Sweet Jesus, I wish that Democratic voters and politicians were unified enough that if we had a solid majority in this country that we could be considered a one-party state. Even if we somehow did manage to finagle things such that we won the next election 60-40 or more, it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that we would immediately celebrate by turning on each other like dogs. The neolibs can’t stand the hippies. The hippies can’t stand the tech liberals. Most of the people pushed left by identifying with one oppressed minority group or another are in a coalition approximately as stable as the Balkans in 1913.

Democrats’ favorite activity is infighting. We like it more than winning elections. The times when we actually manage to get our shit together enough to win are the exception to the rule.

“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.

“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

Also, this is just a really negative set of statements. “I DON’T want X, Y, and Z.” Even giving anon a pretty big benefit of the doubt and assuming they didn’t state it like “No fatties,” they aren’t really saying what they want in a partner, just a bunch of standards by which they would judge somebody.

The search for a romantic partner should involve more positives than negatives. You should have ideas about what things you like in people and yourself, and what interests and activities that you’re passionate about and would like to share with someone. If you start with a laundry list of things that you don’t like, that’s not just going to be off-putting, it’s going to be limiting you to thinking only in those terms, rather than finding something that brings you joy, and finding someone that has that in common with you.

When asked whether Vance believes Robinson’s denial that the comments were made by him, Vance said that the situation needed to “play out.”

“I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him — I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion."

Remember that for Republicans it’s not a matter of how despicable a candidate is, it’s only a matter of if they’re popular or not. Vance came right out and said that the truth doesn’t matter, just public opinion. If 50.1% of voters in North Carolina were going to vote for Robinson, the GOP wouldn’t care what he said. If that number was 49.9%, it wouldn’t matter if he was an amalgamation of Jesus Christ and Captain America, they’d throw him to the curb and claim they’d never heard of him.

They have no principles. The only thing they believe in is power; getting it, and using it against the people they hate. That is their only true ideology.

• Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Kill Bill

• Stand By Me

• Dirty Dancing

• The Lost Boys

Draft horses: “Am I a joke to you?”

That is one of the stupidest takes I have ever seen, and I’ve been on the internet since AOL chatrooms.

Not voting makes politicians less accountable to you. If you somehow organized everyone who thought like you do, regardless of your agenda, and convinced every single one of them to not vote, then you would achieve the lofty political goal of… absolutely ensuring that no politician would ever try to pursue your goals.

Voting, by definition, is what makes politicians give a shit about your cause. There’s a reason why the Greek word meaning “one who does not take part in public affairs” is the root of the modern word “idiot.”

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

Star Trek: TNG

Batman: The Animated Series

Space Ghost Coast to Coast

“You’ve got a little schmutz on you” just feels like the right way to tell people there’s an unspecified substance on them.

With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.

Sexual positions are locked behind tiered paywalls. The most basic ones are free, but as they get more interesting, you have to pay increasing royalty fees.

Chemtrail conspiracy theorists in absolute shambles.

Donald Trump is Pantone 16-1449: Gold Flame.

You must never go there.

That’s basically a plot point in Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where visitors have to pay for the amount of air they intend to breathe while visiting the moon.

Also, Idea: invent a copyrightable method of filtering or otherwise treating air. Release your “specially modified” air into the atmosphere. Start charging for every time someone inhales one of your AyreMolecuulz™.

I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.

If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.

Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.

The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.

Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”