VoxAdActa

Legion assassins are after you because you have a bad reputation with the legion.

Oh.

Well shit.

So maybe I shouldn’t go to Nipton and toss a grenade at the Legionaries as they’re walking away after their leader finished shit-talking me.

They just explode in such an easy, satisfying way! How do they even know it was me? All the witnesses are unrecognizable flesh chunks!

Ok, maybe I will load up another try.

I’ve tried New Vegas three or four times. By the time I actually get to New Vegas and meet Mr. House, I’m overwhelmed by the number of things I’m supposed to be doing and dead dog tired of those fucking OP Legion assassins that show up to ruin my day every fifteen minutes.

Part of that is probably on me, because I’m the guy who wants to experience the whole game in a single play-through, and I try not to take on too many new quests until I’ve finished the ones I’ve already got. I’ve also been recently informed that if I rush to New Vegas and do Mr. House’s quest, the Legion assassins will back off for a bit, which is a big deal because my god I’m sick of them. I never would have tried that on my own, as there’s nothing in the game to give me a clue that they’re connected, but maybe I’ll give it another shot and do that.

I’ve played through Fallout 1 and 2 dozens of times.

I have yet to finish Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Vegas.

The sea change from “actual RPGs” to “shooters with occasional minor choices to make” enrages me.

Oh, but you do! I’m one of those autistic people who can’t fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.

There’s no way to turn off the notification without either clicking “Ignore” or “Reply” (maybe it’s “Accept”). It doesn’t go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.

a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?

RIGHT? AND, AND! It’s a chat where you can’t get rid of the bright flaming red notification until you make the neigh-irreversible decision to either shun a person forever or reply to them.

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

What I wish for is an open platform where left and right can speak freely to each other in polite discourse

Oh, I see. You’re delusional. You honestly think I should be having “polite discourse” with people who either want me dead, or are ok with voting for people who want me dead.

Because, see, what’s left? What makes a Republican want to claim to be a Republican other than the culture war bullshit? What do they stand for? They haven’t stood for “fiscal responsibility” or “small government” since W was in office. The straight-up write things like “We stand against teaching critical thinking in schools” (see: Texas GOP party platform) into their guiding documents. And you think they’re going to have a civil conversation? You think I owe them a civil conversation?

Every server we allow those people on freely will become exploding heads or 4 chan. Go look at r/politicalcompassmemes if you need an example. I don’t know how many times we have to watch it happen before you get the picture, or maybe this is your first ever internet community experience. But you’re wrong. Their bad-faith rhetoric, carefully-stated death threats, and direct personal attacks will drive everyone who isn’t one of them away, leaving only Nazis. If the admins call them out and ban them for that stuff, they’ll end up banning all of them and we’ll be having this same conversation. If the admins allow their speech, but don’t allow us to say “Fuck off, weeb, nobody likes you” without censure, then guess who gets to control the “discourse”? And if the admins don’t ban anyone for it, we’ll become Voat. Since only the slimiest members of humanity can tolerate that vibe for long, guess who ends up owning the server by default?

You wanna see that shit, you enjoy being called slurs and told to go kys, you are free to seek out the communities who will do that for you. But fuck all the way off with telling me I must put up with it, too.

Oh, I can block them? No I fucking can’t. I blocked you days ago, and your shit still shows up in my notifications. So, again, fuck off. If I have to listen to whatever dumb shit spills out of your brain, against my will, then you get to listen to my toxicity.

Are you suggesting that I should have an account on each fediverse instance, just to get all of the content? If so, then what the actual fuck is the point of federation in the first place?

…you… honestly thought… the fediverse… was supposed to be a centralized content aggregator…?

What… uh, so, what… what do you think the fediverse is?

When did I say that? I’m very toxic towards people who are cool with the view that I should be either “sentenced to death” or “hunted with dogs”.

Oh, you’re not cool with it, you just want to force me to listen to it anyway. That’s so different.

Go back to 4 chan, otaku.

That’s not the same and you know it.

Oh, is 4chan too much freedom for you? What happened to your whole “no rules, just right” attitude?

It’s sounding more and more like you don’t give a single fuck about seeing this kind of content; you want to force us to see this content. All the places you could go to get it, and you’re still arguing that we should have to see it too or we’re not free.

You’re right. We’re not free. We’re sad, pathetic, chained little sheep beholden to a “central authority” that doesn’t allow hate speech. Run while you can! Flee, quickly! Or you, too, might get consumed by the woke mind virus and start thinking that maybe the Jews are ok people!

My issue is I don’t like having content blocked FOR me

Oh, I see. You want 4chan.

Well, good news! 4chan exists! Go there.

Do you prefer having a centralized authority dictating your exposure to content?

Like, you mean, a website? That’s what you mean by “centralized authority”, right? A website? With its Terms and Conditions, following the applicable copyright and IP laws, following the relevant laws of the jurisdiction it operates in? Yeah, I’m fine with that.

If you’re not, go to Exploding Heads. They welcome you. They want you.

We don’t.

Yeah, it’s weird.

Why do people think that?

It’s such a mystery.

One of those enduring conundrums of the universe.

Will ever figure out why Republicans keep getting called facists?

It really is one of life’s unsolvable riddles.

How could anyone come to such a conclusion?

I guess we’ll never know.

Yeah, me too.

We won’t get any examples, though. At least not any examples of things real, relevant people actually said. The best they’ll do is drop a dumptruck’s worth of strawmen before flouncing off in a huff.

want a place free of authoritarian policies that don’t limit actual human discourse.

You’ve already been given a suggestion for just that kind of instance. If you want to see that kind of content, there’s a spot for that.

Or are you just upset that there are places who don’t welcome those kinds of dumbfuck takes? Is it that you want to see the content for yourself, or that you want to make the content and force everyone to see it?

Either way, this instance isn’t the place for you. Exploding heads is. Go there, be happy.

I don’t think the quality of the front page changed all that much in the last month.

I don’t know. I don’t think I agree. I’ve been seeing a lot more truly garbage-tier content on the first few pages of r/all lately, from some really weird, never-before-seen, garbage-tier subs. Half of them I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be about. What the fuck is a Honk Star Rail? Where the fuck did Pop Culture Chat come from? Who the fuck is Peter, and why is he explaining jokes? I used to doomscroll down to page 8 or 9 before I started seeing weird stuff like this, and now it’s right there on page 1. In the past, when I started seeing that weird Taylor Swift Simp Cult sub, I knew I’d been on reddit too long. Now they regularly show up, if not on page 1, then high on page 2.

Along with the r/AmITheAsshole scab copy sub, r/AITAH, which somehow managed to make it to the front page in record time after it’s creation, even though it has about 9% as many subscribers as the original did.

Hell, some of these posts on page 1 of r/all only have 1500 upvotes. That’s insane.

But this article is from 2021, along with all the other ones I found about the vaccine causing “shaking”.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/20/shaking-covid-vaccine-side-effect-videos-and-what-/

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

Why does this headline read like some kind of clickbait advertisement?

Right? I think I’ve downvoted a grand total of a half-dozen comments here in the last month. On Reddit, I’d be handing those things out like candy.