Ben Cates

It would make for a fun TTRPG campaign to grant that all the big bad's technobabble actually works as described and see how many sessions it took for half a dozen motivated rebels to figure out how to stage a successful coup anyway.

Christ, what an asshole. Comparing wherever you are to where you theoretically would have been but for some early bad break seems like an easy way to feel miserable about whatever income you do end up making, no matter how comfortable. Why would someone want to live their life like that?

This is a feature not a bug of good fantasy. The map of the world doubles as a plot summary.

Yes, granted, but also MCU Thanos is emphatically not sane and the films aren't particularly subtle about it.

Begging people to just be normal and invest in some quality latex.

"React is bad."

I know how to encode a binary blob to ASCII and that's not a thing I should know. It's not a thing anyone should know.

The 2->3 transition from cramming everything into one giant file (for performance reasons) to breaking everything into as many tiny little files as possible (also for performance reasons) remains a personal favorite.

Something Awful was an amazingly accurately named hellhole, but if you made it out of there with your sanity intact you were pretty much set.

Unfortunately I think the issue here is that they already had a perfectly good hobby and then the American electorate didn't play along.

If Biden had retroactively prevented the pandemic he would still be president but he didn't. even. try.

I kind of hope it's a fancy hardback because it's hard to imagine cover art that wouldn't be a cognitohazard.

"But it speaks to the human condition in a deep and profound way."

Yeah, y'know, there's bits and pieces of the human condition that I feel like I've heard enough from already thanks.

Unpopular opinion: it's a mechanically fascinating game wasted on people no sane person would want to spend time with in a setting no sane person would want to spend time in.

One thing I find really hard to articulate is how we seem to only want to look through the moral lens at the producer's side. Like, one of the downstream effects of the luddites losing is that I can buy a serviceable shirt for less than the cost of a decent lunch. That's a moral consequence too.

this is my politics

I'm old enough to remember when autotune meant you weren't a real singer, album sales notwithstanding.

Ghost pepper autocomplete, including the admonition to wash up thoroughly before you touch anything sensitive again.

If you're lucky it's the *19*70s.

Write what you know.

Much of the charm of Disco Elysium is that if you make the right in game choices Harry will turn to the camera and say that he's the exact same kind of communist you are (a raging alcoholic).

Bad implications kind of Waluigi's whole brand, though.

Folk band, rock album, house track.

Fascinatingly it works for all three but in radically different genres.

Begging people to understand that good at posting and good at bureaucratic maneuvering are separate skills.

The fundamental flaw with all online self help communities is that the people who are successfully helped are by design the ones who stop participating in the community.

Now all you need is an irresponsible fad diet and a weird obsession with a crustacean you don't quite understand.

When you've spent the first half of your weekend compulsively blocking everyone who quotes your post maybe that says something about your post.

He used to be okay but social media has really done a number on him. Many such cases.

Everything is about critiquing sex except for critiquing sex, which is about critiquing power.