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TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
2hr ago
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
You're being antagonistic and obnoxious. Stop it.
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
You know, that is true, but also, when you watch Sam & IDubbz competing documentaries, one of the things that jumps out in IDubbz trying to encourage Sam to be more genuine and less of a character. Sam, understandably, believes if he ever did that he'd get deleted off the internet and unpersoned entirely.
One 'uge election victory later, and Sam does appear to be letting his true self come out at least a little bit more. His open letter to Elon was probably as close to an unironic manifesto for what he actually believes as we've ever seen, and is arguably responsible for his resurgence in fame/notoriety/attention.
So, not only did Sam try to pull IDubbz off the path, and IDubbz has proceeded to ignore all his advice and ruin his life, but Sam may have taken IDubbz advice and prospered enormously?
I don't think it's anywhere near a open and shut case that the vaccines stopped the pandemic, we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against, but as people got vaccinated we also saw the rise of less deadly variants. And of course, as more people still got infected they would build natural immunity. As for the prevalence of side effects, again we don't have much information to compare against, but the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines. There was no scientific curiosity, anyone trying to raise any alarms was not taken with even a slight grain of seriousness but immediately the public health establishments were looking for ways to discredit them. While that does not increase the trustworthiness of those making the claims, it does negatively affect the trustworthiness of those dismissing them without even looking at them.
Note, I'm not saying that the vaccines did nothing but caused deadly side effects, personally I think it probably had a mild effect in lowering the seriousness of infection for people who encountered COVID for the first time after the vaccine, and was probably generally safe and side effects no more prevalent or serious than other similar drugs, but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this, so I wouldn't judge someone for coming to a different conclusion.
No_one
2hr ago
Exactly. While there's something mildly pleasant about hot weather, working in it is sucks and it's only really good for going swimming.
But around 15°C is just the best. If you're inactive and outside, a jacket and trousers will keep you comfortably warm... if it's near freezing you need an entire elaborate set of clothes to feel comfortable being out there and if it's >22°C doing anything more strenuous than walking will lead to sweating a lot.
It took a 35°C heatwave for me to understand what sweatbands are for. The only good thing about summer is that working outside and sweating like a horse is the perfect excuse to keep drinking cold beer to replace lost calories, water and electrolytes. Also the beer tastes much better then. I barely drink any in winter myself..
Mushguffler
2hr ago
He's an insane Frenchman with an addiction to tea.
The interesting thing about Sam's resurgence is how, simultaneously, a number of people who were opposed to him are crashing and burning, notably IDubbbz, where Sam legitimately tried to pull him off the path he was on during their dueling documentaries (goddamn that was 3 years ago).
Despite how he portrays himself in his comedy and public persona, he's clearly got his life far more put-together and on a better trajectory than most influencers/youtube celebs.
Factions:
There's eight of them in the base game, some of them share a particular native type of tech (so far, three with ~8 units each) but each has different leader and faction abilities. You can in theory mix & match, but as the production facility for each unit type is unique, the gigantic opportunity cost definitely prevents mixing units of the same tier (so 2 infantry types etc, not to mention, in the crucial early game the other faction's units are an era behind) and some resources differ.
Native tech types:
Middle Americans (dudes with body armor & guns, tanks, SPAA, guided missiles, big artillery, nukes, even bigger tanks, brutal air power and of course space marines with antimatter sprinkled blades that cut anything as pinnacle of infantry). Will nuke you if given a chance. Each faction type has several 'operations', basically a sort of spell of some sort.
Silicon Valley Americans (cyborg under-armed infantry, hover-servitors with plasma guns, purely mechanical spider snipers, some time-cheating floating beam weapon using AI drone etc). Will cause a small pseudo black hole to appear over your city or army and stay being horrible for a month.
And the very definitely illegal aliens who introduced themselves by gigadeaths and now claim it was all a misunderstanding or necessary or something along those lines and the various humans who've developed an affinity for said alien's ..deity? Not at all clear what the they do, don't feel like playing them.
The 'Silicon Valley' tech tree is natively had by three factions: 'Emulated Mind'- a partly failed upload who is good at logistics and sort of good with some of the cringiest writing(survived death and cancer and won't let the apocalypse stop her), and 'heartless artificer' who is a strictly 'ends justifies the means' type of person and implausibly represented by a pretty indefinable mocha woman with a slight spanish accent.
Whereas, we know it'd be some extremely intense white or asian autist-psychopath IRL. The special traits for the two are: emulated mind can only build two cities but gets more from random facilities around the map, and the 'heartless artificer' is good at cloning and can also improve production through a 'performance review' called 'fountain of blood' where the lowest performers get the bullet to motivate the rest to work up to 34% harder.
Then there's 'Rogue Operative', undoubtedly an Asian trans cybercriminal who social engineered a little too much and ended up running the remains of a company she was attempting to steal from when the end of the world came. I say trans because it's the 22nd century so I'm assuming gender-affirming surgery has been perfected by then but affinities towards hacking have likely not changed much.
The middle American tech tree is had by three base factions: 'Fallen Soldier' -a robust looking hispanic guy who just won't die, kind of a like a WH40k perpetual. His faction's special power is just rigorously training their units and also healing charms-pieces of his flesh somehow prevent those who bear them from dying. Also somehow fix damaged hardware but I'm going to overlook that for now. Naturally, people love not dying of common wounds and diseases. He doesn't know why he rose from the dead, but if you wear a piece of his flesh as a talisman you're going to heal much faster.
Then there's 'practical romantic' (not actually romantic anymore) - the most normal human faction out there. Special power- get resources from defeated enemies, can buff morale with influence. Looks Iranian I guess.
Then there's the most seemingly implausible human faction, led by a fat German aristocrat (monocled, too) who spent a few decades in a bunker before getting out and becoming useful. A good administrator(can rush production) and diplomat/trader. German aristocracy, whatever is left of it is led by people who are almost invariably tanned jocks, and if not that, reasonably fit and very good skiers. Although, maybe in the late 21st century being a fat foodie will once more be a status mark? Perhaps it's good writing.
Hieronymus
2hr ago
This is an excellent summary. I'd add that while dispensationalism is common among American evangelicals, it's losing ground.
Dispensationalists often frustrate me, but I wouldn't call them heretics unless they move beyond dispensationalism into dual covenant theology. Dual covenant theology holds that while gentiles are saved only through faith in Christ, Jews can be saved by keeping the Mosaic Law. Since this is approximately the least evangelical take it is possible to have, and since dispensationalism is an evangelical phenomenon to begin with, this is mercifully rare.
Zephon (2024)
Intro:
Is another C-tier(budget wise) 4x game using some crap Unity implementation(I guess, loading time 20s on a PC capable of 4K Cyberpunk 2077) that gameplay wise is easily on par with Civ V or earlier 4x games in most graphic stuff but the combat AI is actually not that bad and will punish you for fighting fair. Trailer here.. I get good frames but I feel a worse PC would probably suffer.
It's by devs who previously made the Gladius WH40K 4x game. This is a refinement of that game with their own post apocalyptic setting, that of a 22nd century some decades after first contacts came in the form of a surprise genocidal attack that was supposedly self defence. So it is a 4x with all the features of a typical 4x games, and is combat oriented. Even if you don't fight any player faction, the unplayable NPC factions will definitely fight you eventually and at quite the scale.
Overall, I like the gameplay and combat, the setting and writing of quests and characters is interesting if not that well executed and overall while I like the outline of the writing and the themes, in execution I am mildly annoyed there's that stench of Netflix/tweet chatGPT over some of it and they could have done so much better. But unless you're a literate right winger you may not even notice the annoying crap, I think. The most 'cringe' part for me is the 'forced diversity' part on which I'll elaborate later in the 'factions' section.
The map/game itself:
Unlike in common 4x games, the 'NPC empires' are an important part of the game and an inextricable part of the story. There's three of them, a retarded Skynet (did not cause the apocalypse, claims to want to help, not that good at R&D), survivors of the of the alien invasion fleet( definitely did cause the apocalypse), and your basic post-apocalyptic barbarian cannibal federation who somehow survived a few decades in a world of constant warfare between said mildly retarded Skynet and the aliens who while looking only mildly disgusting themselves employ biotech instead of most common machinery that looks like something puked up by a particularly sick cat and animated with voodoo.
Aliens and Skynet are perma-hostile to each other, Barbarians try to shake you down constantly. These factions don't really improve and apart from barbarians, don't colonize much and start with relatively strong cities.
Economy:
The economic part is not that complex, mostly standard 4x approach if a bit refined: all facilities in a city are physically visible on the world map and, at 3 per hex, a city of 7 hexes can only have at most 21 of them, though you're going to want multiples of each for later game units of course. Each facility has its own production and its own building queue, so there are large tradeoffs to make. You can't make planes in a tank factory or barracks and so on.
A city good at expanding itself can easily put up military factories and mothball the productive ones.. but building up that capacity means you delay your military production by quite some time. There's sadly no fun strategies based around slaving or causing refugee waves to exploit! All construction costs minerals, running everything takes energy, and people need to eat too. Late game units require stable transuranic elements and antimatter, sometimes in ludicrous quantities.
Combat: There's line of sights, terrain effects on cover, but mostly only for small unites (e.g. tanks or most planes don't benefit from forests or ruins providing cover and concealment much).
Weapons have damage, armor penetration, range and number of attacks, whether they're direct or indirect fire. Most units can overwatch so you need recon to avoid running into enemies and getting hit. Or if you move into a concealing tile (forest), they may not see you unless they're directly adjacent.
Units have experience level, morale, armor value, movement speed, evasion, vantage point (e.g. planes see over most obstacles etc but are also seen), number of subunits in each formation and a lot of less common properties. (e.g. basic human soldiers does 2x more attacks at close range, reflecting the difficulty of hitting anything with a rifle further out)
Most units (infantry) are composed of multiple small entities each with its own HP pool that each attack, so an attrited infantry unit delivers far less damage.
Crowstep
2hr ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
It's also a good weather because you can wear a light jacket if you want to, especially if you're out til night and it starts getting chilly for the few hours the sun is down.
No_one
2hr ago
The worst things we know of were done in Canada, the 'straw country' US uses for dirty work bc their judges have no jurisdiction there. Ewen Cameron kept some people on LSD in a coma so long they lost memories.
In the US I know that CIA ran a brothel where they were drugging people and drugged some military personnel in experiments, but I have never seen claims US universities (not just a few individual researchers) participated in this.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
2hr ago
No. Shared parenthood without marriage too easily degrades into single parenthood as the parents are incentivized to sabotage each other to go about their lives independently. Even if it doesn't, being "shared" by two independent households is harmful to children. The default needs to be at least cohabitation and a binding relationship, with the possibility for the courts to adjudicate abnormal situations.
No_one
2hr ago
You're Indian and raised there. To the British and many central/northern European guys, 15°C is shirt-sleeve weather when doing anything more active than sitting outside. If it's 15°C and sunny, I often just go shirtless because after the bloody winter it feels so nice to feel the sun on your skin once more.
Temperature sensitivity is bound to where you were raised, I think. I have seen black people wearing puffy jackets in a thirty degree weather, the kind of jackets I unzip when it's >10 °C because I'd sweat otherwise.
Autonomic nervous system just gets used to some particular temperature..
newcomputerwhodis
2hr ago
I always hear people going on about how you're supposed to be eternally in love with your first, and 6 was not my first, so that can't be it.
...though I was about 14 when I played it, so maybe a point for your formulation there.
charlesf
3hr ago
Yes, I have memorized several poems. I'm gifted with an extremely good memory. I'm a formally trained musician and have, over the last 35 or so years, memorized hundreds of songs as well. I can't always immediately recall all of them 100%, but I can brush up 15-20 or so of them in a week to performance level by reviewing the sheets and playing them a couple times. I also enjoy memorizing quotes, passages from books, religious verses etc. I can do pi out to 72 digits w/o brushing up, 144 if I refresh (this is as a song btw, each number is a distinct note). I find the memorization of all these superficially different things to be very similar in practice. In my case I can't really help it. Even brief contact with writing or music can trigger fairly solid, if partial, memories which compel me to put in the work of fully memorizing whatever it was. Its like an itch. I feel like the main sources of this skill are both the naturally very good memory and the formal music training since childhood. Memorizing musical notation feels like memorizing words. I can also "replay" songs in my head with all the instruments differentiated, accurately, beginning to end.
I don't think photographic or eidetic memory are real. Or, at least my own internal experience feels nothing like the descriptions from people that claim to have photographic/eidetic memory. To me it feels like the inability to forget, and I'm pretty sure its a form of, or related to, mental illness, like a weak form of hyperthymesia, but it doesn't really feel like the descriptions of that either. It's not an entirely positive ability. I remember every humiliating thing I've ever done, or awful thing that has been done to me, in vivid detail. I can tell, at the moment I hear or read something, that I'm going to remember it forever. I can also tell when I'm going to struggle to ever remember it; some things just slip right off my brain. Sometimes those things are important. Most stuff falls somewhere in the middle and I can memorize it with a small amount of effort and practice. The worst aspect is if I learn something incorrectly and have the "remember it forever" reaction. When my brain locks onto something inaccurately I will struggle with that for the rest of my life. As a toddler I got east and west reversed in my head. I now have to remember an additional memory that my first recall of these concepts are flipped, like a brain patch. This has caused me to read/study new things very carefully.
I'm completely hopeless with the people's names. There is nothing to grab ahold of, mentally. The sounds that represent that person feel entirely arbitrary. My work requires me to meet and remember a lot of different points of contact for different issues, as well as a rotating roster of my own team of employees. I have to make flashcards and devote time to using them. I also find most people, especially women, largely uninteresting and interchangeable. Unless they aren't, but rare people are rare. The exception to this is if the person's name is in a song. I can reliably make the song start playing in my head when I see them. This was very helpful with my wife when we met 30 years ago; her name is Amy. The song by Pure Prairie League still plays to this day when I look at her.
You are basing your worldview on random ragebait TikTok videos
Uh, No.
I've basing it on literally years of research on the topic:
I've researched the Low TFR Issue
I've researched the legal and economic side of it. Pointed out how corporations are technically competing with men for women's comitment.
I brought up the "how many marriageable women are actually out there question literally a year ago, then I ran some very rough numbers
I've pontificated on why intersex relations have degraded over two years ago.
I've even researched the age-gap question.
This includes talking to real people, I can offhand name a dozen people in my circle experiencing the EXACT. SAME. ISSUES.
I beg you to try and give me some data that I haven't seen yet. You came in and assumed off of 3 comments that I've somehow NOT bothered to look into this issue at every level I can?
In fact, I've put in a LOT of effort to try to find the evidence that runs against this point, but in this search I keep finding videos like the ones I posted, which seem to confirm the data, the anecdotes, the personal experience. All of it pointing in the same direction.
Your attempt to dismiss my point out of hand without a single argument has been noted, and my opinion has remained utterly unchanged.
But anyway, that should be an advantage for you. Getting a nice haircut, moisturising regularly and buying a few well fitting fashionable outfits will already set you apart from the crowd.
This is not a problem for me. I am not the one who needs to hear this advice.
I am the one telling you this advice is useless for most men under current conditions and you sound like a Boomer telling someone to sharpen up their resume and give the manager a firm handshake to get hired.
Owlify
3hr ago
Couldn't you make the default to be shared parenthood without the marriage part? I don't see why that can't be done. I don't know what area you live in, but where I live, fathers have a right to raise their children as much as mothers(as per my understanding).
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
3hr ago
No, it has everything to do with this scenario. Right now the default is single motherhood and the father has to fight in court to change this default. This would make it so that the default is shared parenthood and the mother has to fight in court to change it. She still could be a single mother if she convinces the court that his behavior is bad enough to warrant divorce, but that requires actually demonstrating his bad behavior rather than simply her not wanting to cooperate with him.
Owlify
3hr ago
Well whether a life is or is not a person is an important moral factor in deciding how immoral it is to kill that life. Everyone has a concept of personhood. I wouldn't consider it an ad-hoc moral concept. For example, people generally don't consider taking animal lives equally immoral as taking human lives. In the case of a fetus, the concept is fuzzy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I think many people (and pro-lifers) consider late-term unborn fetuses to be people, which is why they find killing them horrifying, so I wouldn't say that it's not a convincing argument. I can see why others may believe otherwise, just like how people wouldn't consider a single-cell fertilized egg to be a person (although they may believe it still has enough moral worth that it should not be killed because it may eventually become a person, which is also valid).
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3hr ago
Expecting someone to be able to ballpark the population of Iran isn't actually looking for deep expertise though, it's expecting a strong generalist's knowledge of trivia. Sitting United States Senators should be better than a typical bar trivia team at knowing things like world capitals and national populations. If they're not at that level, I'd consider them too stupid or incurious to hold the office. Senators should be polymaths with strong interests in things like CIA World Factbook information.
Gaashk
3hr ago
The key in the southwest is sunshine and rainbows -- sun showers. Especially the kind where there's rain on one side of the house, but not the other. A key to sunshine with rainbows weather is that the rainbows happen when the light is low and the storms are dense, say 7pm when it's lovely out and smells like creosote, ozone, and petrichor.
He and Fishtank got mentioned on Rogan recently which probably helped too.
I do think Sam wants to be perceived as this inscrutable, unpredictable character, rather than his true self. I think he lets his true convictions come out and play pretty often (like the Elon vid), but he's made it effectively impossible to know what his 'authentic' personality is. This is what I believe the closest example is, that I've seen.
Then there's the interesting theory that he may literally be a cryptid.
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