Spyke

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world

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Pentagon seeks $80 billion from Congress for Iran war

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What I don't love about this narrative is that it kinda implies that all Democrats are the same and in on this shit.

There definitely are a lot of corpo Dems that are willing to bend the knee when called upon, but pretending literally all politicians are in on this level of conspiracy is basically giving up. Figure out which Dems reliably fuck up votes and focus some fucking energy on them.

And then also focus on implementing something like Ranked Choice or Approval voting locally.

Fucking damn it, I know there are some really shitty rich people right now being absolute wads, but don't let your awareness of those shitty people make you think that everyone in the world is like that.

memes

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Happy Labour Day to people who are not landlords.

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So while I generally agree with your sentiment, there are some obvious ways that sometime could be an ethical landlord.

What if you have a house that's too big, so you convert a floor into an apartment? You're adding to the number of housing units available. Should you be forced to sell a portion of your house/building to whoever wants to live there? Or should you be able to rent it out to someone at a reasonable rate? Do we want rules that discourage people from potentially adding units to the market?

I feel like the "all landlords are evil" narrative is way too simplistic, and that simplistic view turns off people who would otherwise support reasonable limits on landlords and housing ownership. Like, it's obvious that we need limits and taxes on people who own multiple properties, and it's obvious that there are companies that exploit renters and drive up prices, but it's all more complicated than just "landlords evil lol".

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What’s pvp? An sti?

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Maybe, but to me it's voice chat + matchmaking.

I used to play on a few Day of Defeat: Source servers, and I met a ton of great online friends there. That's because they were dedicated and moderated servers that kicked and banned people for being assholes, in or out of voice chat.

But... If you're confident that you're never going to see the people in your match again, it's way easier to be assholes to them.

gaming

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Achievements

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There are plenty of gamers (myself included) who do actually like well-designed achievements, and they can actually really help you vary how you engage with a game. I'm sure that publishers also love the analytics, but pretending that they aren't for regular people at all is silly too.

til

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TIL Heroes tend to just be well-adjusted people who learned to feel empathy as children, often from caring and patient parents

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In a weird way, having emotionally available and supportive parents is absolutely a privilege. People are able to develop empathy in spite of bad parents, and good parenting isn't a guarantee to a good person, but parenting is a major factor for life success. I wish it weren't, and I hope we can build a society that could guarantee every child full opportunities.

usa

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Yes

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Not sure what the average person is supposed to do from where they live. I go to protests and try to contribute to my local community, while giving money to orgs that are better positioned to do stuff, but I hate this narrative of "nobody is doing anything". I'm not going to pick up a gun and start deciding on targets, and fuck anyone who does generic calls to violence.

At the end of the day, people are just trying to live their lives, and they don't have a lot of individual levers to pull to make an impact. It requires organization and belief that good things can still happen, which are sorely lacking in left leaning spaces.

games

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The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made

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Because it's an opinion article and maybe it's OK for the author to make an subjective statement of the quality of a thing they love? Like, if they really believe it, is it wrong to state that? Do they need to qualify everything in their article with "this is just my opinion, sorry if you don't agree."

I get being annoyed by hyperbole in articles, but I don't really think that this warrants this kind of response. Sometimes it's OK to make strong statements. You can make statements like that without implying that people who think differently are bad/wrong.

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How to treat a man

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Isn't that the status quo? I guess it's not really fathers to daughters, but most women I know went through some amount of "here's how to be a good wife" lessons from their mothers or family. I think women get a lot of "traditional gender roles" training that's mostly about being caretakers.

Usually people putting forth this kinda "women should learn how to care for their man" attitude are coming from a conservative "traditional family values" position.

Really, we should be teaching people how to ask about and learn the needs of their partner, and how to determine your own needs and communicate those to your partner. Basic emotional intelligence stuff. It doesn't have to be gendered at all.

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YSK that you can run your own Twitch alternative with Owncast.

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Over COVID, we started a bad/cult movie night that I streamed over Discord. Streaming via Twitch/Youtube would get copyright struck immediately. Streaming over Discord worked, but you have no real control over stream quality, and often the stream quality is based on the person with the worst connection. You also are locked to 30/60 FPS, which sometimes causes small frame weirdness when most movies are at 24.

An easy, self hosted solution is exactly what I wanted at the time. I played with setting up a streaming server but it ended up being too much of a headache at the time.

There's a ton of valid reasons to self host. Just because you can't think of any doesn't mean it's pointless.