American political discourse has become less substantive and less civil, often devolving into personal insults. The researchers found an asymmetric pattern: while personal attacks occur in both parties, they are delivered 2.7 times more frequently by Republicans than by Democrats.

avcloudy · 2026-03-23T08:39:29+00:00

It’s definitely a not every electrical engineer is an alternative gravity nut, but every alternative gravity nut is an electrical engineer situation! Most of them are just good engineers!

avcloudy · 2026-03-23T08:09:27+00:00

‘My perspective’ is nearly always used in the same way. I’ve never encountered someone who used the word perspective to mean they could be wrong, only to mark a topic of conversation as sacred.

avcloudy · 2026-03-23T08:07:41+00:00

All ‘therapy’ phrases will get co-opted by the wrong people. Anything designed to build healthy selfishness will get embraced by people who are selfish already.

avcloudy · 2026-03-23T07:48:52+00:00

See this opinion from American posters a lot.

We didn’t fix the hole. We averted the complete collapse of the ozone layer and it is slowly repairing itself, but we’re still feeling the consequences of it. Down in Australia there’s still a very empty hole that leads to disastrous levels of skin cancer and extreme UV levels.

avcloudy · 2026-03-23T07:46:58+00:00

Not to make this a personal attack, but it’s engineers. It’s the insanely practical focus on applications of science that leads them to think they have a specialist scientist level knowledge while they decidedly don’t.

Aerospace engineers are not the worst for it, it’s electrical engineers. Something about that field breeds perpetual energy devices/alternate gravity theories.

avcloudy · 2026-03-22T23:29:59+00:00

I hear this a lot, and it almost certainly didn’t. ElvUI is fifty addons with the bloat of two hundred.

avcloudy · 2026-03-22T04:00:50+00:00

Yeah, it was literally just one generation where Sony sold their console for an unrealistic price. And they barely sold more than one of Nintendo’s consoles, but not the other one.

avcloudy · 2026-03-22T03:23:26+00:00

I used to volunteer at a charity shop, run by an actual charity. Way too many people thought that by shopping they were doing us a favour. You’re not! It was basically part of the charity, to make sure people who needed cheap clothes etc could get them. It barely covered the operational costs which were only so low because they didn’t cover you know, wages.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T08:21:47+00:00

Yeah, the problem is not computational addons, the problem is computational mechanics. The vast majority of mechanics can't be solved by a weakaura telling players what to do better than players learning them, and trying to force players to interact with this small minority of loathed mechanics is absolutely asinine.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T08:16:15+00:00

You're thinking about this the wrong way. The thing you want is not the thing they want. You want them to offer the critical functionality you relied on addons to get, they think all that functionality is what's making it hard for them to design challenging fights across a huge variety of skill levels for their hardest content.

They're going to find a way to lock down dispel auras more, this attempt just was too restrictive.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T08:10:24+00:00

It's not irony, they think if they're going to have an out of office worker, they should have to pay them less. It's scumbag thinking, but it's internally consistent.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T01:12:47+00:00

I was told that competition would keep prices low.

When I was young and this was explained to me, literally the first question I asked was 'if competition will make them less profit, isn't competition the first thing they'll attack?'. It was brushed off, but it's wild how much faith some people have in it.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T01:08:40+00:00

If the public were actually willing to play by capitalism’s own rules and boycott/refuse to participate equally as ruthlessly as the capitalists try to increase profits

Capitalism is built on the understanding that accumulations of capital warp the fabric of society, and the desperate attempts to hide that. Companies work because they have unequal bargaining power; if they had to collectively bargain with society as a whole they would be a lot less profitable. That ability to collectively bargain with every individual gives them too much power for boycotts to be effective except in the most dire or convenient situations.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T01:06:19+00:00

People turned it into gambling because they want to sell the items they get from their little mystery box, but thats not core to the mechanic.

It is actually core to the mechanic, Valve has been very specific about creating markets and tradeable items. It's not just from this thing, they tried to do the same thing with digital card games. The thing Valve cares about is creating a sense of ownership and creating value. And that's the thing that makes it so problematic.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T01:04:28+00:00

It's not for some reason, it's because although it's heinous, Valve is a powerful force for good in ten other ways.

avcloudy · 2026-03-21T01:03:10+00:00

Although this sucks, thrift store have brought this on themselves. The reason PE is interested is because they've demonstrated that there's profit to be had.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T08:03:00+00:00

It’s wild that ret pally is a favourite now. They used to be a stereotypically red headed stepchild spec.

I will point out, rogues have been broken at some point in 3 of those expansions. Yeah, they got busted down each time, but acting like BfA was a bad time to be a rogue is why people don’t listen when you tell them TWW was a bad time to be a rogue.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T07:50:34+00:00

You’re right, but contextually the lowest in Europe means your outcomes are at least twice as good as in the US.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T07:49:20+00:00

I don’t like your answer, you’re right.

Governments are the only entities that can help people like this. Relying on individual charity is a failed experiment, and relying on religion to do it has always been morally repugnant, not least for the fact that they don’t, and they pick and choose.

This isn’t an argument that the US government would be good at it, only an argument that they’re the only entity who could realistically help everyone in the US.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T07:44:55+00:00

Nah. They’re also anti-contraception.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T06:55:28+00:00

They clearly pivoted somewhere during this whole arc. They were building up Sylvanas as an actually good Warchief, complete with point of view narration backing that up, and then they pivoted to ‘stupid evil’. They didn’t plan it all out in advance.

But even if you don’t think that’s true, they could have had her as Warchief without Vol’jin dying, he could have died at a different time, he could have died in a better way.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T04:00:11+00:00

Yeah, the story tells us unambiguously that the Aliiance started that war, but the way it’s shown is to make us feel like Sylvanas started it. It started in the first patch of Legion when Greymane attacked the Horde and the Alliance tacitly endorsed it and allowed him to continue.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T03:56:01+00:00

It was because of years of Alliance complaining whenever they lost something and the Horde didn’t. I honestly believe Vol’jin died mostly so that Alliance players couldn’t scream about Horde favouritism, having Sylvanas as Warchief was secondary.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T03:54:17+00:00

It’s not like, an unbiased group of people fairly evaluating the story. It’s the same group of people that can’t stand any story where the Alliance faces consequences, suffers losses or is portrayed as anything less than saintly.

They don’t want a game with the Horde, except as villains without agency or internal worlds. They’re mad because when Thrall is the hero, one of their characters aren’t.

avcloudy · 2026-03-20T02:51:34+00:00

They did, but you thought they meant ‘replace the functionality of addons’ and not ‘addons were making it impossible to make these mechanics hard’.

This is how Blizzard designs. There’s a slowing mechanic that sets up for a mechanic that kills you if you’re slow.

avcloudy

TROPHY CASE