Half Life 4: The Search for Half Life 3

If this is actually Half Life 3… it kinda makes sense they waited for all the hype to die down, for it to fall out of meme culture, before releasing it. Even five years ago, the expectations for this game were astronomical. There was absolutely no way a game made by mere mortals could ever live up to that kind of hype. Now, people have chilled to the point they can actually appreciate Half Life 3 on its own merits.

Which is a long-winded way to say my bet is Half Life 3’s been done for at least 5 years now. Valve’s just waiting on the right moment to pull the trigger.

ACA was a bunch of half-assed bullshit.

Tell me you weren’t paying attention to US politics in 2008-2010 (which were the two fucking years of nonstop backbreaking fucking effort it got the ACA to be passed) without telling me you weren’t paying attention.

Yeah, assuming her feet don’t smell I’d have no issue with her cutting her nails on the train-- if she was catching them with a plastic tray, baggie or even a napkin so they don’t fall on the seat someone else is about to sit down on. But she’s not doing that, which is gross and disrespectful to your fellow passengers, IMO.

I cannot begin to tell you how fucking vindicated my twelve year old, Warrior Cats obsessed, Ashfur-hating self is after reading this write up, lol. The first internet argument I ever had was over this incel kitty. Got my first ever ban, from the Official Warrior Cats Forums^TM, over him, too. I never understood how anyone could find him sympathetic, let alone hot (yes, tween girls unironically found a cat hot, and no, I’m pretty sure most of them weren’t furries). Over fifteen years later, and… yeah I still don’t get it, lol.

Also, for anyone who’s wondering WTF a kid’s series about cats is doing having such a dark plot line: this is pretty much par the course for Warriors. I’ve heard it described as “Game of Thrones for tween girls”, which is pretty bang-on. War crimes, child murder, torture, graphic depicitions of childbirth (err, kittenbirth) and gruesome battle wounds, adult themes like infidelity and emotional abuse discussed at length, and that’s just the stuff I remember from the first arc off the top of my head, fifteen years later!

Thankfully, enough parties have pledged not to coalition with the far right that it looks like they’ll be boxed out of power. Most likely outcome seems to be Sanchez’s center-left party allying with further-left parties and regional / secessionist parties to form a minority government.

Things could still fuck up during coalition negotiations, but for now I’m cautiously optimistic. Probably the best possible outcome, given the circumstances.

(Also the far right party lost half its seats in Parliament, lmaoooooooo)

Yep, the Republican base has proven they’ll vote for literally anyone with an ® next to their name no matter how many felonies they commit. And because they’re fanatics, they turn out to vote every time, no matter what.

The only way we get out of this nightmare is to hold the line, keep voting every cycle to keep the mainiacs out of power until the party inevitably implodes due to demographic shifts. Hopefully it’ll happen soon, worrying about this shit is exhausting. But until then, we can’t afford to be complacent.

Nah, it’s what happens when you read them as instruction manuals.

February 24, 2014. The residents of Crimea wake up to find soldiers all over their peninsula. They wear no insignia, refuse to answer any questions about who they are or what they want. But they speak with Russian accents. The Ukrainian military, leaderless, stripped to the bone by Yanukovych’s corruption, can’t do anything but watch.

Within a few weeks, “referendums” are held under the watchful eye of these mysterious men with machine guns. Crimea “votes” to join the Russian federation with 98%+ of the vote.

Four months after that, as Ukraine is gearing up to hold presidential elections to replace Yanukovych, pro-Russian “separatists” suddenly pop up in most Eastern and Southern Ukrainian oblasts, seizing control of government buildings and demanding their regions be annexed by Russia. And I’m sure the fact that these “Ukrainian separatists” all had Russian accents, and many just happened to look exactly like known FSB officers who’d “mysteriously” quit just a few days before was a total coincidence, too!

Fortunately, they’re prevented from seizing power in most oblasts. Unfortunately, that’s when Russian “volunteers” “on vacation” roll over the border in the Donbass with tanks they “bought at military surplus stores”. (Seriously, the Russian government actually tried to claim that in its propaganda!) Again, the Ukrainian army is such a disorganized mess there’s nothing it can do.

Fortunately, this time people know what’s going on, so volunteer militias form to push back the invaders. (As you might expect, there was precisely zero oversight or vetting of these militias for the first few years, so some did have some pretty extremist beliefs-- this was the Azov Battalion’s origin story, for example. Ukraine’s since integrated most into the real army and forced them to at least make a show of abandoning their extremist beliefs; how effective this has been, someone with more knowledge of the situation than me will have to say.)

After months of fighting, the conflict settles into relatively frozen lines. At this point, the EU tries to mediate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, called the Minsk Agreement. The deal is never actually fully implemented, mainly because Russia refused to hold up its side of the bargain. But it does cool the war down to a frozen conflict. Between 2015 and 2021, only a few dozen troops die per year, standing guard on unchanging frontlines.

Ukrainian society obviously doesn’t forget or forgive any of this. But gradually, the war drops in importance in people’s minds. People’s minds turn towards more immediate concerns, like combating corruption, fighting poverty, and joining the EU (which is seen by most Ukrainians as necessary to accomplish the first two goals).

However, in the background, the country is rebuilding its gutted armed forces. In hopes of being good enough to join NATO, sure. But also, you know. Just in case.

And then in February 2022, “just in case” became reality.

This is the last straw for a ton of people, who are sick of the corruption, the chaos, the government that runs roughshod over their rights and lives while leaving them to rot in poverty. The protests swell in size. The riot police step up the violence against them, but that only makes people madder, and more determined to take to the streets.

(This is also at least partly because opposition also sees this as their big political chance and publicizes the hell out of the protests, encouraging more people to join in. The US Embassy also makes no secret about being on the protestor’s side, too, with the then-US Ambassador even going out to the Maidan to give cookies to the protestors one day. This is where a lot of the conspiracy theories about “US backed coup!!!11!111!11111!!!” come from, but like, my brother in Christ, you cannot psy-op hundreds of thousands of people into massive street demonstrations for months on end unless they’re willing and fucking eager to play along.)

Then, on February 20th, 2014, after two months of escalating protests, the riot police open fire with live ammunition. 100 people are killed. And the protestors still refuse to give in! In fact, they begin threatening civil war if Yanukovych doesn’t resign, immediately.

February 23, 2014. Yanukovych vanishes, without a trace. (A few days later, he’ll pop up in Russia, where he’s been living ever since.) The protestors won! Sure, Ukraine is left leaderless-- there’s no Constitutional provision handling what to do if the president just up and vanishes without resigning-- but it’s not like anything’s likely to go wrong in the next few days while they sort things out. Right?

I’ll try to summarize, then. WARNING: Long post incoming, scroll to bottom for tl:dr!

In 2004, this pro-Russian politician called Viktor Yanukovych was accused of rigging that year’s presidential elections. There were massive street demonstrations calling for new elections, which got named the “Orange Revolution” because the protestors wore orange, the color of the opposition. Eventually, Yanukovych relented and elections were re-run with international observers to make sure they were fair, and sure enough, the opposition won.

Jump forward five years. The opposition’s had five years to blow through all their goodwill and make plenty of mistakes on their own. Yanukovych comes back onto the scene. But instead of rigging the election, this time he gets help from an American Republican operative called Paul Manafort, who helps him pull all the same culture-war ratfucking bullshit we’re used to in the States on Ukraine. It depressingly works, Yanukovych wins the election fair and square.

Jump forward four more years (it’s November 2013 now). During that time, Yanukovych has robbed Ukraine blind, systematically hacked away at what few democratic protections it had, and stoked culture war resentment to keep people at each other’s throats and away from his. People are getting increasingly sick of his BS.

The final straw comes when Yanukovych is supposed to sign a major trade agreement with the EU, one which would let Ukrainians live and work freely there. Ukraine is desperately poor, the EU is rich and has good paying jobs, this is a deal which could dramatically change people’s lives for the better. And then at the last second, Yanukovych refuses to sign the deal, and instead signs one with Russia.

Pro-Western Ukrainians took to the streets to protest. Initially, these protests were pretty small, and seemed likely to fizzle out by the end of the weekend. And then, Yanukovych makes the incredibly smart decision to sic his personal riot police on the protestors in Kyiv’s Maidan square.

So back in the day, r/IAmA used to actually get really cool people to come do interviews on a pretty regular basis: celebrities, authors, activists, politicians, prominent scientists. They even got President Obama to do an AMA, while he was sitting US president! (For a long time, it was the most upvoted thread in reddit history.)

And I don’t just mean once or twice a year, these interviews were happening multiple times a month. Users could ask whatever they wanted, no matter how off the wall, blunt, or challenging, and the interviewees would usually answer almost all of the top questions.

It was all thanks to Victoria. She was the reddit employee in charge of reaching out to celebrities to do AMAs, and then helping them get set up and navigating reddit for them when the time came. It was one of the coolest features of reddit, and it was all thanks to her.

So naturally, of course, they fired Victoria on the flimsiest of excuses.

Why? We’re still not 100% sure-- reddit never officially explained. But the leading theory is that reddit wanted to change the way IAmAs were run to limit users’ ability to ask hard questions. Ever hear about the Woody Harrelson IAmA disaster (“Can we please focus on Rampart, people?”)? Maybe reddit’s plan was to limit the kinds of questions users could ask, to reduce the odds of PR disasters like that. Who knows.

Whatever their plan was, though, it failed. Killing the thing that made IAmAs so cool compared to normal interviews also completely killed users’ interests in them. And without Victoria to reach out to celebrities and help them with the IAmA process any more, the rate at which celebs would show up on site to do AmAs tanked.

Nowadays, you’re lucky to get one AmA with someone people have actually heard of a year, and even then they’ll usually only answer a handful of cherry-picked questions. For all intents and purposes, the feature is dead.

This video does a pretty good job summarizing things!

Kind of similar to how people gradually stopped using the phrase “social network” (implying the main point of these sites was to connect with other human beings) and shifted to calling it “social media” (implying the main point is to passively consume content).

Maybe I’m entering the cranky old women yelling at kids to get off her lawn phase of my life-- but why are all the TikTok challenges always something ridiculously dangerous? (Emphasis on “ridiculous”)

Between the dogwhistle about wanting to end our support for Ukraine, and complaining about the IRA-- the largest climate change bill passed by any nation in human history-- because it “cost too much”, I’m starting to wonder if the guy you’re replying to is on the left at all.

EDIT: Just checked their post history, and yep, they’re openly a conservative.

Because they fundamentally don’t understand how left-leaning people think, which means they don’t understand what we want in a candidate. These are the same geniuses who convinced Kanye to run for president in 2020 because they thought he’d peel away the Black vote from the Democrats just because he was Black. (Did I mention they’re all racist AF, too?)

Correction: Democrats (and other left-leaning folk) don’t live in constant fear of Republicans yelling at us, we live in constant fear of Republicans killing us.

When the stakes are that high, there’s no room to fuck around.

This. Look how angry people still are about the DNC’s percieved favoritism towards Hillary in 2016. Imagine the backlash if Bernie had been flat-out barred from running in the primaries against her. Now imagine Bernie’s last name is “Kennedy”, and it’s less than a decade after JFK and RFK were murdered.

Yeah, the DNC basically had no choice but to let him challenge Carter.

Also, OP’s ignoring that Kennedy was also a progressive hero, too. The primary was progressive vs. progressive-- which is part of the reason it’s remembered today as the poster child of pointless infighting that did nothing but benefit the opposition. I’ve literally never heard anyone here in the States have OP’s take on the primary until this thread.