VoxAdActa

i don’t know why you out of hand dismiss this as a possibility.

Because there's no evidence.

"65% of all the eligible voters in Florida were prevented from voting due to direct governmental interference and extreme voter suppression" is a fantastic claim. One might even call it an extraordinary claim. One for which I would expect to see some fairly extraordinary evidence. I can't just wake up in the morning and decide to believe something because it fits with my preconceived biases, especially not something directly involving almost 14 million people.

Are you actually expecting me to believe that 14 million people tried to show up at the polls and were turned away, without any evidence whatsoever? That's a Q-level conspiracy.

The issue I have with Christian Deism is that I wonder why they even bother continuing to include a god in their belief system. It seems like the whole point is that the world operates as if god didn't exist. Why keep him in the picture at all? He doesn't affect anything. Interacting with the world "through humans" is indistinguishable from not interacting with the world at all (by every metric except who gets credit for helping the people in need).

It just feels to me like the nicotine patch of religions; one of the last steps involved in weaning oneself off of theism altogether. They can still claim the societal benefits and privilege of saying they're Christian (and not feel like a dirty liar while they do it) without actually interfacing with a theistic philosophy.

35% of the population turned out to vote.

So ~~65%~~ 60.35% [edited to account for the provided evidence of voter suppression] of Floridians weren't sufficiently motivated to try to change the government after living through a first DeSantis term.

Yes, yes, I know, "voter suppression", "disenfranchised", etc. I'm sorry if I have a hard time believing that 65% of FL really super-duper wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by systemic corruption; that would put Florida in the same ballpark as Somalia in terms of governmental autocracy.

At some point, we just have to cut our losses and scram. That's why I left Arkansas, and am now squished into a tiny, overpriced, neglected little apartment with a roommate in a blue state, slowly working on replacing all my stuff.

Doc went corporate, and is now HMO. He's rich now, because he charges the other dwarves a monthly premium, but somehow their coverage never actually covers anything that's wrong with them.

Dopey has been replaced with Trippy, after discovering the healing powers of psychedelics.

Between climate change, the housing market, and stagnant wages, Happy found he needed some extra assistance to keep up the positive attitude. Fortunately, Trippy "knows a guy". Happy now goes by Xanny.

Bashful, after being diagnosed by HMO, changed his name to Social Anxiety. He can't afford medication, since HMO won't cover the brand-name drug to treat it (only the generic that didn't work and made him fat). But at least he has real diagnosis now, and he's working on it through on-line pay-per-session therapy from a company he heard about on a self-help podcast.

Grumpy spent years doomscrolling through Reddit and Twitter, and now knows The Truth about Them. He is now known as Ragey, and frequently encourages the other dwarves to Do Their Own Researchy.

Sneezy became a pariah during the COVID-19 pandemic, as everyone assumed he had it. To fight against that stigma, he changed his name to Allergy. Nobody believes him.

Sleepy discovered that the best way to not have to deal with any of the others was to lean in to his shtick, and is therefore still Sleepy (and hasn't been out of bed since 2016).

I don't know much about ficus, but I know if someone did this to a silver maple or a ginkgo, it'd be a death sentence for that tree. There's almost no foliage left to even photosynthesize with, and the surface area of the cut ends is massive; it'll take months to seal up those wounds, during that whole time, the tree is losing water. If it managed to survive just the environmental issues (water, heat, light, etc), it'll be extremely vulnerable to diseases and pests. Unless ficus are the tarragon of the tree world, they look to me like they're doomed. Universal should have just cut them down, for all that.

That's great news! Keep us posted on how things go, so those of us who are maybe-not-quite-that-discontent-yet can use you as a guinea pig. :D

I'm starting to think you're going well out of your way to intentionally miss my point, so I'm going to disengage now.

Games are like an interactive movie and there’s a ratio of moviness to gaminess and this one leans heavier on the moviness side.

The last Final Fantasy game I played was 8, and it was exactly because of this. They stripped out almost all the "game" bits (although they did give us a really cool card game minigame) and turned it into basically a movie you could occasionally interact with. The battles were mindless (there was no reason not to use your strongest summon every round, because it was both more effective than anything else and because it was totally free to do so), the "equipment" system was entirely optional (which was good, because interacting with it required mega-grind), and overland travel was a total afterthought. It was more of a "game" than anything Tell Tale put out, but that's a low bar, since Tell Tale only produces movies that sometimes throw in an attention check in the form of a quicktime event.

It was a real shame, because I had entirely switched system allegiance from Nintendo to Playstation just for FF7. Then the followed it up with 8, and it was obvious where they were taking the franchise. So I'm not surprised to see, all these years later, that the newest FF game is even more of that.

People finding work “miserable” is not an inherent property of work (which is doing something useful) or even of jobs (which is doing something supposedly useful for money). It’s an indication that something has gone wrong with our society.

I have a hard time believing this.

Sure, maybe some people love landscaping, or coding, or whatever. But who's got a passion for forklift driving? Who loves fighting rush hour traffic in a dump truck that, when empty, weighs 13.25 tons, with the pressure of knowing that any small mistake could result in the loss of your CDL and your entire livelihood? Are there actually people out there who would pick boxes in a warehouse freezer even if they weren't getting paid? Are there people who are just thrilled to go empty bedpans for dying old people? Is running a cash register a "calling" for anyone? Is there a subset of folks who just love it when somebody tries to haggle over a nickel, using a 3-year-expired competitor's coupon for a different product as their negotiating leverage, while a line of angry people backs up behind them? Have you ever met anyone who'd go around pumping septic tanks as a hobby if they couldn't make money at it?

I'd venture to guess that the majority of working-class jobs almost entirely comprise piles of misery and shit. Even if there are people who honestly enjoy doing things like 'nam-crawling through 2" of mud in a 12" crawlspace to fix a complicated bit of homeowner DIY plumbing dumbassery, there aren't nearly enough of them to fill society's need for those jobs. The number of people who get off doing cold-calls for a collection agency is nowhere near the number it takes to fill the call centers. Someone is always going to have to be doing a dangerous, awful, body/mind-breaking occupation that gives them only a slight spark of joy when the check comes on payday.

which will make the lower classes weaker and more prone to disease

Yes, the lower classes don't deserve heart disease, and only the overlords can experience the pinnacle of health that is the fatty liver! Our plans are coming together wonderfully, mwahahaha!

It isn’t like humans haven’t been eating bugs for decades anyway.

That's technically true. Hundreds of years (pdf warning) is, technically, countable in double-digit decades.

There are. Ignoring, for the moment, that lobster and shrimp are sea-bugs that billions of people eat without complaint, there are plenty of North American cultures that readily incorporated bugs into their daily diets. Here's a scholarly article on the topic (pdf warning)

I was even lucky enough to meet an Oneida man who gave me a recipe for cooking may/june beetles at a bonfire. They taste a lot like shrimp.

(The recipe: Catch a few beetles, shake them up in your hand to stun them, then toss them onto one of the rocks at the edge of the fire. Wait until they make a popcorn-like "pop" noise. If you like them less crunchy, you can peel off the wings before you eat them.)