How is different from Crazy Frog or Billy Bass? Dumb memes turning into toys or dumb meme toys have been around for forever.

In an American vacuum I could see where you are coming from. In comparison with literally the entire rest of the world, it is clearly a flawed standpoint.

The American Democratic party is the oldest standing political party in the entire world. It last changed it’s political stances in the 1960’s and not because they wanted to, but because they needed to respond to the Republicans flipping the entire south in their favor.

Other countries have real leftist parties that actually get government members elected.

Biden was incapable of clearly communicating verbally for 2 hours straight in a debate. I’d argue that Biden stayed in as long as he did to enable them to feel empowered to force another Kamala on us rather than having to deal with a Warren, Sanders or even a Buttigieg winning the Primary. Kamala was 6th in line in the Primary when she dropped out in 2020.

I vote for them, they move right. I don’t vote for them, and vote third party, they move right. I join their party and vote in their primary’s for progressive candidates, they move right.

It’s almost like a bunch of really old, well off, lifetime establishment government folks just actually want to be conservative authoritarians. At BEST they are stuck in a mindset of 1969’s ideas of what progressive politics are because that is when they became politicians.

Every year they relaunch classic EverQuest time locked progression. They did that long before WoW did and WoW hired their studio lead to help them improve their implementation of it.

I’m not recommending it, just saying you could still go experience it today. I’d maaaaybe recommend it over Pantheon but it is close.

It’s EverQuest. If you liked Classic/Kunark era EverQuest then you might like this game. The gameplay is very simplistic and heavily leans into you needing to manually go out and build a group of people that have the right classes. You go to an area and kill the same mobs over and over for a couple hours and hope you get something neat or a level.

It’s a 100% perfect addition to THE core combat light puzzle platformer games. It also has an age range of 0-99 by both having cute jokes and references that would appeal to older folks while never being even remotely offensive.

Also yea, what else was there? Closest was make Wukong which primarily crushed the market because it again proved that the new or smaller studios can absolutely give a better AAA experience than the big studios these days by focusing on delivering a game not a storefront

Instead of playing games, go outside, touch grass, undergo the series of organ implantations that are required to become a Space Marine. The only thing holding you back is yourself.

Same could be said for any game. The value mostly of a game is the controlled progression with little impact. If I go start power washing the driveway and then stop at a moments notice to go take a shower and head to work I’m gonna leave a giant mess laying around and a half done driveway.

I mean the issue with TikTok is that they give the data and videos over to the Chinese government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on the US government.

Meanwhile Twitter/X is totally different in that they give the data and videos over the US government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on US citizens.

I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.

People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.

Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.

When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.

This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.

I crushed it and have the American Dream. My experience now is, I’m surrounded by old people, trustfund kids, and people who broke themselves to get ahead.

I have to raise my kids knowing that 80% of their classmates have no chance and hope they luck out and also fall in love with a career path that pays well. All of my friends I grew up with are in a constantly struggle, none of them will own a house. I have friends with PTSD from serving in the military and even with the VA loan option and GI bill they will be lucky to own a house by 50 if ever.

I can’t even talk about my life, my struggles are meaningless compared to those around me. I feel like an outsider in America because I actually did what everyone says is the goal and it is wild to me. I’d give it up in a heartbeat just to feel like I was in a community of equals I felt safe to raise a family around.

I get it, and I agree that most people are not in the right job. This is a big part of why folks want things like a higher minimum wage and socialized healthcare. People often are stuck in jobs because they NEED something from that job and are unable to look around. Then on the other side, sometimes folks find their calling but it pays $9 an hour and they feel a need to try to do better.

I work with a lot of folks for example that got into management because they think that is what you do. They hate the job, they miss writing code, they are awful managers. It’s a very backwards way of living your life.

I am just trying to talk to an ideal and real scenario here. The idea that all jobs suck and that is life is exactly what keeps people down. That is the lie folks believe that keeps them from seeking peace and contentment. We gotta fight that even if we also know that it isn’t easy to find a spot and when you do it might not be viable with the rest of your life.

I am saying yes they would, yes I would. You entirely can find a job that is something you want to do and also not your hobby. Most things folks want to do are someone’s job.

The only place I can accomplish the tasks I’d like to accomplish are at my work. Some tasks are so large that they not only require many many people who wouldn’t normally choose to work together, but a regular flow of resources from others.

People are so lost in capitalism they tie it ALL work to just being money. Even if you remove capitalism, even if you remove money, people still need to work together and resources still need to channel from place to place. Your job wouldn’t go away if money went away. If you look at some of the largest most successful open source free programs in the world, most of the top contributors are all from companies that paid that person a salary for contributing to that code.

The US has literally 0 third party representation at the federal level and 10 state senators all libertarian. Even Bernie isn’t technically a third party he just is no party. So to be clear, having no party is far far better in the US than representing a third party even in a local election.

Yea, if you want more leftist policies than right, vote and work with Democrats at the federal level and try to get Ranked voting in more places. Exactly like Bernie has. Continue to support your third party in local until they become able to actually get folks elected to even a Senate post. As long as the Green Party can’t even manage to get the most hippy district in the nation to get a single House Rep elected you might as well just cast your vote for Bob Ross.

A second loss should be a death knell of the current Republican party. He won’t transition any of his power to Vance or any other Republicans. He could die and we still would see 10% of the Americans to vote for him in 2028 because his death was just media propaganda as far as they are concerned.

We all have happiness, it’s just hard to see it past all the other stuff we got going on in our heads.