Archelon

Fascists and “strongmen” appeal to the weak and insecure.

I once got to go behind the scenes at a zoo, including their vet’s operating room. They had a bunch of interesting stories about how they tranq and operate on different animals of various sizes, but the worst experience they had was with an otter.

Poor little guy woke up partway through surgery, panicked, and went fucking berserk. Those little claws left gouges a foot long and an inch deep in the vet. And then, because they’re so small and fast, trying to re-anaesthetize it was a huge pain.

Anyways, I think about that story a lot when I hear about otters.

https://youtu.be/6pGW0EquGvI?si=tUOGMW503IF3Pz9z

Right up there with the ergonomic comfort and ease of use of the N64 tripod!

It’s like Israel is using this war to implement some sort of FINAL SOLUTION.

So with adjustment:

If the goal is to make a living wring a serial comic, success would be having C>=A so you can afford to keep making and publishing more comics.

BR Softech is a leading ~~game~~ grift development company specializing in creating ~~immersive and engaging~~ addictive and predatory Blackjack games. With a team of expert ~~developers and designers~~ sociopaths and ghouls, we leverage advanced technologies to deliver high-quality graphics (to distract users), smooth gameplay (so they don’t notice how much time and money they’ve spent) and innovative features (to hijack users’ brain chemistry into making them spend money on virtual cards). Our solutions are tailored to meet the ~~unique~~ extremely common needs of clients, ensuring a customized ~~gaming~~ grifting experience. Whether for ~~mobile apps~~predatory scams for children, ~~online casinos~~ predatory scams for adults, or ~~social platforms~~ predatory scams for seniors, BR Softech is committed to ~~excellence in the gaming industry~~ bilking suckers out of as much cash as possible while providing nothing of value to the user or society as a whole.

Man, I remember I got Minecraft right after the Nether’d been introduced. Played pretty constantly until right around the oceans update, and then I got distracted and fell off.

Now looking at it there’s so much it seems almost unrecognizable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria

Strategic bombing of a civilian population has only ever hardened that population’s resolve.

Bombing Moscow or any other city would only increase support for the regime.

Now, industrial targets that Putin’s cronies make their rubles running? Much more likely to have an impact.

Later in the article:

I'm writing about the Silent Hill 2 Remake in this scrambled, back-to-front, obnoxious way partly to piss off whoever edits this (to be 100% clear, Team Silent are the creators of the original Silent Hill 2, which Bloober are remaking), and partly to make a point about remakes: that they tacitly or openly position the original game as an "obsolete" museum piece in need of replacement, dismissing the old artistic choices as primitive and incomplete, re-defining the old creative parameters as constraints that need to be lifted. It's all in the service of the market's cannibalistic mania for the new, its structural need to ceaselessly bury "the past", often by directly obstructing non-commercial preservation efforts, and sell you Progress that starts to wither and fade the second you peel away the cellophane.