Oh I agree, I just cant help but to be stunned and bewildered.

What is this goddamned clownworld timeline we live in where David fucking Brooks is calling for a mass revolt, a literal insurrection, against the pinnacle, ultimate form of what he and his ilk have advocated for and done their level best to make a reality for longer than I’ve been alive?

I mean… at this point, fuck it, this is good news, we are gonna need as many bodies in the streets and feet on the ground, from as many backgrounds and persuasions of all kinds to have any chance at all of stopping this madness…

But Jesus Christ if this isn’t the most ‘Dog finally catches car and is disappointed’ fucking thing.

Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable… ‘class’ system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of… allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of ‘classes’ that… could either focus on one main ‘class’, but augment it with certain abilities from other ‘classes’…

And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.

Also… being a Jedi/Sith used to be… exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.

IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive… but you wouldn’t even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a ‘gray’ jedi.

Finally… SWG … still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo… as a core game mechanic of a player ‘class’.

Though I haven’t played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.

… Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like… administrative capacity and zoning laws.

Do MMOs even… do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to ‘you have a house in the set aside ‘suburb’ instance’?

Whelp, thats a whoosh moment for me than lol.

But it does seem like some other people appreciated the info :P

To clarify:

Though the group currently calling itself Anonymous that just published all this … derives the aesthetics and what not from stuff that arose on 4chan in the mid/late 00s…

They almost certainly have nothing to do with 4chan going down.

4chan was taken down by a group of people that used to post on a 4chan subboard, which was removed… and then they started their own community ‘Soyjack Party’.

Which, ironically, is a very similar story as to why 4chan even exists: m00t used to post hentai and loli on SomethingAwful, and then that subboard got shut down, m00t and other frequent posters there got banned, and then they made 4chan.

Like… I stopped using 4chan almost two decades ago now, when m00t made a big announcement post, which later disappeared, stating that as a result of increased media scrutiny and a number of high profile crimes that were connected back to 4chan posts… well m00t said that he was cooperating with the authorities.

I can’t prove this, because … two decades ago, and the announcement was only up for … less than 24hrs… but yeah, as the SoyJack Party hack of 4chan has confirmed, it was obvious that 4chan was/is a shitshow joke of an operation held together by ducttape and fishing lines.

For fucks sake, their versions of PHP and MySQL were like 12 years out of date and had numerous, extensively well documented security flaws.

You are thinking of this:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

I agree with all of that.

Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.

Yep.

It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that… as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.

Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were … you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration…

And then they said things like … is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is … quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid ‘policies’, that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism… all very much in line with … a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism…

And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and ‘everything/one you don’t like is fascist’ was born.

… And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is ‘the joker, baby’ all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late… and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.

If I were to pronounce it outloud, I would say:

D. B. Zero.

Like D. B. Cooper, lol.

the… zer(o), 0 swap is… basically old school l33tsp34k… like uh… l00tb0x, pr0n, type of … dialect? syntax?

Huh.

Well, I appreciate the info and shrugging magic, but uh… hrm.

I dunno then.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean, makes sense, Hitler is one of Trump’s favorite authors.

No, I am not being hyperbolic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-ex-wife-once-said-he-kept-a-book-of-hitlers-speeches-by-his-bed-2015-8?op=1

Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speechs from the 1930s in his nighstand table, and would read from it before going to bed in the 80s and 90s.

When asked about this,

" ‘Trump hesitated’ and then said, ‘Who told you that?’ "

i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

1:

Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

2:

There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

3:

If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

…

I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.

https://lemmy.zip/post/35999238

Here’s the post.

Evidently, Demigodrick has since fixed the problems and successfully upgraded to 0.19.11

https://lemmy.zip/post/36177918

EDIT: Alternate explanation: The fediverse tracker has fallen victim to Trump Tariffs as well rofl.

It may have been lemmy.zip

It did in fact go down for about 48 hours… prompting me to make this new account on dbzer0.

Basically, the admin attempted to update to a newer lemmy version… and it failed, multiple times, and they just rolled back, restored the old version, posted an explanation and apology, and they’ll be further looking into … exactly what went wrong.

The Gay Gamma Goongasm, according to … Christian Nationalist Physics?

… If you get hit with fast neutrons, does that make you gender neutral or ambigender rofl?

Alpha radiation turns you into a chad?

Beta radiation makes you a soyboy?

fucking goddammit lol.

EDIT: i mean shit, if radiation causes gender/sexual orientation modification, then I guess you could actually construct a ‘gaydar’… oh god my brain hurts.

Consider drinking flavored water with biologically compatible salts, otherwise you may have insufficient energy to carry on with the rest of your socially expected activities.

… yeah.

Shits gonna get real bad.

Like Great Depression 2.0 bad, but this time shanty towns are all classed as illegal homeless encampments and Trump has publicly stated multiple times his plan for the homeless is literally concentration camps in the middle of nowhere or outskirts of cities, that kind of bad.

I mean, I can be as much of a pedant as you and post an unsourced definition of ‘ip theft’ … or maybe you could just admit you’d never heard of the term ‘ip theft’, or are unaware of its use.

Its a pretty commonly used term, especially amongst government regulatory and business organizations, as well as academics who study policy, in the US.

The term itself, its phrasing, is intentionally constructed to frame copyright infringement as a form of theft, stealing something that doesn’t belong to you.

The psychological framing of the term is meant to frame losses from someone committing copyright infringement against you as equivalent to losses from being robbed.

The entire point of the usage of this term is to mold public perception.

Here’s some examples where very prominent US institutions/organizations use some construction or variation of ‘ip theft’ as an umbrella term to refer to all kinds of copyright, trademark and/or patent infringement:

FBI

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/countering-the-growing-intellectual-property-theft-threat

KPMG (huge business consulting group)

https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2022/theft-intellectual-property.html

DHS (Homeland Security)

https://www.dhs.gov/intellectual-property-rights

IPRC (Intellectual Property Rights Center)

https://www.iprcenter.gov/

And finally, literally IPTheft.org, which basically functions as an all-in-one training/resource hub that connects business people to all kinds of resources to report when they have suffered… IP theft.

https://www.iptheft.org/