Cage

Lover of vidya, film, cats, and metal. Who’s got time for politics? Me apparently...

[9mmSMG @9mmsmg]

Popular opinion: Arrest that woman.

[Zero HP Lovecraft @0x49fa98]

America used to have mechanisms that facilitated class mobility for lower-class whites who had the capacity to move up.

In pre-industrial England, there was a chain of causality that ran like this:

(smart, healthy, courageous) =>
wealth =>
high fertility.

This, plus England being an island nation, caused a highly eugenic bottleneck wherein the best and smartest people outbred everyone else, and even the poor often had the raw genetic material needed to comprehend highly abstract and intellectual points.

A couple of centuries of this concentrated such tremendous genetic capital in England that the Industrial Revolution became possible.

That's why the Industrial Revolution happened in England: because even the peasants were a full standard deviation better than everyone else in the world.

The Industrial Revolution made a lot of people unhappy and is now generally regarded as a bad idea, but it made the English so powerful and prosperous that they broke out into North America and were so unbelievably superior to every other human population they found there that they were able to populate the USA, which we can informally think of as England 2.

In England 2, the political system was made afresh, though it was heavily inspired by the political system of England 1, but it had a lot of special carve-outs to exploit and support the tremendous amount of human capital present in the "underclass."

This created a temporary state of what we call "class mobility," where any American (but secretly just any Englishman in England 2) could grow up to be a president, a titan of industry, or even to have a gf.

This was possible not because of the supposedly enlightened or progressive political system of the Americas, but because it was running a kind of arbitrage on class in order to mobilize an inheritance of human capital from pre-industrial England.

Indeed, when we look at the wealthiest and most powerful people from America's early history, we see that many of them were from humble backgrounds.

But Americans, and especially progressives, learned exactly the wrong lesson from all of this.

They imagine that class mobility in America is proof of some kind of blank slate, where even yucky poors who are exposed to middle-/upper-class modalities of living can, through the transformative power of friendship, turn into intellectuals and captains of industry.

The opposite is true, of course; all of the mechanisms which exist to facilitate class mobility were only effective because they were filtering through the American underclass, which is largely (still) the descendants of smart and courageous pre-industrial Englishmen.

The moral of the American class-mobility story is that when you have exceptional human genetic capital, society benefits from locating exceptional sons of the underclass and lifting them up.

This is why you will meet American "rednecks" who are highly literate, who have high mechanical aptitude, who really are just a few books away from being world-class engineers and scientists.

But this is not the case for the vast majority of humanity. Among most races, the poor and the underclass are exactly as awful as the stereotypes suggest.

Most of the sensitive young men on Twitter who now complain about economic conditions are the exact men that the old American "progressive" system was designed to extract and elevate.

But all of those systems have now been co-opted by communists to uplift the global underclass, who, unlike America's own homegrown proletariat, have no inheritance of pre-industrial English genetic capital and are basically ineducable.

Pearls before swine.

[John Doyle @JohnDoyle]

He hates it because it insults him.

Just look at the beauty of intentionally not-developed Mackinac Island vs. what we see from “developed” Egypt.

Perhaps he hates it too because we can omit things like cars, as a quirk, and still produce civilization.

For him, there is no ingredient that WILL produce it.

[Carlos That Notices Things @QuetzalPhoenix]

The Opening Sequence for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is brilliant because the show was not actually about the future, it was about the 1990s.

Nothing tells you more about a culture than how they think the future will look like.

It's why every episode starts with 1998

[Firelord Derpy @FirelordDerpy]

It's not food though. The question is not about food, the 20$ burrito comment was not about the burrito itself.

When someone asks "Hey how come burritos now cost 20$"
They're not asking for advice on how to get a 5$ Burrito, they're asking "Why is something that cost 5$ when I was younger now 20$ and what is your solution to fix it? Because the left has a DSA solution and I want to hear The Republican solution."

And if the answer being given was "Look sorry, we're gunna have some years of economic hardship because of the repercussions of Covid, but we're going to be working on x, y, and z to try and pad the damage and we should see affordability start to fix itself over the next few years, we're already working on removing illegal immigrants to lower X costs, and we're prioritizing Y so over the next 6 months we should see Y cost less. Etc. "
That would probably have sufficed.

But when the answer is "Just be better with money because things are going to get worse. But also everything is fine and we have zero need to change anything or fix anything. Now excuse us but we're dropping more bombs that cost more than you make in a year on Iran."
That rings hollow.

The Republicans can't just be "Well the Democratic plan sucks so vote for us." Republicans actually have to have their own plans to forward as well.

[doomer @uncledoomer]

what better way to commemorate the men who died here by solemnly eating a burger

[Cage @CageTurco]

@biggieU_U Talking down The Master in 1 is so cool, and I love the showdown at Hoover Dam, but my favorite finale in the series is getting through the enclave via whatever skills you choose to use, and then at the end being confronted with Frank. “Ride’s over mutie. Time to Die.”

[Harpsibored @harpsibored]

I challenged myself to play "Quina's Theme" on just harp 🐸🎶

#FinalFantasy #FF9 #FFIX

[Genki✨ @Genki_JPN]

Tidus Final Fantasy X Magic The Gathering art! #FF10

via @NaryAnn_YH

[PointlessHub @HubPointless]

Some producer got snapped mid sentence in 1995 and just reappeared

[RAZORWIRE @RazorwireRPG]

Do you have any idea how exciting it must of been to turn the page of your favourite PC gaming mage and see this beautiful 2 page spread? Especially if it's 1998 and you don't even know they were making a Fallout 2? Just pouring over the text and screenshots, wondering who the old lady was. Hoping you'd get to wear the cool armor that dude has on in the picture. I'd give a lot for that feeling again, especially now when a lot of beloved franchises are dead, dormant or dying. Just to have that feeling of discovery again would be magic

[TheDungeonDelver @A_DungeonDelver]

In programming Familiar, I'm adding in random spell lists chosen for creatures that can cast spells. That is, a given magic-user with a group of bandits will have a ready arsenal generated for him, as will the dragons, the lich, the ixichitil, and so forth, anything that has spell-casting classes.

This includes NPC parties met!

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

Blizzard was a game developer that was so popular that they used to have their own annual ComicCon style convention where fans from all over the world would come to meet the developers of their favorite games and learn what new stuff was coming.

Then, an unhappy faction who didn’t like the “frat house” atmosphere made a bunch of largely false allegations at the height of #MeToo. Lawyers were brought in to investigate, and they found email chains discussing the “Cosby Suite,” which was the hospitality suite at the convention hotel that Blizzard developers named for its carpets that looked like a Bill Cosby sweater.

These emails were from years before Cosby’s sexual assault conviction, but they were considered damning at the time and it was insinuated in the media that the men on the email chain were committing rape in the “Cosby Suite,” entirely because of the name.

Everyone on the email chain — men who had worked at Blizzard for decades and built the Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft franchises — were fired in disgrace over this.

Alex Afrasiabi had his name stripped out of World of Warcraft. An Overwatch character named after veteran Blizzard developer Jesse McCree was renamed in the game. These guys did absolutely nothing wrong except joke with their friends in emails they never expected to be exposed as part of a witch hunt.

In the wake of the mass firings of veterans game designers, the entire culture of Blizzard changed as an institution, and the games changed too — for the worse. “World of Warcraft” became a cozy fantasy coffee shop game. “Overwatch” became a gay pride game. Nobody would go to a convention these days to celebrate these games or the people who now work on them.

The false sexual assault allegations were a pretense for a crowd of disgruntled nonbinary weirdos to seize the greatest game studio in the United States, but without the people they purged and replaced, they could not uphold Blizzard’s once legendary standard of quality and the studio collapsed into irrelevance.

When you see gamers celebrating mass layoffs at game studios, it is because things like this happened across the gaming industry. The hobby was conquered and transformed by people who believed gaming needed to change. But they changed it into something nobody wants to pay for, and now they’re all losing their jobs.

[Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن @EveKeneinan]

Given all talk about Nolan's Odyssey, in retrospect, I was quite looking forward to seeing what he had done.

My main feeling is disappointment.

It's just not a movie I'll want to watch again, in all likelihood, unlike, say, Lord of the Rings.

The #$%@!% scene from the !@%@!# ODYSSEY with the !#$@#@ CYCLOPS should be as memorable as, say, Gandalf vs the Balrog.

But it's not. It was technically admirable, but it just failed to land.

In almost every scene you can practical hear Nolan thinking "Hurry up, hurry, we have to get to the next scene!"

[The Middle-earth Mixer @MiddleearthMixr]

I have a lot of friends participating in the “you’re jus not saving enough money” debate on the wrong side. Lovingly, change your tone as that messaging will lose.

Young people cannot be psyoped into believing everything is cool and good. People are struggling and frustrated.

“Just stop spending so much on your IPhone or your Internet package!”

“Cool how am i supposed to get a job?”

“Stop going to Starbucks!”

“I’m not”

“Stop buying corporate slop bowls!”

“I literally am at an office or in transit 12 hours a day going to the store and knowing what to buy is a whole job of its own.”

“Save up for a house!”

“I am buried in debt. Interests rates are high and housing prices are through the roof.”

You all really sound out of touch to young people and rightfully so

[Douglass Mackey @douglassmackey]

Instead of doing this, which will allow dummies to become lawyers, they should allow people without law degrees to study for the bar exam and pass it.

[TheDungeonDelver @A_DungeonDelver]

Familiar is now creating 1-mile hexes in a 30 mile hex. Each hex in the .svg file you can hover over and it gives you the hex number and terrain plus what's in it. The black dots represent settlements or castles; the details of each hex are output into a text file. You can choose hex area sizes - for example, just 1 hex surrounded by 6 if you prefer and it will do the same thing.

Familiar is coming - soon. Pre-orders are available now at a discount.

[Fugitive Caesar @ThomBrady5]

The biggest win we can get is electing Bo French in Texas. If the Texas oil and gas industry throws its $250 billion weight behind 100 million mass deportations, Trump and Texas can team up to stack rapid wins. President Trump needs a red state to be more aggressive than him.

[Brian Niemeier @BrianNiemeier]

1
Everybody knows The Simpsons peaked between 1992 and 1997, but nobody says where it should have ended.

My money is on "You Only Move Twice."

It's not the funniest episode (though it comes close).

But it accidentally solved the hardest problem facing a sitcom ending ...

[Godefroy the Grafted @godefroygrafted]

One of the most fun theories relating to Godrick is that he has Commander Niall's missing leg, and that this is how he can cast storm attacks
This ironically further helps justify the existence of Godefroy, as Commander O'Neil is also missing his leg lol