Xerodin

Unrelated, but I fucking love Cross Code.

I’ve been listening to a lot of post-hardcore punk lately. To cherry pick a few of my favorites from lesser known bands:

I Met a Yeti - Cherry Blossom

Dwellings - Devices

AnimalJam - Pm Ny Wadi

Coletta - Raspberry Cough

Not without a search warrant.

That was a large part of the charm for me in Tunic. The core mechanic was collecting pages of the instruction booklet as you adventured so you could learn the mechanics of the game. The other part of that being the manual was written in an unknown language* and you’d need to infer what the instructions meant using context clues. It was an absolute blast and hit the dopamine button when I figured out some puzzles.

*Btw, if you know, you know

In political party terms, a liberal is someone who supports the economic system of capitalism but wants to give concessions to the general population (free healthcare, cheap public transportation, etc) to placate the people from changing the system. The idea is if people are making a somewhat decent living then they will be less disgusted with the ludicrous amount of money the actual wealthy make and won’t revolt. Messaging from conservative parties has purposely conflated liberals with leftist (socialism/communism) ideology in order to tie it to the Red Scare and convince lower income people that the idea is meant to take more from working class people.

tl:dr - 2021 Ever Given shipping blockage but worse

It’s much more complicated and impactful than that. Commodities may take multiple trips through the canal in different forms before they become final products, and more sophisticated products that require multiple raw material sources spread across several vessels multiplies this problem. Vertical monopolies have min/maxed costs and revenue such that they’ve determined it’s cheaper to refine one material in country x, pay to ship it to county y for further refinement, then pay to ship it to country z for final assembly before shipping it a fourth time to where it will be sold. Companies that are not vertically integrated simply buy the materials they need to make their product but those materials have already been on a similar journey being sold from one company to the next, the price going up for each stage of refinement.

The alternative route around the southern tip of Africa adds roughly 2 weeks to shipping time. Many companies rely on materials constantly arriving in a timely manner so they can continually produce products to be sold. Adding a 2 week delay to receive a material and a 2 week delay to ship their product immediately puts a company at least a month behind on production.

If a product would require materials that went on multiple trips through the Suez canal then attempting to shift to an alternate route would dramatically increase the time it would take to produce. Simplistically, this causes a supply shortage and results companies losing profit and raising prices across all sectors.

The Houthis are trying to stop the Palestinian genocide by hitting capitalism in the balls. In a nutshell, if large companies start seeing a significant hit to their bottom line then they’ll begin pressuring the lawmakers and world leaders that benefit from those companies to stop the genocide.

Genocide stops -> Houthis stop attacking shipping -> companies get their profit

This doesn’t even touch the quagmire of politics in the region…

Should’ve added the /s at the end, my dude. Sarcasm detectors don’t work on Internet text.

Also, after reading your comment I immediately thought of the gummy block ships from Kingdom Hearts and lol’d at myself.

I bit the bullet. tl:dw - he tried to straddle the line for an American audience by saying both sides were bad. He went on to admit he wasn’t educated enough on the subject to explain the history and continued by saying that those in power (Hamas and Bibi) don’t represent the opinions held by everyone there. Finally, he denounced collective punishment of Palestinians and called for a ceasefire.

IMO, it’s an opinion fairly left of the American political center, keeping in mind that America’s political center is skewed to the right, and has always been the area John operated to try to widen the Overton window.

You’re right that the content hasn’t changed much except for which groups are included as the “outgroup.” The “new age” is less about what the content is and more about how it’s being spread. The methods by which unsavory ideas are shared can reach further because of the internet and are more nuanced and targeted towards people who are susceptible to the way these ideas are communicated. Targeting socially, politically, or economically disenfranchised people with sympathetic rhetoric and then gradually introducing brown, gay, lefty hordes as the root cause boogieman has proven effective as more people are swept up into right wing ideology.