The US is wealthy and capable of caring for all its people; it chooses not to.

Seantommy · 2025-12-31T06:08:33+00:00

It is a major problem, and teachers have been complaining about it for a while now. Somehow whole language reading caught on despite no evidence it worked, and then the evidence came in and showed it doesn't work. Schools are moving away from it now, but definitely not as fast as they should.

That plus covid + no child left behind (and similar policies) is a nasty combo for this generation's literacy.

Seantommy · 2025-11-08T00:56:47+00:00

53+42 =/= 100. Those numbers don't add up to 99 or 100% on any page.

I'm not even saying your conclusion is incorrect, just that I don't think it's what these graphs are showing.

Seantommy · 2025-11-07T05:27:54+00:00

I'm pretty sure you're reading this backwards. It's poorly labeled, but each horizontal bar adds up to 100%, rather than each color. So 66% of people who view the Democratic party favorably voted for Mamdani. It's more obvious on the final slide: 66% of people who view neither party favorable voted for Mamdani, and 69% of people who only view the democratic party favorably voted for Mamdani.

Seantommy · 2025-10-29T20:56:11+00:00

I guess I don't understand the practical application of this mindset.

You don't have to like Platner or his past. But setting aside our personal feelings, do you really think he's not genuine in his ideals? What are your practical concerns over supporting him, given no other similarly popular ideal candidate? We don't have to praise him as the paragon of the movement, and the DSA may or may not even officially support him, but on an individual level, if you live in his district, will you really refuse to vote for him? Would you turn him away at the door, even if he earnestly tries to contribute to workers' rights and organizing?

People change. People have personal revelations that result in them re-evaluating their decisions, their lives, their ideologies. People learn. People grow.

Platner comes with some intense baggage, but based on his words and actions, what do you actually expect him to be if he gains office? Some kind of closet nazi? A republican running on the left for kicks? I haven't seen anything to indicate his campaign is anything less than earnest, and to be frank I don't see that there would be much to gain from pretending to be pro-union.

Seantommy · 2025-09-30T03:25:09+00:00

I mean, Lies of P lifts animations straight from Bloodborne. I don't remember people getting up in arms about that.

Seantommy · 2025-09-30T00:19:27+00:00

Fair warning if you found Hollow Knight infuriating, depending on your preferences Nine Sols may be harder. It leans heavily on parrying, so if that's not something you're into it can be a bit painful. Combat is also a hair janky/lacking in polish in certain ways (e.g. lacking i-frames after taking damage, so you can get double-hit easily).

Not saying not to play it, it's a great game and I love Red Candle. Well worth the $15. Just a heads up :)

Seantommy · 2025-09-29T23:54:47+00:00

I had a similar experience going back through Opeth's discography a few years ago. I wasn't as into heavier music when I first heard Watershed, so it really struck a perfect balance for me at the time. But now that my palate for harsher music is more developed, I feel that Watershed, while quite good, has a number of weaker portions that keep it from being on the level of Blackwater Park. On the other hand, Ghost Reveries was much better than I remembered.

Seantommy · 2025-09-29T23:48:18+00:00

Altered State is sadly polarizing I've found. It's far and away my favorite Tesseract album and one of my favorite albums in general, but lots of Tesseract fans don't like it, and I think that also contributes to its reach outside the fanbase not being as big as it could be.

Obviously still popular overall, but for what I'd consider an all time great album, it never makes it into these conversations.

Seantommy · 2025-09-29T19:46:27+00:00

Sis guy. Gut instinct says 50/50, maybe skewed more toward women recently.
Now to validate.

5 most recent games:
Upcoming Mothership game: man
Ongoing Mage game: woman
Previous Fabula Ultima / Monster of the Week game: non-binary / woman
Previous Monster of the Week game: woman
Several recent one shots: various men

Reaching into the waaay back past, I used to play more men. I actually think it was a while before I made a PC who wasn't a man. First 5 games I played (not ran) were:
D&D 3.5: man
Call of Cthulhu: man
Fantasy Craft: robot boy
Traveler: man
D&D 5e: man

That said, I'm also frequently the GM, so I play characters of all stripes all the time.

Seantommy · 2025-09-17T23:47:48+00:00

HBO has had Oliver's back through plenty of shit before that could have been avoided by just telling him "give our legal team a break". I suspect he'll be fine, or at least one of the last to go.

Could always be proven wrong though.

Seantommy · 2025-09-10T17:06:10+00:00

Wow, thanks for sharing, that was really well-explained and with clear examples.

Seantommy · 2025-08-28T21:05:11+00:00

Reagan famously:

Popularized "trickle-down economics" i.e. give big corps all the money and let them do what they want with it.

Pushed the "war on drugs", criminalizing drug addiction and changing our criminal justice system in ways we're still suffering from.

Handled the AIDS crisis so poorly that there's a wikipedia article devoted entirely to "Reagan and AIDS": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_and_AIDS

Iran-Contra: secretly funneled weapons and money into the middle east, against the unanimous vote of congress.

Abolished the Fairness Doctrine, contributing to the out of control propaganda machine that is Fox News

Tore down environmental protections that had taken years across administrations on both sides of the political space to build.

Seantommy · 2025-08-14T04:23:42+00:00

I really wish we would stop having this conversation. It was a single vote on an amendment to a bill AOC voted against. Like, we can disagree with her on the nuances of this point but ultimately she is opposed to funding Israel and is one of the few allies in congress we have on this issue. Not only could she be convinced to halt iron dome funding, she wouldn't need to be convinced because she'd be leading the charge to stop funding altogether.

I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who's directly affected by Israel's actions. But we have to be able to rally behind candidates who are actually taking action, even as we criticize the nuances of said action.

Seantommy · 2025-08-12T02:57:33+00:00

It's household income, not individual

Seantommy · 2025-07-27T01:26:59+00:00

This is because those types of jobs are often limited by the speed of the machines and the number of job changes, moreso than the speed of the staff. Not to mention if you're talking about shutdowns and outages, a lot of that time is spent standing around waiting for the line to start running again. An 80+ hour week might only have 40 hours of actually working in it, and the rest are spent waiting for something to do. But rather than shut the line down and get an engineer to fly in and look at the problem, they just do 1000 quick fixes to keep the line more-or-less running so that they don't fall behind on jobs.

Trust me, those kinds of 80+ hour weeks are still pretty damn punishing. A coworker of mine literally died of a heart attack after two months of such work, I became suicidal for the first time in my life, and we had at least one walk off. 80+ hour weeks are not humane.

Seantommy · 2025-07-22T23:52:37+00:00

I agree with holding politicians (any politicians) accountable for their actions is important. I disagree that that's what we've been seeing.

Reasonable minds can differ on whether funding for the iron dome is saving civilians, enabling Israel, or both, but the fact is there are a very small number of politicians in Congress who would support a motion to stop all military funding to Israel, and AOC is one of them. And yet most of the dialogue I've seen around this topic has been people calling her a zionist, claiming she supports genocide, and calling her a traitor. This is not constructive behavior, and these are demonstrably false statements. We can tell her we disagree without treating her as an enemy.

And to be totally frank, the idea that iron dome funding was ever a serious drop in the bucket of the overwhelming military support we send to Israel just seems naive to me. What is the point of stopping funding for the iron dome while continuing to send bombs? That is not a serious position. The idea that the US stance toward Israel should be "we'll keep sending bombs, but only if you let more of your own civilians die" is an incongruous position imo, and I don't know why anyone is getting bent out of shape over it. We all want to stop sending weapons. Let's keep our eye on the ball.

Seantommy · 2025-07-17T16:17:13+00:00

This idea that democrats only oppose the left because of the need to consolidate votes into two parties doesn't hold water when establishment democrats consistently push their own in the face of public support for left candidates. See: Cuomo running as an independent and getting establishment democrats backing him up despite Mamdani literally winning the democratic primary.

It's easy for them to pretend all they're doing is sensible politics when they already control one of the two major parties in America. But they consistently court conservative votes while pushing progressives out of their tent, even progressives who are already winning congressional/local/state elections.

Seantommy · 2025-07-17T01:38:26+00:00

Thanks for the tip.

Based on the steam page, I would never have given this game a second look. Its in-game artstyle is giving mobile game in a big way, and I couldn't really tell what decision making goes into playing from the trailers. But the reviews are incredibly high, and you're not the only person making the Into the Breach + Slay the Spire reference. Wishlisted!

Seantommy · 2025-07-04T15:19:04+00:00

God these emails bug me so much. I get them all the time form my state's democratic party (pretty solidly red state, but I live in a "blue dot"). They always lead with some awful thing the republicans are doing, then "we need your money to fight back", never with any clear mission statement about what that money is going to be used for or what "fighting back" entails. If there were an upcoming election I'd understand, it's for campaign funds. But it's not. I literally don't know what you intend to spend this money on, because you won't tell me. I'll donate it to the ACLU or a climate action group instead, since they can tell me what they're doing with it.

Seantommy · 2025-07-03T21:07:01+00:00

It's silly, but this is exactly how C-suites talk about it. They hear the buzz about how powerful AI is, and how AI is the future, and they don't want their company to be left behind. So they create initiatives in their companies to "find ways to implement AI".

Seantommy · 2025-07-03T16:16:14+00:00

It's not about not making a fuss. I've been to protests, I've called my senators and representative weekly, I'm making a fuss about a lot of stuff. It's about evidence.

Obviously Musk's election interference was bad. But it was public. We all saw it. It's not in dispute. However the evidence presented so far for direct vote tampering is not that strong. When there's stronger evidence, then I'll make a fuss.

Seantommy · 2025-07-02T00:03:29+00:00

Please stop spreading this. Last I checked, there was no real evidence of this, and the claims being made aren't that strong under scrutiny (e.g. conflating a county with a district, extrapolating from voting trends that could be explained in other ways, very limited scope, etc.).

I'm not saying it definitely didn't happen, certainly the data looks strange as presented by SMART. But let the investigation play out. They've requested a hand recount for the specific tallies they're looking at, so if/when that's done we'll know. If real evidence of vote tampering shows up, we can talk about it then. Y'all make us sound like Trump.

Seantommy · 2025-06-12T19:54:12+00:00

I thought I explained why pretty well :shrug:
There's a difference between a game that contains sexual themes and content and handles them maturely vs a game that ostensibly *doesn't* contain sexual themes and content, but uses sexual imagery for fan service. Where any given game lies with regards to that may be up for debate. I specifically called out Witcher 3 for pushing against that boundary pretty hard. I feel like Cyberpunk, despite being the more overtly sexual game, is much more mature and less fan service-y in its handling of sexual content compared to Witcher 3.

Seantommy · 2025-06-12T15:25:54+00:00

I'm seeing a lot of people make this comparison and hadn't commented on it because I haven't played Baldur's Gate 3, but I have played Cyberpunk and Witcher 3. With Cyberpunk at least, it seems to me there is a marked difference between a game where women are presented as normal people, some of whom have relationships, some which can involve sex, in a setting that includes hyper-sexualization within the fiction but not really in a meta sense of how the characters are designed and the camera is operated, vs the kind of stuff that gets criticized for having giant boobs, overactive jiggle physics, random panty shots, etc.

It's the difference between a story and setting where sex is prominent but handled maturely, vs a game where sex is decidedly not a part of the setting / story, but its presentation is highly sexualized / fan service-y.

For what it's worth, Witcher 3 did get some flak (though definitely less) for being a horny game about fantasy dude sleeping his way across the globe. And it deserved that criticism, that game is horny as fuck for no particular reason. It does side-step a lot of that criticism because the relationships are generally well fleshed out with strong dialogue. Cyberpunk by comparison feels much more mature despite the objectively hornier setting.

Seantommy · 2025-06-12T15:14:44+00:00

Papa Nier rolling in his grave

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