For the things that motivate me to do this, been thinking that what I should do is start a blog, grab the offending comment and rephrase it as something more generalized, and then debunk it in my own blog posts. Just do not have the energy to get tied up in comment threads that are pointless anymore.
I think that things like this can really only be approached with a long view in mind. Progressions and regressions are always happening. We're going through a rather massive regression currently, but any belief system that refuses to change according to actual facts is basically at war with reality itself, and doomed to failure by their own inability to adapt.
As far as an actual approach, it should be social allelopathy. There's a good reason this christofascist regime is so bent on attacking education - it's because their crazy beliefs have a tendency to dissolve under any scrutiny. The more we can provide robust, truthful education to all, the more it buffers people, if not necessarily to atheism, at least to religion that can coexist with common sense.
And that goes for religious institutions to. Support what you believe. If you're atheist, there are groups who organize around that.
People who believe in prophesied apocalyptic events should not be in positions of power, because they have a tendency to try to make those prophesies self-fulfilling.
We need separation of church and state, but we also need ways to establish an expectation that religious institutions will at least not promote beliefs that directly go against established science and reason.
Viva Longevity has become one of my favorite channels for anything nutrition and longevity related. Chris MacAskill is a retired Earth scientist who started the channel as a passion project. He claims to keep all possible ad things shut off, doesn't accept donations, and is doing the channel out of his own pocket.
The gist of it is to push back against all the misinformation, by providing a platform for the most cited and respected health and nutritional researchers, who do actual science, to talk about their work. He also has episodes about how industry-funded disinformation campaigns work to undermine the scientific communities.
There's a goldilocks zone where our own individual longevity can be met while simultaneously causing the least harm to all life, within practicality. That zone being within the territory of the blue zones to one degree or another. Or to be straight to the point, it is completely unnecessary for the vast majority of people to ever need to depend on animal products for food.
I've been trying to think how I could have a good way to play games outside. Was thinking if I ever have the extra money for it, I could get AR glasses, and connect those and a solar charger to my Steam Deck. And a controller. Cyborg in the wild.
While some foods are associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, no single ingredients in and of themselves cause diabetes - obesity does. That's why every fad diet can make a semi-credible claim to have "cured" people's diabetes. If you lose enough weight, it might go into remission.
And to be clear, none of what I just said is meant to imply a moral, individual failure on the part of anyone who is living/struggling with obesity and diabetes. It's a complex thing, and like all complex things we can go ahead and blame corporations for it. 👍
I've played with and without the analog inputs, and using a real DualShock 2. By default it's not L3, it's circle for cqc, and square for pressure sensitive controls for the gun.
The controls were even worse on ps2 because even though they are technically analog buttons, they have a very short travel distance which makes it too easy to accidentally do the wrong thing. I found the modern controls slightly more intuitive.
There was also a time I tried to play the ps2 version on pcsx2, but could only use a DualShock 4 then. Since that controller doesn't have analog face buttons, I remapped cqc to L2 and gunfire to R2 and found that control scheme worked surprizingly well.
But the basic controls are the least of those game's problems.
Despite my best efforts, I never got to a point where I felt like I wasn't fighting against the controls and mechanics. As somebody who has played a fair share of other stealth games, they just are really bad.
I'll talk about the boss fight that was the final straw for me.
It was a character who could turn invisible, jump into the tree tops, and shoot poisonous arrows at me. I had to run around constantly to avoid being hit, try to locate him, quickly switch to first person mode to shoot at him before he would jump to another tree, rinse and repeat. Having to switch between first and third person modes so frequently was jarring and disorrienting. Having to run around so much was frustrating because there were also traps everywhere. It was frequently the case that switching to first person mode to shoot him would result in getting shot by one of his poison arrows, which meant I would have to quickly stop what I was doing to go into the start menu, to open a special medical treatment menu, to deal with a healing system that was way more convoluted than it needed to be, and which also contributed to the disorientation.
The whole thing was an exercise in annoyance and frustration. After getting past it, it made me realize how hard I had been trying to ignore the way these things had been annoying me throughout the entire game. I couldn't ignore it anymore. Just hate it, the games are not for me.
These days when I play Bethesda games I always end up using console commands to expand inventory space. I'm so done with hyper-limited inventory systems and having to waste stat points to increase them.
Trying to find relevant information that's supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I've ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that's what email is for - everyone has it already.
And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies "site" is their fb page, they don't get my business.
These things are successful not because they're good. It's because they're easy and convenient. That's the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.
Yeah to be honest, as a regular user I find Matrix's ux to ve at least somewhat less of a clusterfuck than Discord. Some things are still unintuitive, but that's nothing rtfm shouldn't be able to fix.
Or this one: