I’m not criticizing the choice of C++. I just don’t want to look at the code because I don’t personally like the language.

Languages: C++

Yeah, hard pass on looking at that code base.

The coalition of the ascendant concept is kind of insane when you remember for a moment that the popular vote is kinda worthless in winning elections. The electoral college is structured in such a way that conservative whites have a larger share of the electorate relative to their minority peers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lock for California and New York (enclaves of coastal elites and minorities alike) if you lose the entirety of the South, Southwest, and Midwest, enclaves of…the opposite of those things, really. This 538 article on it has links to other discussions related to this and represents a fascinating look into the relationship between popular votes and electoral votes. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/

Democrats suffer from a condition that I’ve come to call “Democratic Realism,” named after Capitalist Realism. No matter how much they get their shit kicked in. No matter how badly they do. No matter how little they accomplish. No matter how badly they look or do in debates. Democrats always believe, beyond a shred of doubt, that they’ll win elections without trying. Not because of their own merits, but because they’re just the only “real” choice; they simply can’t fathom anyone willingly voting for their opponents.

Hillary barely campaigned in the “flyover states” that she needed to win because she couldn’t be fucking bothered to actually try. It wasn’t worth the effort to try and persuade people she thought of as her lessers. And the DNC just went “well, it’s obviously her turn. She’s been waiting for the chance at the presidency for 20 years now. We should go ahead and let her be president.” Because that’s the mentality. They don’t have to “win” elections. They just pick a candidate and they get to win, because there is no “real” alternative. That Bush and Trump won don’t indicate that, yeah, actually, you do have to fight for the people who are voting for you, otherwise they’ll vote for the schmuck that appeals to their basest and most venal instincts. Those were just flukes…right? And you don’t have to inspire confidence and admiration in others, because they should just recognize how smart and accomplished and inoffensive their candidates are, and that they’re told to vote for them by people that are smarter than they are, so they should just shut up and do it.

It’s a party driven less by any kind of ideological goals and more by a pervasive sense of smug, impotent, lazy egotism. And, yeah, they’ll get a shitload of votes in the elections because the alternative always seems to be someone who is one goose-step shy of a literal Nazi. Biden will probably even win the popular vote. Y’know…just like Hillary did…

And if they are…well, first of all, yikes, and second of all his career as a content creator is going to go from “damaged” to “gone” as no platform would let him stream after that.

Fuck, the original Pacific Rim wasn’t even good. Like, how you gonna set such a low bar and somehow slide under it with room to spare?

“This woman, who suffers from body dysphoria and constantly gets more and more plastic surgery (a behavior which harms no one but herself) is the same as this fictional serial killer who tortured hundreds of people to death.”

But in all seriousness, I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearance.

I mean, this entire discussion hinges on the definition of “trivial,” so…cool.

Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney’s cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney’s invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.

First time?

Churchill was a master of historical non-fiction. Not “history books,” per se, but basically books about historical topics pertaining to England that interested him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_English-Speaking_Peoples. They were very popular during his day.

Ah, yes, Drawn Together. The perfect show for people in the early oughts who thought South Park was both too clever and not nearly crude or mean-spirited enough. I’ve seen every episode at least twice.

XBox has always been a weird console. It never really competes with Nintendo because NIntendo always does its own general thing and also slides neatly into the kids and family market. So it competes with Playstation by default. Except Playstation actually has contracts with good studios to make exclusive games. What’s a non-Halo exclusive for the XBox? Back in the day, you’d play games like Gears of War, Halo (obviously), Fallout 3, Psychonauts, KOTOR, COD, etc. I can’t think of a single meaningful game on the most recent generation for the XBox.

I get the feeling a lot of our more vocal free speech absolutists are going to be conspicuously quiet on this one.

What is this from? Some kind of movie or t.v. show?

It’s “y’all” - as in a contraction of “you all.”

As the internet gets scarier

How the fuck is the internet getting scarier? This isn’t the random gore and porn filled, go to a forum and immediately get targeted by a sex-predator, internet that I grew up with. The internet is a corporate walled garden of mega services that feed disinformation and bullshit to people, but your odds of getting genuinely victimized as a child are so much lower than they used to be.

If there’s one thing I learned working in IT it’s that devs actively half-ass their error messages, routinely misspell critical words you’re gonna grep for in logs, and never even consider having someone in Product read over customer-facing error messages like this. All they see is a Jira ticket that says “include the following verbiage in the VPN rejection message” that was typed up by a mostly plastered PM one afternoon after they downed 3 margaritas at “lunch” at the taqueria next to their office. And then they just copy and paste that shit into whatever bullshit HTML template took the least effort to find.

What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.

Which is hardly trivial to create. CS is a vast field, with a lot of subsectors and areas of specialization, and not all of the relevant skills are tied to things you can toss in a resume or portfolio. A lot of companies need people who have 1) good communications skills and 2) the ability to identify problems in code or infrastructure and offer efficiently implemented solutions, or at least the path to those solutions and 3) knowledge of multiple coding languages and a certain degree of specialization in Linux. Some of these are difficult things to present in a CV and the place they really can be demonstrated is in interviews. The hard part for a new graduate is just going to be able to talk to someone who can give them the job and see if they’re a good fit for the company. Internships or co-op opportunities are also very important, as they let you talk about work you’ve actually done somewhere. But these are hard to come by.

I think early Trigger has some great examples of anime as a visual medium - things like Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill have such a distinct visual style that would be impossible to replicate using live action or CGI. FMA and Frieren could, however, just as easily be in a different visual medium and be more or less the same. And you’re right that the fight scenes in each are fairly forgettable. I think the only one that stands out to me in FMA: Brotherhood is the one towards the end with Wrath. And I say this as someone who has seen a lot of anime - literally hundreds of series.