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  • 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I originally posted this half a year ago. Now it’s even more true:

    Our political system is an old, poorly maintained computer that sits at your grandparents’ house. It’s so clogged up with malware it can’t function and the scammers and botnets are doing whatever they want with it. It’s the only computer that your family has access to, and technically it’s supposed to be shared but in practice your grandparents only let you use it when they’re out of the house. Your grandparents don’t understand it and think it “runs fine” and are more scared you’re going to put commie or terrorist stuff on it than they are about the huge amount of viruses and spyware it’s already clogged up with. Your parents are too tired from working 3 jobs just to survive to care about it or pay attention to it and they “don’t use it anyway” so trying to get their help fixing it is useless.

    You know that the ONLY WAY to fix this situation is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall, but grandma is worried she’d lose all her emails and grandpa says if there’s something wrong with it, he’ll fix it. You do see him messing around in settings all the time, but he clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing. He also talks to “Microsoft tech support” a couple times a week and sends them money. You’ve told him it’s a scam and he told you to “Shut up, you don’t know anything about computers.”

    This isn’t even an analogy… it’s literally what’s happening. Legal systems are just complex code that runs on human beings. The constitution is the kernel, the US govt and all it’s bureaucracies are the OS and you could even think of the states as containers or virtual environments that run within the context of the bigger system. The OS has been completely hijacked by scammers (no, seriously, I’ve done subcontracting for big defence contractors), the users with the power to fix things don’t understand, don’t have the skills to fix it and are more scared of the people who want to fix the system than they are of the scammers. The other users who could help deal with the situation are too exhausted and burned out to care.

    EDIT:

    To really finish off this analogy, it needs to be added that your stupid little brother and his shitty friends ALSO use this computer to troll, harass girls and “nerds” they know from school and go on 4Chan. If you bring up reinstalling, your brother and ALL HIS FRIENDS dogpile into the conversation saying THEY want to reinstall too and that 4Chan says Hannah Montana Linux is the best OS to use… and they have a USB stick right here.



  • This is 100% a scene from a Witcher game.

    • Geralt rushes in to save girl.
    • Girl turns out to be sorceress.
    • Geralt and sorceress kill monster.

    Post fight dialogue options :

    • Insult sorceress (she leaves)
    • Demand payment (acquire magic sword, she leaves)
    • Name drop Triss and / or Yennifer (unlock “Sorceress needs help with random bullshit” quest. Complete quest -> acquire magic sword)
    • Hit on sorceress (acquire magic sword, unlock “Sorceress needs help with random bullshit” quest. Complete quest -> Bang sorceress)

  • My wife has a genetic disorder that (among many other things) causes her spine to herniate at the drop of a hat. She’s had to have emergency surgery multiple times.

    About a year and a half ago, a neurosurgeon was operating on her and came to talk to me and my mom who were waiting. She was extremely excited, in that like “academic who just saw something new” kind of way, because my wife had the third biggest herniation she’d ever seen, and the largest in a patient under 70 (my wife was 34 at the time). She asked if it would be OK if she invited a professor from the local university and a couple of his grad students to come look at it.






  • They could actually make this work.

    • Have a recruitable Volus biotic warrior who you pick up in a nightclub and has romance dialog options.

    • They go hang out in some big room on the ship, like a cargo hold.

    • If you choose the romance options, more Volus just start showing up on your ship with no explanation. Like the next time you go in the cargo hold there’s another one, then two more, then you start seeing them in the mess hall, engineering, medbay…

    • There’s either dialogue options to ask what’s going on (and kick them off the ship) OR there’s more romance dialog options, but you can’t do both!

    • If you keep choosing romance options, they eventually all show up in your room at the same time. It turns out that when Volus take a new partner, their whole extended polycule is allowed to vote on whether or not they approve of the new person being added to your dynamic. There’s a whole scene where you and your new partner have to lobby, bargain and plead for them to include a human. Maybe whether they accept you or not has to do with other choices that you’ve made.