This made me start uncontrollably weeping. Not for the performances by the trans representatives, but because all I have been seeing for the last 8 years is a downward spiral of our dehumanization. Then to see this number of Republican reps change their vote in a really unexpected place… This was really important. All we can hope for is that they don’t backslide. I don’t dare hope that this means any of their hearts have truly changed.

The thing about Death Stranding I wanted to see more of had nothing to do with its core gameplay, but actually the side mechanic of being able to build things that other players could use. Like, we all love Dark Souls messages and how entertaining and sometimes helpful those can be. But there was something incredible about the design of being able to build a bridge that other players in other single-player games could also use. That was really special. The rest was kinda pretentious garbage and more-movie-than-game.

There are too many people on the Internet (and likely also generally the world) who don’t know how successful sex strikes have historically been, and it shows.

The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.

But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:

1. Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
2. Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.

It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.

I’m reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It’s perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford