A lot of people are going to get hurt more than before, especially those perceived as enemies of the winners of the culture war.

I have nothing funny to say about this. Humor about this escapes me now.

If you’re talking about me, I don’t have much of anything left in savings. I can’t go anywhere further. Where I am now is all I got and survival is all I can really hope for, at best, and that may just be a matter of how long.

Life goes on, I suppose… for now.

I don’t blame people for attachment to fictional characters; my primary issue is the way that attachment is cynically exploited for additional profits.

I am an Elder Scrolls enjoyer from way back (the very first game from the early 90s!) and the lore’s been built up for decades, hit or miss, elegant and sloppy. Todd Howard’s bumblefucking makes the lore interesting in spite of his executive decisions.

most of the community love for the AD comes entirely from Razum-dar being such a charismatic and memorable character

Yeah, he’s Khajiit CIA with all the propaganda-driven “super cool Adult In The Room that pragmatically murders enemies of the regime” vibes that entails.

The expansion packs gave us some decent characters, including some Altmer that didn’t like the Altmer nazis to the point of making their entire island disappear from them (but now cooperating with them in the present because fucking liberalism again).

I remember textbooks in my formative years bringing that up as a bad thing to show how “fake” the elections were, not tolerating meaningful dissent away from pre-selected leaders.

I know that all three alliances in Elder Scrolls Online (clumsily kitbashed due to map convenience as they already are) are supposed to be “both good and bad” but by the Divines the Aldmeri Dominion is a sus ethnostate. I’ve had struggle sessions with some ESO guilds with some that claimed, I kid you not, that Ayrenn was “the only Adult In The Room” (their words that time, not mine) during the Three Banners War because… she said some snippy snarky MCU talk during the Daedric attack on the summit at Stirk instead of “childish” things the other leaders did like grieve for their dead soldiers.

When I brought up Shadowfen and asked whether Ayrenn was in on a literal genocide attempt against the Argonians or if she was just incompetent or uncaring enough to delegate to genocide-enjoying generals, what I got back was “war is hell” and “well all three alliances did bad things to each other” (none of those other bad things were direct fucking race-specific genocides!).

Because pirates raiding a coastal town with a letter of marque is equally as bad as murdering Argonian children before they hatch on a generational scale and poisoning their spirit-trees to try to prevent future generations.

And all of this is before later games showing the Dominion wanting to retroactively erase non-elves from existence using time fuckery.

Emoji concepts you can hear.

When King Bazinga foams at the mouth about those damned illegal immigrants

I find your experience very relatable. I had a similar issue with Genshin Impact and I’d add how cynically monetized and exploitative the way it played really was, pressuring people with emotional manipulation into paying up for the sake of imaginary waifus with low-key gambling characteristics.

Before that, I had a similar issue where I alienated coworkers that I nonetheless had to work with at my school district because they were all loudly into Game of Thrones and kept trying to pressure me to watch the show and the “best” parts (the parts with the most gory torture scenes and/or sexual violence) over and over again and it made even eating lunch around them a very awkward and offputting situation, maybe for them too.

For almost ten years that was their thing, dogmatically, and they weren’t interested in anything I was watching, reading, or writing. Locally, on my side of this networked community, I even got called a quote, “joyless scold” for expressing my frustration and disgust with that show and its fandom, much to my surprise at least at first. It still boils my blood when someone under pretense of “grown-ass adulthood” accuses me of being “childish” because I enjoy shows that aren’t necessarily targeting horny teenage boys (which don’t really seem that mature to me) as their primary demographic.

Making new friends can be challenging, but I believe that it’s still possible to meet and interact with people that may actually like the authentic you, where you don’t have to bury parts of yourself just to try to fit in. Even one friend like that may be like an oasis in the desert, and worth the search.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Rakata

He’s done self-inflicted errors for years and one of them was firing what PR team he had because he started believing in his own marketing hype.

I must atone now.

Joe Rogan Endorses Trump

How is this even news? The only surprise to me is that the meat-sweating drug sponge took this long to make it official.

He is the very smartest; all the people that kept their jobs around him leave that belief unchallenged and his cult bolsters that belief as well. No one was there to explain to him that what he was showing was a demographic defeat.

Was the covid part of the deep end dive because of the temporary closing of his magic car factories?

That’s how gambling can be both illegal in Japanese prefectures but also pinball parlors are mysteriously across the street from special vendors that will offer cash for the pinball prize items.