Free Lud, Fuck Ice, Play Guilty Gear.

Let's raise some money for Lud's freedom.
Sunday, March 8th at 2PM EST/8PM CET in the RRC Discord, I am hosting an Xrd charity bracket.
Send me proof a donation of any amount and you can be entered.
Winner gets art by @congealeddairy.bsky.social

Liberals have been talking a lot more recently about our low-trust society, but usually they approach it as though that distrust is just a product of right-wing lies. That ignores the many other legitimate reasons not to trust politicians or businesses or the media

Part of my critique here is "back to normal" or "rebuilding" doesn't address the contradictions inherent to America as a whole (e.g. being founded on genocide & slavery w/o giving suitable reparations to those affected)

When you know that, why should you believe in the concept of America at all?

That and of course Citizens United mean i'm not sure how far this can go - but we've made more ground than we have in decades at least, so it's worth seeing what can be done there

i get where you're coming from, and i'd say there's a bit of hope with how well DSA candidates have been doing recently

The larger problem is human psychological biases like the mere exposure effect mean you're not realistically going to beat someone who's been in office & on TV for decades

THIS

Also a bunch of the more active "left" orgs in the US were weird grifts and/or rape cults that did nothing but organize performative marches - that's who was behind a lot of the big Iraq War protests for ex.

Now we at least have the DSA as something functional

It's just very slow going, which obviously sucks for the rest of the world. America is so much more rotten to the core than a lot of folks realize, and has been for a long time - i won't stop fighting, but it's going to be an uphill battle that won't end soon no matter what

As someone who's been working on the ground since Trump got elected the first time, the issue is that the people who genuinely want change and work toward it are people with no money or power beyond the local level

There's actually been positive shifts in state elections though

Why rollback and netplay events are good for locals, actually | Patrick Miller Get more from Patrick Miller on Patreon

"Why rollback and netplay events are good for locals, actually"

Last night I hosted a sweet locals session out of my garage and then after cleaning up I read one of the worst fighting game takes in recent memory, so here's my attempt to upcycle it.

www.patreon.com/posts/why-ro...

Great work, and ties into what some of my other friends have been saying about this topic for a while now!

i'd add that it's not just rollback that's led to top players not attending weeklies - hell, the Tekken scene first ran into this when they got into MLG!

The article briefly mentions it, but personally I don't care what Lud's status was. Every post about his situation has wriggling weirdos underneath asking about it & I reject the xenophobic premise of their question. Immigrants are a positive good and Lud should be celebrated, safe, & protected

I will say this any chance I get: Itoi was part of far left student protests in the ‘60s - ‘70s where he physically clashed with police, was arrested 5 times, and ultimately dropped out of law school from his disillusionment

so he indeed knows how they work

Funny enough i was never a shoto player at all! Originally a grappler guy, then a straightforward rushdown type, but really found my home with zoners who have some sort of extra offensive juice

Guess that last part tracks, huh

i just argued in another thread recently that FGs arose directly from the time when STGs & beatemups dominated JP arcades, so their design took inspiration from those trends & those are the genres whose skills carry over to FGs most

Works the other way around too, as i've found!

Oh also the OG here was WoW - the #capcom IRC crew's guild was apparently where a lot of the real shit went down

Back in the day it was DFO, haha

Am i the only one who went the Euro board game route?

Same to an extent

One of the Rosetta Stones for understanding social media right here, took me waaaaaayyyyyy too long to realize this lol

The NYT has been hard canceled in that regard for some years now, though Trump II made it all more obvious to the masses

Trans people have been sounding the alarm about the Times and anyone who willingly associates with it since at least the early 2020s

It flopped so hard for WWE, in fact, that they had to resort to straight-up Twitter begging on their official accounts to search for takers. The stuff Evo's doing now wrt local tourneys should set of similar alarm bells imo

If we can avoid that pitfall i think we'll be safe, yeah. People running locals should also look at WWE's recent attempt to ""support"" indie wrestling promotions; most of them were smart enough not to fall for it since they realized that would let WWE poach their talent at any time!

We really need to learn from the experience of the Starcraft 2 tourney scene, since the Saudis completely took that over then abandoned it out of nowhere. They left themselves vulnerable and had no infrastructure left when that happened, so they've had to do a slow rebuild of it all

The new Evo calendar and the grassroots/corpo split | Patrick Miller Get more from Patrick Miller on Patreon

"The new Evo calendar and the grassroots/corpo split"

I wrote about the new Evo event calendar, its effects on locally owned events, and how the mutually beneficial relationship between grassroots and "main game" funded FGC may be approaching a fracture point.

www.patreon.com/posts/151654...

It's kinda this, because that was the only way to have a community in the pre-SF4 era (unless you were really into the 3D Mortal Kombat games, as those had an online clan-battle culture that nothing else did then)

People who have other options aren't gonna be down for that

The silver lining here is that they're FAR less popular than the Nazis were - Hitler had hundreds of thousands showing up for his rallies even before he won!

History shows that popular support is key for fascist regimes, so we just need to keep fighting as that support falls

They keep records of everyone who's ever had their name changed on their drivers license, so this will undoubtedly affect a bunch of false positives as well

Look at what the Epstein files have to say about this...a lot of the main characters there had a personal fixation here

Well in theory that was supposed to be "dirtbag" more in the sense of 80s punk & underground-rock types like Black Flag or Steve Albini or what have you

But, well, look at how a bunch of THOSE folks turned out in the end and you can't be too surprised

so this happened under Carter. the policy was probably planned under Ford. interesting that Ford rarely gets talked about and Carter pretty much exclusively gets talked about positively, yet something they did lead to this. probably nothing worth interrogating though, hahaha

TC Pipeline is a trans relocation org located in Colorado which is near Kansas

It would be helpful if you could signal boost them. They could use funding and volunteers, and trans folks in Kansas may want to contact them if they need extraction

Also: the letters sent may be illegal

tcpipeline.org