If they were smart, sure. But Disney can’t just leave shit alone, they aren’t capable.

My first name is a random set of numbers and letters and other alphanumerics that changes hourly forever

My last name, a thousand vowels fading down a sinkhole to a sussurus, couldn’t just be John Doe or Bingo

My address, a made up language written out in living glyphs, lifted from demonic literature and religious text

Telephone uncovered by purveyors of the Ouija, then checked against the CBGB women’s room graffiti

My social, a sudoku

My age is obscure

My ‘in-case-of-emergency’ is in the daisies chasing birds

Employed by trillionaires with perfect teeth and pores, and people who open doors for the people who open doors

My medical history is a course at SUNY Buffalo

Charlatan psychiatry and troubleshooting undertow

Nervous in the service still,

I’m burger meat and purple pills

“Here, thank you. We’ll call your name.”

Sure you will

• Aesop Rock, “Shrunk”

Fuck me, even the magical creatures are gaming the metrics now? We truly are in the end times

HORUS is by a long shot my favorite LANCER manufacturer. In a world of mega-corporations and mercenaries, I like to throw my lot in with the anarchist collective that likes to play with space ghosts.

But yeah, definitely. It barely matters. As an engineer of some renown once said,

"For instance, how am I gonna stop some big mean Mother-Hubbard from tearin’ me a structurally superfluous new behind?

The answer? Use a gun.

And if that don’t work, use more gun."

And there isn’t a lot of “more gun” you can do than staring down the many, many barrels of a Raleigh or Monarch unit.

I fucking love LANCER. In most settings, you get your hands on a literal infohazard and most people would (quite rightly) probably try to keep that under wraps. Oh, we’ve discovered an AI that wrote itself, that can invert its cameras and blast you with a holy fractal pattern that will permanently blind organics and can straight up kill you right through the cockpit of your mech without any physical damage. In a sane world we park this thing in cold storage and hope nobody finds it for the next millennium.

In LANCER? HORUS got their hands on this, and their response was “overclock it, and point it that direction”, and the result is the Gorgon, one of the most dangerous and badass ‘support’ units in the setting. AI copilot programs have to put a big fuckin’ censor bar over Gorgon units in the field, so their pilot doesn’t just straight up die by catching it in their peripheral vision. An extruded Basilisk unit on a Gorgon can stop a pilot dead in their tracks with a full mental stun even through the NHP-filtering censor, it just shuts your entire brain down. The Basilisk pattern is akin to looking God right in the eyes, it’ll burn out your neurons if unprotected and it’ll turn you into a drooling mess for a minute or two even when suitably protected.

And this is a defensive unit!

I believe it, it can have a much higher nicotine concentration if you want it to and vape juice is tasty.

The one saving grace of cigarettes are that they taste like garbage so it’s harder to get proper addicted to them. But a good vape will taste like candy even to a non smoker, so you can get drunk with your buddy one night and take a couple rips off of his watermelon flavored vape and exit that night with an intense craving for more, ask me how I know.

Don’t you know switching to your sidearm is always faster than reloading?

We call this the New York Reload and strapping down with like six pistols is a legitimate tactic.

I went and got “tested” once and was told it is impossible that I have ADHD because I did not commit crimes as a child.

No, seriously. I didn’t steal things, I didn’t fight people, primarily because I was afraid of my dad and his physical punishment. Apparently this is a key lynchpin criteria of an ADHD diagnosis. Never mind that I constantly got into minor trouble for never shutting up, or that I couldn’t sit still, or that I read literally every single book in the entire fiction section of my middle school library in the 3 years I attended that school. Never mind that ADHD-memes groups read like a structural study of my life.

Guess I’ll just fucking suffer I suppose 🤷

This requires a level of pre-planning that I am only sometimes capable of.

I don’t understand how it isn’t more obvious to everyone that the American people at large literally did not elect him, the election was stolen, Trump and Elon Musk both were on national television bragging about how they’ve done so, multiple times.

Do not ever trust the US government for anything, ever - you’re completely correct there - but please don’t get the impression that the majority of citizens are over here cheering and rubbing their hands together in sick, evil glee. We are hostages of the owner class. What is happening, happens without our consent or approval, and those who express their disapproval are shot dead.

There is a small percentage of very uneducated and unwell people who do support the actions of the American regime and they’re being hugely signal boosted by said regime as a way of whitewashing what is going on. If they can get one person to express approval and then put that sound bite onto Fox News, then suddenly you can have a thousand people express approval. Once you have a thousand people on board the misinformation is now self supporting, it’ll spread on its own.

A small subset of Americans are cartoonishly evil, and surprise, it’s primarily the robber barons just like the last time. A larger subset of Americans are criminally underinformed about their situation, either through their own lack of interest or through targeted efforts to destroy their ability to learn the truth (defunding of educational programs, defunding NPR, burning books, etc). The largest subset of Americans are just scared. Everything that has defined the backbone of domestic life in the USA in our lifetimes has been destroyed and it is not coming back. People who speak up about this publicly are disappeared or executed. Some of them, you hear about on the news after. Most, you won’t.

I have such an unbelievable amount of respect for citizens in other countries who are willing and able to stand up for their rights. I always thought the US would be capable of the same. And in some ways, we are. In most of the ways that matter, though, we’re scared little children, whose fear and ignorance is being amplified and preyed on by those who would take advantage of it, and the average person is either blind to it or afraid of the consequences of standing up to it alone.

Please, hate what we’ve done, hate who leads us, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that regular citizens are approving of this.

Time for rolling,

Grass

Lucky.

I played a goolock a few years ago, when he finally got the proper attention of his patron, he, uh… delaminated. His patron briefly turned off the strong/weak nuclear forces holding his component atoms together.

Loras started that morning as a human man and ended that night as a pile of loose protons. Rough way to go, as they say.

Yes. Don’t ask me why, I don’t have a fucking clue, but it is. If I had to guess, it’s because it’s a (quite good) game about rebuilding yourself from nothing. You start the game as an empty shell of a character who was just shot dead and lost all their memories, and the entire rest of the game is about creating yourself to be who you want to be, and about making change in the Wasteland and deciding on a new future of things to come. I can sort of understand why that might resonate for trans folks. I have no idea if this is an accurate assessment or not.

But it’s a game that I love with an ongoing unholy fervor so I say, the more the merrier.

For me at least, being grounded was the preferable alternative to having my ass beaten physically off my body with the nearest leather belt or wooden implement. I can serve my time and be free afterward, or I can make things worse for everyone involved, and still be grounded but also be physically harmed while I’m grounded.

Was this good and right? Hell if I know, man. It feels like a fundamental disrespect of someone’s human rights, but also, I was ten, and it succeeded in teaching me to be less of an incorrigible little fucker.

YOU made this? In GIMP?

Fuck yeah, I’ve had this saved for like two years, no idea where it came from. Nice work, this is top quality, I’ve already reposted it to several people across Lemmy.

Right, that’s all good. Now you have to get a couple of low-ranking servicemen to carry out every step of that hundred page manual to the letter on each of their several dozen machines, daily, after they’ve been deployed for an ongoing 10 months because their superiors are morons, and are further scheduled to become the longest running carrier deployment of all time at over a year of deploy time, because their superiors are morons.

I’d believe that some corners were cut in these servicemen’s duty, and it just happened to be one too many corners one too many times. The men are fatigued, they want to get off the ship. It’s possible these corners were even cut on purpose with exactly this result in mind in an attempt to get them off the ship.

Sure. This comment thread is about class mobility in the West though.

But, fact is, it seems it’s the same everywhere.

Throughout pretty much all of human history it’s been apparent that the “nobles” class has been, at best, more trouble than they’re worth; and at worst, the instigating spark that creates a nation-destroying blaze.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read a history book that the American nobleman is equally as useless and destructive as his counterpart anywhere else.

You say “fired all the five star generals”, I say “created new leadership opportunities for disgruntled veterans”.

America is going to end up with two armies, one full of soldiers and one full of sycophants and idiots. Boy, this doesn’t sound familiar or anything, does it?