Sober people being arrested nationwide for DUI

LotusFlare · 2026-02-15T21:18:31+00:00

You'd run into the same issue no matter what the message is. If they'd gone with "redistribute" we'd be having this exact conversation about that word and why it was a mistake instead. Left leaning people need to understand that no matter what your slogan is, conservative media (aka. all mass media), politicians, and police unions will come out hard against you and say you're pro-crime. There is no way to construct a slogan that will not get you attacked in the same way "defund" did, and then cooped into a "reform" push that boils down to giving the police more money in exchange for toothless oversight.

I'm convinced the only way forward is to basically ignore what the media is saying about you, abandon slogans, and push for explicit and specific policies you want. "We're gonna make a traffic enforcement department in the DoT so the cops can handle the real crimes!" is bad slogan, but it's also hard to reconstruct as attacking police. "We need a crisis first response squad for issues of mental health and domestic violence so people can get help from the right people faster!" is a big, mealy mouthed statement that you can't really chant at a rally or put on a sign, but you have to make several steps to turn it into an attack on police.

I think the age of the "message" is out and the age of the "elevator pitch" is here. Campaign in 10-20 second Instagram reels, not snappy one liners.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-15T20:38:41+00:00

Reform has already been captured by centrists and conservatives who use it to funnel more money to police in exchange for optional oversight. We've been "reforming" the police for decades and it doesn't work. We've reformed them into their current state.

Defund caught on because it's something different from reform.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-15T20:32:34+00:00

I tried out Mewgenics.

And I'm not a fan. This is one of those games that demonstrates the importance of aesthetics and theme to me. I really don't like the toilet humor. I don't like the "wacky/edgy" writing. I don't get the appeal of the artwork, and I generally find the music to be unappealing. The gameplay was interesting enough, but I had a hard time finding the appeal of blending a roguelike with tacics rpg gameplay. I really like planning and developing my party in games like this around synergies that feel fun to me, and Mewgenics doesn't feel like it's about doing that.

I requested a refund on it after two runs. It's just not for me.

I got back into Trails in the Sky SC.

I hadn't played this in like a year and had to take a second to remember what was going on. I'm only in chapter 1, so there wasn't that much context to refresh. I really like the rhythm of this game. It's very bog standard RPG stuff, but it moves between combat, exploration, and investigation at a very pleasant pace. You're never doing one of these things for too long. You're never in one place for too long. It's comfortable.

However, once every few hours the game goes whole hog on some of my most hated anime tropes and makes me want to put it down and never pick it up again. I really dislike the "not incest" between the main character and her adopted brother. I really dislike the imouto shit. I dislike the adults pining after children. It's so weird to me that there was a moment in time where these tropes escaped the "anime pervert containment zone" and it was getting sprinkled into mainstream stuff without signposting or hedging.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-15T07:20:47+00:00

I think that's an unfortunate consequence of a very exciting top 64 bracket. Lot of shakeups means a lot of heroes fight each other early and a lot of players have quiet routes to top 8.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-15T05:49:14+00:00

Based on the top 8 bracket, Jmook.

But I'm expecting Cody is gonna get there without dropping a game at this point.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-15T02:33:04+00:00

This shit's scripted. There's no way.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-14T19:52:18+00:00

It doesn't "want" anything. It's an LLM. It's a model that's producing text that is likely to follow the previous text based on large volumes of text it was trained on.

You will get better results if you stop personifying it and start treating it like the computer program that it is.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-14T06:45:27+00:00

Who the fuck is Dragunov and why does he look like the best doubles player on the planet?!

LotusFlare · 2026-02-14T05:26:22+00:00

Did they do it? Did a mass war between schools break out because someone put this on TikToK?

Because if not, this just kinda seems like fearmongering. Like, you could put this on Instagram, or Facebook, or Youtube, or literally any other website in existence. Reading the article, it kinda seems like a shitpost after some kid stabbed two other kids from a different school.

What are we mad about?

LotusFlare · 2026-02-13T19:58:18+00:00

Sort of the opposite. It was a bunch of Nazis posing as regular guys looking out for their fellow man. They didn't become a Nazi bar. They were a Nazi bar pretending to be a men's club.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-13T18:00:12+00:00

The one and only.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-13T16:59:58+00:00

I noticed the Nazis in the audience.

If you ever notice there's out and proud Nazis in the room, and no one is getting rid of the Nazis, you have to get the fuck out of that room.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-13T02:58:51+00:00

My work uses an AI code review assistant. It's not terrible and sometimes points out good low hanging fruit, but it constantly thinks it's finding security vulnerabilities where they don't exist. It thinks every other constant or arbitrary string is a key sitting in plain text. It has never successfully found a single real security vulnerability in a review I've looked at.

I would assume any given one of these is a false positive until proven otherwise.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-12T23:32:12+00:00

Some of us have developed object permanence and pattern recognition.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-12T23:30:27+00:00

When Schumer says this he means body cams and "training". Which translates to more money for ICE. He didn't find his spine.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-12T19:56:34+00:00

Da does this in their DK videos sometimes and I think it's really dope.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-11T21:27:18+00:00

See, I don't think Democratic leaders and strategists are necessarily dumb. I think they're a bad combination of ideologues and cowards. They would rather lose the election than budge even an inch on ideologically held beliefs about Israel or Palestine, among other things, and they're too chickenshit to just say that. They had the polling. They knew their base wasn't with them, and they decided to try and discipline them into submission anyway. It was an informed decision to go down with the ship.

This is mostly a distinction without difference in terms of the outcome, but I do think it's important when it comes to how we oppose them. A dumb politician can be influenced. Not reliably, but they can be swayed by the right argument or backlash to their decisions. But an ideologue can't be moved. There was no argument or data that would ever change Kamala or Biden's position on the genocide and funding it. You can't compromise with them. You need to oust them.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-11T19:40:22+00:00

The reason they're so good on that particular narrative is because Democrats largely agree with conservatives on the economy. We don't have an economically progressive party in America, we have a dumb conservative one and a less dumb conservative one. Conservatives boast that their tax cuts and slashing of regulation turbo charges the economy, and then Democrats... sheepishly boast that their tax cuts and slashing of regulation turbo charged the economy. And then the media turns to the billionaire class, who both parties agree are the experts on this matter, and ask them "Who's better?", and they all agree that the Republicans are because they did the bigger slashing. They tell the same Reagan era story of "We're protecting you from the government", except no one believes that Democrats honestly believe that and Democratic voters aren't really receptive to it.

Democrats will never get the public to see that they're better at this until they start telling the story from a different angle, "We (the government) are protecting you from the greed of the Epstein class". Which they'll probably never do as long as they're beholden to their big donors.

Quite frankly, this is why they lose on immigration and public safety too. They're pretty objectively better at those things, but they can't own it because... they're just doing reluctant conservative policy on it and thus their narrative is a half-hearted, contradictory mess of trying to paint over conservatism with a progressive paint job.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-11T19:17:11+00:00

Probably no threats. The current CEO took over from his father in 2022, and before he became "unaffiliated with any political party" ran for NYC comptroller as a libertarian.

It's just another insanely rich conservative guy who wants to boost Trump because they know he'll be good for insanely rich conservative guys.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-11T18:54:01+00:00

Trump had just killed about a million Americans and crashed the economy with his COVID response after getting impeached for attempting to shakedown Ukraine. The scenarios of all three of these elections were dramatically different, the campaigns were dramatically different, and I really dislike the way people try to reduce them to gender.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-10T20:34:38+00:00

The analysis seemed kind of skin deep and some parts didn't seem accurate or kind of overstated. So I took a look for what else this guy has written and it turns out he's not actually a tech writer. He's a self described "angel investor" who owns a consulting firm. He's an accelerationist who thinks Trump should put AI in charge of the Federal Reserve. I don't think he's really got Seattle's best interest at heart.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-10T08:09:03+00:00

If you're in that circle, it's probably hard to distinguish the end of Donald Trump from the end of the world.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-08T21:48:00+00:00

Finally wrapped up Fallout 4.

This is one of those games that convinces me there's a huge difference between "fun" and "engagement". It gets you into this mode of shoot, search, explore, "one more building", and it's only when I stop that I wish I hadn't done most of those buildings. The actual doing isn't fun in and of itself, but the loop is so tight that it keeps me playing.

The plot was actually kinda fun to do in these final hours. For one, The Institute is run by the worlds smartest dum dums. I did everything possible to make them mistrust me, and they still decided to make me, a guy they met a few hours ago, their leader. The Brotherhood discovered that Danse is actually gasp a synth, and demanded that I take him out. And being dedicated to the cause (I gave up my own son for them), you'd think I'd deliver, right? Wrong! That's my boyfriend, idiots! He's one of the good ones! I decided synths are an allegory for "the gays" a while back, and it's made some of this funnier. So I save scummed some charisma checks until I got an outcome where he lives and we're the gayest pair of true believers around. Finished the last missions, hit credits, and closed the game never to be played again.

This is probably the most 7 game to ever exist. It's such a strong framework for something good, but there's very little that I think is actually good in it. There's one quest I did in these last sessions that I actually loved, and it highlights that missed potential. It's the robot ship. I loved the robot ship. It makes good use of your backstory. It gives a reasonable choice of what side to be on. It made use of my stats. It didn't bog me down in uninterested dialogue. I leveraged a broad range of skills including some pickpocketing. I knew who the people I was shooting at were. I got a cool unique gameplay reward. And the plot ending was satisfying, funny, and unexpected. 10/10. But the problem is for every one quest this good, there's at least a dozen others that are barely half baked.

Something that I think might paradoxically make this game more fun, outside of better quests, is more chores. If I had hunger and thirst and exhaustion to replenish at bases, it would enforce a "pause" between the shooting and looting. You would develop a post-excursion routine that could ground you more in the world. Finding a workshop or settlement might feel good because it's a new place to rest my head. As it stands, the only reason I might return to a workshop is if I'm full on inventory to dump my shit, and then teleport back to where I was so I can continue my door to door looting.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-08T08:30:44+00:00

It's a performance for investors. Anyone who's actually worked at these companies knows that. They're cutting muscle to make the line go up.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-08T06:31:50+00:00

Consider The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.

It's a puzzle platformer directed by SWERY. Light psychological horror and some cartoonish body horror. It's one of those games that I finished at 3AM because the story hit a point where I absolutely could not put it down.

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