The Democrats knew this was going to happen. There’s no way they couldn’t. And I don’t mean Democrat supporters, many of whom were vehement that Biden was fine like so many anecdotes in this thread recount. I mean the Democrat leadership, who manage his campaign and more than likely manage his presidency. Unlike the public, they have access to him. They have his medical records, the reports of his doctors and caregivers, everything. There’s no way they didn’t know this would happen if he debated.

They might start seeding support for a different candidate into their supporter’s discourse after this, but they will have been planning for this outcome long ago. And when a left-leaning (left from a US Overton window) news platform hosts a debate that shows him up that badly and then publishes commentary like this, you have to wonder if that caused friction with the DNC or if they assented to it.

As the party starts singling out a replacement, the question I hope people start asking is why they didn’t replace Biden earlier? Did they need to wait until the urgency of imminent elections made their new candidate more palatable? And if they don’t replace Biden, why are they letting Trump win?

https://youtu.be/PkqftJRoSXo

Forked-tongued ghouls, all of them.

Games can suck or be masterpieces at any level of budget. The concept of AAA and AAAA is a marketing ploy against the masses of people who are conditioned to see big budget as inherently better. On the other hand certain genres of game don’t really work without massive budgets, while for a most genres it doesn’t matter.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an obvious pick, but then I don’t think it really counts because it doesn’t do any of the heinous shit that AAA games are hated for. Sven Vincke may actually be a class traitor for how he looks after his workers and product quality. BG3 has made him a shitton of money but he could have raked in so much more with the usual post-launch enshittification and staff cutting the industry usually does. And yet he didn’t.

(as far as I can tell, she’s not living in China currently, and is some 1st gen Chinese Canadian YA author who writes Chinese history-inspired fantasy/SF)

Not living there currently. She They was born and spent their childhood there and speaks the language natively.

He gives lots of reasons, but if one of them isn’t “oil-producing countries are starting to escape US hegemony and your gas-guzzling motor industry is on borrowed time” then I don’t think he’s really appealing to the US government’s interests.

They should start calling them seasons, and produce teaser/release trailers and behind-the-scenes interviews with the sanctions architects to build up more hype and anticipation for each season’s package drop. Maybe that way, the Russian economy might actually be interested. Or affected.

It’s hard to believe. But it’s easy to believe the lack of attention this news is getting

The president of a miscellaneous Global South nation was walking along the beach with Xi Jinping.

“Xi,” said the President, sometimes it feels like you’re there for us, but sometimes it feels like you’ve abandoned us.

Xi bade the President to look back along the two sets of tracks they had made on the beach.

“My like-minded good friend,” said Xi Jinping, “the Chinese people have been walking hand-in-hand with you ever since we stood up in 1949.”

“But Xi,” said the President again, “sometimes one pair of footsteps veers away.”

“Those are the times you turned to the Americans.” Xi pointed to where the straying footsteps came to an abrupt stop at an ice cream truck. “But we have always been here to resume walking together once your people grew weary of being fed junk food.”

Or it’s a glimpse at Rom’s Dengist arc

The kicker is that Rom eventually becomes Grand Nagus and starts transforming Ferengi society.

The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene,

I love that scene. It’s so authentic: hearing a white American describe his successful living arrangement as literal communism but saying it’s not communism, and a black American correcting him. 100 years of Red Scare and minority struggle captured in a few lines of dialogue.

Start learning Chinese, you’ll find it useful when you get to the end of that pipeline.

Get in the pokeball.

Church and State will still be seperated; they’re just doing a little gerrymandering. Education is church now.

I recommend Dungeon World for the following reasons:

• Zero prep. Whoever’s going to be the GM doesn’t need to spend hours on planning. There’s also shared world building, instead of the players just creating their characters and the GM being responsible for everything else.

• It has few rules, but they’re important. New players playing dungeon world tend to quickly pick up on how the game is delivering structured creativity, and once they collectively have that understanding you’re in a good place to experiment with other systems or homebrew variations on Dungeon World.

• It has low material demands. Pencil, paper, 6-sided dice. A browser window with tabs for everyone’s character sheets in Google Docs will work, but you don’t even need that.

• There’s a bunch of other themes under the ‘Powered By The Apocalypse’ system that you can easily switch to.

The pill’s effect works on the coffee, not the teacher, and the bewildered teacher is wondering why his coffee sets off his hayfever

Where I live it’s both in person and over internet. I can show a QR code to my pharmacist and if I’m too old to know what a QR code is or if my phone is dead I can show the paper prescription or give them my ID

That’s not just research, molten salt heliostats are in active use already.

“We did it! We time travelled! But what year is it?”

“I’ll ask that guy over there. Hey stranger, are you aware that Palestine is being illegally occupied by a genocidal Zionist state?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re somewhere between 1948 and 2025…”

“I can narrow it down. Hey again stranger, are you a liberal?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re somewhere between 2023 and 2025.”