Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]

Biden’s hubris coupled with the cabinet’s refusal to invoke the 25th ensuring that democrats cannot win the 2024 election.

Biden rolling like a soulsborne character as the physical embodiment of Medicare tries to crush him with a big hammer.

I was going to say that Biden maybe wouldn’t have come off too bad if he hadn’t looked confused and sounded like he was dying, but his incoherent closing statement was maybe not the best look. I mean, in the rest of the debate he mostly lauded a series of largely meaningless and unimpressive policy achievements.

I liked it when he called Trump a whiner though, that was funny.

As for Trump, it was funny that the only thing he had to talk about for any given issue was the 18 million strong migrant horde come to destroy America. Which is basically Trump’s MO since 2015.

On the whole I can’t believe Biden’s camp agreed to do the debates. While it wasn’t the debacle of 2020, there was never any chance Biden walked out of this looking good.

THEY’RE ARGUING ABOUT THEIR GOLF GAMES!

Guess not.

Won’t someone think of the children?

It’s so funny that they’re going ahead with the 2024 presidential debates after the clusterfuck of the 2020 debate, where IIRC they cancelled two of the debates after Trump spent the first debate running roughshod over Biden. No concerns over this making Trump, who is literally a felon and an insurrectionist (even if it was a half-assed insurrection and also the actual half-assed insurrection Trump did was when he tried to stop the states counting votes and not the Jan. 6th riot), seem more legitimate. Though I guess he was already President so maybe he can’t be made to be seen as an illegitimate candidate, I don’t know how the electoral wonks feel about that.

But mostly it’s funny because Biden is so obviously in decline. It was a pretty bad showing in 2020, they’re really gonna have to pump him full of adrenochrome to make him even seem present in the moment. Not that Trump isn’t very old also, but from what little I’ve seen of the both of them recently Trump mentally seems to be more or less where he was in 2015, whereas Biden seems mostly out-of-it if he isn’t reading from a teleprompter.

https://x.com/macarthurboyd/status/1750139916221046995

christopher macarthur-boyd @macarthurboyd

most people: i find it really difficult to access the health service in a meaningful way

keir starmer: the tenets of ninjitsu warfare will be eradicated from these lands, by decree of the shogun

Has anyone here watched the Australian Crime/Detective Parody/Dramedy show Deadloch?

First of all, great show. It’s about this small town in Tasmania that has been suddenly inundated with lesbians, which causes a lot of tension with the good old boys club that used to run the town before all the lesbians moved there. And now the town is in the midst of holding a feminist art gala when the bodies of murdered men start being found, so the lesbian police chief has to investigate, and high command sends her a new partner who is very brash and rude and poorly dressed and aggresively straight. I think it strikes a good balance of making a fairly compelling mystery and drama about some cops and their families, while also having it be comedic throughout.

See also this random lady who appeared on my for you page talking along a similar line. Not about Deadloch, just about evil women characters. https://www.tiktok.com/@poppylaur/video/7303297766682266923

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/19bgfqe/2023_hugo_award_nominating_and_final_ballot/

So there’s this thing called the Hugo Award, which are given out by this thing called Worldcon. If you haven’t heard of these things, it’s nerd ass shit for nerds. In fact, it’s for an incredibly specific kind of nerd. Both the Award and the Con are mostly about Science Fiction books. But then Worldcon in particular is so called because every year it moves around the world. They have a bidding process where some people who normally organize a convention can instead organize that year’s Worldcon. Mostly it ends up in the US, but it has been all over the globe. This means that, at least from where I’m sitting, the average attendee of Worldcon is a wealthy nerd who like to read Science Fiction and can afford to take an international vacation once a year. Over the last twenty years Worldcon has had between 3,000 and 6,000 attendees each year, which means that it’s smaller than at least the top 4 furry cons in the US alone, and possibly smaller than the entire top 10, per this list of furry cons in 2023.

What I’m saying here is that the Hugo Awards don’t matter. If you win one, and your next book comes out with “Hugo Award Winning Author” stamped on the title it’s going to have a negligible effect on sales. It’s not like getting on the NYT bestseller list, or the Sunday Times, or any of the others. The Hugo Awards have cachet with such a small population of nerds that they simply do not matter in the slightest.

This year Worldcon was hosted in Chengdu, China, and Reddit has been freaking out since it was announced like three years ago. Today the statistics behind the Chengdu Hugo Awards came out, and apparently there are some irregularities. Now I haven’t looked into this, I don’t know or really care if their were irregularities. It wouldn’t really surprise me, get enough people together and some people are going to go to desperate lengths playing interpersonal politics and airing petty grievances even with so little to gain.

What amuses me about this situation, and the particular reddit thread linked above, is that there are many comments implying, or even outright stating as if it is fact, that the terrible hand of the CCP is at play here. That the CCP, I assume under the direct orders of President Xi, have decided to manipulate the outcome of this tiny award that no one anywhere who was not already in attendance at the con gives a shit about.

There’s also some outcry about Xiran Jay Zhao and RF Kuang, who are both immigrants from China who have published popular SFF books in the West, being deemed ineligible for the Hugo, apparently for no reason. Now there’s some legitimacy to this grievance, I think, but it again gets ridiculous when you’ve got redditors suggesting that the CCP are punishing these people for either being critical of the Party, having parents who were critical of the Party, or simply resent that these immigrants found success in the West. I don’t know anything about Kuang, but I specifically remember Zhao condemning the Uyghur genocide. If Worldcon had been hosted in Chicago this year, and a work had been deemed ineligible that was written by some real patriot Qanon freaks, even most of these nerds wouldn’t care. But because this is happening in China it must be the nefarious ways of the Orient at play here, the trickster mind of the Han perverting the great Western institution that is Worldcon.

Saw a great reply to someone else posting this that said something like “Clare Daly is no friend to muslims, she denies the Uyghur genocide and the Assad gas attacks.”

Decided to watch the new season of True Detective. Like any redditor, I love season 1. Don’t have any deep hatred for season 2, I watched about half of it but it didn’t keep my interest enough to keep tuning in every week. Saw one episode of season 3, seemed promising, but never did watch the rest.

It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s got none of the magic that season 1 had. I went and rewatched the first episode of season 1 right after finishing the first episode of the new season and two things struck me. One, it’s so focused. The episode, and the rest of the season, are about these two odd guys and their relationship as they investigate the ritual cult murder of poor women, all set against a stark backdrop of poverty and social rot in rural Louisiana. Two, it looks amazing. In every scene there’s great lighting, and the whole season has a distinct and cohesive visual style.

Whereas the new season seems unfocused. The story is everywhere. Visually it looks like a dozen different streaming shows. Also, the leads for this one are Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. I love Foster, this is the first thing I’ve seen Reis in but she seems like a good actor. But they have, I think, two scenes together in this episode, and I wasn’t feeling a lot of chemistry there. But maybe too soon to tell on that one.

Lastly, a fair amount of blatantly supernatural stuff happens. I’m not even entertaining the possibility that this season isn’t explicitly supernatural horror. If it isn’t, and all these ghosts and voices from nowhere and jerky movements in the shadows are red herrings, then it’s some of the cheapest storytelling I’ve ever seen.

TL:DR The first episode of season 4 of True Detective isn’t bad, but doesn’t have any of the magic of season 1.

This one’s too easy, there’s a clear winner here. Harder question is

who’s the better filmmaker: Brian Levant, who made the 1994 Flintstones movie and Snow Dogs AND Beethoven, or Jean-Luc Godard?

https://twitter.com/liz_franczak/status/1744712132015370527

Lol, Twitter just banned TrueAnon and zei_squirrel, among others

Seconding the suggestion of The Jarkarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

I’d also recommend Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse. It’s about official US armed forces policy that they literally “kill anything that moves” during the Vietnam War. There’s an interview with a soldier in the book where he says that the My Lai Massacre wasn’t an anomaly, it was just the one that people found out about back home, and that really there was a My Lai happening every month.

I listened to both of these as audiobooks. Which was odd for me, while I like audiobooks they don’t make up much of my reading time in a given year, and I’ve never before listened to nonfiction. But I didn’t regret it. Kill Anything That Moves has been uploaded to YouTube.

I keep getting recommended clips of RDR2 on youtube, a game I’ve played before and enjoyed. The clips almost make me want to play it again. I like the story well enough, and the game is generally quite good at atmosphere and environments, and many of the strangers and side quests are pretty entertaining. I get tired of all the free roam stuff. Or at least I get tired of it if I’ve decided to try and get achievements, or some of the hoops you have to jump through to unlock outfits at the trapper just get… wearisome. But stopping the quests just to hunt, or fish, or steal a stagecoach, or do a treasure hunt is fun.

But I can’t stand Rockstars approach to quest design, or whatever you’d call it, for most of the main story quests. I feel like every one is “Go to location A, get in an arcade shootout with like 20-30 guys who are all dead set on killing you. Get on horse. Engage is a running arcade shootout on horseback while you travel. Arrive at location B, get in another arcade shootout with either more or less guys than the first shoot out.” Repeat ad infinitum.

I’m not sure what it is about this game that makes me hate that approach. Is it really any different from most of the other AAA single player games I love? Most of them probably boil down to “Go to a location, shoot a bunch of people.” I think if it was less guys, maybe I’d like that more. Or if the whole enterprise felt less arcade-y. Not that I’m sure I could articulate what is even arcade-y about it in the first place.

Then I’ve got this issue, not sure if it’s the same issue or a separate issue. Haven’t thought about it too hard, may come out a little under-cooked. But, at least by AAA standards, the story of RDR2 is fairly intimate, personal. You get to know Arthur real well, and everybody in his crew. And I think I’m feeling some dissonance between that and the GTA levels of violence happening every single quest. In the real American West there were nine gunfighters at the OK Corral, and three men died, and no one’s stopped talking about it for the 140 years since. Obviously a game doesn’t have to reflect that. But a lot of old Western movies also just aren’t that violent, even more modern deconstructions like Unforgiven, and then you’ve got RDR2 which is like if Quentin Tarantino had a psychotic break. And I’m not saying that the game should sanitize the Old West, or the actions of the Van Der Linde gang. But they kill a ridiculous amount of people. In one mission Arthur and Micah, alone, kill an entire town’s worth of armed men.

I feel like someone could make the argument that the level of violence is an intentional choice made to satirize depictions of the Old West in other media. Obviously they built this formula on GTA games, and even RDR1, which it’s fair to say are broadly satirical. But then RDR2 pivots hard into a much more serious story, such that the more explicit satirical elements sometimes feel out of place. And the level of violence just feels like a holdover from the Rockstar formula.

Or hell, maybe I’m just tired. Whatever they were doing, it didn’t work well enough for me to do a replay of the game. Though I liked it well enough to complete the game once, so maybe I’m just complaining to complain.

TL:DR The violence in RDR2 is too frequent and too cartoony. Make it rarer, but make it hit harder and feel worse. Admittedly, they do have a game to sell, and if they did what I’m suggesting they run the risk of making the game too boring for gamers. Then again, Death Stranding exists, so counterpoint. And the parts of the game I see discussed most are either the open world activities or the story/characters. So hell, maybe it would be fine.

I think my favorite thing about all this was Jimmy Falun Gong posting a thread accusing Trueanon of being grifting sellouts. He’s generally a good follow, but he has an deep hatred for any podcast more popular than his. Which is every podcast.

I’m so angry about this.

Oh, whoops, baked my sourdough starter. Oh well, at least I’ll have some cookies to show for it.

The God of Cooking, punishing me for my hubris: You think you will bake cookies? The easiest thing to bake? A recipe so simple that many children could successfully pull it off entirely untended? You fool. You absolute jackass.

Alright folks my efforts in the kitchen might be cursed. I followed this recipe (beware ads on this shitty recipe website) (yeah, I use a recipe when baking cookies. I only do it like once every two years. Don’t judge me for this) to a damn T. But still the cookies came out all fucked up. They came out super flat. You know how your standard chocolate chip cookie is, what, maybe 1/4” thick or even a bit more? Well mine at like 1/16” thick. I don’t know what that is in metric, I’m clearly an idiot. I’ve triple checked this recipe, I didn’t massively fuck up and like double the amount of butter or something. The only thing I’ve done differently is use salted butter because I don’t have unsalted in my house, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the culprit.

I’ve made cookies in the past, I don’t understand how this could have gone so wrong.