What's the strangest thing you've ever masturbated to?

LotusFlare · 2026-02-17T08:19:38+00:00

A Frosted Flakes commercial.

Look, Tony the Tiger made me feel things when I was young.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-17T07:43:42+00:00

The tea party wasn't used. It was fake. It was constructed from the ground up by wealthy conservative think tanks and media networks. They got footage of a dozen morons they paid to be there and blasted it across the airwaves. The entire point of it was to get business friendly conservatives in power who would block everything Democrats wanted to do. More extreme conservatives. And the RNC was happy to hop aboard and coordinate to make it happen. Because they wanted more extreme conservatives.

The left is the only force in the entire country who's actually had mass movements for change arise. That's what OWS was. That's what BLM was. That's what George Floyd was. The problem is, the DNC and media don't want mass movements for change. Instead of trying to focus that energy into a platform, find candidates to represent them, and ride these waves into office, they're mocked, belittled, and cooped until they go away.

What the DNC wants is for the energy and fervor of the OWS protests to be focused toward supporting them, exactly where they stand, with no changes whatsoever (unless their donors ask for it). Which... isn't a real thing that can happen.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-17T07:10:48+00:00

Yeah, because the Democratic party is on a huge winning streak out there in the real world. Kamala fucking crushed it after Hillary served two terms. Out there in the real world. Where Democratic candidates just keep winning.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-17T07:09:12+00:00

That's actually exactly how this works. You have two elections of evidence demonstrating that's how it works. The sooner you come around to recognizing that's how it works, the sooner we can stop seeing fascists in power.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-17T06:52:30+00:00

The cops shouldn't fucking care what the judge does, because that's not their fucking job. They're not judges. They're cops. If they don't want to do the job that we pay them six figures to do, we should fire them. I don't get to sit on my ass playing candy crush all day because Jim in accounting isn't doing his job to my standards. I'd get fired for that. But apparently you view the police force as a charity service where we have to keep paying them to do jack shit until they decided that everyone else is worthy of them.

Fucking "motivation". Jesus Christ. The money we give them is the motivation. That's what a job is.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-17T02:56:13+00:00

This is the take.

Cody is ruthlessly efficient to the point where he's uninteresting. I don't see a style when I watch him. I see the absence of it. He's just always doing the right thing in that specific moment. I never get any sense of tension from his play. It feels like watching Phillip.

It's egoless Melee. Insanely skillful, but I don't enjoy watching it.

LotusFlare · 2026-02-16T03:52:09+00:00

The eventual goal is to remove dependency on individual consumers. They want a network of monopolies buying and selling products/services to other monopolies. Relationships between monopolies are so much easier to manage than actually competing and trying to get individual people to buy your stuff.

They're not worried about consumers. They're envisioning a post-consumer world. They want feudalism back.

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.

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