“But experts argue mass deportations are unlikely in the short term”

Okay, but like. Long term planning is a thing. The long term is in fact something you need to consider in the present, especially for an action that you might only have a limited window to undertake

Best of luck, guys.

I know that doing things that can eliminate a political opposition are incredibly ethically sensitive, but it’s demonstrably the correct choice here. I just wish that it wasn’t a choice that had to be made. How are these far right parties getting so many votes? Where have we failed?

This is a pretty outstanding Dipshit Move, even by the standards of Trump. And a good 90% of his actions seem stupid to the point of being actively malicious anyways.

Boris Johnson robbed my country blind; his party’s Austerity sold off and destroyed our public infrastructure and services to such a terrible degree that it’s unlikely the UK will recover within my lifetime if at all, and that’s BEFORE you get into the truly devastating consequences imposed on us by Brexit, or the fact his verbatim orders to handle covid were “Let the bodies pile high in the streets!”. All to line the pockets of him and his billionaire shitbag friends.

…So it is with some regret that I say: I can’t argue with this statement.

Boris Johnson has a similar fascination, you see. This guy wants to be Winston Churchill sooooooooo badly. You would not believe how hard BJ wishes he could be a modern Churchill. It was an open secret that the russian government had some pretty solid influence over Boris, a lot of rumours about them having dirt on his father in particular- and many reasonable and well-founded theories that Boris pushed Brexit through at the behest of Putin. But Boris Johnson saw the war in Ukraine start and he changed overnight. He certainly didn’t give up any of his vices or become a better person, god no, not at all. But he had stars in his eyes at the prospect of going down in history as a big and strong and heroic wartime leader studied in history books, and for that reason, he absolutely jumped at the prospect of helping Ukraine. Zero hesitation.

What I’m saying is that I genuinely believe Ukraine represents Boris Johnson’s lifelong dreams as a human being. And for that reason even if Boris is a terrible person who is certainly prone to bias, he has every intention of supporting Ukraine as much as he can- hence his willingness to speak against someone that he was previously very close with.

Even as a dedicated pokemon fan that hasn’t played Palworld (the butchering mechanics don’t really appeal to me)…

I really hope Nintendo loses this, and loses it HARD. I think that some actual competition would be really healthy for the pokemon franchise, giving them an actual impetus to make sure their games are high-quality and well-supported and don’t pursue serious anti-consumer practices.

Godspeed, Palworld. Counting on you.

Megalovania

I’ve had some issues with Invidious being unable to play specific videos once or twice, but the issues tend to go away after a couple of days.

I mean, we know Google and Youtube are both multi-billion-dollar corporations that are absolutely enraged by the idea that there could be any possible way for a commoner pleb like you to NOT have your online experience absolutely crammed with as many privacy violations and hyper-targeted ads as possible. Invidious having to constantly stay ahead of such powerful entities’ attempts to block them out means that some errors and periods of downtime are perfectly excusable- what’s important is continuing to support them in their fight.

Nobody’s ever accused me of being smart! But hey, at least I’m honest

Insanely true, I didn’t give a shit about 90% of the features on my new phone once my old one broke down and I got a Pixel 8, but I was delighted to go from a worn-out 12 hour battery life to a 64 hour battery life. I would actively like to uninstall any sort of current AI function from my phone if it could increase my battery longevity by even 1%.

Also: ew, Apple.

Edit: Really annoyed it doesn’t have a headphone jack though

People really need to understand that for 3rd party candidates to actually be viable then they need a dedicated support base within the existing government structure.

You can’t realistically vote in a 3rd party president until you’ve first built up an actually effective support structure of 3rd party mayors, senators, and other politicians to prove that your party can function effectively in government rolls and that it has the reach, policies and platform to actually appeal to voters at large.

(On god we need Ranked Choice voting though. Here in the UK and in America. Fuck First Past The Post, all my homies hate FPTP)

Ooh, very nice! I’ve visited the country once, and ever since that visit whenever I taste dill I’m instantly transported back there. You guys have some really underrated good food!

Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive games… Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite…

Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.

Oddjob is banned. No exceptions.

Yeah, checks out. I’m just a UK guy, but when the Tories were all having a media circus about “Oh inflation is done now, we’ve stopped inflation, the cost of living crisis is done!”, I mean… no amount of lying to my face is going to stop me going to the shops and wanting to scream when I see the price of Everything has jumped up by 20% again.

I can’t imagine that’s any different at all in China. You just can’t really hide something as objective as the cost of a bar of chocolate.

Now that’s really interesting! I wonder where I can go to see this stuff…

I don’t rightfully know, but my heart says “The hotwheels logo”

It’s pretty modern if you mean popular, although the idea itself is REALLY old.

Rather than going into specific examples because there are a lot of them (especially in gaming and TV), I’d like to say my piece on cliches.

Basically, cliches come to exist because the cliche trope is a really good idea.

“The Butler did it” as a murder mystery trope is a fantastic idea because some people with too much money will use the protection money affords them to mistreat their employees, providing a great motive you can build on to create a great story with relatable morals and characters. It sets up a character with perfect motives, means and a reasonable position of trust to avoid suspicion.

Similarly, “Hell good, Heaven bad” is a fantastic trope because it lets you step back and analyse things like the negative impacts of religion and how authorities (and the bible) will portray themselves as good regardless of their actual actions. Plus of course there were periods of time where people were told doing virtually anything that didn’t fit into an extremely narrow worldview meant you were going to hell. You know, stuff like basketball and Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, the problem with cliches is when someone sees a popular idea that’s also a very good idea, but doesn’t understand why it was a good idea. As a result, when they use the idea, it rings hollow at absolute best, and that kind of terrible execution of something that’s already known and popular tends to be especially disappointing. I think the best example is The Hunger Games, which absolutely defined young adult dystopian fiction for years because it showed how the media industry mistreats its workers, and Alleigant, which used a lot of ideas from Hunger Games (and some other things) without actually understanding the ideas.

(TLDR: Hunger Games has a love triangle as a prominent plot element, but the actual reason is that it’s perpetuated by the media pretty much on pain of death for Katniss so that she can entertain the viewers. By contrast, Alleigant also has a love triangle but the triangle IS the plot element and the author bends over backwards to make it happen despite the fact none of the characters really feel like they’re suitable for it)

Anyways, cliches aren’t bad but you need to know how, why, and when to use them in order to actually fulfil their potential, and the heaven-hell one you’ve mentioned above is no exception.

Gonna say it, this REALLY feels like a case of the news cherry-picking what parts of a protest they show. Between the unreasonable viewpoint that’s directly adjacent to a very sensible and popular viewpoint and the fact we KNOW the media have a very vested interest in trying to push pro-genocide narratives (such as anti-Israel protests being pro-terrorist)…

Yeah, even someone as gullible as me? I’m not buying this.

Oh yeah Bethesda’s actual valuable talents just straight up don’t exist anymore.

Basically it’s a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I’m aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn’t have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda’s games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on ‘permanent hire’ wages instead of ‘shitty short contract’ wages).

But it gets worse. A lot worse.

See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don’t have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part

Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it’s also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren’t talking to each other… well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.

I’m sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.