Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.
And yet more blithering insanity from this timeline, as the billionaire troll manipulates the system to get his ludicrous lawsuit heard by a brazenly compromised judge.
The US legal and political system no longer even pretends to serve the people - it’s overtly just a tool to further the grotesquely destructive and wholly undeserved privilege of a few obscenely wealthy psychopaths.
And the people just stand idly by and watch it happen.
Future students of history (if there are any) are going to wonder how it was that the US could go so self-destructively insane - how people could actually let things get so warped and twisted. And you know… as an American living through it, I couldn’t tell them. I don’t even understand it myself.
The people who are driving it are really very few. While there are certainly a great many people with no power and no control and thus no ability to alter the blatantly destructive path this country is on, there are many millions of people who could make a difference, but somehow they just… don’t. It’s like it doesn’t even register. They just get up in the morning, read about the latest bit of brazen corruption and insanity from the psychopathic plutocrats and their authoritarian cronies, yawn and go about their day, as if corruption and lies and insanity are just to be expected.
How is that even possible?
I genuinely don’t know.
“Bungling” implies that it was accidental.
At this point, it’s safe to assume that any and all election disinformation coming out of X is coming directly from Musk or one of his cronies
Most similar to Advance Wars:
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis
Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation
Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon
Just in general:
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2
Drill Dozer
Golden Sun 1 and 2
Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town
Guru Logic Champ
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Zero Mission
Medabots RPG
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
Write enormous screeds about how literally insane it is that the world is being actively destroyed at the behest of and for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful and profoundly mentally ill few.
Play video games and work in the garden.
The first likely accomplishes nothing of any note - even if other people recognize it, part of the insanity is that the psychopaths in power have arranged things so that nobody can stop them.
The second doesn’t accomplish much of anything either, but they’re at least situations in which my efforts aren’t systematically undermined and exploited for the benefit of psychopaths. Instead of being rigged so that whatever I do benefits the ruling class, they’re situations in which I can actually make choices solely based on what I think will work best in a given situation and reap the rewards if I choose correctly.
If the GOP had any decency left, its members would be discussing whether to dump Trump for a candidate who isn’t out to bulldoze democratic institutions in favor of autocracy
Except that they want to bulldoze democratic institutions in favor of autocracy. That’s their explicit goal.
Trump isn’t the important part to the Republicans - he’s just the one who happens to have a chance to deliver what they want.
Hey! They’re talking about me!
Exactly as noted, I don’t really mind social interaction per se, and actually quite enjoy it in small doses. I just find it to be exhausting - as if I’m surrounded by spiritual vampires who just want to feed on my carefully husbanded energy (which to some degree is exactly what I think it really is, but that’s fodder for another post).
I much MUCH prefer being entirely solitary, and especially in the middle of the night, when it’s just me and the moon and the stars and the owls and the crickets and the whip-poor-wills.
Ah… yes. You’re undoubtedly right.
Shame I didn’t think of that. I stand behind the spirit of my post, but yeah…
I guarantee that today or tomorrow hundreds of thousands if not millions of Republicans nationwide are going to see that story and think, or even say, “Good! Serves 'em right!”
And they’re also going to continue to insist that they’re the moral ones.
No - I don’t agree that they’re completely different.
“Made by AI” would be completely different.
“Made with AI” actually means pretty much the exact same thing as “AI was used in this image” - it’s just that the former lays it out baldly and the latter softens the impact by using indirect language.
I can certainly see how “photographers” who use AI in their images would tend to prefer the latter, but bluntly, fuck 'em. If they can’t handle the shame of the fact that they did so they should stop doing it - get up off their asses and invest some time and effort into doing it all themselves. And if they can’t manage that, they should stop pretending to be artists.
It strikes me that I went on at great length but didn’t directly answer your main question.
Targeted emotions felt via affective empathy (at least for me and presumably for others) aee generally either directed at the same target as they are for the source or untargeted. Though sometimes, they can end up being directed at the wrong target.
I think the way it generally works is that if I both feel affective empathy and experience cognitive empathy, then the emotion ends up aimed at the same target, since the cognitive empathy provides a framework for it. For instance, I feel someone else’s anger and understand who they’re angry at and why and agree that it’s justified, so I end up angry at that target too.
And yes - if I’m the target and I grasp the idea behind it, so experience cognitive empathy, then I do become my own target.
If I don’t have the context for cognitive empathy though, the emotion is just sort of there. I’m just aware that being in this place or around these people or whatever is putting me on edge. I don’t quite feel the full sense of the emotion then, presumably because it needs context and a target to fully manifest. Instead, I feel a vaguer, less directed form of it - like being around angry people without really focusing on it, so not getting cognitive empathy, just leaves me feeling unaccountably stressed and cranky. Or being around sad people makes me feel unaccountably melancholy.
And along with that, one thing it definitely does is prime me to find something to direct it at. It’s not just that I feel unaccountably cranky or melancholy or whatever, but that I’m likely going to (over)react to the first thing that happens that provides something like justification for the full-blown emotion. Like once it starts, it has to find a way to fully manifest.
For myself, other people’s anger makes me really uncomfortable, and I avoid it as much as possible, in part specifically because if I don’t, I end up sharing in it, but without a reason or a target. It’s really unpleasant because in a sense, it’s not real.
Real anger - my own anger - feels complete. Not that it’s pleasant or anything - it’s still anger. But in a way, it’s a sort of relief to feel it, since it at least makes sense. I have a reason for it and a target for it, so it fits. Empathetic anger is weird and unsettling, since it’s just there, but it’s not a complete, sensible thing.
And you’re right about targeted emotions, at least in my experience, and while anger is a good example, it’s not the worst.
Grief is awful, because it’s such a horrible, desolate feeling, and just that much worse when it doesn’t even really mean anything.
Jealousy is another bad one - in fact, thinking about it, I’m tempted to say it’s the worst of them all, because it’s so unpleasant, and in multiple ways, and it’s so entirely pointless without an actual reason or target (it’s arguably fairly pointless even with both).
On a somewhat different note, just because I’m thinking about the trials and tribulations of affective empathy - embarrassment is weirdly bad. Partly it’s that it’s unpleasant, but more it’s that it’s such a common aspect of other people’s enjoyment - there’s a great deal of comedy that hinges on laughing at other people’s embarrassment, and it’s all completely lost on me, because I’m stuck just feeling pointlessly vicariously embarrassed.
Broadly, the way I have to deal with all of it is to try to avoid situations in which I’m going to be subjected to other people’s unpleasant emotions, and if I find myself in one, to try to shut myself off from whatever they’re feeling. I’m okay up to a point, but I can feel it coming if I’m getting to the point that it’s going to suck me in, and pretty much all I can do then is resign myself to it or throw up a barricade and just shut it out. Which sort of ironically makes me come across as aloof - as if I’m insensitive rather than overly sensitive. That gnaws at me, but there really isn’t much I can do about it, since I already have enough to deal with with my own emotions, and just don’t have the fortitude to deal with everyone else’s as well.
I would presume it’s not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.
For the moment, they’re working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it’s hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.
So… by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.
At a “non-profit” (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.
Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We’re watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.
Imagine Israel, of all countries, crying to the UN, of all organizations, about a purported “flagrant violation of narional sovereignty, international law and Security Council resolutions.”
I laughed out loud when I read that. As if that isn’t exactly what Israel does virtually on a daily basis, and has done for decades now, and while thumbing their nose at the UN the entire time.
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.
No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.
The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.
And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.
Just makes me wonder how many Palestinians they’ve murdered in similar circumstances, and we just didn’t hear about it because they weren’t Israelis, so it was treated as if it didn’t matter.
And tomorrow, they’re going to drop a bomb on her.
And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.