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  While I agree with cutting down on “Rtard” as a flippant insult, I haven’t even seen significant uptick on that preference in the left. It’s more likely to me it was seen once, and demonized by the right because it’s easier to hate on some phantom censorship-adjacent concept than it is to have a genuine opinion on something. The trend of hallucinatory demonization, like “Trans kids are terrorists” or “There’s rampant voter fraud from immigrants” or “You can’t say Christmas anymore” certainly tr...

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  Okay, so here’s a random joke: A gas station owner asks me whether I’d like leaded or unleaded, and instead of either, I call him a “N%%%ER”, because he’s black, and tell him he should go back to Africa. And say I claim it’s funny, because it’s unexpected and extreme! But also just a joke to be edgy - I’m not “actually racist”! Would you agree, and find that to be dark humor, or just offensive? Though exaggerated, that’s pretty much what many people deal with in terms of conservative “humor”. A...

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  I will say, we have seen hopeful amounts of change even in Democratic *primaries*. Voter suppression has happened in the partisan election, and candidates have been rejected from primaries, but if this continues across the country (slower than we'd like) it's going to signal to Democrats their same old "I'm the only opposition to Trump you've got!" story isn't working. But in terms of earning back trust: Yeah, I don't ever really see a path to that. That's...

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  While I think some people have felt that there are existing terms that fit more broadly, my vote for a brand new term to address it would be "pulling for false victims". I added the word "false", because in some contexts pulling for more victims using full, detailed context is a perfectly legitimate strategy to fight a larger power. (For instance, one woman who's been harassed by an employer could talk to other women in the workplace about it, and find that there's a...

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  I picked up People of Note, a rhythm JRPG, in part to be the first to deliver ProtonDB reports. Wasn’t expecting a musical number at the beginning of the game, but does prep me for what I’m in for.

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  I have a particular term for certain kinds of edginess I just call “Shadow the Hedgehog writing”, where it’s more likely to come from a teenager trying to seem grown up/cool than an actual adult. Plenty of anime/VNs have fallen in this category, giving early content warnings that the content will be dark; and then just having non sequitor turnouts like “And then the heroine stepped in a trap that severed her spine. She screamed for hours, praying for help, but none came.” There’s a particular...

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  I’ll admit that I’m staggered by how a lot of writers absorb hundreds of little details of how trained soldiers/detectives will use little tricks to survive, observe a room, or follow patterns of criminals. Once long back, those little things like leaving a bit of pencil graphite in a door hinge to denote intruders (or, in Better Call Saul’s case, placing a carbon sheet under the doormat) were extremely rare to hear about. I don’t even know who you’d ask without ending up on a list.

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  One of the last things I used to respect about Microsoft was when they kept up the development of their own rendering engine, even as Chrome ran away with its popularity. IE6 was a monster, but for a time MS was doing a good job as an underdog by pushing standards compliance. Even if it wasn't as nice as Firefox, it was important to have more horses in the game of competing browsers rather than creating a monoculture around Chrome. Needless to say, the Edge appearing in this contest is noth...

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  I mean…have you seen the size of cars then and now? Or the *number* of cars then vs now?

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  The term “faith” made a lot more sense to me once I thought of believing in the goodness of other people like a faith. You have no logic saying it’s there, even get disproved often. But you keep believing in it in spite of the absence of evidence.

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  (Yes, I get the joke) What the hell causes people to believe there’s a large political faction that wants people in media to be unattractive? At worst, some people just get taken out of a fantasy world if the women are wearing straight bikinis for no reason, but there’s many ways to make them look sexy without attire being totally impractical.

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  I remember that day of the “general strike” where the simple idea was to not spend any money on big corps. I got confused, because to me, that’s a 365-day-a-year lifestyle thing for me. Maybe I’m lucky that I don’t have lifestyle needs like pet food, baby supplies, etc, and markets have been cornered there. But there’s plenty of forms of entertainment and leisure without giving it to Disney or Amazon and the like.

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  The silliest ones I’ve seen now are ads for mobile games that put censor stickers over the “parts” of fully clothed women. (Yes, even in the game, they’re fully clothed)

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  If you only print occasionally, do it at the library. Far better to rely on community printers that are running often to keep the ink warm.