experbia

Take me to the Internet.

Make no mistake - the policing situation in Portland is 100% political, from the police side. Policing is AOK in the more conservative areas of the metro area - the rest of the city is intentionally left to rot despite no actual reduction in funding or capabilities. Portland in media became a “liberal stronghold” and our (naturally) right-wing police force (which have colorful and long-standing local history with regional white nationalist groups) have decided to make their political statement by selectively performing their job duties to attack liberals.

I have family that’s a part of this shitfest, on the LEO side. The shit they say after a few drinks on Thanksgiving is disgusting. The issues plaguing Portland are 100% intentional by the police. They view themselves as “teaching Portland a lesson about their liberal government” and boast about how they’ll drive past dangerous and criminal events if it looks to them like it’s just a liberal or undesirable “getting what they voted for”.

There are private groups to help you track down and (sometimes forcefully!) recover your stolen car in the city, because if you call the police to report a theft, they’ll wait until you tell them what part of the city you’re from and if it’s not the conservative areas they’ll just tell you they can’t do anything and hang up on you. No report, nothing. They’re well aware that this lack of report number impacts your ability to make insurance claims, by the way - another chuckling boast over Thanksgiving when I asked.

They won’t stop until they “feel respected” again. To them, this means zero oversight, unlimited budget, no questioning, no consequences, and conservative leadership over the city. The disgust I feel when I see our “public servants” now after being educated on their perspective is alarming even to me.

I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.

I’m glad to hear Wargroove 2 is worth it! I really enjoyed the first and I was worried when I heard about a sequel.

hell yes, Badly Broken Code is such an amazing album

I was top 0.05% for Battle Tapes. it’s good shit. Weight of the World is where it’s at, but it’s all good.

everybody on Earth will know

hahaha holy shit, he believes. he really believes his own shit. he really views “X” as being of planetary importance. he’s actually living in his daydream, where Mars (by his hand) and Earth are networked (by him) and his “X” has somehow supplanted the Internet and spans between planets. his principal operating perspective is a delusion. wow. like, all the time.

that sounds great. abstractivus, the machine overlord.

as though they knew him from his brief period as a vorlon or whatever.

vorlon

wait a sec…

I’ve always said that Starfleet is, first and foremost, a jobs program.

It gives purpose to people who can’t find their own, in a time where your needs are provided-for by default, and seeking personal fulfillment is the purpose for most people’s lives.

Drones would cut out the human driving a shuttle over to inspect an anomaly or object themselves, robbing them of a sense of accomplishment and achievement. Starfleet is about that stuff, so that’s a no-go unless nobody wants to do it and it needs to be done anyway. We see that a lot, too. They do have probes and sensor stations and stuff, after all, usually in really boring and unfulfilling locations.

They have excessive, ridiculous redundancy. They have people doing jobs the ship computers could (and often, in times of need, DOES) perform very well on its own. There are several recorded instances of entire starships being successfully maintained for extended periods of time by a single individual (who does go insane due to isolation every time, because plot).

I agree entirely

Janeway is my favorite captain for sure. The others are all remarkable, because of course they are, but whenever I watch Voyager, I am reminded of how much more I like her over the others.

She had (and used) this great guile to serve her and her crew’s needs. She didn’t readily break her principles, but would intelligently question them when they didn’t appear to align with the greater good or her responsibilities.

She was both flexible and reliable. I feel that some viewers saw that as unpredictability, but I don’t think so. She actively did more to help her crew in every way than any other captain we’ve seen.

this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of “free” (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.

this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.

chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.

Cops are well aware standing in front of a car gives them a free pass killing someone

This “technique” has been demonstrated enough that frankly, I think that any rational person would conclude that in any situation where a cop walks in front of your car, you’re better off just gunning it before the cop has a chance to extrajudicially execute you first. If they walk in front of your car, it’s clear they’re just itching to murder you. The threat has been made, you should fear for your life. It’s you or them.

Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur’s Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn’t close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it’s a notable part.

Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn’t trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn… it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly “modern” games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It’s clearly just a matter of “want”.

I feel like I’ve just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald’s in a roadside casino, and I’ve just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.

I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch “games” like this ever again.

And it would never have gotten completely out of control, if people didn’t use ad-block.

“I wouldn’t get so carried away beating you if you didn’t make me so much angrier by trying to run when I smack you.”

We should never have tried to fund the web with ads in the first place.

I agree. But here we are. And until it’s illegal to do so (and, honestly, afterwards too), when a website I’m viewing politely asks me to download toxic ad content filled with psychological manipulation and malware, my computer will politely whisper “no.” I might revisit this policy in the future if the entire advertising industry takes a huge step back to tone down their abusive shit, but in the meanwhile, I have no problem blocking malignant content from my presence. No means no.

A business plan that requires psychological abuse and exploitation of your customers is not an ethical, sustainable, or valid plan and the people who push it are not worthy of my consideration.

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

Half of US adults cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Video is easier and faster for most people, as much as I dislike it. It’s a way for a clueless board of MBAs to circumvent the “literacy” problem of more widespread adoption of their service. Lowest-common-denominator corner-shaving ruins everything, as usual.

I live in Oregon. These people are a total joke around here. It’s just funny as hell to think that Idaho would want them - their whole counties are net liabilities in the state economy. Yet they stomp around “threatening” to run away from home and go to Idaho like a teenager mad over having to go to summer school. Might want to actually check with Idaho first, idiots.

Firstly, they’re classifying the term “grooming” as hate speech. That’s not factual.

I couldn’t agree more, I’m glad you said this. See, I personally think all conservatives (presumably such as yourself, but if you’re not, you’re obviously close enough) are pedophilic sexual predators by nature, which is why they so readily jump to the false conclusion that everyone wants to fuck kids all the time. Normally I wouldn’t say this because when I’ve said so in the past, conservatives have been real mad about it and viewed it as hateful to be associated with something so repulsive merely by way of having a certain political identity, but it’s nice to be in a safe space you’ve created that allows for me to share this decidedly non-hateful speech targeted at conservatives (and you!) that expresses my complete and utter contempt for you and your gross, clearly unsafe way with children. I mean, you willingly force them into churches (a.k.a ‘rape factories’) all the time. Tells you all you need to know about any conservative. You’re obviously complicit.

A misplaced comma doesn’t trump 240 years of legal precedent, no matter how much Alioto might wish it did.

Fortunately true.

Unfortunately, in the larger court of public opinion, it can very effectively be used as basis to rile up and outrage the domestic terrorists loyal to the corrupted judiciary, so there will most likely be some trepidation about clarifying this.