I believe it’s a hormone thing because otherwise nobody would have a second kid. Apparently the hormones kick in and make you forget the pain while also giving you a big hit of dopamine so that you connect having a kid to being happy.

Should’ve gone for the thermite, then at least we could call him a “hot” boomer.

I would disagree with this sentiment on a basic game design level. I don’t know about the Zelda games, I didn’t care enough about BotW to play more than a few hours, but designing a large map that incorporates multiple biomes in a believable way is much more difficult than creating a bunch of smaller levels that don’t have to have any relation to each other in the slightest. You can get away with a lot more in terms of map geometry and set pieces when you load into each level individually.

This is obviously different when you’re talking about Bethesda-style load into every building style environments vs Elden Ring “You see that castle in the distance? You’ll be going in there eventually” design, but the fact that Bethesda makes their interiors separate from the rest of the world is how they cheap out on their games. It’s less hardware intensive and you can cheat a lot more in your design. And on a gameplay level that goes for Ubisoft-style collectathon map objects (and Zelda shrines in this case), but that’s not unique to open-world games - it’s a lazy cop-out that game devs have used forever to pad out their games. Collecting all the secret skulls in Halo is the same thing, but because it’s implemented well and doesn’t drag on forever with no reward like most open-world collectibles, it feels totally different.

Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn’t being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.

Personal responsibility only gets you so far when the big money actively fights against it. I think the answer lies in both holding companies like Google to higher standards as well as improving access to the knowledge we need to navigate what the world has become. It doesn’t help anybody when the FBI has recommended people use an ad blocker for over a decade but nobody has ever heard them say it.

And the only time the Bible ever made mention of LGBT people is if you go all the way back to the Latin text where one of the people that Jesus healed was a soldier’s slave where the word used was a type of male slave the Romans usually kept for sex.

And as far as I know, the Torah makes no mention of LGBT people either, but Hebrew supposedly has pronouns specifically for FTM people that expressly recognizes them as men trapped in the bodies of women.

When all this stuff was written, LGBT people were simply a fact of life that nobody thought needed defending because the two genders bigotry and homophobia came later as a package deal with the spread of European Christianity (and the problems with Islamic culture are the direct result of the US spreading radical Muslim propaganda, as mentioned before - it was exported out of the Middle East). It’s not the religion itself that’s the problem, but the people who use it as a shield for their hatred. Bigots will be bigots, and religion is just an excuse that they can twist to justify their actions. India has been having trouble for years with Buddhist extremists who are just as bad as the worst of the crazies in the US, and Buddhism is probably the most peaceful religion in the world.

It’s like the 2nd Amendment and the US Constitution - old documents created in a different time with different problems being reinterpreted to justify modern hatred.

Iraq, 1960, before US operations in the region during the Cold War:

Muslim extremism is a direct result of US intervention in the Middle East to use countries in the region to fight a proxy war against the spread of communism. The CIA had a years-long operation where they literally air-dropped extremist Muslim propaganda into the region to radicalize the population.

We destroyed the largest democracy in the region and installed a dictator at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) because they elected a man who was going to kick them out and nationalize the industry due to the horrible pay and working conditions they forced on the country. Al-Qaeda started as CIA-backed resistance fighters known as the Mujahideen. The list of issues created by European and American meddling in the region is miles long - neo-colonialism at work.

I think this law requires you to upload a photo of your ID and says that it’s the website’s fault if underage people use it and they face a hefty fine. It’s a lot more than the standard “click to pinky promise that you’re definitely 18” because PornHub already has that.

Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

But no war like the culture war, I guess.

You should watch Shaun’s video on the Harry Potter series. He goes into a deep dive of how the books are littered with her political views - even the first one - and how you can watch her become more conservative as they progress and she became more wealthy: the books start out criticizing the system, but by the end, the message becomes that the system should never be questioned.

Throughout the books are a pattern of borderline racist stereotypes (the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names - might as well be named Ching Chong - the 15-year-old Irish kid is obsessed with whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc), but you can also see where her transphobia came from. Everytime she wants you to hate a woman in the books, she describes them as having some kind of masculine features, from a strong jawline to “mannish hands.”

As people become more wealthy or famous, they’re given a bigger microphone to cast their garbage opinions with and it’s never been easier to tell the world your shitty political beliefs than it is right now.

I don’t watch Star Trek, but even I know that the first show was hated in its time for having a black woman in the main cast and would’ve been called “woke” and boycotted for the socialist themes.

Got you pushing too many pencils, Dillon!

I had a FedEx driver the other day tell me that they separate packages into multiple deliveries sometimes even though they’re all being dropped off all at once for the same reason. Cook the metrics so it looks like they’re making more deliveries in a certain timeframe.

They never said that everybody has a right to drive. The reality is that, at least in the US and similarly planned countries, cars are priced like a luxury and treated like a necessity by the powers that be. Anything that isn’t driving a car is an afterthought.

The Republican party is a cult - especially the cult of Trump. All these grifters selling hate to conservatives have made it that much harder to convince them when they’re wrong, and the odds of them doubling down on those beliefs when they are challenged get more and more likely the deeper in they are. There’s a point where it becomes almost impossible to pull people out of a cult and there’s largely no line that they won’t convince themselves that it’s okay to cross.

I think that’s where we’re at and have been at for quite a while. Republicans convince themselves that they’re the good guys fighting the good fight against whatever the party tells them is bad, and believe that their bigotry and hate is justified.

The trick is to get an entire neighborhood in on it. That way you can schedule shouting matches in the front yards of the houses neighboring the open houses as well.

A lot of these minorities also always think that they’re different because they’re “one of the good ones” and will reap the same benefits.

My friend told me once about how people in cults have a sunk-cost fallacy to the cult’s beliefs that makes it harder to get them out the longer they’ve been in.

People are more likely to double down on their beliefs when proven wrong because they’d have to admit that they were wrong and so were all the things that they did following those beliefs. And nobody likes to admit when they’re wrong, because nobody wants to believe that they’re the bad guy.

See also: anything that challenges the status quo and/or my worldviews.