The school lunch stuff fucks me up.

I got booted from free lunch when my mom remarried and my step dad made too much. They didn’t want to pay for my lunch/buy food for me to pack, so I just didn’t eat. Sometimes I’d find some dimes in the vending machines and could get like a Vitamin water or something.

Like yeah, my family could have afforded to pay, and they probably should have been made to pay, but if school is mandatory then feeding you should be too.

I’d get dizzy and feel sick by the end of the day. I still struggle with disordered eating.

Anyone against feeding children is a monster.

Remember the meltdown over “Obamaphones”?

As a trans and possibly autistic New Vegas fan, I resemble that remark.

I think trying to police strict categories though is a problem - reality doesn’t fit genre. People don’t fit genre. My Bejeweled loving grandmother got hella into the newer Civilization games, my FIFA addicted ex would dabble into furry romance games.

Even within the same game, there’s vast differences in how people can approach gameplay - I play the Sims for fucked up historical roleplay. Other people use it as a wish fulfillment vehicle where their self insert characters live their dream lives - others cheat to give themselves lots of money and just build gorgeous houses.

Video games are a combination of art and toys. There’s no “right way” to appreciate art, and no one likes when someone else tells you how to play with your toys. Thomas Kinkade paintings makes me want to vomit, while Cy Twombly paintings intoxicate me - others will not have the same reaction, and that’s part of the beauty that makes us human.

(How on earth can human beings listen to Sargon for more than 15 minutes? Even the clips I’ve heard excerpted in Hbomberguy etc make me want to claw my ears out lol)

That kind of categorization just seems to lead to a kind of elitism. (Victoria 2 players are of course the most elite gamers)

I think it’s time to recognize that “video game” is a medium. Being a “gamer” is the same as being a “reader” or “someone who likes watching movies.” Specifying genre is what might make things more clear.

Like I’m a “gamer” that plays mostly obscure indie art games, isometric CRPGs, Bethesda RPGs, and will try an FPS/adventure game if the story looks compelling enough. I’m not the same kind of “gamer” as someone who plays the Ubisoft releases, or sports games, or hero shooters.

Like ultimately all of this is shit we do for fun - why do we need to categorize and judge people?

Yeah - there are a shit ton of Joker’s epic boners.

Also a lot of funny stuff with Superman and Jimmy Olsen. The Bronze Age is… something.

DRMless digital is great - I have a calibre library of thousands - but still more vulnerable.

Canticle of Lebowitz is a great post apocalyptic novel. After the nukes, Catholic monasteries preserve the ancient tradition of copying down manuscripts. Text doesn’t require any form of infrastructure.

There are also many texts/other media that are not available in any digital format. Obscure or older. For as much of an Information Age we are in, a lot of knowledge is being lost through neglect.

The best true crime podcast will always be Criminal. Very little sex/murder, more like a This American Life for crime.

I think in part it’s hyper vigilance and some bits of “Just World” falllacy. When you are raised female, you’re constantly taught shit like always keeping a key ready between your knuckles when you’re walking outside at night, or where best to kick someone, or the debates on whether to shout “help” or something else - to be female is to be taught you are in danger. My mom was fucked up but the shit where she would obsessively show me where all the sex criminals in our neighborhood were wasn’t maybe that unusual.

The “Just World” aspect is maybe if you learn enough you can protect yourself. Listen to enough true crime podcasts and you’ll crack the pattern and protect yourself. Look at all the weird women on Facebook who post about their “close calls” with human trafficking - or even how police departments will feed into that shit.

Then perhaps a more complicated aspect - the most awful crimes are committed by those closest to us. Stranger danger is very appealing as an alternative.

It was fun, but vim ultimately made more sense and is what I used for note taking most of the time now.

There’s a reason why the US refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Seeing the way DHS and foster works has been a “black pill” for me. There’s a wider attitude that children are the property of their parents in their states (see the endless conversations about “parent rights” - eg, denying children education and medical care). Children whose parents have rejected them are basically dumped into a lost and found, have no value, have no voice.

I’ve talked to social workers where they had to place kids in homeless shelters because there were no available beds. Kids sleep in DHS offices. DHS can’t be assed to make sure kids’ shit gets from place to place - I’ve bought multiple children clothes because they went inpatient with basically nothing.

At one point in college I decided to make myself take notes in ed for a semester for the lulz

Amazon’s ebook store front (as well as the internet in general) is flooded with AI slop. The internet is a place where the signal to noise ratio is dropping rapidly.

Physical media is necessary. Especially books. Especially the kinds of books regimes might want to ban. When it’s time to rebuild, we’ll need firm ground to stand on, and physical books work as long as you can hold them.

The ISS is also a symbol I think. The “International” Space Station. Think about how Soviet and American’s worked together on Skylab, and how that inspired the creation of what is truly a marvel and testament to humanity. Space has a been a place for the future and hope - it doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from, what matters is the spirit of exploration and desire to better understand the universe.

Elon wants his name on a Mars mission above everything else. He wants history to talk about how he got us there, and imagines a future where planetary exploration allows his progeny to be lords of entire planets. Safety doesn’t matter, and we’ll probably end up with the first Americans to die in space in the next few years. (Will the US space program become as secret as the Soviet era one?)

Imagine what happens to foster kids who age out. Imagine applying for jobs at 17, knowing that you’ll need to support yourself, and then trying to figure out whether putting down the group home as your “permanent address” is a smart idea or not. (About a third of girls who age out end up pregnant quickly, another third will end up in sex work.)

Something like half of homeless people were in the foster care system. The foster care system in the United States is disgusting - group home positions are poorly paid and unpleasant, which incentivizes the wrong kind of people to want to work in them. “Troubled teens” are vulnerable to all kinds of extra abuse - look up what was happening with cops and kids at the Tulsa juvie last year.

These are people who have never been loved. People who were put through the meat grinder of the human soul that is DHS care, were thrown out on the street and told to figure it out.

People consider the homeless a public nuisance and ask for the police to remove them.

Basically, there are lot of areas that are technically owned by someone but not really maintained. Little patches of land near gas stations, etc. Or public places like parks or under underpasses. Slowly, you get tent cities that pop up and will be tolerated for a few months, until people start calling the police.

The police are supposed to warn people beforehand to clear out - we all know how much American cops respect procedure and humans rights of course. But after that warning is given, they’ll come through and trash everything. Identification documents, medications, personal photos - they don’t give a shit if they’re tossing out someone’s insulin. The ID being tossed can be especially devastating - if you lose all of you ID documents - how do you prove who you are to get new ones? This is a problem social workers/advocates deal with all the fucking time.

Btw there have been massive cuts to many NASA programs across the board (especially in outreach/education lol). Artemis/Moon to Mars will probably die or be significantly changed because it’s “DEI.”

Bridenstone was Trump’s first appointment to the office, and was focused on giving private companies access to space - this is why this Starliner debacle happened in the first place.

NASA is dying because the oligarchs see space as a resource to be exploited and do not understand the purpose of scientific exploration, beyond what they can funnel into their own wallets.

I only have one Linux shirt - the awesome upside down command line guide XKCD one. My beard has grown in since, and I have not needed Randall Munroe’s help to navigate my system for many years, but it’s a fun shirt.

I mean, can’t we go back to the way that the Dems refused to see that Hillary was not popular, and how party leaders actively intervened to make sure that no one resembling an actual Dem (Bernie) got the nomination?

I think that’s really where the writing was on the wall - sabotage a popular candidate with the kind of populist support that we saw launch Trump into office, to platform someone who was probably one of the most hated women in America?

They’ve already gutted education in southern states. The largest school “district” in Oklahoma is Epic Charter Schools, which has been investigated multiple times for financial malfeasance (originally, it worked like an MLM - teachers got paid based on their roster number, and some would recruit a hundred+ students and made bank) and the fact that “attendance” is spending five minutes on a log in screen. Parents were getting kickbacks with a “learning fund” people were buying TVs and Christmas trees with.

It’s the future. Kids whose families can’t afford private will get to set them in front of a laptop and let AI-slop “teach” their child.

Nothing wrong with Doctorow - I just think that his techno dystopias are very prescient.

Yeah - they’re teaming up with the Christofascists. Accelerationists - smash the United States into a wall, so various parties can pick up the pieces. It’ll be Gilead where I live - Cory Doctorow elsewhere.