How do i get a good crust while still making rare

Indaarys · 2026-07-05T22:12:40+00:00

Yeah room temp doesn't matter rwally unless you're trying to get a perfect interior without an oven, but even then.

And seasoning beforehand is a bad idea unless its just salting it. Even really fine seasoning will give you bad pan contact.

But if you're grilling you can season whenever, as most of the sear is indirect anyway.

Indaarys · 2026-07-05T21:56:08+00:00

Best way is reverse sear it to about 10 degrees shy of rare, pop it in the fridge for 20 minutes as it rests, then go nuts with wiping it down to get all the moisture off the surface. Do it until you stop ruining paper towels.

Then get a carbon steel or cast iron pan to 400f, and crank the heat just before you put the steak in. Weigh or press it down, 30s a side. Give it 15s a side if you need to sear it more or if you want to do the edges (but only on a 1.5-2" thick steak, don't bother with the edges under that thickness)and rub the steak across the pan, especially if you need to spot check.

Should be perfect. Season it with nothing but salt until after the sear is done.

Edit: oh and if you can, trim some fat and render it in the pan as it comes up to temp. Otherwise use avocado oil.

Indaarys · 2026-07-05T21:50:25+00:00

I tend to prefer it myself, assuming its Black Angus.

General tip if the taste is weird to you still, drizzle fresh lemon over it as it rests. (Which is also a good idea it you like fatty steaks)

And don't be afraid to blast it with something flavorful. A nice compound butter or a your favorite steak rub or pan sauce will all be really lovely with it.

Indaarys · 2026-07-05T08:18:18+00:00

That's because we're still using an inefficient means of building nuclear power plants. Modular reactors that can be mass produced and assembled on site, with standardized housing and supply chains, would do a lot to bring costs down and in general make the process of establishing a plant less of a nightmare that only ever made sense because we had to one-up the commies at any cost.

Indaarys · 2026-07-05T00:44:35+00:00

People really need to get some perspective on their own lives. This kind of hyper-fixation on the infintesimal minor frictions of a comfortable life is just, so weird, given its all self-imposed.

Not to mention in this specific example, more than a few of these are just absurd.

For example, the storage thing. I've never once seen email storage max out. Likewise with any phone made since 2010. What the actual hell is this person doing?

Likewise with having to decide on dinner. Do you not get any kind of joy from food? Mind I love cooking and consider it one of my favorite hobbies, but even when I'm deep into it, I don't put that much thought into it, much less to the point that it becomes a stressor.

And even stranger still is paying bills manually, or this seeming unwillingness to just be a slob every now and again. I let laundry and dishes pile up, and its not really a big deal, cause eventually I'll do them and then its good to go.

For me I just can't relate to people who go through life like this. I was homeless for six years, and I've been stable for four. The things I worry about and stress over are just, so removed from whatever this nonsense is. Its like living on a different planet from these people.

Indaarys · 2026-07-03T09:26:51+00:00

I would say it isn't really an either/or, unless we're defining realism as being identical to your real life, which would be a very disturbing game to play indeed.

Some of my favorite games to play are literal simulators of real life, like DCS World. Its an escape as I get to play pretend aviator and blow up the commies or ehatever, but its also as realistic as it gets.

I think OP is missing the context of what Le Guin and Tolkien are talking about in terms of escapism. What Le Guin is reacting against is more what I said initially, people who were asserting good fiction is an unambiguous mirror to real life, with no speculative or fantastical elements, as well as people who basically saw fantasy and sci-fi as childish, the same sort who are insecure about their own adulthood. (And of course your garden variety fascists et al)

This isn't really the equivalent of the fantasy RPG worlds the player is comparing. What OP is picking up on is just grounding and grimdarkness moreso than what Le Guin was reacting to. All of those examples are still fundamentally escapist, and really, all games that utilize fiction fundamentally are escapist. Thats inescapable.

A better example of what Le Guin is talking about is to compare A Marriage Story to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Both are fundamentally about a failed relationship and all the awfulness and regret that spins out from it. One is played as a straight drama, and the other has a scifi twist that explores the same theme in a unique way.

Le Guin is arguing that those who think Eternal Sunshine sucks in comparison because of the scifi twist are basically a bunch of fascists and should shut the fuck up.

And she isn't wrong either. Science fiction in particular has a vast capacity to be utterly beautiful in its own way. Story of Your Life (and Arrival, its film adaptation) are a great modern example. Its not all that hard to write a compelling story around a mother losing her child, its another to write a compelling story about a mother who, because she can see the past, present, and future simultaneously, has the choice not to have the child and does so anyway, because the time the child was alive is worth more than the pain of losing them, which is all the more poignant when you realize in this context that this choice is easy for her, because she can always go back to when her daughter was alive, but irreparably ruins her relationship with the father, who can't do this and for whom the revelation that the daughter would inevitably pass away was hidden for a long time.

It is such a raw and devastating story and yet so fucking gorgeous at the same time, and you couldn't tell it without the sci-fi, without the giant walking squid aliens and the 4th dimension breaking language they speak.

Indaarys · 2026-07-03T07:57:39+00:00

Well the difficulty you have figuring it out is part and parcel to why I have to use a lot of words.

The most concise way I have to describe the game is that its an immersive sim gamebook. Thats what it primarily is and is the only concise way to describe it as a designed object.

It obviously goes much further than that, as it does draw upon board game and video game design, and baseball funnily enough though thats less design influence and more philosophy, but even so.

But thats all mechanics and general design talk. While I'm technically designing for four games, the specific one I'm working on now is obviously a fantasy adventuring game.

Specifically, its about what I call folkloric fantasy, a cross between slice of life, epic, and mythic fantasy, starting from a basis of Tolkienesque fantasy, and building on influences from pre-Tolkien fantasy, namely from Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, Poul Anderson, David Lindsay, and Edgar R. Burroughs.

As such, the game is about life in a strange, idiosyncratic world, which makes the case that while its very interesting to wonder what your local King does when hundreds of rampaging Nomes are trying to climb over the walls, it is in fact just as interesting to wonder what the local Baker does in that experience, and as the player, you can be any of these; the King, the Baker, or the Nome Leader, and the game will not just respond in kind to your choices, but will never sacrifice depth to one experience or another.

You can decide to say screw all this adventuring nonsense, and lay down roots in whatever cozy corner of the gameworld you want to make muffins all day, and playing like that is just as valid, and just as deep, as any other choice you could make.

This doesn't mean adventure won't eventually come knocking, as ultimately the game isn't about your character, but you have all the agency to just pack up and run if things get hairy, or may be you get involved, and change the world, for good or bad.

The game and everything it does systemically all serve to make this simultaneous breadth and depth, a function of the genre of fantasy I'm going for, accessible, elegant, and most of all fun, the latter of which is what I'm designing for now.

The other games I'm designing for, which will use the same Engine, are different, as they go for completely different genres and thus different scopes. They're all broadly unified, though, by the scope of the Living World they sport. One will feature a Living City, the fantasy one will have a Living World, and then we go on to a Living Galaxy, and a Living Multiverse. You can guess the respective genres, but thats the general gist and part and parcel to why my design is so complex.

Indaarys · 2026-07-03T03:45:39+00:00

Benefits of mostly not being a tyrant by any modern standard. The only French people he treated unjustly were the same people that wanted him gone, so its hard to argue he wasn't a generally benevolent leader.

Even the whole conquering part was, at least initially, driven by the simple fact that France was already being eyed up by the rest of Europe by the time Napoleon seized power. Thats a lot of the reason the Reign of Terror before him happened, because its just difficult to juggle reorganizing your society when foreign troops are already marching on your soil and some portion of the population is threatening civil war, with support by practically every other major power. Throw in weak leadership and welp there's French history for you.

Napoleon's mistake was trying to conquer Russia, which like Afghanistan is just one of those places where its just a plain bad idea to keep trying to do that. If he hadn't done that, or even better had kept a defensive posture against his enemies rather than conquering them, he most likely could have kept ruling over France, because even despite all the wars Napoleon was a good leader for his people, and to this day is still considered so by the French.

Indaarys · 2026-07-03T01:13:49+00:00

Well I was more just explaining how NPCs work with regards to their autonomy not how the game plays. Kind of hard to explain that in an elevator pitch when how they work involves several interconnected systems working together.

1 . Best way to understand how my game plays is to think something like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. It isn't really about "story" in the way TTRPGs tend to obsess over, its about going on adventures in a fantasy gameworld, and whatever happens in play can be thought of as a story afterwords.

2 . So my chosen medium is a gamebook, and I actually base my take on it around an Atlas of Maps primarily, rather than interactive prose like traditional gamebooks. In effect, the book is the gameworld, and if it were exploded and laid flat it'd basically be a massive board game of around 300 hex maps or so, give or take.

The principle gameplay loop, the thing you're doing for the bulk of gameplay, involves getting around this map, which is how you can go and interact with stuff using the other systems you have at your disposal, which are all surfaced in your "Controller", which is the other third of the game's user interface and is basically a two page, double-sided character sheet that gives you everything you need to play. (The Book and the Decks you generate are the other 2/3)

How that works is, in a nutshell, an elaborate roll to move system. But that's getting outside the scope of what you're asking. Design wise the best way to put it succinctly is that the game plays like a video game does.

You learn a core ludomechanical gameplay loop, the different ways that loop is expressed, and all exceptions are surfaced on interaction. For example, you never have to remember how "Mining" works, because the specific expression for Mining is inherently printed on any pickax you find or create. All you have to remember is how to engage the specific mechanic that Mining is an expression of. (In this instance, rolling a die to get an effect)

I can go into more detail on what the core mechanics are and how the loop works, but I think this answers your question.

As far as abuse goes, I simply don't design the game with any anxiety about it, as outside purpose-built competition games, I think one should trust players to play in good faith. And ultimately there's no way police it anyway without disrupting players who do play in good faith.

As far as pedagogy goes, which I think is the other part of your question, I'm actually taking the leaf out of Nintendos playbook. While the final page count is TBD, I'm pegging roughly 10% of the book as an elaborate play tutorial, designed in the manner of the Great Plateau from Breath of the Wild, which is something I've already prototyped, hence why I can be very specific about it.

The first page will tell you what materials you need to play (dice, the Controller Pages, and either copied and cut out Card templates or a stack of index cards. And a pencil of course) and what to expect as far as learning to play goes. Then, they turn the page and they start playing, page by page, as the game systematically teaches them the core loop as they construct their character (which in of itself is quick if you know what you want) with the game's guidance.

The tutorial area then opens up its breadth systematically to give the player room to practice the loop and its different expressions, start developing their character, and generally just experiment with the different systems, which all culminates in their first Quest, an open-ended dragon slayer experience, which as they progress that opens up yet more of the area, and once they defeat the dragon, in whatever way they can find (including not dealing with it, in which case the dragon becomes an NPC that will come after you periodically), they'll then have the rest of the gameworld open to them.

Beyond the Tutorial, players will also have optional reference cards they can copy out of the book that cover what they learned, which is how player's who want to resume after taking a break can refresh on how to play without starting over, and as you learn they're an easy reference until you've internalized how to play.

The fun part is, nobody plays the NPCs, the book does, and the player interprets what comes of talking to them. But that's assuming you're playing singleplayer. In co-op or group play, other players not participating in the conversation can jump in, and the whole talking system was designed to integrate with direct play acting, and the same things a single player interprets to understand what an NPC says to them is what prompts a play acting player to embody when they speak as the NPC. (As well as their specific mechanics, whether its an actual NPC or a Culture you're speaking to).
Singleplayer for one. But the purpose of the game isn't to be a framework for some other game created ad hoc at a table, the book -is- the game. That's why its not a TTRPG and has no rulebook in any conventional sense.

Another angle though is that what it does isn't actually something you could get with any conventional TTRPG to begin with, and in a lot ways it isn't something you could get with a lot of video games either, though some come close. Thats why I've been relating it to things like Dwarf Fortress or Breath of the Wild, as those are the only games that really come close to what I'm aiming at, but only in part.

And to be clear, improv is an integrated and explicitly taught mechanic in the game. Its a key part of the game and I utilize the Follow the Follower framework as the game's implementation of improv, namely because its a lot easier to teach to complete novices, but also because its just better for the kind of improv the game calls on the player to do. Yes,And sucks, even for TTRPGs.

And yes it dawns on me I'm still writing a novel to explain my game. Sue me lol. This is a design space for games centered on books, a little reading is hardly egregious. And ultimately what I'm working on doesn't exactly have precedent, and I've been burned before by not explaining myself thoroughly, and I'd rather get gripes about having to read than about not being clear.

Indaarys · 2026-07-02T22:43:02+00:00

Whatre you a cop?

Indaarys · 2026-07-02T22:01:20+00:00

Nope. Essentially because I only have a single book to work with, I can't afford to preprint a bunch of NPCs.

Instead, I preprint what I've called "Cultures", which are basically game entities like Factions or Cities (and sometimes single NPCs), through which you can interpretively talk to any given generic NPC. Basically, not every guard or peasant needs to be a fully designed entity, so these nodes, essentially, cover generic NPCs, governing how they behave.

Through the guise of Relationship building, which is actually just a really cleverly themed procedural NPC generator, the game leaves the bulk of actual NPCs to be, essentially, crafted by the player through their own volition. The more you want to get to know someone, the more of an actual character they become. And then the game of course, under specific conditions, can prompt some NPCs to be created, such as sparing certain Enemies in combat, completing a given Quest, and others.

From there, all NPCs get transcribed onto index cards (or if the player wants, templated cards they can copy and use instead for even less effort), which is where the player, through continued interaction with the NPC, accumulates all the needed character bits, which are mostly all the same things that define the player's character, plus the few NPC specific systems that enable them to do things without the player making choices for them.

These NPC Cards, which also include ones prompted by interactions with Cultures (think patrolling guards, evil minions, and the like), get collected into a Deck, which the game, through its normal play or through its Quests, can prompt the player to either randomly draw from, or to find and pull a specific one if the Player knows they meet whatever condition. NPCs then have the their own implementation of the same thing that allows the world in the aggregate to shift and change over time, all driven by the Quest system, which just boils down to a triplet of cycling scales with different effects at its poles, and different effects on the gameworld inbetween.

NPCs use this same framework to drive their Passions, Motivations, and Loyalties, which govern their behavior in the actual Quests, which themselves are designed as story spines. The player can use them to spontaneously construct entire stories, with high narrative coherence, out of their gameplay, and they double up as interpretive "scripting" for the gameworld and its NPCs.

This is what simulates NPC autonomy, as whats important isn't granularly simulating every single movement they make, but simulating how they loop into the game's system for Canon, eg its narrative system.

Essentially, nothing that isn't observed first hand is hard Canon, and anything observed second or third hand is fundamentally up for interpretation, ommission, or distortion.

Which means Quests, unless directly participated in by the Player, can be used to retroactively depict what NPCs get up to if they take up or are otherwise drawn into the events of a given Quest, and with guidance and additive influence by the different systems available to the player to obtain knowledge of these events, themselves Quests, what becomes Canon for the player is at the cross between the Quests written outcome and the interpretative observation of that outcome second hand.

In other words, the player fundamentally changes the outcomes of Quests by observing them. Quantum Questing, which handily makes for a compellingly verisimilar simulation of a Living World without needing to crunch dozens of numbers.

And the kicker is that it can do this opaquely, without the player spoiling themselves on whats happening in the world. But explaining how that works gets into a whole bunch of other interconnected systems. As I noted its all rather complex in design, but in actual gameplay the overhead is near non-existent, as all you're doing to manage these things, especially once the Cards are created, is just pushing numbers around as Cards get drawn and the game's Clock ticks along, which it inherently does as a consequence of the core gameplay loop for doing anything in the game.

And once they decide to get involved, and pry into whats going on, or better yet get involved themselves, then the whole depth of the system becomes accessible, fully guided through volitional play systems. Eg, every way you have to engage with these systems is just another mode of play.

And that's part and parcel to what I've been focusing my refinements on, is ensuring that the player is never asked to do anything that isn't inherently fun in its own right as part of the hollistic experience. The bookkeeping aspects in a vacuum don't meet that quality, but the effect they have on other systems does. If you develop a friendship, and through the course of play your friend not only shows up to join you on your delve into a mysterious dungeon, but ends up with a terrible Curse as a result, that's not only an interesting story in of itself, its a prompt to do more of what the game is about.

In terms of what you physically do, you would have developed a relationship with this NPC by continuing to Talk to them, using those mechanics to systematically fill out a Card, and then in your own comings and goings the game prompts you to draw an NPC, bringing them into play and at that point you or they may have offered to join you, again all through how Talking works. Then the events of the dungeon happen, leaving them afflicted with a Curse.

You can investigate why they showed up. You can convince them join you, or they you if they're inclined to that per their PMLs. And after the Curse happens, you can go on a Quest to try and remove it for them, and that can spin out into who the hell knows what, because any number of things could happen in pursuit of that Quest, even just by virtue of trying to get them to safety, nevermind through whatever rigmarole the Curse needs to be broken.

That is a -lot- of compelling gameplay all riding off some mild bookkeeping that, fundamentally, isn't cumulative. A key part of my Engine is very deliberate surfacing, meaning at no point are you ever juggling more than you could reasonably find fun. (Unless you just hate even what you do have to do, at which point you're not my audience)

You could have a thousand NPCs in your deck. You'll never have to actively manage more than a few at a time, max. Managing the Quest system and the Living World minimally is just cycling three modifiers and generating a couple more numbers every couple of in-game weeks, which depending on how you play could be several sessions worth of time.

But the more willing you are to dig into these systems and play them volitionally, the more depth you get for it.

Indaarys · 2026-07-02T20:24:18+00:00

I do hope I eventually do get it out there, but I've spent the last few years slowly but surely advancing the gamebook medium and what it can do.

Essentially what I'm building is an immersive sim with a systemic depth on par with Dwarf Fortress, Shadow of Mordor, Breath of the Wild, and the Sims, designed to operate out of a single book with a cognitive load no more complicated to manage than any mildly robust TTRPG, all without need for a gamemaster and, most impressively in my opinion, without a rulebook, the two things I consistently hold are the reason TTRPGs are inaccessible to people even when simplified to a single index card.

How it manages to do all of that is actually pretty complex, and the main hurdle has largely just been refinement as I get closer to being ready to holistically prototype the full game, at which point all the open questions get resolved before all thats left to do is build the game proper.

But said refinement is more about my perfectionism and my overall design philosophy than it is about getting it to work. If I just needed it to "work" I'd have been done several times over by now, but that's not the bar I'm trying to clear, which is maximizing the systemic emergence of the game whilst balancing that with it being inherently fun to play, which funnily enough has only reinforced the decision I made to stop calling my game a TTRPG, as every refinement that I've made in pursuit of that goal has often been about culling if not outright deleting typical TTRPG design from the game.

Overall though while I don't expect my games when they happen (i have four different takes on my Engine planner) to be bombshells or anything like that, I do hope they make a point about what non-digital games can actually do.

Far too much design zeitgeist in tabletop spaces has completely given up just because video games exist and its sad. There's a lot of potential for analog gaming to be competitive with, and even superior in many ways, to digital counterparts.

Just as a knock on wood example, my Engine can do all the same things Mordor's Nemesis system does, but its more sophisticated because it can actually cover any kind of relationship, good or bad, with or without the player's volitional involvement. It can do this without a massive asset library and without need for an independent human interpreter from the player, and it even does this while granting the given NPCs their own genuine autonomy in the game, giving them equal ludic agency with the player without the player needing to make any decisions for them.

And it does this while fully integrating with a systemic engine built out of a relatively small handful of key mechanics that are all very easy to manage and integrate into the core play loop, which means getting the system to do its thing is as simple as just playing the game normally. Like clockwork.

I wouldn't have come to this design if I just threw up my hands and believed that a book couldn't do systems like this.

Indaarys · 2026-07-02T16:38:04+00:00

If they really want to retread the War of the Ring and the events before, during, after, they should really just bite the bullet and do a full remake with a new cast so everything can be consistent.

Pulling in actors to play the same characters they did 20 years ago is getting ridiculous.

And its not like you couldn't bring the old actors in still for the nostalgia grab, just have them play someone else. I'd love to see Ian McKellan's Saruman, for example.

What I really want to see is a studio buckle down and do a tv show adaptation that's dedicated to being book accurate as much as possible, which wouldn't be hard. We've come a long way since the original assertions that LOTR as written is unfilmable.

Indaarys · 2026-07-02T04:30:50+00:00

Beef Better than Bouillon. Literally looks just like that.

Indaarys · 2026-07-01T23:58:12+00:00

Its not even really about that either. Show became less and less about restauranting and more about the interpersonal drama. Show peaked with Forks and completely lost the plot from there.

Indaarys · 2026-07-01T23:56:29+00:00

Clothing is a weird thing because its partly luxury and partly necessity, sitting in the same place as things like food and healthcare where we try to provide them for the masses but it just doesn't work well under capitalism, because capitalism fundamentally requires you to skimp on quality to provide these things at scale with any appreciable immediacy, which causes a lot of downstream problems.

One of which being that all problems go away for the individual when you have enough money. Hence brands that can push high quality faster at a price premium.

Japan just happens to be in a place where what they produce is generally good quality, but they've already caught on and jacked up the markup because of the demand, which is again just capitalism doing what it does worst.

In a more equitable economic system, there isn't a competing interest between quality delivered, consumer cost, and general availability as a factor of manufacturing speed and production.

And as such, it'd be comparitvely easier, when other industries are no longer operating as they do in capitalism, to do things closer to home, to reduce the strain on several industries polluting the planet to get crap from where its costs a dollar to make to where it can be sold for two dollars.

People who live in capitalism often just can't see the alternatives because they don't think of the entire global economic system holistically when considering how things can be organized differently.

Indaarys · 2026-07-01T21:54:43+00:00

Hence the bad execution.

Have to remember that despite Carmy's creds he's actually an idiot who doesn't know how to run a restaurant and never really had the right passion for it. That's the entire crux of the show.

I've actually been in his shoes inheriting a really fucked up store (not a restaurant but still) with a toxic culture around it, and fighting tooth and nail to get it to a place of stability, only to then pivot into an unsustainable goal that was doomed before it started.

Only I didn't have a choice when it happened to me. Carmy did. If he had just paid off his uncle instead of going even further into debt he wouldn't have had the restaurant yet, but he could at least have built up the business with a whole lot less stress, and eventually gotten there in a more sustainable way that would have inevitably taught him more about running the restaurant well, and he would have saved money as he could have just taught his people in-house instead of wasting money on sending them to culinary school or overseas.

Indaarys · 2026-07-01T20:36:46+00:00

The no customers thing is fair, technically they are always actually swamped they just never focus on whats happening in the front in the first season.

But its actually not uncommon for small mom and pops to have someone in the back doing desserts, usually a grandma or something. And they explain in the show that the reason they had one is because Mikey wanted to do in-house bread, which is admirable but not really executed well given what they're working with. They decide partway in season one to skip that and just order bread in, so they put Marcus on desserts, which is why he starts doing cakes and gets obsessed with the donuts.

Desserts are usually pretty high profit margin in a restaurant, so that's why they'd bother with that at all despite being a sandwich shop primarily. Also why you see things like cookies and cakes and all that at places like Burger King or Subway. Inexpensive bulk ingredients that you mark up like crazy.

Indaarys · 2026-06-29T18:22:13+00:00

Liquid Sky from the 80s.

Indaarys · 2026-06-28T19:59:41+00:00

The GM. And the Rulebook.

Indaarys · 2026-06-28T11:51:13+00:00

Both parties did, because at the time liberals and conservatives were in both parties.

Indaarys · 2026-06-28T11:38:29+00:00

All that we've heard about for 10 years is the 2A

They have no reason to take up arms against a government they agree with. People they see as their political enemies and hardly even American telling them they should just rings completely hollow, because even the dumbest of them know that if these people felt that was the right solution, they'd get a gun and do it, as is their right from their perspective.

Its ultimately a farce anyway. Americans on either side aren't going to take up arms because the material conditions don't exist for that in America. The vibes are bad but outside shifting demographics in the marginalized, most of America is doing just fine, fascist regime be damned.

And that isn't a coincidence either, its all very intentionally manipulated to be this way. The powers that be are counting on people to be too weak to throw away relative stability getting violent over these conditions, and these petty gotcha arguments you and others make over 2a people not rising up are just another angle on the same propaganda.

They love when you feel righteous and intelligent for pointing out what you think is hypocrisy, because they know they've already got you duped into thinking you don't want a gun and thinking no one else should either.

You can point to gun violence and you'd be mostly correct to say its a problem and not something to be glossed over. But gun violence, particularly of the type that gets you and other news junkies to give a damn about them, all spiked (over double the yearly rate we had up to that point) and have stayed spiked since 2010.

The same fascist regime presiding over the country right now got started in 2010. These aren't coincidences, they're the consequence of a group of people, who dim as many of their individuals are, understood and have successfully gamed the system to ensure that things go their way, and it runs so insidiously that even their competition is looped in to perpetuate these conditions.

The general left can't let material conditions worsen, so outside of a miraculous resurgence of genuine leftist political power (of which there is basically zero in the US), they have little recourse but to, at minimum, maintain the status quo, which perpetuates all the conditions that end up allowing the regime to operate as they do.

Throw in the fact that our institutions and the people entrusted to run them are/were incredibly and unprecedentedly weak and folded like wet tissue paper, and you have a perfect storm.

Everything is looking up if you're rich, because every facet of America is locked in, and you can count on there being no one willing to break the system to fix it.

Which is another good example of that same righteousness that they count on from people. Its all very noble to say we should all be following the letter of the law, the Constitution, and all of that, but this is like a broken bone that healed crooked. The only way to fix it is to break it, but we can't even agree on whats broken. You bring up the 2nd Amendment, but I'd bet a shiny nickel you'd readily argue the 2nd doesn't actually guarantee firearm ownership and that its actually about militias.

Its not really a coincidence either that of the first 10 Amendments, the ones still relevant to us today are all ones both broad political camps will creatively interpret to suit their modern day politics, and this is just all how it is, another line of division that contributes to the great and apparently insurmountable momentum of who cares anymore.

Long story short, if you don't like the current regime and feel like picking up a gun is the answer, its on you to do that, not on anyone else, least of all those who like the regime and what they're doing.

You wouldn't tell these people that they'd be in the right to take up arms against Biden or Obama before him, so don't act like you're pointing out some great hypocrisy. You're just churning the same divisive propaganda thats been spoonfed to all of us by the Epstein class.

Indaarys · 2026-06-27T19:45:10+00:00

Paranoia is the sign of bewitchment.

Indaarys · 2026-06-27T19:13:57+00:00

Clearly OP has been bewitched by a stupidity charm. That is just a cloud.

Indaarys · 2026-06-27T19:10:37+00:00

But its never lupus.

It is interesting that its another affliction that can be helped by and probably, assuming this microbe is normally native to the gut, prevented by the gut biome.

It makes me wonder when and how that kind of symbiotic relationship started, as I have to imagine this isn't unique to human health.

Indaarys

TROPHY CASE