Dr. M. Harris-Peyton

Jesus Chris just get an Instant Pot and learn to chop some goddamn vegetables

What I find so strange is that effective writing - which is really just the art of clearly explaining an idea or a sequence of ideas - is such an obviously essential skill which we as a society nevertheless have systematically downgraded in educational importance.

Their ideas are unpopular but they're everywhere, creating a sense of normalizing pressure. You target their injection channels and they're reduced to a bunch of screeching corncobs. If you counter their propaganda with anything equally attractive, it folds and even sympathetic elites can't save it.

If you were, say, a savvy liberal advocate, you could use that vulnerability to effectively break the movement. It halfway happened in 2020 with deplatforming and the creation of RW social media islands, and only really recovered when Elon bought twitter.

A nearly untapped vulnerability of the RW media ecosystem is that it depends on artificially injecting their ideas into otherwise mainstream concerns. This is why the culture war stuff works, though--you can't talk about Star Wars or or school sports without giving oxygen to those weirdoes.

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across.

If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers.

If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Ah I see we're at the "lots of people confusing Tourette's with having intrusive thoughts" part of the discourse.

Right up there with "ADHD is just Not Paying Attention Sometimes" and "Depression is when you're sad" in the pantheon of Missing the Entire Point.

"We need to go back to real conservatism!"

Listen, I get that nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but if you roll back American Conservatism to any arbitrary past state, remove the antidemocratic, racist, and authoritarian content, you don't have a lot left over.

Fascism is metastasized conservatism.

today's liberal internationalist take is that you can't be an american liberal internationalist if you don't have a real plan to stop this fuckery from happening again

Okay so apparently we've all been playing Menace this week, huh?

MENACE commentary is basically fifty percent "this specific game mechanic is imbalanced by 10%" and "I LOVE THIS FUCKING DATING SIM OMGGG" and if you have two thumbs and love this you are this girl 👍👍

I actually seem to remember this being a thing on the International Space Station, too--I think Cmdr. Hadfield talked about it.

Tortillas produce fewer crumbs.

The term for this historical model is translatio imperii, and it's really dumb.

My most crank history take is that the United States is actually "what if the Khanate was a democracy?" and not "what if Athens but with planes?"

I have a Unity license because I developed one (1) mod for Humankind like three years ago and every email I've gotten from Unity since then feels like it's from a parallel universe run by cartoon villains.

Oh hey, just a note: anyone who compares writing genre fiction to writing code has clearly never written either.

Signed,
--A Weirdo Who Can Do Both

FDRbros…we’re so back

I like that bluesky is just curated enough that someone can say "I experience random intrusive thoughts about the ME3 ending which are occasionally socially visible" and it's a very relatable example.

Your friend just did the "no wheelchairs in Dungeons an Dragons" discourse again but in a new genre and it's like...

are we talkin' diegetic/exegetic narrative explanations for the chair or is the friend just weird about representation in media?

Anyone whose response is "ellie is deranged about this" should work in education for five minutes.

There are a lot of parents out there who are, generously, not good at being a parent--negligent, intermittently abusive, and/or worse--and the results are extremely obvious.

all the kinds of modern Indie Games:

-"roguelike" (slot machine)
-feelings
-unlock/tech tree simulator
-"god we hope northernlion plays this"
-crunchy first person shooter
-morrowind built by a single lunatic

The two ways to interpret this:

1. He drywalled it in and can only get it by punching through the wall in an urgent self-defense situation because of "the element of surprise" or whatever.

2. He stabbed it into the wall while on Special K and can't get it out, so it's A Strategy now.

My primary problem with a lot of more serious literary fiction isn’t that it isn’t well written or compelling it’s just that a lot of it is about “I’m articulate and depressed” and I kind of want like, something to happen, I guess. I suppose I’m something of a philistine in that way.

Ultimately, it is Mr. Fred McFeely Rogers who won the culture war and we are all better for it.

Also if a Mongolian folk metal band performed the halftime show I think the football would get played better.

Both of that lady's thought experiment options would rock, actually.

Witches may need to reconfigure their magic system to use totemic spell objects to circumvent an arbitrarily-enforced Etsy rule about having to sell physical goods.

I feel like, in writing that sentence, I might be the first person to ever put those words in that order.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

So, this post made me realize why I had a 2-for-1 lil smokies coupon at the store this week.

I've been so underwater with work that I legitimately did not make the connection.

"Cooking is a bourgeois affectation!"

(Proceeds to pay indentured laborers to drive a single burrito in a Toyota Corolla through a blizzard to their house.)

This has been my standby bread recipe for about a decade and I can confirm, it absolutely makes you reconsider buying bread ever again.