How?

I would like to think that they don’t have that.

Did you not understand that I was talking about immigration? Which is one of the ways we solve that. All of that.

Besides which we’re actually talking about keeping the population stable. A declining population is bad for everyone economically. Luckily population growth naturally slows down in modernized societies, which is why allowing people to immigrate is good for everyone.

The replacement rate is down to 1.56, meaning every couple is having, on average, 1.56 children in the United States. We need two or above to keep the population at the same amount.

There’s actually another way to keep the population up, and it’s great for America economically and culturally, and it makes the world a better place at the same time.

Military coups usually don’t install a democracy.

Which AI? I asked Google AI about a webcomic, and it offered to find the artist for me. I said sure.

First it made something up completely out of thin air. Then it picked a random user who had commented on the comic. It had already identified the OC post of the comic, so all it had to do was check the username, and it couldn’t even do that.

You guys are making me want to try karaoke again, which is not something I’ve ever felt before.

I get that this is how politics works, that a certain amount of disassociation is part of the package, but holy shit how ghoulish is this.

If in the course of my job I inadvertently or intentionally caused the deaths of hundreds of schoolchildren, I’d like to think I wouldn’t then complain about the possibility of losing that job.

Imagine having so little regard for human life. I know there are a disproportionate number of sociopaths in government, but they can’t all be sociopaths, right? Some of them must just be racists, and some of them must be able to delude themselves that much, but still. What the fuck.

I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.

My Minecraft survival world is awesome, but I think in this context “productive” is usually referring to, you know, farming and stuff.

That’s how I feel. I’ve got three small kids and a handicapped wife. Getting myself killed or arrested isn’t an option. When there’s a tipping point, I’ll be on the right side of it. If there’s a way to get to that tipping point faster, I’ll do that too. But sacrificing myself and my family just so I can tell some internet tough guys that political ideals were more important to me than my ethical ideals? That’s dumb.

Personally I think Ass World is overrated. Don’t

Because the rest of us respect people who create things.

Starflight on Sega Genesis.

Starflight was a formative game for me. It’s an open world space exploration game with ~800 planets in over 200 solar systems.

And it pretty much just drops you in the middle of it without any explanation. After a bit you get some news updates from your home base talking about a huge, imminent threat that’s destroying entire solar systems, but they don’t hold your hand, and the galaxy is massive, and it’s impractical to find the points of interest in such a large space.

I watched my dad play it as a kid. We spent hours exploring and gathering resources to upgrade the ship and explore further, but we never really scratched the surface of the main quest.

Then as a teenager I went back and finally read the fucking manual. The back half of it was a journal written by a space captain not unlike myself, which had been sent back in time from several months in the future. It gives tips, like how to communicate with the different alien species and the locations of some rare items. More importantly, it guides the player to the main quest, which is fucking amazing. All of this written like a captain’s log, so it’s a fun story in its own right.

Starflight manual:

Second answer: Tunic. This one is cheating because the game is about nostalgia for manuals, but it’s so well done.

You find these beautifully illustrated manual pages throughout the game, and they become an essential part of figuring out the world. Part of it is written in a made up language, and every page you find gives you more context to translate it. Then there are abilities you have from the moment you start the game, but you won’t realize how to use them until the manual gives you simple button instructions.

Amazing game. If you love old school game manuals, you need to check it out.

They later released a version with a physical manual, but you shouldn’t look at the pages until you find them in the game.

Tunic manual:

In some cases he has used AI to remove watermarks. It changed other details of the comic. Pretty gross.

Someone needs to send this to that guy in the Comic Strips community who keeps cropping out artists’ signatures because he thinks they’re “ads”.

He hates ads so much.

I’m reminded of a story from Oliver Sacks, where one of his patients had some kind of vestibular issue that made him unable to tell that he was always tilted about 20°. He couldn’t correct it alone, because that felt level to him.

The patient had been a carpenter, so his solution was to mount a spirit level to his glasses. He watched it out of the corner of his eye and constantly corrected his posture. Eventually it became second nature to him.

Thumbnail looks like a sandwich.

Wait… did I miss my cat’s quinceañera?? Oh no. It was supposed to be last August, and I totally spaced. Do you think he’ll notice if I just do it on his 16th birthday?

Follow up question: do boy cats get quinceañeras?

Not my logic. You’re the one who wanted to simplify it to body counts. Is adding good deeds also too much nuance for you? All morality is judged on bad deeds alone? Wow that’s even more simplistic.