TechnoUnionTypeBeat

Democrats spent the entire four years of Trump's presidency studying the 25th Amendment and trying to figure out how to get it applied to kick Trump out for being incoherent

Now that their boy has brain matter dripping from his ears, they suddenly forgot about the 25th and oh no, the president has to cooperate and decide to step down himself

At least two admitting to crying watching Biden's performance. So many talking about needing to get drunk or high to the cope with the outcome of the debate

Most of them are starting to realize that Biden is old and not firing on all cylinders, and that the Democrats are in deep, deep trouble with the election if their candidate can barely sound coherent during the debates. One person quietly said that Biden was making Trump look sane by comparison

Then the debates as to who could even replace him began. AOC? Too young. Bernie? Too radical. Clinton no because the GOP hate her. Harris? Maybe that's why she's been out of the spotlight, so she can take over without any scandals. Newsom wasn't even floated but RFK was

That post is too coherent to be the actual BMF

Been thinking the same as I watch everyone around me having aneurysms about the debate

This was your god? This was Dark Brandon the Chosen One? This is the best you got?

Watching some people I know have live meltdowns as they were confronted with the reality of this living corpse as their nominee has been fucking hilarious

Watching them consider if RFK should take over was even funnier

The Democrats are a ratchet for the political spectrum in the US

Biden isn't a leftist but he's as left as the Democrats will get going forward. Like a ratchet, the Overton window slides right and then stops leftward at whatever the current Democratic president is, in this case Biden

The next one won't be Sanders, won't be AOC, won't be some surprise other SocDem candidate. The next one will be either Biden 2.0 or further right, and on and on

At best, Democrats are absolutely toothless. Plenty of red states are passing abortion outlawing and anti-queer laws, and the Democrats haven't done shit. "Oh but the President is limited in what he can do" "oh but the senate, the Democrats will be filibustered" who gives a fuck. They haven't even raised their heads from their desks, let alone done any attempt to fight for these rights. All they're doing is preventing the laws from getting worse at a federal level, if that, and that'll change immediately on the next election regardless of who wins

There is no "going from there". Voting for a candidate is inplicit support of everything the candidate does. You cannot vote for a candidate and then pick and choose your support, they don't give a fuck, all they care about is that they won on their platform. Biden will not move any left from his position, Democrats literally never have been pushed left. Any time there's left pressure, they call it loony leftist behaviour and go run to the Republicans for some bipartisan crackdowns

A lesser evil is still an evil, especially when the lesser evil really isn't that much lesser

Shadowrun 5 is the one I know best and unfortunately a lot of that's changed

Specifically, Essence is now tied to your magic ability and maximum social limit. The maximum Magic stat you can have is tied directly to your Essence, and the calculation for it and the social limit round down to the nearest full number, not caring about the decimal

So even if you were to get say, cybereyes to offset a character's blindness or poor vision, which I believe is 0.50 essence cost, you go from your 6.00 maximum to 5.50, but every calculation takes it as going to 5.00. One point isn't a crippling loss for a build but starting from <5 and you'll start to have trouble doing anything magic or social

Absolutely fantastic pod, devoured the entire back catalogue recently. Their Andor episodes rocked

I think the problem is that Pondsmith and others inspired by him still use the word "humanity" for it

In Cyberpunk RED, only implants that take you above and beyond what a human can do begin to affect your "humanity" score. Replacing a limb or getting cybereyes to allow someone blind to see doesn't make anyone less human anymore in terms of game mechanics - you don't get hit with a "humanity" penalty for it. If you start loading up on cyberware that begin to push you into the realm of (often violent) superhuman - implanted weapons, a reflex booster that basically makes everyone move in slow motion - that's when the stat begins to be affected, and even then it's meant to represent an alienation from others rather than becoming ontologically less human

It's a sight better than Shadowrun where even an implant that lets you taste food better will materially make you impure and less able to tap into the purity of magic, but it is still problematic. I think there's definitely a story that can be told in cyberpunk about being able to pay to become literally superhuman, and how that would inevitably cause class divide to be a literal physiological divide - imagine a world where every rich kid is literally smarter and faster and stronger than anyone else can ever hope to be unless they also paid up. The problem is most cyberpunk writers are lib as fuck and can't even begin to think about class properly, so instead of a discussion about alienation and paying to become superhuman, we get this garbage about becoming subhuman for modifying The Divine Form

You're absolutely right. I wouldn't mind seeing it explored in fiction and fantasy in particular, which seems to me like the perfect genre to explore those dynamics. The only other story I can think that does it also features a sort of throuple, though the two women have a more sisterly relationship while both are in a romantic relationship only with the male (the Honorverse series)

I hope with queerness and non-heteronormativity becoming more "mainstream" (well, talked about more openly outside of niche spaces) that we'll start to see more of an exploration of what being poly means

Our intrepid hero has joined the plucky rebellion! The rebels are a ragtag group of the downtrodden and the oppressed, fighting against the tyranny of the current leadership (but don't you dare give them any actual political ideology as a basis, they need to be generally "Rebels"). They don't seem to have concrete plans, but they talk a lot about change and fighting for the people

Uh oh! Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader's soldiers. They're shocked! How could they do this? Don't they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would've done the same to them

Oh no! Our intrepid hero was there for the deposing of the tyrant. The tyrant was executed by the rebel leader and assumes control, then immediately turns into the McCarthyist nightmare of Stalin. Now our hero has to save the kingdom from the rebels, who have turned evil by their taste of power!

Basically fucking hate how rebellion and rebels are portrayed in media. It's almost like a psy op how often rebellions are thinly veiled anticommunist propaganda, and how rebels are often portrayed as being as bad or worse as the current tyrant, they just hide it better

Just off the dome I can think of the Avatar series multiple times, Bioshock Infinite, and the Hunger Games series but I know it's basically ubiquitous