At that age, I was trying my hardest to figure out what I’m doing, to be together like the older adults.

I’m 39, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and I’m more together than most of my coworkers, many who are older than me.

We’re all just trying to figure it out, so when you look up and think you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re with everyone. And if you know someone who says they have everything together and don’t have any issues, be wary as they likely have a lot of blind spots to their life.

EVE is one of those games that early on it’s tutorial was essentially ‘Here’s a spaceship, go fuck yourself.’ When they say you can do whatever the hell you want, it’s really not joking. There are people who live in JITA (most populace system) purely doing scams, or running markets. You have people who go into piracy or try to build massive empires.

I knew a guy who his entire playing of the game was making ammo to sell. There was a corp who’s entire thing was doing PVP but with a bend to “Customer service”, as in “Here is your complimentary missile delivery.” and after blowing you up sending you a request to fill a survey on how the customer service was.

So it’s a game that really is what you put in it. The reason I had to quit is it’s a massive time sink. It’s definitely not a game of “Oh, I’ve got about 30 minutes, let me hop on.”

This is EVE we’re talking about. This is honestly one of the more benign if not weird habits.

This is the game where to join a corp you nearly needed a resume so people could make sure you weren’t a spy because months to years infiltration processes happen in this game. Or just rampant piracy.

Exactly this.

In Eve Online, when a capsule was destroyed, a frozen corpse was left behind.

I knew someone who would go around collecting corpses. A battle is going, he’d be out there scooping them up. He’s running a hauler, and this was the day that when your ship got destroyed, every bit of loot went out in individual units, so when a pirate would try to shake him down he’d respond with “If you blow me up, you’ll crash back to desktop.”

That was how he played the game, gathering corpses.

I mean… I’m not going to argue the fall of the US isn’t stupider than the fall of Rome…

But I will argue the fall of the US started back when Reconstruction was stopped. Just took a while for the confederates to win.

I’m a pessimist and past few years have been showing how it can get worse even when I can’t imagine how much worse it can get.

There’s only one guarantee, as long as there are two people on the planet, it CAN get worse.

FWIW this is why I think it’s so important to keep the farmers and union workers on our side.

WHELP

Hell, we imported a few of them from Germany.

I stopped trusting that from 2020. I thought there was hope for people then they turned around and voted again.

It’s a broad statement, but when I saw that about obviously not living in the south. I got out, but guys… it’s bleak down there…

We want change, we have got to get the neo-confederacy out. The biggest church is still the Catholics which they’ve swayed to the Republicans side with single issue of abortion, but the US is mostly protestant and the biggest protestant church is the southern baptist church. The church that literally was formed during the Civil War so they could continue to say slavery wasn’t a sin. And it is the kudzu of religion down there.

Seriously… if you live in an area where a nuanced view is possible, good for you. And I can understand trying to lower the temperature… but if you have people that are in the left side of Christianity… there needs to be some serious outreach work to try to bring some sanity to the evangelicals to the country.

I don’t expect much, but to keep an idea I keep wandering over to the conservative areas.

The Epstein Files are the only thing I’ve seen he’s not been able to shake off from his cult.

Wow, obvious to me some people haven’t been camping before, that or were miserable the entire time. That looks pretty freaking awesome!

I read it somewhere that anyone talking rule of law or the Constitution anymore is starting to sound like sovereign citizens, waving a document around like it’s a magic shield that in reality does absolutely nothing.

I would like to disagree with this thought process, but I can’t.

The millennials were robbed of their chance on the world stage by the boomers.

Gen X over there like “What the fuck!?!” (I’m a millennial, I get the plight.)

I didn’t have “possible nuclear exchange in the Middle East” on my bingo card for this year

Really? That’s been on mine for the past couple years.

I’ll be cantankerous… yes.

I live in a red state. My jobs are me the rare left in the entire crowd. I have to learn how to talk, chat, joke with these people. And last Trump administration I kept talking with them. Things I learned. Since I wasn’t willing to immediately extol the good of Trump, I must be against him (not even talking politics, just me keeping my mouth shut.) That they’re against many of the things on helping people.

But hell, years of working with one crew, I was getting them over, realizing that the wealthy were fucking us over, that the insurance that was fucking everyone over was why we needed better. That many of the “sullied” republicans were against it. Hell I think one thing that got them listening was they said something good about Biden, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and made a snark about Trump and when I was told “I said something good about your guy” I outright tore into them to never say that Biden was “my guy”, I may look at lesser of evils but it wasn’t some fucking football game.

But I saw chances… I saw hope that maybe… maybe they could learn. But the second Trump started running again, it was the same parroted stuff, even from a soybean ventures guy who was watching to see if his prices would ever go back up because he was losing money on it.

So no… I don’t trust them. I think there are some who need to be out there to welcome the people when they’re willing to join sides, yes… but there also needs to be those to remind that these are not friends, and they are very likely to stab us in the back unless they actually show that they’re willing to put the work in to make change.

Andrew Johnson. The guy kneecapped Reconstruction, basically was a friend of the confederates and didn’t finish cutting out a rot that would destroy the nation a century later.

Live in a right wing state…

They’ll still call it the “Liberal media” any time it says ANYTHING against their world view. Fox is “liberal media” around here.

Oh all his people he loves keeps having elections. They just run unopposed, and win no matter what.

He WANTS the elections… it’s a popularity contest, you think Trump would get rid of that?

Actual fair elections on the other hand…