IDK maybe be skeptical when someone's thread paints someone from a marginalized background as a vicious, plotting mastermind spanning years of hateful campaigns.

Especially when that thread seriously misrepresents at least one recent event to support the devious villain angle. Fuck it, I'm just saying it.

No, Ana Mardoll wasn't behind a dozen different hate campaigns and if you're uncritically spreading this bullshit I'm strongly considering giving up on your critical thinking ability.

The soundtrack to Spider-Man is a reminder of a dark era in rock music. I know it became somewhat of a meme to hate Nickelback but honestly among the whole crowd of faux-macho radio rock assholes Chad Kroeger's croaking really was just awful, and combining him with Josey Scott's nasal whine for the soundtrack's lead single was a fucking crime.

I love that The Good Place starts with "Hell is other people" but is bold enough to conclude that "So is heaven". Michael's whole idea for the Bad Place neighborhoods revolves around the idea that people will bring their insecurities with them and end up torturing each other.

But the Good Place redesign looks at once you've worked through those and sees joy in connections made.

I had a mixture heartwarming/heartbreaking experience on a shop the other day. I had a Petco order with a decent number of items, and in the location I went to they had some sort of behavioral training going on that day. So while I was finding the various items, this couple came in that from the reaction of the employee who greeted them had brought their puppy in before.

The tiny thing, some sort of terrier mix, was damn near all fear.

I'm actually entirely willing to argue that yes, the "woke" left has moved farther left while centrists stayed closer to the right.

And that that's the problem with centrists.

The framing of the memes just asserts that moving left is automatically a bad thing. These memes simply assume that the center is a specific instead of relative position, but never outline what that actually means.

I'd argue that the left has been pushed in the direction of more radical positions on subjects like healthcare, climate, wages, etc.

Rewatching Man of Steel on a whim and....Jonathan Kent is the real villain, right? "Son, sometimes you just have to let people die so you don't make people uncomfortable."

And telling people to go to the underpass in a tornado?

Brand new accounts appear in the thousands, while Twitter makes no new changes to the platform, and right-wing dipshits see a change in their analytics.

It's almost like they just proved that Twitter was never suppressing them, they just lost inflated follower counts. The right has for a while now relied largely on inflating their own numbers through various means, including creating numerous accounts run by a handful of people and running botnets to automate spreading content.

If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him. Who does not put out his money at interest and does not take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be moved.

It's funny, every time someone brings up student loan debt some dipshit inevitably brings up every other example of predatory, abusive debt schemes as if we should not ALSO consider being done with those. Basically every modern example of debt is something where the ability of those with a lot of money to leverage it against those without is abused to force a large portion of the population into remaining in a sort of unofficial servitude to capitalists.

I'm semi-curious how much of the drop in HP prequel audience is people reacting to Rowling being an awful person vs people responding to her bad writing in the movies vs people just having largely aged out of the fandom. There was always going to be some extent to which the people who grew up with the books and the original movies found themselves eventually less invested, and her writing was never good enough for nostalgic revisiting to rekindle the original devotion.

Rebels talking about the Dark Side as a cold feeling has me thinking about what it must feel like to be in Vader's presence.

Ezra's description at just being on the same planet as Vader is the same cold feeling as when he taps into the Dark Side in the mine in defense of Kannan. And Vader is shown through the cartoons, comics, and original trilogy to be a very powerful Dark Side user.

But for all his outward calm he's also been established as basically constantly sustained by sheer hate. So I imagine it as being a different sort of cold than the Emperor

This performance was not something I'd known I'd needed to witness. I appreciate the declining to say the word that was the reason Hayley had actually retired the song.

I wonder to what extent the Hunter Biden thing not having much impact is because the people who might have been swayed can't see the difference between the framing claim - that Joe got Hunter a position, Hunter used it for Joe's benefit - and what the Trumps do every day. There may be a certain level of scandal/corruption fatigue.

The constant self-dealing, the absolute venality of the Trump regime, leaving people looking at the claims about Hunter like "...so?"

It probably doesn't hurt that they've been mostly incoherent in establishing guilt.

At some point it has to become clear that there are no systemic solutions to the dismantling of the country by a party that has actively reshaped the country's institutions to enable that dismantling.

The GOP and conservatism are incompatible with modernity, liberty, and life. That last part isn't hyperbole, they're literally actively causing the deaths of potentially millions all in service to their own power.

The continued existence of this country and the people in it is directly dependent on the end of the existence of the GOP, in a literal sense.

Judging from the reactions to even mild criticism of him, Andrew Yang really tapped into the "I don't actually pay a lot of attention to what's happening around me but I like LOOKING like I really care" bloc. The "I'm tired of gridlock on both sides" contingent that remains blissfully unaware that a Dem-controlled House has put multiple bills on Mitch McConnell's desk that do everything they're saying needs to be done only WITHOUT the poison pill of protecting corporations.

I really need to understand how Google Play's ad algorithms work because I have not once played any harem-sim game and yet I keep getting multiple of them advertised at me.

It's kind of pissing me off, actually. The closest I've come is playing games with gacha-style team-building.

Is that the thing? That the harem games and the rpg and squad battle games all involve gacha mechanics?

I would pay for an ongoing comic that was just superheroes and supervillains who have kids doing all the mundane child-raising activities.

PTA, parent-teacher meetings, checkups, vaccinations, after-school sports, etc. No big fights, maybe some tense encounters between rivals when it turns out one super's child goes to the same school as another's.

A superhero's kid trick-or-treating and they knock on the door of a supervillain who has a grudge against their parent.

I wonder if anyone's ever done a project trying to trace back various assumptions people make about how certain things work to the media that helped create those assumptions.

There's a lot of ideas that seem almost entirely inspired by fiction that people still hold on to. This seems to end up, ironically, further shaping fiction as those tropes get repeated forward.

Thinking about the "hardboiled detective" trope tweet from earlier. It seems like people embrace an idea that an investigator would have to be entirely impartial?

The economy has never actually improved under conservative leadership but sure, lets keep pretending that right-wing complaints about how responses to the virus are going to kill the economy deserve anything other than the biggest possible, "FUCK YOU". The trick to save the economy during an absolutely necessary shutdown is take all the money currently going to pay police to beat people and all the money currently going to buy the military the latest version of equipment that will never actually get used and give it to people.

There's a number of rural-dwelling left-leaning types who've discussed their experiences with the assumptions a lot of the rest of us tend to make about "red states", namely that a lot of those places...aren't so red. Like, there are conservatives living in those areas, but where most of us picture endless waves of confederate flags down the streets of these places, there's a lot more left-leaning types than we tend to assume.

Given the number of people who've just started doing Instacart, I have a feeling Instacart probably really isn't going to feel much of an impact from people striking.

If people are apparently okay breaking TOS to use third-party apps, I don't think they care about solidarity. What Instacart WILL end up feeling is the number of shoppers, both short term and long term, who quit working because the pay isn't worth the effort and it's especially not worth watching batches appear and then immediately disappear with barely a chance to accept one.