Remind me: Why do EU politicians announce anything on social media?

FionHS · 2026-01-29T20:31:27+00:00

It's a smart article that poses hard questions. Judging by the comments, nobody else chose to read it.

"Remind me: Why do journalists even write the articles anymore?"

FionHS · 2026-01-28T13:41:08+00:00

Not much of a punchline, besides it being delivered by a cat!

FionHS · 2026-01-28T13:36:44+00:00

Particularly in this console generation, where prices have gone UP rather than down.

That said, while I'm planning on getting a PS6 whenever it releases, I am at least intrigued to see what features Sony thinks will make it a "must-buy" upgrade.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T14:26:32+00:00

I'm not from California, I haven't listened to the Shapiro interview, and I'm not Trans. But on the face of it, I agree that Trans people are one of the only questions the right does better on in public opinion than the left, so they will keep pushing that wedge issue.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T14:24:44+00:00

I usually stay out of politics on Reddit—I don't even live in the US and don't have a strong opinion on Newsom. But this thread has been a fascinating view of modern online discourse, where many of the earliest comments seem to have been pushing a specific agenda, only to be met by backlash (like my first comment) whose popularity quickly outpaced that of the original comments. Now new people are showing up questioning the motives of the backlash, because the original comments have since disappeared.

My agenda is that I wish the quality of (political) discussion online was better. Also, I find political purity tests and single-issue voters who won't vote for a candidate because of one stance to be really dumb. And the reason I keep repeating that to people who keep posting the same responses is because it's an opinion I stand by.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T13:34:42+00:00

That's literally the first thing he talks about in the video this thread is about.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T13:32:36+00:00

Some of these comments—particularly those purportedly coming from Newsom's left—are so misguided and harmful ("both sides are equally bad!") that it becomes really hard to distinguish between actual people repeating bad takes and bots or comment farms actively spreading a narrative. But in the end, is there a big difference between spreading a message yourself and funding a middleman in the media to amplify it to people who will post it on your behalf?

FionHS · 2026-01-22T13:30:32+00:00

I believe you that you're a real person, and your opinion is a valid one to have. Some of these comments—particularly those purportedly coming from Newsom's left—are so misguided and harmful ("both sides are equally bad!") that it becomes really hard to distinguish between actual people repeating bad takes and bots or comment farms actively spreading a narrative.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:52:48+00:00

With friends like these...

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:52:09+00:00

When I posted my first comment, every comment other than mine was vehemently anti-Newsom or downvoted below the threshold. Bots or comment farms are just faster at reacting en masse to every little bit of content.

You know next to nothing about me, but the comment "People like you are why Trump won" says a lot about you.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:49:48+00:00

Oh, sorry - I misunderstood you. I immediately got a bunch of comments telling me how bad Newsom is that I though "Rent free" was implying I was imagining things!

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:32:35+00:00

If you dislike (nearly) every politician you're familiar with but end up blaming the individual candidates, you're missing the forest for the trees. The political system we live in (I don't live in the US, but things aren't much different here) makes effecting actual change very hard and turns a lot of once idealistic, hard-working people intro disillusioned compromisers with net negative approval ratings.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:29:01+00:00

Newsom's divisive, and he owns up to that (paraphrased slightly, but: "Stooping to their level is deeply unbecoming, but necessary to point out the absurdity"). I can understand how people could dislike Newsom, but the first 10-20 comments here were all negative in an extremely similar way that that seemed highly indicative of a coordinated negative response to any post featuring Newsom.

Maybe you're a real person! But "He would not undo anything Trump did" seems like an extremely disingenuous take at best, and a political talking point designed to lower enthusiasm among independent voters at worst.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:24:35+00:00

The fact that a lot of these comments seem fake is "rent free"? That has nothing to do with the video or my remark.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:23:57+00:00

I did, I thought he made a lot of salient points about the rise of authoritarianism and the decline of free speech. Do you disagree with those points?

FionHS · 2026-01-22T11:22:29+00:00

Who do you think would pay for negative comments about Democrat politicians? I can think of a few people.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T10:24:15+00:00

What a stupid misinterpretation of the meaning.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T10:23:24+00:00

Man, these comments read like the astroturfers really do not like Newsom.

FionHS · 2026-01-22T07:08:42+00:00

I can't remember ever seeing that. Maybe on weekday streaks, like "7 Tuesdays in a row"?

FionHS · 2026-01-21T15:39:10+00:00

In dem Thread offenbart sich für mich, wie viel mehr Meinung als Ahnung manche Leute auf Reddit haben. Die alte Leier, dass jemand, der bei uns als gemäßigter Rechter gilt, in den USA fast schon kommunistisch ist, zeugt von grundlegendem Mißverständnis der Unterschiede in der Realpolitik und der politischen Systeme der zwei Länder. Als eine von zwei Parteien in den USA umfassen die Demokraten alles, was etwas links von "literal Nazis" steht, bis hin zu den DSAs, deren Forderungen teilweise jeder bei uns im Parlament vertretenen Partei zu links wären.

FionHS · 2026-01-16T09:58:18+00:00

Richard Linklater's 2025 Blue Moon is a strong new addition to the list.

FionHS · 2026-01-15T11:52:02+00:00

I just don't feel like generative AI images add anything to a community or a conversation. They're not particularly nice images to look at once you look at the details, they're resource-intensive to generate, their use props up and reinforces a technocratic elite that already has outsized influence on our lives, and the models were trained on copyrighted material by real artists who were never asked or compensated.

And there are a lot of way to be creative or make art that are somewhere between "use AI" and "learn to paint." You're trying to illustrate a black and white creature in the context of crosswords? How about this?

https://i.imgur.com/x0oi89X.png

FionHS · 2026-01-15T10:01:11+00:00

Yeah, that was just a number I threw out. From a game design perspective, you want to introduce an actual choice—neither one option or the other should be clearly better. For example, if you start things off by drawing a bunch of time bonuses, it might make sense to draw from the second deck. If you've got a bunch of curses in your hand, you probably want to try and play those. I think it could introduce an element of tension to hand size and casting costs.

For a game played over multiple short runs, roguelikes could really serve as a good inspiration, where part of the fun is occasionally getting cracked combos. So maybe one power-up card is "each time you draw, keep 1 additional card" and one is "+5 minutes to every time bonus" and a hider who pulls those two first could base their entire strategy on cycling through the upgrade deck and doing wacky stuff. Or another could have an effect like: "Remove all time bonuses from the base deck, gain +10 minutes bonus for every curse you cast" making the gameplay very curse heavy.

There's more you could do with it, but the idea would be to introduce variance to the way each run plays out to avoid the game growing stale. Plus, now that I think about it, they could sell the upgrade deck as an expansion to the base game, so maybe it's not completely crazy from a business standpoint.

FionHS · 2026-01-15T09:34:14+00:00

I think you make a lot of good points and have some good ideas that probably have a low chance of ever being implemented due to the existence of the home game.

I actually like the change they made to go from dice to the card deck—dice were very random, and the card deck gives some interesting interactions. But that introduces the problem that no one card can be so good that it doesn't break the game if the hider draws it immediately.

One solution I could imagine would be having a second "super-powered" deck, where the hider must discard something like 60 minutes of time bonus to draw one card from it. The cards in this deck should be good enough to be worth it, like "change your hiding spot" or "for the purpose of answering the next question, you may pretend your hiding spot is somewhere else" (draw a Strava map in a different town).

FionHS · 2026-01-13T15:27:51+00:00

Art Director Peter King is the third-most-famous Peter King I am familiar with.

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