even the RX9070 is running around $900 USD, I cannot fathom affording even state-of-the-art gaming from years ago at this point. I am still using a GTX1660 and playing games from years ago I never got around to and having a grand time. Most adults I know are in the same boat and either not even considering upgrading their PC or they’re playing their kid’s console games.

Every year we say “Gonna look into upgrading” but every year prices go up and wages stay the same (or disappear entirely as private-equity ravages the business world, digesting every company that isn’t also a private equity predator) and the prices of just living and eating are insane, so at this rate, a lot of us might start reading again.

It means internet arguing is stupid and pointless and will do the exact opposite of making you feel satisfied or accomplished.

Nobody has ever had their opinions and beliefs changed from arguing on the internet, or if they have, they will never talk about it, so there’s no results you can track from it, no outcome, no closure. Arguing on the internet means getting heated for no reason and with no payoff.

Most of the people who say the stupidest shit are just children anyway, but for some reason we’ve made it socially acceptable to argue with, and take the opinions of literal CHILDREN as seriously as if it’s people writing policy.

That’s not an immediately lethal injury, I don’t know why they show him dead in the last panel. There’s not enough major arteries going through the face tissue for someone to immediately bleed out, and there have been many, many stories of people suffering partial face and/or scalp degloving and surviving, sometimes with only minor disfigurement if the blood vessels can be salvaged/reconnected in time.

If that fucking cop could do his job instead of acting like a hysterical child, he could get the guy to medical care and they may be able to reattach his face. It’s not even totally severed, this dude could make a full recovery if they can keep him from going into shock and dying later.

Likely he could sue Velma and the gang and get a share of what I assume to be years and years of reward money, or stolen criminal loot they’ve acquired. Why else would they “solve mysteries” for so many years?

Yes, I do overthink things.

I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.

Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen?

As someone who used to be an operations manager for several work-crews, I fully understand why you would just make a fucking blanket-rule. Because the more people you put on a work crew, the more obvious and stupid risks they will take. It was a daily struggle to get people to wear glove and eye protection using hammers, and the times that I didn’t enforce it as a “do it or get sent home” rule, can you guess what happened?

No really, we were on first-name basis with people at the urgent-care center my company worked out a deal with.

Sure the day that they’re raking the yard there’s no chance of someone suffering a head-injury. Until one of them is loading the wheelbarrow back on the truck and didn’t bother lowering the lift-gate because they chose to load their buckets and tools first and didn’t want shit to fall out of the back of the truck, then the goddamn wheelbarrow falls and lands on Martinez’s head and now he needs stitches and X-rays and is off the team for a week and we have another worker’s comp claim and everyone’s paycheck suffers for it.

We wouldn’t need PPE rules and a thousand other safety regulations if people were always smart, alert and watching for hazards. They’re not. They’re incredibly dumb. Everyone is. So we need blanket-rules.

Autistic partners checking in.

They’re fully aware most of their policies are going to get shot down in court, that’s why they’re carpet bombing the US with bullshit right now.

If we all breath a sigh of relief that some new policy to force toddlers to work in slaughterhouses got shot down, we’re likely missing the 30 odd, convoluted deregulation policies that slip right past the new cycle because they’re written in legalese and seem abstract to 99% of non-wealthy Americans.

I don’t know how many times I can scream that they’re robbing us blind while distracting us with stupid cultural nonsense.

But maybe some kind of resilience to the forces of destruction plaguing commercial social media.

This isn’t going to be the effective slogan that turns the masses who are finally just barely starting to fill Bluesky.

As soon as any platform sees a measure of success, it becomes a product and thus vulnerable. If we want social media that isn’t just a massive propaganda and advertising machine, I feel like we need to change something else.

Like physically storming corporate offices and returning the means of production to the people?

Maybe.

It’s a pretty lame comic trying to ride on having a controversial “punchline.”

If it was posted on a larger site like reddit it would probably be on front-page just because of the drama and controversy people would extract from it.

If this was reddit the comments would be 1000+ deep already, and all of it would be contentious.

Oh absolutely 100% this has had foreign involvement, the KGB handbook (literally) describes how to plant chaotic agents into a democratic nation’s population to boost both sides of every social debate or argument. The digital age made this the easiest tactic in the world and every nation that’s been “annexed” by Russia experienced this sowing of absolute weaponized bullshit and hate.

edit: several tankies follow me around downvoting my every comment and throwing tankie memes at me because they seeth when someone says that Russia did a bad thing. It’s quite charming, they can’t do much else because they’re blocked.

They want us to all tune out. This is all by design so we don’t know what’s real or not anymore, then they can get away with even more and nobody will care.

This is what they’ve been doing for years and years, this is just more of the same.

My parents raised me out in the wilderness in a literal compound and hour from the nearest convenience store with no phone or even a mailbox.

So yeah… I had to learn everything about the world through a little black-and-white TV in my room that had big ol’ rabbit ear antenna that if I moved just right, I could get PBS from another town that had a lot of educational programming. As long as it wasn’t about “evolution” they were fine with me watching PBS.

If it wasn’t for PBS I would probably be dead. Seriously, that life doesn’t do a person well, both my parents and a sibling drank themselves to death, others are on the way. I however, learned science, and biology, and how to read and how to do math and a host of other topics that I am going to be an eternal sponsor of PBS for. There was one special that explained sex to some degree, but was still heavily censored. My parents were too busy being high and religious to dream of having an awkward talk with their son, so I was totally on my own.

Thankfully, I learned where to find the “relationship” books on my rare ventures into town to visit places like bookstores and managed to learn a lot about sex from pilfering a book from the sex and relationship section and reading it in the kid’s books section.

It’s a more niche “back room” kind of forum, so there are less casual browsers and more technerds here, which makes it predominantly male for a lot of reasons that require a whole other discussion to analyse, but it’s exactly like when reddit was a niche “back room” website gaining popularity.

Lets not forget when reddit started, it was absolute chaos, some of the very worst communities imaginable where at home there, and the userbase RAGED every time some pedo or hate sub got purged. But they did get purged, and it became welcoming for a more diverse group of users to participate in. (Until the bot nation attacked)

Look, there’s room for both sinking and floating here, we just need to give everyone a chance to try it out their own way!

Trump was also deeply involved in WWF, which also happened to be an entertainment venture which pioneered the idea of wide-scale, public cognitive dissonance for profit.

It was frustrating for some of us when we were kids and we were yelling at our friends that “professional wrestling” wasn’t real and they didn’t believe it, they wanted with all their heart to believe in the storylines and dumb drama, because it was engaging to that part of some people’s brains which desperately needs to follow narratives to make sense of the world. It seemed fucking insane that people would believe that a real sport could have people with swords and black-magic, we were like “What is wrong with this person that they can’t reason through this??”

But we let it go, because it was “harmless.” It was just a silly show, what harm could it be if some people really wanted to believe in it?

But we should have all taken notice of that specific phenomenon because it’s a profound window in the human condition and how far along we really are in evolution. We’re not a rational, reasonable species, we’re animals that formed brains during a million years or so of ice-ages and desperate survival. Our brains are designed to tell stories to explain what we feel, and the brain will readily, greedily latch onto a provided story. The brain is not reasonable or logical, it’s just a story-telling device. And we’re not at all immune to cognitive dissonance no matter how intelligent we are. There are countless people who believe one thing and know another and it doesn’t interfere with their reasoning or life at all.

If we’re not taking control of the stories being consumed, the stories consume us. We might all feel a lot smarter than people who get sucked into WWF or MAGA, but we’re also vulnerable to emotional appeals, fear and hate. I’ve seen plenty of it masked with progressive values, but far more rationalized. We need to be on better guard, we need to understand the nature of our actual enemy. It’s people pulling puppet strings with stories and emotions and it CAN be countered.

Needs more DEEP STATE

Same, I’ve been scoffed at, mocked, people have thought I’m making it up and am just creeped out by the “mold” in the stuff.

And like, bruh… I fucking LOVE cheese, almost every cheese short of the stuff with the live maggots, nor all forms of bleu cheese. Because the smell and taste reminds me of waking up in a tent in the woods when my family was homeless and there were ants crawling all over us. I get the same association with truffles and most mushrooms too, so I cannot eat truffle-anything.

I want to see a MCU series that just follows around mutants with helpful but mostly benign mutant powers or powers that can’t really be used in fights. Like every-day people who can do almost fantastic things like always know what time it is without looking at a clock or never needs to use the bathroom.