It is unclear, however, if the federal employee violated any laws by refusing entry. While members of Congress do have an oversight role over federal agencies, that power is typically exercised through hearings and enforcement of policies.

And while the Constitution grants Congress the power to establish federal government offices, it is unclear whether individual members are granted unfettered access to those buildings.

NYT got that boot ALL the way down their gullet.

Let’s see what’s up on the site now … https://www.kohney.com/comic/rat-problem-pt2/

I stand by my statement.

The Other End has been becoming one of my favorite webcomics for awhile now. Every time I start reading a strip I have no idea where it’s going and it’s usually terrifying. A+

Hey, fair. I know the overall political left has always been plagued with infighting and purity testing. I’d like to at least do my part in bridging the gap between leftists and liberals by not getting in your face about not panicking over this shit if you’ll still allow me the same space to entertain my concern without calling me hysterical. Deal?

There have been growing criticisms of him coming from the left for a bit now on how some of his tendencies to diffuse situations learns more towards liberalism than leftism. This isn’t an outright attack on him or to say he’s moving rightward overall. I need to watch this video again but I think this is the one that touches on a bunch of the points, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hCxHvogsTY

From a comment on the video, “Jon Stewart made me a liberal as a child, adulthood made me a leftist.”

If you like Jon Stewart I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t. But as someone who has continually been moving left, I do feel more distance from him than I used to is all.

After everything, I do still generally respect and like Jon Stewart, but even I found his piece this week on the Daily Show to be some real weak ass shit. I try my best to keep ahold of myself, not run away too much with assumptions or conspiratorial thinking. But you don’t have to wait for them to do 100% fascist shit to start calling them fascists.

The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying “these rogue, partisan bureaucrats … have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

This. This right here. They are screaming their intent at us and we don’t need to wait for them to do it to respectably call them fascists. Like to be clear I guess he can do this but the way he did it is potentially incorrect? Regardless, that’s not what I want to hear you say when you do it to a 22-year veteran of the department.

Real talk: so do I. Part of it is just being a computer nerd, part of it is working in IT, part of it has just been curiously testing Linux.

I have had more stability doing this over the course of a year than I had running the monthly Microsoft updates on Windows 10. On the rare occasions something broke (usually my own tinkering and not the update process) simply reinstalling it actually fixed the problem 90%+. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I was legit surprised and thought I would have slightly more problems with a bleeding edge distro.

As well, it’s great to be able to just update everything with one simple command on the command line rather than having each application install an updater task that sometimes sits down in the system tray doing nothing but nagging you. Or having a program prompt you for an upgrade only to take you to the download page and make you basically reinstall the app over the old version with questionable results every time …

staring at save screen

Wait, did I just save, or do I still need to save?

zones out while processing save again

I don’t even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that’s enterprise pricing. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s business. And I hate it.

We were so aggrieved by the lack of communication that we decided to proceed with our incredibly drastic reaction without communicating to anyone …

History from someone who moved to the platform early on:

A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk’s meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don’t mean sensitive as in “snowflake”, I mean sensitive as in “aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe” - when someone shits in the pool you don’t wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.

I don’t particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it’s still gross. I keep advocating for “bleats” which kind of works as “Bluesky tweet” and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it’s a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should’ve just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I’ll probably resort to just calling them posts, there’s no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it’ll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains … if it lives that long.

Of course you’ll still meet individuals with a wide range of beliefs and I don’t think you can boil a complex group down to a simple answer; but yes.

A few years back now it came out that Violent J’s daughter was a furry, and like a good dad he supported her and at least tangentially got into the furry community which is very LGBTQ+. This opened up a really weird friendship between the groups, but from what I understand the Juggalos also have a history of being very anti-fascist which also jived with the progressive furries.

While I haven’t met many myself, I fully accept the alliance. They’re both alternative cultures which can look odd from the outside, but as you pointed out I think they both heavily focus on acceptance, respect, and support. It’s a good unifying thread! Juggalos and furries will show you who they are without shame, I trust and respect that.

With the Switch 2 announcement, it’s kind of clear that they aren’t even trying to be a tech company anymore. While not every last one of their consoles released was a true innovation, it did feel like something that was built into part of their brand. Now we just have the Switch 2 which is mostly what you’d expect with some decent QoL upgrades.

Nintendo is pursuing the walled garden approach. You’re barely even buying a console anymore, a lot of this hardware has more or less converged. What you’re buying is access to the cultivated ecosystem. Like everything else these days, they entice you in with the big, recognizable brands and hope there’s enough else to keep you there. Emulators straight pierce that veil and it’s why they went so hard on them.

I’m not criticizing (too heavily) the people that choose to hold on to the franchises they love, but once you step outside and choose alternatives, there’s very little to bring you back. Pokemon lost me a few gens ago, honestly not the biggest Zelda fan, and Mario alone won’t do it for me. Metroid and Starfox are scattershot … Personally I’ll stick with the Steam Deck and wait for Switch 2 emulation to roll around. And if it doesn’t, there are just so many other games to play these days.

This is the book that introduced me to the Chinese Room thought experiment and is the first thing I began to think of when the recent AI trend started to make a splash.

Peter Watts is great and though it’s not related to the topic at hand, I cannot recommend Starfish enough. Dark, haunting, and psychological. (It’s apparently part of a series but I never carried on)

38/M/US

Home is a very complicated question that’s going to mean a lot of different things to people emotionally, so I try not to get too prescriptive about my own definition. I moved away from my rural upbringing as soon as I could and I never really looked back. It was not a place I enjoyed or felt like I belonged either. I kind of lost my sense of home and I can’t say it’s something I really look for anymore. It feels too permanent for me. To me, home is a treasure that must be hard fought, then protected, and can therefore always be lost. I don’t think I want a home anymore.

What I want is a sense of belonging. That seems a lot easier to manage because it’s built out of the values and interests I’ve made for myself. I bring it with me wherever I go. I’m free to change it or grow as I like. I try to match it to the people and places around me to see if I like them and if it works for me and if I’m happy. I moved from the rural town I grew up in to a larger city in my state. Then I moved several thousands of miles across the country and spent most of my 20’s and 30’s here. During that time I’ve moved to several small towns and suburbs around the larger city. I’m thinking of moving again, this time outside the country. I’m still excited by the prospect, and afraid.

I assume a lot of this is probably just some psychological phenomenon that is inducing a fake/unreal fantasy. I assume even if I could move to some other country I might not feel as joyful like when I was a kid and even if I do, at some point it might not feel special anymore and it might not be like I hoped.

So maybe this is just this classic “the grass seems always greener on the other side” thing and in reality it might not be like that.

I do think these things are at least partly true and it’s perceptive of you to point that out, but it shouldn’t discourage you either. It’s a very human thing to want to try. Just set your expectations, I don’t know that you’ll simply find a new home. You’re going to have to bring some of it with you, you’re going to have to make some of it on your own, and you’re going to have to ask for help along the way.

See response ^

Last post and I’m done here, but let me explain the post and my response:

Someone is going to make a long post about how women is being portrayed as sexual objects in games and will absolutely refuse to acknowledge this post.

Poster is implying that someone (leftist, feminist, anyone they don’t agree with) will come in here and complain about how sexual this is. Rather than expressing any genuine sentiment or opinion of their own, they assumed one for someone else, a strawman to bat at. It’s a dogwhistle, an attempt to bait out and rehash old Gamergate shit. I mean, I do have to assume because again, I cannot overstate how lazy and insincere it is to make a post like this that does not express your own opinion and implies someone else’s.

The primary point I was trying to make with the overall post is that it’s not sex or sexuality that is the problem. Didn’t Larian release a mainstream game where you could have sex as a bear? Look, the ORIGINAL Twitter post is the model indicating how proud she is, I think we can very confidently say she does not feel like she’s being treated as a sexual object in this context and most people can see that. OP cannot distinguish the difference between sexuality in videogames and treating women as sexual objects. That’s gross and they need to sit and think on that for a LONG while, preferably before ever talking to a woman again.

EDIT: Just listen to women. If a woman says, “I feel like I’m being objectified”, you stop. If a woman says, “Damn, I look sexy!” you say, “Hell yeah!”

You know, fair enough, you caught me in a “think of the children” argument and I never expected to be the one here. But I stand by my point. And wash my hands of the matter.

Returning to the queer games I mentioned earlier, those are by and large indie games. And quite adult/NSFW. Not strictly by nature of being queer to be clear, simply having LGBTQ+ representation doesn’t make it adult. Just being in that space, those are the themes they choose to explore. Do you see the nuance here?

We’re mammals, we stand at the pinnacle of human technology and evolution, man and woman hand-in-hand shouting, “Boobs! Boobs! Boobs! Boobs! Boobs!” (or butt, whatever, I’ve made my stance known). The boobs and butts belong in specific times/places and when that lines up properly, let us exalt them. But can we at least agree that the time/place is at a bare minimum NOT everywhere all the time?

Bringing up these tired arguments forfeits your place at the table. But even further, these are all mainstream corporate interests regarding Marvel and Disney and property/brand characters. Let it go. Fuck them into a hole in the ground, fill it with cement, and leave the grave unmarked. These arguments exist because we choose to exalt these properties instead, of which there are limited spaces in a roster, dying for “mainstream” representation of everyone’s preferred “thing”. Just go play an indie that suits you. You’ll find weirder ones that hyper focus your own fetishes and fixations to a point where it’s almost terrifying.

So tired of it being 2025 and these posts making it to Lemmy. Have any of you ever actually played some of the queer games out there? I’ve played lesbian games made by women mostly targeting an audience for women that are so spicy they’d set your skin on fire. It’s not the sexuality that’s an issue, it’s a larger cultural conversation about where these things belong, how they’re viewed by the masses, and the impression it creates on children who this is ostensibly for too, I guess? Teens? Still impressionable.

Grow up and go play an h-game in your own privacy and don’t make it everyone else’s problem. And stop laundering your opinion with “someone is going to make a post”. You made the post, you brought the trash into the house, and the (current) 9 upvotes shows you’re giving it space to breath and quite frankly, it reeks.

EDIT: no opinion on post, I don’t care how caked she is. If I were that actress, I’d honestly be proud, too.

I remember we used to house a bunch of balls together, just when they were young and didn’t mind as much. My favorite thing about them was any time you’d touch one and it would panic, they’d all tense up, so you ended up with this snake ball with 5 heads and 5 tails. I love them, they’re adorable.