If the Democrats were a functioning opposition party, they would have forced Fetterman out when his staffers started reporting his erratic behavior. But Chuck Schumer needs Senators to, “go against him,” and thwart any legitimate opposition the party can muster, so we let this brain damaged, mentally ill man occupy one of fhe highest positions of power in the nation.

That’s a dumb way to frame this. “My interest in resolving my crippling debt dropped 95% when I set my house on fire!” Well, creating and imminent crisis doesn’t make your other problems go away.

Schumer’s gonna pass the SAVE act so he can pass Iran War funding, isn’t he?

I feel you, but honestly, with this administration, who fucking knows what will happen. The Secretary of Defense is an alcoholic, the President is sundowning, and JD Vance appears to already be in hiding. This might end with our unconditional surrender to the next Ayatollah after we lose a ground invasion.

I don’t even think you can say, “America,” at this point; I think this 5 to 10 people at the top of the administration that thought they could repeat what they did in Venezuela. There are plenty of ghouls in both parties that have been dreaming of regime change in Iran, but even they wouldn’t be stupid enough to think they could just bomb the country for a weekend, kill the Ayatollah, and move on. Intelligence officials at the Pentagon directly contradicted the administration’s claim that Iran was planning an attack, and even John Fucking Bolton wrote an op-ed saying this was a bad idea. America is gonna get a kick in the nuts, but only a handful of people are actually responsible for this cluster-fuck, and they probably won’t learn anything or face any consequences for their actions.

People keep saying this is going to be America’s next forever war, but there’s a good chance we might just lose.

No, just for Biden to appoint someone who wasn’t too cowardly to prosecute Trump for his many, many crimes.

I saw the Porno Freaks open for the So Called Christians when I was in college. Great show.

Good. He’s an authoritarian who had his paramilitary goons invade an American city. All you achieve by going to the State of the Union and listening politely is the normalization of fascism. Only deeply unserious people who are incapable of meeting this moment would consider attending without disrupting him.

I hate TikTok too, but it’s not going away without comprehensive legislation regulating social media. Until then, a fediverse alternative that’s not ruled by corporate algorithms would at least be a form of harm reduction. Think of it like a Safe Injection Site program; it’s not great that they’re still using, but at least they’re getting clean needles.

Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we’re going to start examining the human energy cost, we’ll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.

I did vote for her. I live in a comfortably Blue state, but I agreed to vote for her in solidarity with some of my swing-state friends that didn’t want to vote for her.

As for strategy, well, Kamala’s entire strategy was, “our base is already going to vote for us, so we’re going to instead pursue disaffected Republicans by campaigning with Lize Cheney and Barbara Bush.” That choice depressed the turnout of her own base and cost her the election. Motivating Democratic voters instead of chasing imaginary moderate Republicans would have been a better strategy, and it probably had a bigger impact than the Gaza protest votes.

Anyway, let’s just say you’re right, and the electorate is full of childish leftist dummies that won’t vote for Harris because they’re idiots that can’t see the big picture. Well, then what? You can piss and moan about these voters all you want, but you seem to think they were the deciding factor in 2024, so what are the Democrats gonna do to win them over? It seems unlikely that all of these people you think are idiots that can’t reason or forecast will be radically different in the next two years, so are the Democrats going to do something different in 2028, or have you just resigned to losing now?

It’s getting hard to tell if they even want to win. Even a year ago it might be plausible to argue that centrism is a smart strategy, but at this point, with victories like Mamdani and Mejia, it’s just demonstrably wrong. Hell, Platner is still leading Mills in Maine even after the whole, “having a Nazi tattoo,” thing. If the Democrats are still pursuing centrism going into 2028, then they have to admit they would prefer losing to fascists than adding progressives to their tent.

This continues to be the stupidest, least productive way to think about elections. The lesser of two evils argument may be true, but it failed to motivate people to vote for Kamala in 2024 (or Hillary in 2016, for that matter). You can bitch about protest votes or an apathetic electorate all you want, but at the end of the day, you don’t win elections if you don’t get votes, and, “yEaH, bUt TrUmP iS wOrSe,” didn’t get votes. If the Democrats once again run a candidate who doesn’t reflect their base and once again lose the election, it will once again be their fault for repeating a losing strategy that produces losing candidates.

I just left two long comments about this, but tl;dr, there’s no DualShock without Nintendo inventing this derpy thing first. DualShock was an industry defining design, but they were refining the functionality Nintendo created.

The N64 invented 3D platforming with this controller, which is why Mario 64 puts things like Crash Bandicoot and Laura Croft to shame; they’re creation of the C-buttons allowed for a free moving camera that could be used simultaneously with the joystick, which no one else could do at the time. Here’s an old promotional video for the DualShock where a developer even says, “What I’m really excited about is that we can do this on Sony, we don’t have to go do it on Nintendo.”

Nintendo invented an entirely novel system of inputs to give unprecedented control over a 3D environment. Sony looked at what Nintendo was doing and found a way to simplify those controls, and it was a great design; it’s the template for every modern controller. But criticizing Nintendo for not taking the time to, “reflect or refine,” the design, even though the design was a groundbreaking achievement in game development at a time when there was literally a new dimension being added to games, is ridiculous.

I mean, at the time it was designed, “both,” pretty much was the right choice. Without the D-pad a lot of the titles they could reliably develop, like fighting or puzzle games, would have been incredibly difficult to get working well, but without the joystick, they couldn’t launch with titles like Mario 64. It’s easy to look at the PS1 Duelshock controller and assume they were idiots, but original PS1 controller only had a D-pad. The N64 beat the PS1 to the joystick by two years, and while it was much derpier than the Playstation’s solution, it was integrated from day one.

How the hell did you use the Z-trigger?

It’s gotta be Zoomers looking at it with no frame of reference. Anyone who played this at the time would have recognized the layout here; they were taking the SNES controller, adding an extra set of buttons to be more in line with the 6 button layout popularized by Sega, and then sticking a joystick in the middle. Assigning the c-buttons as directional was actually pretty insightful. They work for camera controls on stuff like Mario 64, but they also function as a top-row/bottom-row for strong-attack/light-attack on D-pad fighting games like Mortal Kombat.

It was designed at a transition point between joysticks and the D-pad. Your right hand goes on the right prong for the A, B, and C buttons. Your left hand should be on the center prong when using a game designed for the joystick, or on the left prong when using a game designed for the D-pad. It’s not the most elegant design, but it’s really not that hard to figure out.