Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

Wouldn’t happen to me. I’d simply understand better.

the general public largely has no idea that the space exists

Idk, man. Like, 20 years ago? Maybe.

But not knowing about D&D in the modern day feels a bit like saying you don’t know about the NBA or you’ve that you’ve never heard of Disney World.

you have to introduce the medium in general before worrying about genres within the medium

I think the thing that makes “Like D&D” annoying is that it’s really the only easily accessible TTRPG franchise. It feels like you’re watching the Olympics while people keep shouting “Oh, so how is this different from Football?” at every event.

sigh

I take off my robe and wizard hat.

I gotta say, I’ve never actually found a D20 Modern game in the wild.

No shortage of WoD, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, Alternity, Shadowrun, Battletech, Kids on Bikes, Big Eyes Small Mouth… But I’ve never seen a D20 Modern at an actual tabletop before. Might have just been on the wrong side of the GenCon convension floor. But I’ve been around playing these games for a while. I’ve never actually seen anyone do it.

Go run Hillary again and find out.

Can you really look around at our current reality: an executive branch shamelessly enriching themselves, a Congress that has ceded all power, a SCOTUS that has enshrined corruption and abuse of power, military and paramilitary in the streets, etc., and think, “well who knows if Harris would have been worse?”

We had all this shit in 2024. We had all this shit in 2004.

Liberals have an opportunity to clean up politics through prosecution and legislative reforms. They control numerous big wealthy states. They have oodles of cash and a wide network of friendly business interests.

What would have happened under a Harris Presidency with a Republican Congress? Same shit we got in 2011. Debt crisis. Economic slowdown. More wars. Business bailouts. Hordes of angry racist voters blaming women and minorities for all their problems. An incompetent boob in the White House poisoning the country against everything they stand for.

This shit is objectively worse

Worse than what? We’ve been sliding downhill since 2001. Every year is worse than the last, with vanishingly few exceptions.

This isn’t a problem of a single person making a handful of bad decisions. It’s endemic to the entirely national leadership, from city councillors to SCOTUS judges.

Genuinely very annoyed at the guy who sees a Californian or a South Carolinian vote third party and gets mad about it.

Why even bother with democracy if there’s only one correct choice on the ballot? Just do a dictatorship already, you cowards.

Within any given party, you’ve got a wide spectrum of opinions. Unfortunately, very few of these opinions are any good.

the housing crisis is not specific to the US, it’s a problem that exists in a lot of the Western world

The US expanded it’s housing model to the rest of the world. The concept of a mortgage - a lifelong debt to some faceless creditors for the privilege of not being homeless - is recent and local. And the hyper-financialization of these debts, resulting in exploding administrative costs, is even more recent and local.

It’s a creature of the American economy that has been spread by American banks for the purpose of juicing American profits.

Electing Obama was preferable to electing McCain, was it not?

It’s difficult to say. Would a John McCain Presidency with a Dem Congressional majority have produced the kind of progressive compromises that Bush/Pelosi and Reagan/O’Neil gave up?

Would it have all ended like Clinton’s second term, with Corporate Dems selling off the farm while crying about how the President made them do it?

In the same way it’s difficult to say “Hillary would be better than Trump” without knowing the fresh new horrors her campaign would have inflicted. Or, for that matter, whether a Hillary 2016 just ends in a Trump 2020.

It’s all empty speculation. And it’s all just predicated on eating what these corrupt organizations churn out.

This isn’t complicated. The system is dead simple, and certain people keep making the wrong choices.

The system is what it does. If you think the outcomes are wrong, then you either acknowledge the system itself is broken or you give up on the concept of liberal democracy.

Because the US isn’t unique. Trumpie candidates have been popping out of neoliberal democratic systems for over a century. “The voters are wrong” is a sentiment directly at odds with the democratic model. The voters can’t be wrong, unless you’ve identified some Guardian Council better suited to select the candidates.

Voting strategically for the least bad candidate presented by the two major parties is the only thing that has been shown to work

It hasn’t worked. It gave us Clinton, the OG Epsteincrat. Then it gave us a string of loser shitlibs who caved to fascism at the first shove. And a long string of corporate cutouts - from Biden to Lieberman to Manchin to Fetterman - who only knew how to obstruct from within the Democratic party.

This strategy is why America is the only country in the industrial world without a public health care policy. It’s why we have exploding student debts and a housing crisis. Neoliberalism is a curse.

The Democrats Aristocrats!

Critical Support

Someone’s paying for it.

Certainly, trading the promise of future fuel for dollars right now has a bunch of uses.

That cuts both ways. The hype artists who insist it’s going to become the foundation of all professional services is also bullshitting you.

But yeah, these tech companies aren’t going to just vanish, any more than IBM or Yahoo did in prior downturns.

Are you suggesting that The End is not, in fact, Near? And OpenAI is not about to collapse into bankruptcy, ending the entire AI ecosystem?

Good advice

Russia is currently importing gasoline, due to domestic shortages caused by the war.

Even if the US could buy it’s way out, I don’t think Russia has enough to sell