We’re spending a lot of time here trying to figure out if it was the toaster or coffee maker which started the fire while ignoring the gas leak. At a certain point the situation becomes so volatile a fart can set it off.

The legal system in this country is like our health insurance industry. It gives you the impression that you have robust protections in place until the moment you get sick and have your claim for life-changing treatment denied. Everyone believes the law is there to protect them until they get arrested. Until they have the cops manipulating evidence and filing reports filled with lies and the prosecutor presenting it to the judge as fact. Then the Twelve Angry Men fantasy world turns to dust.

>Novice necromancer submits a spell to the DM.
>DM "its poorly written but whatever. You can use it”
>As is the nature of a fucking weirdo the necromancer goes off by himself to perform his d*********
>A successful summoning
>Roll to control it
>fail
>The Jimmy Kimmel sorcerer summoned an additional Jimmy Kimmel sorcerer minion.
>Nervouslaughter.jpg by everyone at the table.
>Roll to banish
>another fail
>each of the Jimmy Kimmels then summon another Jimmy Kimmel, 1 per Kimmel.
>Necromancer “oh god, this is getting bad...'m gonna need some help”
>party is in an inn across the way
>necromancer runs for help.
>DM runs the calculations
>in the time it took for him to get the party from the inn the Kimmels have reproduced
>There are now over 16000 Jimmy Kimmels and they’ continuing to multiply exponentially
>"oh god...”
>"Tha...That's too many late night hosts guys, we need a high level NPC!”
>"DM, how many more Jimmy Kimmels can be created?”
>DM - "According to the spell submitted by Drenokan, there's no limit
>"FUCK!"
>The party bails from the town. The screams of the townsfolk can be heard in the
distance as the Jimmy Kimmels continue to multiply. Everyone smacks Drenokan in the back of the head as they go
>As they run a tower of Jimmy Kimmels emerges from the horizon as the dawn breaks.
>Party arrives at a port town as a wave of Kimmels builds in the forest behind
 them, Kimmels now tumbling over one another summoning more Kimmels as they fall
 as Kimmels summoning Kimmels summoning Kimmels summoning Kimmels summon yet more Kimmels
>"welll take a boat and just head off to another continent, problem solved guys. let's get out of here”
>DM's narration is perfect
>"As the boat departs Jimmy Kimmels are just beginning to tumble onto the
docks. The panicked screams of the townsfolk generate an eerie melody as a
precession of percussion drifts through the air. An untold ‘number of late night
hosts clattering together herald the end of Swiftwater, the small port town at the western edge of the continent of Edhyak. Edhyak, known for it's bustling cities and vibrant merchant commerce
was thus buried beneath a mountain of Kimmels. In the coming hours millions die in this chuckleopolpyise, their bodies merely acting as a foundation for yet more bodies to follow”
>Mackleroy, a merchant character in the party is livid. He's real big into world building and he'd spent a month with the DM developing this place and it basically became a barren bone wasteland in a matter of 6 or 7 tums,
>Mackleroy “Okay, can we restart already? This is getting stupid”
>DM "No, Not until we finish the story.”
> Boat is filled with weeping people lamenting their forsaken homes. Mackleroy is considering tossing Drenokan overboard. Other party members are actually trying to critically think things through "How can we stem this tide of undead?" "mayhaps we can draw them into the void
>captain of ship calls out "Gods alive! Protect us! Thar be Jimmys headn our way!”
>DM narrates further “In the distance a wave of late night hosts roll across the horizon cutting the sea in twain. The rattle of their bodies has become a deafening roar. The ship breaks out into a panic. People are screaming, crying, jumping overboard; complete pandemonium. The boat gets swept up in this Kimmel tide. Kimmels appear from thin air tumbling onto the boat as they do.
>The party is fighting off Jimmys on the boat in a sea of Jimmys
>The wave of Kimmels gradually continues to overtake the boat and soon the boat itself is adrift in this sea of Kimmels. Party takes tums fighting off the Kimmels. Frantically making saving rolls that never hit 20 for some kind of divine intervention. At one point our sorcerer tries to reason them "PLEASE, STAHP. NO MORE!"
>nothing
>DM intervenes "There are countless Jimmy Kimmels now. Even if you could cut down one million with a single swing you'd never be able to overtake their ability to reproduce. This continues for a while longer and then...they reach a critical mass. The weight of the Kimmels becomes so great that their combined mass crushes the innermost portions of the planet. The generation of gravity from the Kimmels’ ever increasing mass sucks them into a void of density instantly Killing anyone left on the planet who wasn't already dead...or a late night host. This starts a chain reaction with fuels the creation of a new star. A star born of death. The cries of many are lost to a burning blaze in the aether. Some say you can still hear the subtle hiss of a PA system echoing around this star.

Tongue in cheek. This short campaign is affectionately referred to in our group as "Jimmy Kimmel's wild ride”

does the nyt et al just completely avoid calling any part of the DNC ‘right wing’?

Yes. There can never be any legitimate politics to the left of the Democrats. To accurately describe the Democrats as right-wing would imply there is a legitimate position to their left. This would vindicate figures like Mamdani (at the very least) and strategies of mass-politics with a clearly defined enemies (like landlords, Silicon Valley, the oil industry, or the rich) which the NYT is simply incapable of doing

Conservapedia

The right holds the keys to the most advanced surveillance panopticon and regime of police repression in world history (in terms of scale and technology, perhaps not in intensity), but what they sorely lack is the respect and fear of their enemies. A properly terrorized opposition wouldn’t grave dance their martyrs like this. It is a situation which cannot be allowed to continue, one way or another.

Know the work rules:

A large number of Americans genuinely believe politics is a one-dimensional axis which runs from infinity Conservative to infinity Liberal. Therefore, if you are shitting on Liberals you must be right-wing. This is pretty deeply baked in. Political polling institutions which are ostensibly staffed by political scientists often frame the left simply as “very liberal.” Television political coverage does more or less the same thing. Orgs like DSA, if mentioned, are portrayed as very liberal. Communism is used only as an epithet, but is functionally interchangeable with Liberalism. Non-affiliated voters are universally described as “independents,” which are universally assumed to be somewhere in-between Liberal and Conservative (never outside). This is also why the solution to every political issue is framed in terms of dialog and meeting in the middle. This is the only thing which is even possible under this paradigm. To resist compromise is to be divisive. Division is bad, against the rules, and means you want to destroy The System (“Democracy,” which is good).

Then you have the smart-asses who learned about the Political Compass website sometime after 9-11 and think they’re Machiavelli because they understand there are actually two axes (with Margaret Thatcher and Joseph Stalin in the same corner).

Our political education is really fucking bad.

Cheers and congrats

Who’s fucking genius idea was it anyway to just let this company MITM half of the Internet’s TLS traffic?

I love helmets.

If I ever open a clinic, the waiting room is going to have the music from the Kerbal Space Program vehicle assembly building.

Hell yeah

It really feels like everything is cheapened by association. Civic rituals like lowering the flag. All these public moments of silence. All the fawning eulogies. How could you take any person or institution seriously after such debasement? It’s like the BBC changing their color scheme to black and banning upbeat music when the old crone bit it, but instead of royalty we’re talking about a podcaster.

There’s also some amount of like Kirk being viewed as the institutionalist to some degree. That sounds insane, but just saying.

Well yes. He was the front man of a substantial political fundraising and propaganda apparatus. That’s institutional by definition. By comparison, Fuentes is just an influencer. Kirk’s political line was determined by what gets evangelical crackers to open their wallets for Republican political campaigns (There are limits here. Your job is to sell ethno-religious strife as an alternative to any materially beneficial policy, but you’re not supposed to wear your Grand Wizard robe to the rally). Fuentes’s political line is determined by what creates the most controversy possible for the sole purpose of promoting himself.

hopped on the bike again today and my butt was immediately like

The right eye on this image is transparent and it looks demonic in dark mode

Rode 17.5 miles today

Could have probably done 20, but I had a mechanical issue 7 miles into the trail and decided not to push it. The front derailleur cable started slipping.

It was about 6 months into the covid crisis. I was browsing the chapotraphouse subreddit through a VPN while on the clock. It was one of my favorite subreddits because it was one of the only places which was completely uncritical in its support for the George Floyd uprising (the true reason for the ban, in my opinion). It got banned while I was reading it. A couple hours later, I was called to a meeting and told I was being furloughed because of the pandemic-induced economic standstill. In the meantime, someone set up a “lifeboat” discord server. Within a day or two, about 10,000 people ended up there from the 140,000 subscribers to the subreddit. I joined a group of a dozen or two people who decided to grab Lemmy, an emerging Fediverse platform (which was very bare-bones at the time and did not even support federation yet), kick the tires, and do what we could to make it suitable for such a chaotic situation. About a month later, we got chapo.chat online. We had dubbed our bespoke Lemmy fork “Hexbear.” Eventually, the site name and domain was changed to match when we decided the community had much broader interests than just a podcast.