Ahahah!

I legit didn’t see that, I actually need glasses.

Amazing. Choccy milk is a great choice rofl.

After coming too close to personally finding out the hard way that alcholoism does indeed run in my patriarchichal lineage…

Take out the Jack, maybe replace it with some Kombucha, or just a nice non alco cocktail, and yep, this looks amazing.

Just keep that carpet clean, eat that pizza with some plates or something, or use the other side of the open box as your psuedo plate.

EDIT: For those with bad backs, they make … complicated pillows for this sort of thing.

… Or just put the TV up on the box some off screen Ikea furniture came in, rofl.

Yep.

Thats another prime example of them literally doing essentially exactly their paranoid fears.

Oh howabout FEMA death/concentration camps?

… Well, FEMA is probably fucking over, but the plan for migrants, suspected migrants, and the homeless… literally is send them all to prison camps, and if we don’t have enough capacity, build more pop up semi permanent structure camps on the outskirts of major cities.

They became lost, staring into the void, and now are the monsters they dreamed of.

My recently diagnosed PTSD, following finally being able to escape from and ghost my family of abusive nutters by moving many states away … says yes, you are correct!

… If I ever start a band, I’m naming it ‘Courtney Love’s Shotgun’.

… This is unironically what all the rightwing conspiricists have been afraid of for two+ decades now.

This is what they thought Clinton, or Obama or somehow the UN or ‘ZOG’ would be able to use as the mechanism to instate tyranny.

… And now they are doing it themselves, so utterly deluded that they would short cicruit if you tried to explain this to them.

I grew up in a right wing nutjob household. This is what I was told my whole life, growing up. I was indoctrinated into it, and had to deconvert myself out of it similar how I had to deconvert out of christian extremism.

These people are perfect hypocrites.

Jesus.

Yeah, if you only read short passages of a book… well you definitionally lose all the context of the entire rest of the fucking book.

I guess the teachers are just assigning Cliff’s notes summaries instead of the entire text now?

The attention span destroying effect of short form video content is literally stupifyjng us.

I’ve said this whole fucking time: TikTok should be banned for children. Not because its Chinese, its not like every US social media app doesn’t spy on you as well.

All short form video content is addictive, habit forming, spreads mis and disinfo, and ruins your attention span and ability to concentrate, makes you more emotionally unstable, fucks with your sleep schedule.

This has all been studied.

Brain rot is real.

Short form video content apps are the modern day cigarettes.

Turns out this fakepost is actually a Boards of Canada fan detector mechanism, apparently.

Sorry your kid and you and your partner went through that… that must have been just cripplingly stressful in so many ways…

But uh… yeah.

You understand got lucky by basically random chance, at least in the monetary cost part of that situation… but of course, there are so, so many other nonsense ‘exceptional’ scenarios which… well actually millions of people end up in each year, and they just get to be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, for things that happened to them which would generally have been impossible to precisely predict or prevent.

We are ruled by idiot, corrupt nepobabies who just actually cannot theoretically grasp things that do not specifically, personally affect or traumatize them.

‘Functional Literacy’ is generally defined as 2nd grade and up.

By that metric, yeah, 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.

Technically, they can read and write at a very basic level… but not ‘functionally’, as in, they could not function in society. They couldn’t read a news article and understand all the words. They have a very limited vocabulary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

Wikipedia is currently going with an 86% literacy rate for the US, and I’d be willing to bet the discussion page is full of arguments about how to reasonably compare different metrics.

You may also notice that 86% puts us as neighbors with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

This is what happens when Ya’llQaeda takes over a country.

We had considerably better literacy rates a decade or two ago, more like 95%.

I mean, there is literally 0 chance Trump has listened to or even heard of the … band? musical group? … Boards of Canada, only took me 7 words.

But uh hey, if you’ve never heard of em, give em a listen.

In particular, here’s the last song, the outro ‘manifesto’ of their album ‘Music has the right to children’, their debut in 1998.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wnopyFg5msU

Rather poignant message.

Whole album is also great, of course.

Oh uh, headphones recommended.

If us Americans survive all this…

Well, here’s your hyberbolic hypothetical argument for euthanasia… realized as an actual case study.

I mean… I can see that theoretically working… but not with the way Bethesda handles companions.

If your companion is functionally invulnerable, and the ‘points’ systems that govern their disposition toward you are very simplistic and easily gamed… yeah this would be very, very cheesy and janky, and because there’s no real agency on the part of your spouse, along with no real risk of them ever being seriously, permanently hurt or killed, it would all feel fake and stupid.

…

But!

You could make a very compelling game with a while bunch of branching plot paths based on key, pivotal decision/priority moments relating to how you and your spouse agree or disagree on things.

Something like this, done well, could be a very compelling New Game +, for FO4, or just a whole different game.

If you made a game where… you know, your spouse can fucking die, and the game can move on after that?

No invulnerability, no ‘severed thread of prophecy’ shit…

If you could actually take the concept seriously, I can see a game working around the core concept of ‘you and your spouse try to survive the apocalypse’.

Maybe theres certain ‘good’ endings where you two fight a bit, but ultimately reconcile and defeat some greater foe, achieve some good goal.

‘Bad’ endings where you piss off your spouse so much that they actually leave you, form a faction against you, force you into a moral bind where you have to kill them to do what you think is right.

Maybe theres middling endings where you do achieve big goal, but at the cost of your relationship, or your spouses life.

…

There are ways something like this could work, but I have 0 confidence that Bethesda is competent to either write compelling plot and dialogue for this, nor do I think they could actually code, actually structure a game that allows for all this.

They can handle basically side quests that modify the totality of an end state in fairly superficial ways, but I don’t think they can even concept design a game where the actual core plot is quite variable.

… All Im really aware of as far as terminology goes is that basically its different everywhere, even inside the US.

What it was for me: grades 1 - 5 are elementary, 6-8 are middle school and 9 -12 is high school.

But different areas … either don’t do a middle school, or call it something else, or its only 2 grades instead of 3… it varies.

By the time you are done with all this, you are 18 yo.

So… 2nd grade is basically the schooling level of an 8 yo. 6th grade is the schooling of a 12 yo.

After that, you’re going to a college, community college, university, something like that, to get a 2 or 4 year year degree (associates or bachelors), then another 2 after a bachelors for a masters, roughly another 2 after that for a PhD (doctorate)… but there is also variation in terms of exact education track and how long it actually takes to complete them vs how long its ‘supposed to take’.

Public education in the US generally stops at grade 12, and then any college/etc after that is ‘secondary’, as in ‘optional’.

EDIT: Adjusted age dates. I just woke up from a nap, blarrrgh.

Yeah.

The US is indeed, completely insane, compared to the rest of the developed world, but the average person has no other frame of reference.

Literacy rates in the US are down to 80%, by the way.

20% of the adult population cannot read or write beyond a 2nd grade level.

The average literacy ability is a 5th/6th grade level.

So… something like 2/3 of the country has reading and writing skills below that of what a high school (primary school, before a college or uni) graduate is supposed to have.

Our school systems are collapsing.

(And yes, you may notice that proportion of people with sub high school literacy rates is so large that it also includes many people with Uni/College degrees. Yep. That is correct. Many of those also fail to teach basic writing skills before giving someone a degree.)

Alberta: NorthMidNorth

Yep, I’m going to the MidEast for a business trip next month.

What? Doha?

No, New York, New York City…

$5k is roughly 1/4 the cost…

… of a birth.

Alone. Just, average medical costs of a birth, without insurance.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-baby/

https://www.uwhealth.org/news/how-much-does-it-really-cost-have-baby

… And they are slashing Medicaid.

If you do have insurance… $5k is about half the cost of a birth.

So… congrats, you can have two kids, and then uh lol have fun paying the cost of raising two kids, which is about half a million dollars.

And that’s just to 18, btw, this assumes those kids can find a job immediately after high school and move out into a place they can afford on an entry level income.

Which uh, is basically wildly unrealistic at this point.

Because all entry level jobs require 2-3 years of experience.

And housing costs are insane.

… Also your Mom is banging the guy who gave her the rat.

Ah, my alma mater.

One of the first protests I was a part of … way back in 08, was the very same issue, pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Back then we aimed at occupying a different building, but seeing as this new building (that didn’t exist when I was there) was literally funded by Boeing, the MIC… yeah, its more fitting.

I never cared for football or anything, but uh Go Dawgs!