JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
1mo ago
I'd settle for a humanity with the ability to tie shoes and sit on a toilet properly. But like God before me, I am doomed to disappointment.
JTarrou
1mo ago
You know the option where a guy is altruistically helping others? That doesn't happen. Go with the other one.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see, and you can breathe. So move.
If you can move, stretch.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see, you can breathe, you can move.
If you can do all those things, speak your own name.
Loud or quiet, say your true name. The secret one.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see and breathe and move and speak.
You know who you are.
If you know who you are, you know what to fix.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
You can see, breathe, speak and move.
You have identity and purpose.
You can work, you can communicate, you can fight.
In that order.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your eyes.
Now: Begin again.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Well, this is the previous "sex dolls" from PD2
Sounds to me like projection
JTarrou
1mo ago
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
JTarrou
1mo ago
It's never really come up.
Let me use a sports analogy. Tomorrow, you're going to get revenge on someone in a game of tennis. You've never played a game, not one. Your opponent is the worst professional tennis player in the world, ranked dead last. How you feeling about your chances?
JTarrou
1mo ago
Nah, probably not, unless he was a regular on the strip or in the MOPH.
Behind Covenant is tough, I lived in that area, a dozen blocks south roughly. Behind St. Mary's makes Baghdad look like Bennington.
JTarrou
1mo ago
stories make me feel nostalgic in a way that is difficult to explain.
Nah, I get you. Feels weird to write them. I have a lot of these in one stage or another of writing, but some of them just ain't for consumption.
When you sand off the edges, it just sounds fun and wild. When you have to live it, you want to make sure people think twice before following your example.
But youth is wasted on the young, and no amount of aged wisdom is going to stop them trying to climb that hill. And frankly, someone has to.
JTarrou
1mo ago
The vest, properly set up. There's a heirarchy of clubs, insignia, arrangement, patches etc.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Since 2023? You mean the last two months? I stand corrected.
Or did you mean that the recent rise in homicide rates has only taken us back to '97 so far, and we have room to grow before we hit the full '92 again?
JTarrou
1mo ago
Sub-state organization. Possibly sub-legal. Vigilance committees, neighborhood watch but tooled up. You saw this a lot in Hispanic neighborhoods during BLM. The Roof Koreans during the RK riots. You have to organize and strategize to defeat both retaliation and arrest.
The current failure is only of social pride and excessive legalism. People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more. Get realistic, look at your sub-legal options.
Go the other way. Find a group you won't snitch on. Teach each other, train each other, police each other. Street crims ain't shit to three guys who know what they're doing.
You know what? I might have a story for this.
JTarrou
1mo ago
'Cause life is a game that no one wins
But you deserve a head start the way your life's goin'
So throw in the towel, 'cause your life ain't shit
No take that towel and hang yourself with it
Life's short and hard like a body-building elf
So save the planet and kill yourself
If you're feeling down-and-out with what your life's all about
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
Suicide rates and murder among teens and the power of memes.
For those old enough to remember, these will be familiar times. Let me ask the '90s teenagers in the room, what was the dominant feeling of the age?
I would say that it was mostly a decade in which the youth aesthetic was of depression, sullen expressions, heroin chic, and underpinning it all, suicide. Suicide was in the air from the minute Cobain suck-started a shotgun. The music had song titles like “Hey man, nice shot” and “Lift your head up high and blow your brains out”. Subtle stuff. On the black side of the culture, gangsta rap was big. Drugs, murder, drugs, murder, booty. Still lighter than the white side.
Would it surprise anyone if I told you that the '90s were the only improvement in the teen suicide rate since the Depression? Murder rates peaked in '92 and dropped for twenty years.
Let's consider more recent history. The teen culture from 2010 to 2020. I'm not sure how those in it would classify that era, but to me it seemed like a decade of social media, politicization and gender. The Z discovered a giant pool of suicides (the lowest rate in decades) that they could save with hormones and surgery. They were the first generation to tackle racism and really make black lives matter. The aesthetic of the age is chipper, smug, vague, androgynous. Black culture has moved from the ghetto to the antiracism seminar. The result?
Suicide rates rose swiftly throughout the decade among teens, bringing them back into line with the already high rate before the '90s reversed course for twenty years. Murder rates started rising in 2013 and shot up in 2020. Mostly among young black men.
Death has a way of clarifying things, as it's tough to fake.
One cannot go back to the past, but we would do well to consider what sociopolitical norms and policies might have contributed to that massive achievement, and we absolutely must be extremely clear about which ones lead to the reversal. And no, I'm not talking about Lupus and Jimmy Pop.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Abbot's fight for vouchers has had the side effect of starving urban school districts, who are unable to raise funding because the state takes the majority of their property tax revenue through the "robin hood" program (and no longer even uses it for education -- now it just goes into the state general fund. It's purely kleptocratic now in a way that I don't believe it always was). My school district is getting rid of librarians and counselors as they can no longer afford them, cutting gifted and talented programs (very much done to piss off the rich -- it's not saving much money but it generates lots of ire), and generally laying off teachers and increasing class sizes.
That sounds awesome. Cutting government funds to religious schools is something I support wholesale.
Which election, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016 or 2020?
More options
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