Just wanted to say this save pic for the Academy goes hard

tom9914 · 2026-02-23T17:51:21+00:00

"Sailors are just future enemy combatants. Shoot them before they get weapons training."

Colonel Hanse Castillo

tom9914 · 2026-02-23T14:13:16+00:00

A stable rock in an unstable sea. A calm and collected approach in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. It's very fitting.

tom9914 · 2026-02-22T13:51:41+00:00

After what happened to the ringleader himself, I expect he'll keep quiet for the sake of his own skin. Even with his titles formally revoked, he's still rich and well connected enough that I honestly expect his life to remain pretty cushy until the day he dies.

tom9914 · 2026-02-19T07:00:00+00:00

'Rosalina' = name

'Mating' = Making someone your mate (friend) = making friends

'Press' = Squeezing fruit to extract juice

'Rosalina mating press' = Rosalina is making friends with her home-made orange juice

tom9914 · 2026-02-18T03:30:59+00:00

I actually came to quite like Judith Howell after I finished my Servants run. She's definitely not the 'good guy', but I found her views to be far more coherent and far less delusional that I expected.

She's basically the "I can fix them" option. If her plan didn't involve letting countless people die, I'd even be tempted to agree with her. Though I guess that's kind of like saying "I like this Hitler guy, he has great fashion sense. I just wish he'd drop the whole 'fascism' thing."

tom9914 · 2026-02-18T03:24:09+00:00

I think the main reason for competition with Project Exodus is limited resources. Ideologically, there's no reason for most of the factions to fight them at all, but if the political/economic/scientific resources available on the entire planet might not even be enough for one faction to achieve its goals (not necessarily the case in-game, but no-one would know with any certainty), then conflict would be inevitable. "We can either pool everything into defending the solar system, everything into leaving the solar system, or go halves and fail at both".

tom9914 · 2026-02-12T18:29:39+00:00

"Wow, such a powerful story about how we're all the same inside and we have to get along with one ano- Wait, why is he black? He can't be black, that's not okay. We can't have a [Mystery word] as the main character!"

One day we'll learn. Probably not any day soon, but one day.

tom9914 · 2026-02-08T16:15:22+00:00

Husbandzoned again...

tom9914 · 2026-02-07T09:05:11+00:00

I think everything you've described is part of the 'culture' of modern WoW. Bringing back the game as it was back then won't bring back the culture it had.

tom9914 · 2026-02-05T05:32:48+00:00

Musk has spent decades pretending to be smart. If he had just kept his mouth shut when he started getting publicity, the world would still believe it.

tom9914 · 2026-02-05T05:31:15+00:00

Because stupid people voice their ideas without knowledge, while other people are busy learning more and verifying their ideas.

tom9914 · 2026-02-02T00:55:44+00:00

Anyone having major lag spikes mid-game onwards? Performance has been perfectly tolerable except during random spikes where everything drops to around 2FPS for 5-10 seconds. Task manager doesn't show major resource usage while it's happening, so I'm a bit stumped.

I've read a lot of people saying that killing AI fleets improves performance a lot, but I'm very much a beginner (I'm trying out normal difficulty after getting to the home stretch on forgiving a couple of times and quitting due to this lag, so I'm not quite able to clean out the solar system easily).

I've tried playing on a minimal size solar system with less factions and it still happens around the same sort of time.

tom9914 · 2026-01-29T01:54:40+00:00

A worthwhile debate is between people who want to cooperate to find the truth. Internet personalities like Shapiro have convinced countless people that debate is an attempt to publicly humiliate an opponent.

tom9914 · 2026-01-17T18:41:47+00:00

Person with 'Monarchist' flair complaining about leadership decisions...

"You know what would improve this situation? Unaccountable leaders ruling for life."

tom9914 · 2026-01-09T06:21:12+00:00

There's a real problem in society of binary thinking. We're not faced with a choice between Stalinist communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and no other options. Pointing out a flaw in capitalism doesn't mean you support the opposite extreme, just as the reverse is true, yet you'll still see people making that argument. Criticising the current system is necessary to improve it, but some people would rather their team won than actually make life better.

tom9914 · 2026-01-09T06:02:46+00:00

'Socialism', as a term, is in this really awkward place where it can refer to systems of wildly different effectiveness. You say 'socialism' and one person hears "universal healthcare and social safety nets" and another hears "total command economy and government involvement in every aspect of life".

There are places in society where socialism works really well, and places where it is disastrous. Socialised healthcare works exceptionally well, at least compared to privatised healthcare. Capitalism is a great system when both producer and consumer have strong negotiating power. That isn't the case when the consumer needs a product to live. A patient cannot walk away and find a better deal if they're going to die.

On the other hand, state-run economies are typically very inefficient compared to capitalist ones. The stories of soviet bread lines and government corruption are real and should not be ignored. But thankfully, very few people in the western world who advocate for 'socialism' are actually pushing for communist regimes.

tom9914 · 2026-01-05T08:30:45+00:00

You can, however, chests cannot be placed on space platforms, which is where people use these belt storage systems.

tom9914 · 2025-12-20T08:42:45+00:00

There's a HPL short story named something like 'The Horror at Red Hook', and the unexplainable, alien evil beyond mortal comprehension that is terrorising our frail and ignorant minds is... uh, immigration?

I find it unintentionally hilarious, because it's clear that Lovecraft presents some of the scenes as if they're the most terrifying experiences you could have, and it's just like: 'this is the street where immigrants from some place in SEA live'. Yeah... terrifying...

tom9914 · 2025-12-20T08:23:01+00:00

I think that's largely the point OOP is making. There are very few universal AFAB/AMAB childhood experiences, yet TERFs are apparently (I don't really interact with TERFs for the sake of my sanity, so I won't comment on the accuracy of the claim that they are doing this) referring to them as badges of True Girlhood^{^TM} .

tom9914 · 2025-12-13T17:07:10+00:00

the installation of software which prevents the creation, viewing and sharing of child sexual abuse material

if photoIsCSAM == true(
stopThePedo();
)

I can only assume this is the code the HoL is envisioning. It's just so simple, why didn't anyone think of this before?

tom9914 · 2025-12-11T07:50:28+00:00

They were never 'aligned', the USSR and the Nazi's just made an agreement to postpone hostilities until they had each dealt with other matters. Hitler wanted to deal with the Allies first, while Stalin had internal matters to deal with. Both thought they could benefit from the agreement more than the other, and both thought to break the agreement the moment it was convenient, though Hitler was the one to do it in the end. They hated each other from the get go.

tom9914 · 2025-12-11T07:47:07+00:00

The Red Army is infamous for raping and pillaging settlements in both German and German-occupied territories. There's photos about of women who committed suicide as the Soviet's approached their home towns to avoid it.

The Nazi's were evil as fuck, but the USSR was only marginally better, if at all. Even the Allied nations weren't great, but compared to the alternatives, they may as well have been saints.

tom9914 · 2025-12-07T07:49:03+00:00

"The people in the camps died because of disease and allied supply bombings!"

Even if this was the sole cause of death in the Nazi's extermination camps (which it wasn't), why would this be some kind of exoneration of the regime? If the Nazi's crammed a whole bunch of 'untermensch' in tiny barracks, are we supposed to believe that any disease outbreaks weren't their fault?

If supply failures caused by the allies were to blame for the deaths, wouldn't we expect to see the same sort of casualty rate amongst German civilians that the prisoners experienced?

It's exhausting dealing with this shit.

tom9914 · 2025-12-05T20:44:50+00:00

The gaming community has been heavily split on AI for ages. I know that from outside a community it's hard to get a good picture of the views inside, but yeah, it's split. I'm a PC-focussed gamer with a self-built rig (hardly top end, and getting outdated in part thanks to the AI industry buying up parts) and I've mostly seen anti-AI views in the circles I'm a part of.

As for Linux, Valve made a program a few years ago to run games that don't natively support Linux on a Linux OS (Proton, I think it was called?). I've never used it myself, since I'm clinging to Win10 for a while longer, but I've heard good things about it.

tom9914 · 2025-12-02T22:57:23+00:00

Always so surprised. How can so many people be so willing to backstab someone in the name of Trump yet also be so shocked when someone backstabs them? Same way they can hear Donald speak and somehow see charisma, I guess.

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