My youngest niece is a princess. Ever since she was a toddler, she has wanted to play all of the stereotypical princess games. I love it so much.

I’m on my 3rd all achievement run of Into the Breach. Subset is God tier.

Audio Visual! My job is so much fun!

Absolutely! The opinions you see on platforms like Lemmy or Reddit don’t necessarily reflect the views of the actual target market. Many of those users are casual gamers. These are people who own a phone and an Xbox, and that’s the extent of their gaming experience.

That market is HUGE. Valve is offering accessibility, convenience, and comparable (to consoles) performance without the complexity of PC gaming. I think it’s a fantastic move, and I’m genuinely excited to see it succeed. I have long wanted to play with more of my work friends who fall into this category.

Plumbing is a noble trade.

I spent the last two days building a machine from old parts and installing Linux Mint. It’s my first time using Linux and I am really surprised at how lovely it is. I am still learning, but I can easily see it replacing my home gaming PC. I have yet to find something I can’t get to work.

Do you know what the genetic difference is between a human alive today and one who lived 100,000 years ago? Almost none.

The real difference is shared knowledge. Every generation stands on the shoulders of those before it. You hold in your hands more understanding than any person in history could have imagined.

You will always be ignorant, not as a flaw, but as a truth of being human. Accepting that is where real learning begins.

Stay curious. Curiosity keeps you open to the world. It grows empathy, invites wonder, and reminds you that every person you meet carries a piece of the story you haven’t heard yet.

And when you share what you’ve learned, don’t speak as though you hold the final word. Speak as someone who has explored, reflected, and arrived at their understanding with care.

Learning is a lifelong conversation, one that connects you to every curious mind that ever lived. So keep asking, keep listening, keep growing. The future needs you.

The measles outbreak earlier this year? It’s still happening and getting worse.

So glad they fired everyone at the CDC. /s

A true air fryer cooks by blasting hot air from directly above the food. The fan and heating element sit on top, and the food rests in a basket with holes that let air flow underneath. This creates a fast-moving vortex of heat that surrounds the food, cooking it evenly and making it crispy with very little oil.

A small tabletop convection oven works differently. Its fan is usually in the back or on the side, pushing hot air around the chamber instead of straight down. The air moves more gently, and the food often sits on a solid tray or rack that blocks airflow underneath. It still cooks evenly, but it produces more of a roasted texture than a fried one.

Personally, I prefer tabletop convection.

Gyozaius.

I like it!

Solid list! I am glad someone else recommended Dragon Quest 8 as it’s god tier good.

I like Dark Cloud 2 more than the original myself. It’s completely separate from the original and feels like an improvement on the concepts of the first.

The fact that you need a /s makes me very sad.

This is one of the biggest problems with our current state of polarization: we’re quick to box people into a binary; either “red” or “blue,” “left” or “right.”

Real people rarely fit neatly into those categories. When you take the time to actually map out someone’s beliefs, experiences, and values, what you find almost never looks like a solid block of one color. Instead, it’s more like a mosaic: someone might lean conservative on economic issues, progressive on social ones, independent when it comes to foreign policy, and undecided on others.

Reducing all of that complexity down to a single partisan label is not only misleading, it also fuels division. It makes it harder to have real conversations, because instead of engaging with the full person (their reasoning, contradictions, and growth), we engage with a caricature. Recognizing that most people carry a mix of beliefs forces us to slow down, listen, and resist the urge to collapse identities into overly simple categories.

The challenge is that this feels counterintuitive, especially for people who haven’t examined why they hold the views they do. It’s easier, and often more comforting, to inherit an identity or adopt a team than it is to wrestle with contradictions and gray areas. But when we refuse that deeper work, we not only misunderstand others, we also misunderstand ourselves.

In other words, the messiness is the point. People are complicated, and when we acknowledge that, we create more space for dialogue, empathy, and genuine understanding; the very things that binary polarization squeezes out.

Edit:

If you’re interested in seeing how this plays out in practice, the New York Times put together a quiz a few years back that illustrates the point really well:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/08/opinion/republicans-democrats-parties.html

Yup. I totally understand why it rings hollow and why “feels good” that a Nazi died.

Authoritarianism isn’t waiting for permission. Absolutely.

But there’s a difference between “they don’t need justification” and “justification doesn’t matter.” Yes, Trump was always going to crack down on dissent. But Kirk’s assassination transforms that from “Trump’s authoritarian overreach” into “necessary response to political violence.” It shifts the narrative from aggression to self-defense. Did Goebbels need Wessel after his death in 1930? No, but it sure as shit worked to mobilize the base.

My point is that we, the true patriots upholding actual freedom, lose here. We all lose here and its frustrating that so many people are caught up in the cosmic justice that they can’t see that this is EXACTLY what they want.

The “feels good that a Nazi died” impulse is human. But politics isn’t about feelings, it’s about power. And right now, people celebrating are ensuring that the worst people in America are about to get a lot more of it, wrapped in the flag and carrying Kirk’s picture.

Instead of telling me how I feel, name a single “good thing” that has resulted.

Kirk’s organization is stronger, his ideas are martyred, his followers are more radicalized. You tell me I am afraid, but I am observing reality; historical and present.

Show me the improvement, because all I see is fascists getting exactly what they want.

It appears you do not want to know more.

Ohhh! I love Starship Troopers! The book, not so much, but the movie I adore.

Let’s dig into your choice to respond with this scene.

That’s the moment where Verhoeven shows us ‘Federation Victory’! The good guys have won! They’ve captured the Brain Bug! It’s afraid! Humanity wins!

Except what’s actually happening is fascists celebrating the torture of a sentient being. One that extracted human minds just as they’ll now extract from its mind; each side justifying their horrors by pointing to the other’s. All while convincing themselves they’re heroes.

The Federation doesn’t attempt communication or diplomacy. They literally probe its brain for intel while cheering its terror. The troops cheering ‘It’s afraid!’ aren’t the good guys. They’re Verhoeven’s mirror showing us how righteousness becomes the very tyranny it claims to fight.

NPH’s character literally becomes a full SS-uniformed intelligence officer who feeds his best friends into an endless meat grinder. The bugs were defending their home. The Federation manufactured its own eternal enemy. And everyone cheering becomes complicit in forever war.

You’ve sent me a scene about people so drunk on their enemy’s fear that they can’t see they’ve become the monsters.

So either you’re agreeing that celebrating suffering makes us indistinguishable from what we oppose, or you’ve accidentally proven my point by quoting the villains as heroes.

Either way, I couldn’t have picked a better metaphor myself.

I understand finding comfort where you can, but consider: Kirk not being here to “see it through” assumes his death diminishes his impact. The opposite is true. Alive, he was one voice that could be countered, fact-checked, and eventually forgotten. Dead, he becomes eternal; forever young, forever wronged, forever useful to those who will absolutely be here to see it through. The solace is hollow when his absence strengthens everything he stood for.

You’ve identified something crucial that others miss: we don’t defeat dehumanization by becoming better at it. The moment we celebrate death, we’ve accepted their fundamental premise that political disagreement justifies violence.

Your terror is appropriate and I feel it with you. Not just at the violence itself, but at watching people you agree with politically abandon the very principles that distinguish us from what we oppose. The hardest battle isn’t against fascism; it’s maintaining our humanity while fighting inhumanity.

Your “cool story bro” response is exactly the kind of thinking that creates space for demagogues to thrive. When someone offers strategic analysis about why celebrating political violence backfires, and you respond with a thought-terminating cliché, you’re demonstrating the same anti-intellectual reflex that makes populations vulnerable to manipulation.

Think about what made Charlie Kirk successful: he offered simple, emotionally satisfying answers to complex problems. “Your problems aren’t from complicated economic systems, it’s those people over there.” His audience loved him because he never asked them to think harder than a bumper sticker.

And here you are, faced with someone explaining why emotional satisfaction isn’t political victory, why martyrdom empowers the very ideas we need to defeat… and your response is a meme. You’re operating at exactly the level of discourse that Kirk counted on: where snark replaces strategy, where being dismissive feels like being strong, where “cool story bro” seems like a clever response to warnings about tactical disaster.

The movements that win understand complexity. The movements that lose mistake attitude for analysis. When you brush off strategic thinking with internet catchphrases, you’re not fighting against the Charlie Kirks of the world. You’re proving that their reduction of politics to tribal reflexes and emotional reactions was right all along.

The system that produces Charlie Kirks depends on people refusing to think beyond the satisfaction of the dunk, the own, the sick burn. Your dismissal isn’t rebellion; it’s compliance with the exact intellectual laziness that powerful interests count on to keep populations manageable and movements ineffective.