GraniteM, granitem@lemmy.world

Trump Only Fucks Up

I saw a straight-up depressing ad at my last visit to the theater. A couple of guys are out back of a restaurant talking, and a third guy joins them.

Guy 1: What are you doing with your tax refund?

Guy 2: I’m going to buy some recording equipment and start that podcast I’ve always wanted to!

Guy 1: Nice. I’m putting it back into this truck that I have so I can keep making money making deliveries to restaurants! How about you, [Guy 3]?

Guy 3: [Smiles ruefully, opens his phone to…]

And the ad is for an app that invests your money in crypto currencies. So the ad is shitting on the idea of pursuing your creative dream or owning your own real-world business, and endorsing the idea of taking all your money to the crypto casino.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Prostitution? Gambling.

Exotic dancing? Fraud.

Dealing street drugs? Gambling.

Marketing pharmaceuticals? Fraud.

Your stomach thinks all meals are smoothies.

Your tongue always knows what it would feel like to lick any surface you can see in person.

There’s no meaningful difference between eating a pound of crab meat and eating a pound of crickets.

I had garlic ice cream once. It wasn’t horrible, and I’m glad I can say I’ve had it, but I wouldn’t order an entire sundae.

She forgot that butts exist. And feet.

Someone remade Portal as a browser-based side scroller, and I fucking loved that game.

I played through Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, and with how hard every NPC was flirting with Aloy, I wondered “Why isn’t this a post-apocalyptic dating sim?”

In Divinity: Original Sin II, there’s a game-breaking mechanic where you can plant tea plants in pots, grow new tea plants, harvest them, and then use the buffs from drinking tea to get infinite moves during fights. I actually got into the whole management of the tea farm, and I don’t want to totally throw out the RPG combat, but I might like it if farming and then using your crops to win fights was an entire game unto itself, rather than just a broken exploit.

And cliffs! Sheer cliffs seem to be much less geologically common than my childhood led me to believe.

At first I thought the American just couldn’t recognize short-haired flat-chested Scandinavian moms as women.

I became a knife guy. It started when I was visiting a government surplus store and I realized that I could buy knives that had been confiscated at security checkpoints at a steep discount. Then I started developing opinions about grips and blade geometries.

Now I’m wearing a neck knife every day, and I tell people that once you start carrying a knife, you’re amazed to find all the convenient uses you can find for the thing in a given day.

I’ll be honest, I’ve given real thought to the idea of trying to leverage toxic masculinity to get men to take on more domestic responsibilities.

“What kind of real man needs a woman to cook for him?!”

“Bro, are you telling me that a woman can change a diaper but you can’t?!”

“Dude, if you can’t braid your daughter’s hair and get her to dance lessons on time, are you even a real man?!”

Rise of the Leighs and Dens

Don’t worry, any stuff that doesn’t fit into the universe probably doesn’t matter.

Let this empire burn and 50+ flags fly freely

Later, in the smoldering ruins:

“I meant 🌹 🌺 ❤️ Balkanization🌈 🎂 🦄, not 🔫 💥 🔥 Balkanization 💀 🪦 💣!”

I checked, and we do have an extradition treaty with Albania, so it’s not what I figured.

If less than one percent of Nader voters (not all Florida voters, just Nader voters) had voted for Gore instead, the margin in Florida would have been wide enough for Gore to unquestionably take the state, and he’d have become president.

Card is confounding because those first few Ender books are unequivocally about the importance of empathy and recognition of common personhood, even across seeming-impenetrable species boundaries, and how mutual respect and love are the most important quality a person can have. And then… yadda yadda yadda, OSC is a gigantic bigot. The. Fuck?