folks who raised us on “two wrongs don’t make a right” and “treat others how you want to be treated” behave completely unrecognizably today. The disinformation engine is so effective they were tricked into completely rewriting their own internal values.

Depending on state, you may need to defeat varying regional wildlife (at least one full game with multiple generous DLCs, spanning the US) in order to complete the journey, and this does accrue XP as one might expect.

It does also produce players attached to min-maxed builds to adhere to one or another strategy, so play the meta-game carefully.

Thanks, interesting and brief read!

Goddamn inflation…

I just bought two oldish business class Dell laptops this last week and put Bazzite on em both, for the fam. Easing out our Chromebooks we’ve used for minor things, just can’t abide a machine that won’t let me actually own it anymore, with the way the world’s going.

Not exactly revolutionary lol, but your enthusiasm demanded something in response, so I wanted to let you know that we (and I bet lots of others!) are all in. And I really hope you keep doing stuff like this!!

If I haven’t contributed something to Lutris by this year’s Hacktoberfest, by golly I’m committing (heh) to putting an open issue to rest during best month.

Cheers and thanks again!!

Yeesh, you’re exactly right that this is the right way to think about it and thank you for pointing it out that way. Absolutely disgusting, I can’t believe we all allow this. I’m pretty fuckin good at math and those timescales and numbers are just not intuitive, I’m always surprised with figures like these, even though I’ve seen em before. If people knew, really knew this stuff, I have to believe it would change.

Anyone “earning” like this while the people (and their families) propping up these fiefdoms sacrifice and struggle the way they’re forced to - anyone doing so is de facto amoral. I’d go so far as to say deserving immediate death, no further evidence needed.

But maybe that’s the 4 beers my old ass had tonight making me feel spicy, lol.

Same for our family. To be clear I saw their “inclusivity” for what it was, but I’ll still reward that over its absence, because I want to see more of it in the world regardless of motivation. My wife was all in, the stereotypical Target-loving mom who liked them a LOT and would visit sometimes just to kill time between other things.

But she has principles, so she hasn’t shopped there since all this stuff, and we won’t be going back.

Folks, give your money to Costco! There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, yes, but Costco has been a standout in the industry just for how they treat their employees, for a long time now, probably decades by this point. And they read the room wisely (or just actually mean it, but probably not) and vocally retained DEI efforts.

Guarantee this prick is furious over this, don’t worry. Like, probably even more upset than you or I would be for getting fired unfairly. These people have their entire identity and ego wrapped up in this stuff, their brains are broken.

And the only way election reform happens is if we get the corporate Dems who like things the way they are (AKA roughly all of them) out of power. It’s damn near hopeless.

I’d commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. I’d have to go Ultra, though, no question.

The extreme timescales, the highly personal, self-driven body modification, culminating in a truly unique, grotesque sort of personality to one’s own body…one which can’t help but physically, visibly project the creeping, gibbering paranoia nurtured by millennia spent slowly becoming so estranged from every other lifeform once called kin, making one’s journey through time and space utterly, irreversibly alone, even when traveling with others…

For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game, on the other hand, I’d be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora’s box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and long-forgotten exotic physics…not to mention, who knows who or what has been lurking just beyond perception, waiting for you to do the risky dirty work of extracting some particularly nasty doodad…

One can dream.

Well it’s the same as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps! Everyone worth any respect at all has gotta be a self-made man, a rugged individualist, a lone wolf! Help is for snowflakes and libtards, these patriots don’t take handouts, they’d never be caught dead getting bailed out by Uncle Sam, they assume full responsibility! After the real adults solve the fucking crisis, anyway. And rinse and repeat.

It’s cartoon language for cartoon people, from the politicians to the voters and back. Their world view is a 12 year old’s embarrassingly shitty fanfic of reality. Just utterly shameful.

(I know you know all that, that passage just stuck out to me too as egregiously disingenuous double speak and it pissed me right off)

Edit: spewed more vitriol, lol

Now this is top tier pedantry, ya love to see it.

Edit: if you would’ve subtly but deliberately screwed up that idiom, this would be elevated to a true masterpiece

Billy Mays did pass into the Great Beyond, after all…that guy could sell some As Seen on TV omnipotence to a whole pantheon of deities, I’m sure of it.

For fuck’s sake 😂

Completely useless comment here but maaaan, Max Payne, Red Faction, and BloodRayne were all easy 10/10 for me (to be fair I was easier to impress then). Seeing them stacked together like that immediately short circuited the joke and just made me worry this was a list of great games and I’d missed a bunch.

And here I was thinking I’d had all my chuckles already, over silly little punny names. Yours is excellent lmao, and just a single character needed too!

The irony of rudely over-explaining intellectual charity to someone who just asked for a tiny bit of it from you is just…really something my friend. I hope you’ll pause on that for a moment and ask yourself if you ever sincerely tried to give me any whatsoever throughout this exchange.

I understand the concept of intellectual charity perfectly well, I’ve deliberately granted it to you repeatedly throughout this conversation. I, and people I enjoy talking to, extend intellectual charity a bit beyond just that literal definition you supplied, of reading specific statements in a charitable way. I try to extend intellectual charity to my assumptions about the minds writing the statements, because I think it’s kinder, more fair, more productive, and just frankly the “true spirit of the idea” (if such a thing can be said to exist). But again, it’s yours to give and not mine to demand.

To be clear, though, implying that I don’t know what it means, and that I invoked it as some kind of “win the argument button” is just…super uncharitable of you. A fun irony from someone who claims to know such an awful lot about the idea.

Separately, I’ll cheerfully concede that Germany does make your point better than mine, that was a sloppy misstep on my behalf. What I’ll say about that, to try to convince you one final time that my position is internally consistent and merits at least sincere consideration - I recognize the slippery slope that begins right outside the line of my position, and I recognize that diligent effort and vigilance must be brought to bear to prevent the narrow intolerance from cascading into broader denials of liberties.

And I still think that’s preferable compared to allowing some of the (historically proven…) most vile and damaging ideologies to spread. Even worse, I recognize that ultimately - human beings I don’t know or particularly trust will be the ones making those calls, because they’re interested in spending their lives in government and such, and I’m not. What I think you don’t properly understand about my position is how close I believe we are in the US to violent, world-shaping fascism. If that begins in earnest, is that the point where you finally say “okay we gotta do something more direct about this, the free market of ideas isn’t going to make this problem go away on its own”? I can tell you with certainty, the most vulnerable folks who suffer most (or at least first) under that scenario will never share your point of view. They’ll rightly condemn us for allowing this to happen, just as many of us condemn the oh-so-liberal Germans who stood by during the rise of Nazism.

Before we got to this precipice, I shared your point of view basically wholesale. Because I believed it worked well enough to prevent us from getting here - but I was wrong! - it didn’t. Maybe you’re right and we’ll tip back toward safety from the ledge, public sentiment and political movements tend to swing like a pendulum after all. But I personally no longer believe your approach is sufficient. I very well understand the risks of what I’m advocating for, and I still believe it’s the right move.

Maybe 10 years from now I feel differently yet again, I’d sure love to. But my intellectual life has been essentially a cascading series of the slow grinding away of idealism into ugly-but-useful pragmatism. And things just get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse…so I don’t really expect to return to idealism, as pleasant and “right” as it feels.

Great point of view and yet another strong reason not to just allow internet connections on every damn thing. One other huge reason - being forced to accept brand new (legally binding!) licensing agreements, long after the device has been paid for and installed.

Roku was in the news somewhat recently for auto-installing an update that required users to accept a new license agreement to continue to use the device they’d paid for and had been using up until that point. And that license wasn’t a trivial change, it required the user to agree to forced arbitration!

In other words, in a very real sense, they came into the house and modified the TV (not just the cheap little streaming devices), then turned around and said “Want to keep using this thing you’ve made a part of your daily life? That you already paid us for? Well, fine you can, but - we don’t want any of you to ever sue us, so agree not to or fuck you. Don’t think too hard about it, it’s your TV, just say yes and get on with it”.

Wild stuff! And I guarantee it gets worse before it gets better. We need high quality FOSS hardware badly, I really hope we see that start to take off in a bigger way. I’m not super optimistic though, hardware being just a lot harder to iterate on.

This is a particularly useful way to phrase it / think about it, gonna hold onto this one, thanks!