The Tea Party was an outgrowth of the '08 Ron Paul movement that got devoured from the inside out by neocons and tech fascists. And that was back in the '10s, years before Trump made his fateful run.
Yeah, people won under the Tea Party banner. But mostly empty suits like Paul Ryan and ethno-nationalists like Mike Lee. Your Thomas Massie types were always vanishingly few and far between.
One might even suspect they are organized as a means of building solidarity with the police. That the police (and the national guard and the military at-large) are positioned as a neutral unbiased arbiter, and not a reactionary gang leveraged by private industry to intimidate and displace the working class.
i kinda believe that no kings is not there to do anything but provide a circus
Definitely felt like it was a manufactured outlet for dissent. Especially when you had those protests in Europe that had to be rebranded as "No Tyrants", for fear of offending actual kings.
The tricorder from Star Trek is well-established as the formative concept for the modern day cell phone. And the idea of a pocket-computer goes all the way back to the calculators developed by TI, designed explicitly against the size of the CEO's shirt pocket to guarantee it would fit.
Miniaturization has been a long time coming. It goes back to clockmakers and glass cutters, trying to turn large scale instruments into portable devices. I don't think it is outrageous to suggest a pocket computer was in the future back in the 1960s/70s.
I do think the speed at which we got here caught people off-guard. But it also set this fantastic expectation for what we'll do next, such that people speculate on faster-than-light travel and AI holograms and robot battle suits and immortality drugs more freely when they can point to "pocket computer" as an already realized possibility.
Battle of Algiers style my bruh. individual actions that can’t be connected to a “group.”
I'm sorry, what? It could absolutely be connected to the National Liberation Front. That's who the French were trying to run down and were willing to torture half the damned city to find. Arguably, it was the French hyper-police response to the guerrilla group that sparked enough backlash to yield a national revolt.
Even then, the French haven't properly decoupled from Algeria to this day. We're a far cry from any kind of Battle for Algiers in this country, much less a multi-generational independent government grappling with the long history of humanitarian crimes perpetrated against our people.
Americans have been putting up with stolen elections for a long fucking time. How many people are willing to get into a shooting battle with the ICE-aligned PD or chud-filled national guard over Republicans holding seats in states and districts they've been squatting in for decades?
Even if people are individually angry, there is no collective organization that opposes the current administration. At best, you have good hearted pacifists who play the game by the rules and get rolled every two years. At worst, a bunch of grifters and bait-and-switchers promising to take your money and votes for a sense of false hope, then blame civil rights groups and minority voting blocs for not fighting hard enough whenever they lose.
Sure, you can say you're at war. But it's you and what army? Name, rank, and serial number soldier.
I quit and when I looked back at the mid 2010s the game was unrecognizable
I have to say, I've played on and off for a long while - from the mid-90s until a few years ago - and I agree. But that was sort of the appeal of the game. Always evolving. Constantly trying new mechanics and styles of play. It was a kind-of laboratory for game design and implementation that kept me coming back to see what was new.
The thing that has turned me off more now than ever before is the way the game has fully stagnated. Every new release is just a reskinned iteration that calcified at the end of COVID. The mechanics have gotten cookie-cutter and have really divorced themselves from the different styles and themes between sets. The gulf between Common and Rare/Mythic, plus the way Common cards are totally interchangeable across editions, has made Pauper a lot less fun.
And now that AI art is popping up in all the new sets, I can't even enjoy that much.
That's before you get into the shameless cash-grab that was the 30th aniversery set. $999 for a box with four packs in it which, apparently, did so badly that the excess cards were dumped in a landfill rather than going into discount. Really painfully shameless overmarketing and underdeveloping. Heartbreaking to see Hasbro rip the beating heart out of the company, because they saw a golden goose and couldn't be satisfied with just one golden egg a day.
Hundreds of parents were persuaded to pay up to £35 a ticket for an event which promised "surprises at every turn".
Eager families who turned up at an industrial area in Whiteinch described it as "little more than an abandoned, empty warehouse".
A handful of embarrassed actors tried to make the best of some sad-looking props and a bouncy castle.
The promised chocolate fountains and "chocolatey delights" were conspicuously absent.
Children were instead offered a half-cup of lemonade and a small ration of jelly beans.
So, it's definitely what I'd call a "Red Flag" when gauging whether a vendor will be overpromising and underdelivering.
It’s just stupid to think you can always tell or that someone who does a bad photoshop is am amazing artist.
It's more an issue of effort and intent. AI is a signal that the vendor is going to do things in the laziest and cheapest manner possible. A hand-drawn flyer down with crayons and love indicates the person running the event put some god damned elbow grease into it. Slop ad-copy is a clear indication that they're just hustling.
Bosses are dumb. Use that to score extra vacation. Don't rock the fucking boat.