My current tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory is that’s exactly what they’re banking on. They’ll draw the trial out until right before the midterm election… Then Trump will use the resulting riots to declare martial law and cancel the upcoming midterms, so he doesn’t lose control of congress. After he has cancelled the election, he’ll make a final push to clean house, and will start ousting liberal congress members by accusing them of being riot conspirators.

The Mangione Riots will be Trump’s Reichstag Fire.

My guess is that they died before the statute of limitations expired. This happened in the 80’s, and there’s plenty of time between then and now for something to have happened to them.

Yeah, life always seems to throw expensive problems at people all at the same time. I thought I had a pretty good nest egg saved up, and then boom… Car shit the bed, cat needed surgery, wife had a hospital stay, and a few other big life events. All while the economy is in the garbage, inflation is in the high double digits, the wife is out of work (due to the aforementioned hospital stay), and any hope of a social safety net was being dismantled right in front of me.

I didn’t even consciously realize how stressed I was about money, until I realized I had fallen back to pirating my PC games instead of just buying them. I hadn’t been a prolific pirate since my broke college student days… And then suddenly there I was again, browsing FG’s site for the latest repack, so I could install it in between shifts.

Growing up, I had always heard “brothers fighting on opposite sides of the battlefield” types of stories from the American civil war. I always wondered how people could let it get that bad. Nowadays though…

Yeah, I came in to say exactly this. The typical contracting process usually involves reaching out to multiple vendors, (usually a minimum of three, including at least one Historically Underutilized Business), soliciting quotes from all of them, waiting for quotes to come back, deciding on the best quote (and being able to justify it if you didn’t pick the cheapest one), and then going through the entire invoicing process with the selected vendor.

With a p-card, you can just walk into the local office supply store, swipe your p-card, and be done with it. Or better yet, just order it online using the account that the contractor has already set up via the aforementioned bidding process, and have it delivered in a day. But needing to go through the entire contractor process for every single purchase will quickly cripple any office.

I hate to admit this, but I bet “that congressperson who gave her affair partner a sloppy handy at a children’s show” would also have worked.

For reference, she and a man (not her husband, but a man she was there with) were kicked out of a local production of the stage musical “Beetlejuice”. She initially claimed it was because she was singing along with the musical, but footage later surfaced that showed she was giving him a handy in the middle of the audience.

Know all of the panic about children at drag shows? Yeah, every single accusation from conservatives is a confession.

It’s also how flat earthers started. 4chan started satirically memeing about flat earth. Then idiots saw it, missed the satire, and picked it up as a serious thing. At that point, 4chan went “this is funnier than any satire we could make” and stood back to watch the crazies launch rockets into the upper atmosphere.

I bought a bidet like six years ago (right before the pandemic) and Amazon is convinced I need to buy another one every single week. How many toilets do you think I have, Amazon?

prices surged from under $2 to nearly $5 per dozen.

Where the fuck does this editor live? Cuz where I am, they went from $2 to $12.

RetroArch is the go-to for most people, because it can emulate just about anything. But first time setup can be kind of a pain if you’ve never done it before; The UI for settings can be unintuitive, you need to dig for what you want, and it’s easy to forget to save your settings because the save option is in an entirely separate page. It also suffers from some software bloat, because it has so many features that it can get bogged down when emulating more intensive systems.

For Nintendo I tend to use Delta. It’s simple, has cloud saves via Google Drive, and runs everything flawlessly. For PSX, I tend to use Gamma. Again, it has a simple interface and syncs via Google Drive.

RetroArch is a good one, and is the go-to for most people. It covers just about every console you could want. But it also suffers from some bloat due to having so many features, and config can be kind of a pain if you’ve never done it before. If you’re just looking for a more basic “just fucking boot it up and play” emulator, maybe an app like Delta (Nintendo consoles) or Gamma (PSX) would be less bloated (and potentially run smoother.)

plus theres those sd card cartdridges for it

If you’re willing to get a flashcart for your NDS, you might as well just get a 3DS and load up some custom firmware instead. It’s stupid easy to hack with the SD card slot, and you can play whatever games you want for free. No need to fiddle with flashcarts when you can just use the 3DS’ built in SD card slot instead.

I just emulate things nowadays. I have pretty much the entire NES, SNES, GBC, GBA, N64, NDS, and PSX libraries on my phone ready to go. And it works perfectly fine with any Bluetooth controller, because touchscreen controls are… Well… Complete fucking garbage.

I’m currently playing through the NDS version of Chrono Trigger in my free time. And since all of the games are stored locally, it doesn’t use any data at all. I recently went camping for a week, and my iPad lasted like 7 or 8 hours of playtime (on low brightness because I was in a tent at night) off of a single charge.

Yeah, the issue with multi tools is the same issue with phones; They’re mediocre at a lot of different things. A dedicated multi-bit screwdriver will almost always be better than a multitool. A solid pair of pliers will almost always be better than a multitool. Et cetera, et cetera…

But in a pinch, a multitool is better than nothing. And a multitool is a hell of a lot easier to carry as a “just in case” thing than an entire toolbox of individual tools. As a freelancer I habitually keep a lot of tools in my trunk, but I don’t want to walk all the way out to my car just to tighten one screw. So I also keep a multitool around as a “good enough” solution.

To be clear: Hospitals use pagers because they use a longer (and much lower bandwidth) wavelength, which is affected less by things like thick fire-resistant walls. Hospitals are built like bunkers so that things like fires don’t require the entire building to be evacuated. Pagers can still reliably get signal even in the basement of a hospital, when behind multiple fire-resistant walls and solid concrete floors. Texting has effectively replaced pagers for 99% of the population. But hospitals still use them because reliability is prioritized in the medical world; No hospital wants to lose a patient because a doctor was in the basement and didn’t get a text.

My favorite bit about fridging is that the term initially got coined due to Alexandra DeWitt being killed to get at the Green Lantern. She was later resurrected as a zombie during part of the Black Lantern story arc, and was always shown inside of a fridge even as a zombie. She was only shown a few times, so it was a subtle nod to the criticism the writers had received for fridging her in the first place.

Yeah, to actually affect any real change, it needs to send a message. While freak accidents would make for great memes, they don’t send the “this is a warning; nobody is untouchable. You could be next if you don’t clean up your act” message that will actually cause lasting change.

Freak accidents can be hand waved away. Conspiracy theorists would go wild, but the ruling elites wouldn’t actually change anything. You want something that can’t be explained away as anything but a targeted and coordinated attack.

If you want to send a message, maybe have them all simultaneously choke on a 50 cent coin. It’s common enough that anyone can get their hands on one, but uncommon enough that you basically need to seek them out. That would at least send a “money bad” message. But be sure it’s something consistent, to ensure the message is actually received.

Alternatively, my friend (the biggest stoner I know) married a cop. Our state never officially decriminalized it. His stance has basically been “as long as I don’t see it, we have plausible deniability and I don’t need to do anything about it.”

He was extremely popular with GenZ men. They were hitting voting age during his first term, when they reaped all of the benefits of things like the rock bottom COVID interest rates. Many of them were able to buy houses fresh out of school, while the millennials before them were so bogged down by student debt that they weren’t able to get those low interest loans. And then they saw Biden fail to address (or at least fail to broadcast that he had addressed) virtually any of their concerns.

And all of that started while they were still barely 18, and lacked the knowledge to understand that many of Trump’s biggest wins were inherited from the previous administration, or that Biden had been handed a shit sandwich and was making do with what he had.

Yeah, the point of dog whistles is to fly under the radar. Which means they steal popular symbols to use, so they can have the plausible deniability of “lol we were just posting memes about a comic frog” if anyone confronts them for their nazi shit.