First Wordle Problems

skill issue

Yeah but it’s really important. Exposition is a noble but thankless calling.

I was the one being gotten in trouble. So thanks for that.

Bring them fardels over here

To hope? Perchance to dream?

It’s very silly and ahistorical and also has the strong whiff of Soviet-era propaganda around it.

Well right, I guess my point is that’s insane, heh.

Ha yeah. It was obligatory to have a song about that stuff in 1989! Along with one excoriating Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts et al.

Yeah, same for 1984, honestly. Which is also flawed but hits really hard in its best parts.

Yeah it’s whatever. Interesting artifact of the time, culturally important to know the references! But not like amazing art or anything.

Seems like a hard cap at 80 would be fine. But obviously wouldn’t affect most actual real-world speeding.

Oh auto safety was the Wild West until like 1990 as far as I remember. You just did whatever. Everybody was smoking in the car too!

Obviously something like this was going to happen at some point. You just wonder what a judge will do with it. And for that matter, how the administration is going to argue this somehow IS okay. What, is this another "inherent Article II" thing? Maybe!

It’s a lot MORE common on the right, obviously. They have huge bodies of lurid conspiracy lore around “pedophiles” and will tell you about it. But people on the left are drawn to this notion of Secret Unforgivable Evil, too. It’s seductive.

Yeah like we know he was a sex pest in his younger days, beyond a doubt. The Paula Jones thing? He totally did that shit, come on. But the “pedo” obsession with some folks is just…unwholesome.

In "The Peripheral" there isn't even any travel, just communication with "alternate pasts". But, crucially, that means you can get on the Alternate Past Internet and once you do that there can be telepresence, and therefore influence. In both directions.

Yeah. THE TERMINATOR is your classic sf time travel plot [complimentary]. "Here's your standard grandfather paradox, with a love story! And a fuckton of kickass chase scenes." And that's great. Hard to do on an epic canvas, though.

Yeah, that sounded fun but I never saw it. "The Peripheral" is like that too (though it's more like there's a prime timeline that uses other timelines for fun.) No paradoxes.

Like I LOVE time travel stories but they just ARE incoherent, definitionally. You cannot "make it make sense," as the kids say. And that's fine, for a while! But if you just try to keep it going on a large scale it inevitably gets laughable.

well, and how much of a narrative problem "time travel" is in general! It's extremely fun to play with which is why storytellers always go back to that well. But it can only really work in the context of a single contained story where you can handwave the paradoxes or make them the whole point.

...but there are many many levels of "embarrassing, incriminating, and politically ruinous" that all fall well short of "criminally liable". And (with respect to the victims) for our purposes it's the political effects that matter.

Oh, sure. I see no reason to think this statement couldn't be true, more or less. I never believed in the legendary "client list," and while there's sure to be a ton of embarrassing details for lots of people that doesn't mean it would rise to the level of something you could charge them with. BUT

hmm, i'm listening

It's no longer "well, if the Dems take the House there's a chance I could be supboenad" to "WHEN the Dems take the House it's very very likely I'm on that list." You act differently once that feeling kicks in!

And we have JUST kinda reached the point in the calendar where the relevant people aren't going to be in denial anymore. It went from "ha well elections are a long way off anyway" to "oh man it might already be too late to turn this around" in just a couple of months.

Which, by the time this is over, will be "not very much hard power at all". Or at least so we can hope.

Yeah. They've been far more public and self-conscious in recent months, it feels. I don't think it will work out either! It's just not enough people, and they actively repel other kinds of people. But it's still an ugly thing to have out there and nothing to turn your back on.

"Sure you'll save a few lives, but millions will be late!"

Yeah. I never want to go Full Neolib and pretend class just doesn't exist at all or is never relevant, but WAY too often it's nothing but an excuse to avoid thinking about anything else.

man speak for yourselves, me and the girls are are breathlessly awaiting the grand holiday ball where there will be EVER so many eligible suitors and the punch will be simply divine