This is what has been most depressing/distressing about watching all of this unfold. People online (and I’m not immune to this either) have this impulse to think “Surely not right? Surely these people will come to their senses and not just blindly follow transparently evil orders right? We’ve been told these people are heroes who stand up for freedom and democracy and our safety right? Surely at least some of them will do the right thing right?” It’s so ingrained into us through support our troops propaganda and various TV/Movies showing them and cops as principled heroes saving the day. We’ve also seen this with corporations. “Wow I can’t believe this company turned away from DEI so quickly. I can’t believe this company is going to keep selling surveillance tech to the government. Surely someone will see how wrong that is.”

And then I snap back to my senses and remember history. We’ve seen what horrors these people are willing to commit, whether they want to or are “just following orders.” Maybe you at least believe that they won’t do it to US, as cynical as that is… and then you remember Kent State, segregation, the violent crackdown on unions, the police rallying around protecting cops who execute people in the streets, etc.

Nobody is going to come to their senses. None of them are coming to save us from themselves. If we don’t stand up for ourselves this is just going to happen and be another chapter in a long history of cruelty.

How often are those military coups AGAINST the fascists? Hell a lot of those military coups were backed by our military/intelligence agencies. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the US military to be the bastion against tyranny.

Maybe. But you’d need servers. And that would cost a lot of money for something aiming to be that scale.

My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.

Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.

I don’t know how they do it for Doctor Who, but I remember reading that for Marvel movies they often do work on the CGI scenes before they’ve even finished the script or hired some of the key talent. It can’t be easy to try to stitch together a narratively coherent and emotionally resonant movie when before you begin you’ve been told which action scenes you need to work into your script.

Yeah I think it’s some of that. I feel like there is often an inverse relationship between budget and how interesting/emotionally resonant a show/movie is. More time for action is less time for human moments.

I just watched it tonight.

I struggle to really pin down exactly what the difference is between the good and bad Doctor Who episodes/seasons. Like if I was going to give a general complaint about this episode or season, I’d say that it felt like confusing nonsense but… I feel like that’s Doctor Who most of the time and I usually loved it even when it was in spite of the confusing bits. The more recent seasons have been confusing in a boring way that’s just hard to put into words. I think this Doctor started out pretty strong but somewhere along the way it lost it’s magic.

The one thing that comes to my mind as a potential difference, but honestly I could just not be remembering right, is it feels like the Doctor kind of just stands around listening to exposition a lot more in recent seasons. Like we’re being told a lot more than we’re being shown and The Doctor doesn’t really run around solving problems as much as they wait around for the bad guy to explain everything and then we reach the end of the episode and the plot happens to wrap things up somehow. Then there is just this over-reliance on reveals of things that I don’t even know why I should be surprised because it’s based on some random reference from a long time ago.

There’s definitely some important differences, I’m just not 100% sure that those are it or not.

Others have done a great job of breaking down the specifics of this episode. I just wanted to air my more general thoughts as they relate to the newer seasons.

EDIT: Also, whether or not the new Doctor turns out better or not, it’s kind of sad to see this Doctor getting the short end of the new paradigm of shorter seasons for streaming shows. Eccleston was only on for one season and he got nearly as many episodes as this one got in two.

But numbers are also text

I couldn’t get through much of it either, but not because of the weird stuff, I like weird, the gameplay is just too… involved? Stressful? Exhausting? Like I’m ok with challenging games sometimes, but needing to spend a ton of time slowly trekking across fields and mountains while manually trying to keep your footing, managing a bunch of consumables, and occasionally needing to play walk through the ghost minefield with your baby detector while dealing with the rest of that is just not something I could keep up for as long as the game was going to go.

I hate that for a lot of these apps there’s no way to turn off these kinds of ad notifications without stopping the real notifications you want from the app.

Oh I was looking at system requirements on the store page. Is that accurate?

I got a new PC recently so unfortunately I am now on Windows 11. I’ve been wanting to make the swap to Linux but I can’t really make a clean break because at least some of the games I play a lot won’t work on Linux. I do think I’m gonna try to set up another hard drive with Linux on it to try to slowly start learning it and ideally move over anything that I can over there eventually and just keep the windows drive for those few games.

Does anyone have any recommendations related to that? Distro for gaming/ease of use? What’s the best option for setting up the dual boot? Anything I wouldn’t have thought of that’s relevant?

I’m not talking about personal actions. I personally believe in equality and I wish I could do more about that even if there are all sorts of personal reasons that’s difficult for me.

Corporations don’t believe anything. They’re just profit optimizing machines. They were doing rainbow capitalism when they thought it would be more profitable and now that they think the opposite is more profitable, they’ll do that. It’s as simple as that and hoping corporations would be allies in a fight for equality was always based on a misunderstanding about power.

It’s not like corporations don’t have power that can resist government action. Look at how effectively they’ve evaded taxes and regulations. The big international ones can threaten to take their ball and leave if they don’t like a country’s policies. And that’s when they don’t just bribe politicians to change them.

The workers at those companies are people though. Labor organizing was always going to be necessary to build up power for change. Not saying it’s easy and I can’t fault someone for worrying about losing their job, but if resistance was going to happen anywhere that’s where it would be. Not in boardrooms or alone in a booth.

But there’s the difference. It’s one thing to have convictions but not the means or courage to act on them. It’s another thing to have power, but lack convictions beyond whatever is currently convenient. The former could overcome those obstacles given the right circumstances. The latter never will.

It’s almost like their support for these issues was never genuine to begin with.

For leaks there is rarely going to be a way to know for sure. So you have to evaluate whether or not you think it’s reasonable given what you do know. We do know that they’ve done this kind of thing in other races. We do know that the party is funded by capitalist interests. We do know that the campaign didn’t really put forward a positive agenda and therefore had to look for other ways to gain advantages. As far as the character of the people/party involved, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt knowing all the awful things they’ve been complicit in. Lastly it doesn’t seem like it’s some crazy infeasible or irrational thing to do. We’re not talking about demonic sex cults or mind control or some nonsense. We’re talking about political maneuvering through media strategy during a campaign. The objective was rational even if it was unconscionable.

As you said, they thought it was a good strategy to optimize their chances at winning. Not only did they turn out to be wrong, but the act of trying to instigate one of the only two political parties we’re stuck with to take further right positions and possibly nominate a very right wing candidate is not an acceptable byproduct of the strategy.

Do I think we were headed in that direction anyway? Probably. As long as the parties aren’t willing to address the fundamental problems with capitalism, the door will always be open to a right wing demagogue who knows the right things to say. But spending your effort to speed that along instead of, idk, working on actually popular social programs, certainly didn’t help.

Did you not read about the part where their plan was to boost the more extreme candidates in the primary to try to get the rest of them to move further right in hopes that it would make an easier opponent for them?

That they realized they screwed up after the fact doesn’t change that.

Yeah you’re right, it’s nothing compared to helping Trump get elected.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/missteps-doomed-clinton-campaign/story?id=43422676

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

Yeah look how well it’s worked. Far right nutjobs have totally not been normalized. Nope.

Ah yes. Give money to the “progressive party” so it can do progressive things like funding ads for far right republicans in primaries:

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1106859552/primary-illinois-colorado-republican-candidate-democrats-ads

Or backing “centrist” primary candidates against progressive candidates.

Very progressive. This amalgamation of rich people’s money and consultants is a great political ally.

I have less hope for two reasons:

1. These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.

2. The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.