This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker:Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.
(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?
My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.
This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.
I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain, none enough for a whole post, so let’s just toss all three of them together. Why not, right?
FIRST: That game up there? Was crafted deep in the bowels of Hell, on the lower foothills of Mount Sonofabitch. I just beat the game’s third major boss tonight, after, no shit, probably five or six hours of attempts and farming over the last few days. The recommended level for his area? Seventeen. My level when I finally took him down about half an hour ago? Forty-five. And the next area promptly beat the shit out of me again.
SECOND: You may have heard the godawful fucking story about the people Trump effectively sold as slaves to El Salvador, including a number of them who were accused of no crime at all other than being brown. Now, before I ask this, I want to be crystal fucking clear that this is horrible and the people responsible should rot in Hell. Okay? We’ve got that? Everybody understand? Good. Because while I’m having some trouble untangling the court cases, what with not being a lawyer and all, it looks like a judge ordered the government to produce one of the men involved by midnight tonight? And there may or may not be a temporary stay on that order, or maybe SCOTUS just overturned it, I dunno, it looks like things changed while I was playing video games. But here’s my question: Does the court, any court, have the ability to order other entities to do literally impossible things? Because part of the whole point of selling these men to El Salvador was to put them beyond the reach of US courts. Short of invasion, which Trump obviously isn’t going to do, we don’t really have a way to compel El Salvador to return any of these people, and certainly not to do so in the next three hours and eighteen minutes. The judge has no jurisdiction. Again, yes, I recognize that there’s something horrible about taking the situation these human beings are in and reducing it to a legal hypothetical, which is part of why I’m doing it on my blog and not, say, BlueSky– but does anyone actually have any authority to compel this to happen right now? The courts can order the government to do shit all they want. What happens if they just … can’t?
THIRD: I don’t remember the goddamn third thing. Fuck. I’ve had this post in the back of my head all day and now that it’s time to write it Thing Three is gone.
…
Right, shit, the economy went to hell today too. So I, personally, with very modest investments in, until yesterday, the low (very low) five figures, have lost about a thousand bucks in the last few days. I do not expect things to get better anytime soon, for obvious reasons. I have been contributing a couple hundred a month to an account managed through MetLife that I deliberately rarely look at, and $100 a week to an Acorns account that I monitor perhaps more carefully than I ought to. Yesterday I reset a bunch of stuff on Acorns so that now that $100 a week goes directly to my savings account and is not invested in anything. My understanding of how this works is even if the value of individual shares of a given stock are falling, buying more of them means a faster theoretical recovery later on, since I’ll own more stock, assuming that the companies I’m investing in don’t go under, in which case that money is just gone. But if I think it might be years before the market recovers– and I do– isn’t there more value in socking that money away into a savings account, where it’s not going to just vanish? Or at least is much less likely? The interest rate is going to be a lot lower but at least it’ll be positive.
Help me out if you know anything about investments. I’m sure there are better ideas than the binary I’ve set up here, but if you’re going to give advice at least tell me which of those two is a better idea right now before telling me about your third thing, okay? Thanks.
I am fully fucking aware that, lead times being what they are on comic books, this was definitely written, if perhaps not completely drawn, before the Current Unpleasantness actually began. But once we realized we were going to publish it during the Current Unpleasantness, and that it scans as really fucking unsubtle given the Current Unpleasantness, maybe we reconsider the entire fucking thing? Because I don’t need this shit in my life at all, much less in a medium that’s supposed to be fucking escapism:
And fuck me dead if this very same Fantastic Four comic book doesn’t use vampires as a persecuted minority that Doom is scapegoating later on in the damn issue. Using Doom as a stand-in for the shitgibbon is one thing. Using vampires as a stand-in for trans people is deeply fucked up.
I recognize that there is literally no way that Marvel is gonna reconsider or reschedule any of this, but I wanted to register my protest anyway.
The election is in … nine days? I suppose it depends on how you count, and I think the fact that Nuremberg II is happening in New York City right now is probably a reason to start severely restricting my internet intake for a while. I will probably fail, because I always fail when I try to do shit like this, but … Jesus, enough. He’s a fucking Nazi, people. Republicans are Nazis. Point blank. No exceptions. If you are a Republican or you are willing to vote for them, you are a Nazi. Yes, that means “nice people,” yes, that means your neighbors, yes, that means your family members.
Donald Trump is a Nazi. If you don’t want to be called a Nazi, you need to vote for Kamala Harris. I will not be debating this topic.
I did get a sticker, but I got Indiana’s boring one, not any of these cool stickers.
I always try to vote early, but I don’t recall ever voting on the very first day I was legally able to before. This year, though? I wanted that shit over with, and I drove from work directly to Mishawaka’s county services building, arriving about 20 minutes before the doors closed. The line for early voting was out the door, and it took about an hour to get my vote cast.
For the most part, my votes will not surprise you.
These six fine ladies, along with two male ticket members:
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice-President Jennifer McCormickand Terry Goodlin for Governor and Lieutenant Governor Valerie McCray for Senate Lori Camp for US House Destiny Wells for Indiana Attorney General Maureen Bauer for State House
(They’re up there as a gallery, so it’s possible the order of the pictures doesn’t match the order of the names.)
I voted for the Democrat in all of the local races with one exception: I did not vote for Dave Niezgodski for State Senate, because Dave Niezgodski is a sex pest and I don’t vote for sex pests. I thought briefly about voting for his opponent, but without knowing anything about him, I decided to refrain; honestly, this will be a small enough turnout contest that I feel like simply withholding my vote is enough. I don’t need to actively vote for the other side.
I got to vote against the loathsome Derek “I have a penis” Dieter again, which always pleases me, because fuck that guy.
Purely voting strategically, I voted to retain all of the judges up for vote. I don’t really like voting for judges, to be honest; I rarely know who any of them are and they don’t campaign, and for some reason the Indiana bar’s survey isn’t out yet despite their website promising it’ll be ready by September 30th. I voted to retain because all of them were named by Mitch Daniels or Eric Holcomb, and if they were drummed out of office Mike Braun will likely be picking their replacements, and Mike Braun is a fucking lunatic. Whoever he picks will not be an improvement, so absent any information of use for any of them, retention it is.
The only thing left is the school board, and … our school board candidates are not exactly covering themselves in glory this go-round. My specific candidate for my district isn’t up this year, so I’m just voting at-large, and … ick.
I ended up voting for Jeannette McCullough and George Jones. I know both of them and I am not especially fond of one of them– in fact, I have suggested voting against one of them in the past– but the other choices are worse. In particular, if you’re local enough that this matters to you, I specifically do not endorse Gabrel Kempf and I really really really do not endorse Marcus Ellison. Please do not vote for Marcus Ellison. I have known him for a very long time and I do not want him on the school board.
Related:
Getting from work to the early voting center I used involved about ten miles of driving on a road that was sporting a surprising number of political signs. They’re really not all that common yet, although I’m sure that will change, probably by this weekend. And after a while something struck me about all those signs: first, that there were quite a lot of Harris-Walz signs, more than I really expected, and that most of the lawns with Harris-Walz signs also had other signs for local or state offices.
The interesting thing was the Republican signs. For the most part– and I may take this route again on my way home on Thursday to take a closer look and maybe do some counting– it seemed like lawns that had Trump signs only had Trump signs, and even more curiously, lawns with signs for any other Republican candidate often did not have Trump signs. There would either be a Trump sign by itself or a dozen local and state candidates and no Trump sign.
At the moment, I’m presenting this only as an interesting anecdote and I am not drawing any conclusions. I just want it noted for the record. Feel free to speculate on your own, if you like.
Does it seem to anyone else that everything, and by everything I mean everyfuckingthing, has gotten significantly more evil and stupid recently? Like, just in the last couple of weeks? I probably just need to stay off the fucking Internet for, I dunno, the rest of my Goddamned life, but between JD Vance literally spreading a blood libel against his own fucking constituents, admitting that he’s lying about it but that it doesn’t matter, various developments in AI technology including an app that lets you have your own completely fake social media network, and whatever the merry fuck is going on with the North Carolina governor’s race right now, I just want to tap out of everything for a couple of weeks. I do not want any further news, thank you, and I would like consumer technology to simply stop.
Just saw a clip of the previous guy talking about how the audience was so completely behind him at the last debate. In public, he said this. There was no audience at the debate. No one pushed back on the claim. It’s just another fucking lie to toss on the pile; truth doesn’t Goddamned matter anymore, even the shit that we literally just saw happen a couple of weeks ago with our own damned eyes.
(I refuse to know what’s going on with Puff Daddy. Put him under the jail, or free Puff Daddy, whichever is more appropriate. Don’t tell me. Also, if Laura Loomer is pregnant, I’m going to kill the person responsible for me finding out about it.)
Brace yourself, by the way; Indiana is probably about to elect someone even dumber and crazier than Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor. I’m so, so excited for it. We haven’t been obviously the worst in the country at anything for a while.
I’d like to point out that in my first post about the VeepstakesI said in the very first sentence that Kamala was going to choose someone who wasn’t on the list. And I couldn’t be happier with the choice of Tim Walz as Vice-President.
I think, in all honesty, the move with this guy is that after the joint barnstorming tour this week they should put him on a repeating schedule through the Midwest. Go Wisconsin-Indiana-Michigan-Ohio-Pennsylvania-Kentucky, then a day at home to recuperate, then do it again. I really and truly believe we can win all six states, and I’m not kidding.
(At this point I realize this post is going to be a rehash of a bunch of recent Bluesky posts I’ve made, so my apologies if you follow me there. Also, go follow me there.)
So, yeah, I was talking about this earlier on Bluesky, but I kind of want to record it here as something a bit more permanent. The big thing about the VP selection is it’s not supposed to matter, right? There’s always talk– I participated in it– about the pick bringing his home state, if that’s on the table, and beyond that the VP pick is basically just not supposed to fuck up. I was thinking about this this morning, and realized something: in every presidential election save one since I have been a relatively conscious human being, the winning ticket has featured 1) the VP candidate who won the VP debate, and 2) the VP candidate who, in general, was the more competent and energetic choice.
“Prove it,” you say? Sure, I love writing these.
1984: George H.W. Bush vs. Geraldine Ferraro. Bush Sr., if I don’t count Ford, who was only President during the first few months of my life, is easily the most competent and least evil Republican president of my lifetime, and he was enormously qualified to be president, especially in comparison to the loathsome, corrupt Ferraro. I will not pretend to remember the debate or even if there was one, but Reagan/Bush mopped the floor with Mondale/Ferraro, winning all but Minnesota, and a heavy storm in Minneapolis would have meant they won Minnesota too.
1988: This is the one exception to the pattern. If you remember only one thing about the VP debate in 1988, it’s Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle that Jack Kennedy was a friend of his and Quayle was no Jack Kennedy. Bentsen was also massively more qualified for the job– for any job, really– than Quayle was.
1992: My favorite VP debate of all time, featuring Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Admiral James T. Stockdale, an utter nut who turned off his hearing aid and wandered around aimlessly in the back of the stage for part of the debate. Clinton/Gore won the election, obviously.
1996: Al Gore and Jack Kemp. Four thousand people died of boredom during the debate. You don’t remember a thing about it. You don’t remember Jack Kemp. Jack Kemp doesn’t remember Jack Kemp. Bobdole remembers, though. Bobdole never forgets. Clinton/Gore reelected.
2000: Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman face off in the Politeness Bowl, where Lieberman, a supposed Democrat, couldn’t find a single thing that the most coldly evil man ever to hold federal office said that was worth even mildly disagreeing with. Cheney could have suggested feeding Lieberman’s children to lions and he would have pursed his lips, shrugged, and said that Cheney had a good point. Cheney/Bush won, and that’s not a typo.
2004: Cheney sacrifices John Edwards and his weird tongue tic to Shub-Niggurath and eats his still-beating heart raw on live television.
2008: Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin, who most of America was already heartily sick of before the debate; it is indisputable that picking Palin was the number one factor in keeping John McCain out of the White House. (Just noticed: I flipped this and 2012 on Bluesky. Oops!)
2012: Biden literally ends Paul Ryan’s entire political career, spending the entire debate laughing in his face at everything he has to say.
2016: I was about to say “I take second to no one in my loathing of Mike Pence,” but I didn’t try to hang him on the Capitol stairs, so maybe I do take second to at least a few people. Either way, he served the purpose of shoring up the evangelicals for Trump. Quick, without looking it up: who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate?
You looked it up, you lying bastard.
At any rate, Tim Kaine is such a nothing-person that still, fully ten hours after writing this as a series of tweets this morning, I cannot recall what the fuck he looks like, or whether he’s still alive. I’m not convinced that he cost Clinton the election, especially with Palin as a recent exemplar of the breed, but it certainly wasn’t a choice that helped at all.
2020:
Also, remember the fly?
2024: I’m already ordering popcorn. I don’t even really know if this debate is going to happen, but I want to be prepared. Walz is going to demolish JD Vance. It’s going to be fucking glorious.
If you had asked me more than four or five days ago, I would have told you that, at least for me personally, Bluesky (follow me!) was beginning to approach the levels of usefulness of pre-Nazi Twitter, but had yet to even come close to pre-Nazi Twitter in its ability to be funny.
This JD Vance couch-fucking shit has absolutely put that concern to bed. It’s been going on for days, and it’s still funny. It may literally never stop being funny.
This might not be true, but I’m pretty sure it is: every single time in the history of the human race someone has asked “But where’s the ______ for white men?” that person has been a racist asshole. This fact made me at least a little nervous about trying to find out if there was, in fact, a White Men for Kamala Harris group. Why was I wondering so specifically? Well, in the last few days we’ve seen a number of other identity-based groups getting off the ground, and White Women for Kamala Harris broke Zoom, and damn it, I wanna play too! And frankly, given that white men are the other guy’s biggest demographic, I think it’s probably perfectly reasonable to suggest that those of us of that persuasion who are very much not in favor of the fascist felon and his merry band of dipshits should be loud and proud of it.
I’m happy to say that White Dudes for Harris is a thing, and our Zoom call is Monday at 8:00 EST, and Pete Buttigieg is gonna be there, and if you’re also a white dude you can sign up for it here. And you should. We’ve got some numbers to live up to, dammit.
The more I hear about Josh Shapiro the less I like him, and Bloomberg is claiming that the Veepstakes is down to him, Mark Kelly, and Tim Walz. Of those three, I am 100%, unreservedly, whole-chestedly, full-throatedly on Team Walz. Let’s do this right, damn it.
You have at least one book review coming and possibly two, but just in case I don’t get to one or either of them: R.J. Barker’s Tide Child trilogy is really damn good, and unless it utterly fails to stick the ending– I’m about 100 pages out– Rachel Caine’s The Hunter is an absolute return to form on her part and I’m happy as hell to see it.
Also, despite previous reservations, I may actually be seeing Deadpool and Wolverine in theaters tomorrow, marking my first in-theater Marvel movie since 2019. That will almost certainly receive a review if I manage to actually get out to see it.
