For once, I'm not utterly ashamed to be born in this wretched fucking state!

I might feel some pride again if we vote out Abbot!

Great time to plug that https://revolt.chat/ is coming along nicely! The Android app is being reworked and is in rough shape at the moment, but the biggest feature missing from the desktop app (where I figure it matters most) is screen sharing. Otherwise it's an entirely serviceable Discord clone that is FOSS and would benefit greatly from additional support. I, for one, will be taking the money that was paying for my Nitro and donating it to Revolt instead.

Zen Buddhist. I grew up Christian, realized I was believing out of obligation rather than genuine conviction, but also I'm pan and Christians have made it very clear that's not okay with them.

I was areligious for awhile. Which I use because I am still an atheist; I don't see much evidence for gods, but that isn't important to Buddhism.

I appreciate the Buddha's teachings and find them incredibly helpful. I'm calmer, more focused, and over all, happier for my practice. It gives me a spiritual outlet that doesn't make me feel "dirty" the way Christianity did.

There are aspects to Buddhism that I have to take on faith even though I am otherwise a skeptical individual. But ultimately, those things don't change how I would have had to live my life. And I believe that a true practitioner needs a balance of logic anf faith: too much logic, and you kill your faith. Too much faith and you wind up in a cult. You need enough logic to stay grounded, and enough faith to believe. But you have to acknowledge that you can rarely prove the things you take on faith and because of that, there will always be non-belivers, and that has to be okay.

While you're definitely correct that Trump isn't the last bigot who will run for president, none of them will have rhe same level of influence he did.

Trump is a literal cult leader. You have pastors like Shane Vaughn who literally call him "a messiah." He is literally worshipped. That's why he could get away with Jan 6th, that's why he'll have so many voters no matter what, it's a cult.

With the above said, the his defeat will dishearten his mkst fervent followers. I believe many of them will never be able to bring themselves to vote for another candidate, ever. Not all, but many. Republican voter enthusiasm will be at an all time low.

Following this, the infighting we already see will only get worse as would-be successors fight for the scraps that their titan left behind while others fight to leave Trumpism in the dust. Even if they manage to get a majority, they'd accomplish nothing meaningful.

Their entire plan hinges on Donald Trump's cult influence. The depend on his rabid base of supporters. If he loses this election, that goes away. The remnants will be fought over, but none of them will be able to touch the level of influence Trump himself had. His legacy will leave the Republican party fractured for decades.

Plot twist: it's consensual polyamory and they're all very happy together.

It's not the "not fiction" community lmao

Hope your day gets better, man

I've been saying this even before Bethesda went down the gutter. Everyone is pointing to their recent collosal failures like they wouldn't still be disappointed even if ES6 was "perfect."

I don't think anybody can point out what, exactly, made Skyrim so fucking legendary. It was a buggy, unpolished mess of a game. Its lore was inconsistent. It had a villain and story that should have been deeply intriguing and interesting and yet it does Alduin a disservice and was, quite frankly, boring.

But somehow the game was fun. So fun that people spent an average 80 hours a week playing it, me included! And the only possible exploration is that Bethesda had passion, and then Skyrim inflated their egos. So I can see why people see their recent spree of lackluster-to-terrible games as a very valid reason for agreeing with Tod Howard, for once.

Set that aside, however. Let's assume they "get it right." Let's assume it's made with passion and recent history has humbled them. People will still be disappointed. Why? Because "it's not Skyrim." Just in the same way that hardcore ES fans hated Skyrim because "it's not Morrowind." Skyrim set the bar so astronomically high that it would take an absolute fucking miracle for them to, at bare minimum, meet expectation! And it would honestly be better that they didn't, because then people would expect them to hit that milestone every, single time when the "secret ingredient" to Skyrim's legendary success is so fucking aetherial nobody can say exactly what it is.

The best time to save the planet was 10 years ago. The next best time is now.

"We have no idea what happens next."

I'm pretty sure there's a movie about this.

I don't get all this "gaming on Linux is hard" non-sense. All I have to do is set a specific flag on Steam and click play. That's it. One step, and 99% of my library just works, sometimes better than on Windows.

If it isn't on Steam, I search for it on Lutris and Lutris installs it for me, and I click play. And more often than not, it just works.

Hell, the mother fuckers that make Final Fantasy XIV's quick launcher made that shit a flatpak! And it's so fucking seemless, not a soul would know that game isn't a native Linux game!

Where's the difficulty?

The last straw for me was that Amazon drivers always seem to have some kind of problem finding my apartment. So even though instructions say "leave at my door," it always ends up in Parcel Pending on the other side of my complex.

NOBODY ELSE has an issue finding my apartment: UPS, USPS, Uber Eats, even fucking Door Dash! But I might as well be living in the Bermuda Triangle to Amazon, so WTF was I paying for Prime for?

And honestly, like so many others, I've found it not even the least bit tempting to go back. Ebay has been a reliable alternative.

Terraria. Hands down. No other game I've ever played has had the same sheer amount of value for $10 fucking dollars.

A honorable mention would be Stellaris and good ol' Skyrim. But their larger price tag definitely means that Terraria is greater value.