Well, it's starting to look that way. They've reached the point of trying to overthrow our democratic institutions. The only thing left for them to do is openly advocate for the execution of political rivals.

If the contractual details of malt distribution were going to affect the quality of beers you were getting then you absolutely would care. Unity's pay scheme will lead to studios shutting down if there isn't pushback. Studios switching to a different engine like Godot will make their games feel different for better or for worse and efforts to help fund these alternate engines will help tip the scale towards that being "for better".

But most importantly of all, this is a company using toxic and predatory practices. Regardless of the industry (yes, malt distributors too), if we don't push back against toxic business practices, then companies in many different industries will see avenues they can take advantage of to make extra money. These ideas don't hang in isolation. If Unity's scheme works, other businesses will learn from it. This is the reality of capitalism. Whatever methods can turn a profit without generating negative attention will be employed. It's in the hands of consumers, competing businesses, and the government to keep those toxic practices in check. I mean, why the fuck are we on Lemmy? Ultimately Reddit's actions are not going to affect the majority of users on their platform. Most of us came here to protest shitty business practices.

I was reading about Vivek Ramaswamy on his Wikipedia page last night and I saw that he's seriously pushing raising the voting age to 25! What a bunch of absolute fascist shitheads. Trying to steal the right to vote from voters that disagree with them. Literally doing the thing they accuse Democrats of doing. It's the same old bullshit hypocrisy with those fuckfaces. I wish it still surprised me. How anybody could possibly support them at this point is beyond me. They've become a joke and nothing more at this point. I wish there was a serious opposition to the Democratic Party. It's not good to have only one sane party in a country. You want your party's ideas to be forged in the fire of scrutiny that comes with serious political conversations. But what Republicans have become is useless. At this point I can't wait for them to just fucking die as a party. Wipe them out so badly that a new party has to rise in their stead. And God I hope it looks nothing like the modern conservative bullshit ideology.

You think it's weird in Iowa? Try Wisconsin! Literally every state it touches now has legal weed except for the tiny bit of Iowa we touch in the corner. Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan. All now have legal weed. But I still see the news reports in Wisconsin about "criminals" being caught with weed. It's insane.

I most recently encountered this fact from the game, Stray! You know, the recent game with the cat and all the robots. Apparently their city design was heavily inspired by the Kowloon Walled City.

Germany in particular pisses me off so much. No country bought into the fear mongering about nuclear energy after Fukushima as much as Germany did. Shutting down nuclear power plants in the face of climate change is so incredibly irresponsible. For all of their faults, I give a lot of credit to the US and France for not shying away from using nuclear energy.

I, for one, vote in support of defederation from Threads. No reason to allow Meta to use our content to boost engagement on their for-profit platform. And pull users away from places like Lemmy at that.

I'm derailing this showerthought to point out that I think it should be "a unique", not "an unique". Say both out loud. Now you might think that doesn't make sense, because unique starts with a vowel. But not so fast! "Unique" is well... unique... because the "u" is actually pronounced like a "y". The "a vs an" decision is actually an issue of consonant/vowel sound and not literally whether it's a vowel or a consonant in the first letter of the following word. Remember the old list of vowels? a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y? This is one of those sometimes moments. Y sometimes behaves like a vowel, but for the "a vs an" decision, it behaves like a consonant. You wouldn't say "an yellow shirt". You'd say "a yellow shirt". And "unique" has the same sound at its start as "yellow" does.

I wonder where city municipal Twitter accounts will move to for emergency communications now that Twitter is quickly becoming useless and irrelevant.

For all his flaws I don't believe Macron is fundamentally a fascist. I think he's a corporate stooge appealing to the wealthy, the old, and the business types. France has indeed had fascism creeping in, especially with the likes of Le Pen. But France also has a long history of leftist movements and protests. So the pendulum could really swing either way at this point for them. Macron is shitty, but he's not Le Pen. Hopefully at the next election, people vote leftwards and don't fall for the typical fascist tactics of convincing people that immigrants and LGBT people are the real problem. Le Pen particularly scares me because she's very cozy with Putin and has isolationist, anti-NATO tendencies. The west is already struggling to maintain a united front in support of democracy and in opposition to global authoritarianism. If France elected Le Pen, pandora's box may be opened and there may be no coming back for France.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you lima bean? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Beans, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Adzuki, and I have over 300 confirmed bowls cooked. I am trained in garbanzo warfare and I'm the top cook in the entire US bean forces. You are nothing to me but just another customer. I will feed you beans with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fava. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of bean providers across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, marrowfat. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your lentils. You're fucking cooked, kidney bean. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can feed you over seven hundred different recipes, and that's just with my black beans. Not only am I extensively trained in pinto combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Great Northern Bean Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little split pea. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have prepared your fucking mouth. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn soybean. I will shit beans all over you and you will drown in them. You're gonna be fucking full, baked bean.

I grew up Catholic, converted to Evangelicalism, and am now an atheist. The one thing I'll always give the Catholics that at least I grew up around is that they took the "feeding the poor message" pretty strongly to heart. They had a HUGE food pantry and they gave food to the local people in need of it every week. There were always drives happening for food and clothes and whatnot. It was enough of an institution that they had full time staff dedicated to it. I'm sure this isn't the case for many other Catholic churches, but my anecdotal experience of at least one midwestern Catholic Church was pretty good on feeding the homeless. Now, the transubstantiation (literal bread turning to body, etc) stuff was bullshit and played a key role in my deconversion. People in my community didn't even know that we believed that and when some of us kids found out, that was a bit of a reckoning 😆

Evangelicals, on the other hand, had their acts of charity but they were weak sauce compared to the Catholics. Occasional Christmas toy drives or whatever. They did free car washes. It was pretty inane compared to what the Catholics had been.