The one thing that I am salty about with the switch 2

 So...I know I just said last post that I'm not salty about not having a switch 2. I'm not. I dont think it's worth the money. BUT...apparently 3 million people did, which broke records by a massive margin for day 1 sales. 

And I AM salty about that. Why? Because it sets a bad precedent. it signals to the console makers, hardware makers, and software developers that it's okay for them to charge more and people will continue to buy it. We shouldnt buy this. Honestly, nintendo has had a bad, anti consumer business model for a while. The switch 1 was $300, they never lowered the price although released a $200 switch lite. They still charge MSRP for their launch games from 2017.

 As I said, in the past, stuff got cheaper fast. Even if console MSRP and new games cost a lot back in the day, stuff would get cheap FAST. And 8 years is a really long time. Imagine if the N64 and its games still cost full price in 2004, and then the game cube cost even more. That's what we're talking about here. Or imagine the game cube and its games were still full price in 2009. Or 360/PS3/Wii still costing full price in 2013-2014. 

That's the problem here. Nintendo isnt lowering prices, stuff still costs full price even at the end of life span, and THEN they're bumping up the price for the next gen. And its not just nintendo. Right after nintendo did this, xbox raised their 5 year old console up to $700....it launched at $500. Really, it's all price gouging. And its the same thing thats happening with the PC hardware market. GPUs went from costing $80-700 to now costing $200-2000. It's insane. We've had 100% inflation in the GPU market over the past decade and in some price brackets, especially at the low and high end, it's significantly more. 

Again, i feel like I'm getting priced out of the current market here. I'm not changing my spending habits, the market just decided to arbitrarily charge a lot more while my income situation hasn't kept up with inflation. And then we got inflation on everything else cutting into cost of living and ugh. 

And then 3 million people go out and buy this. Hope you have fun, you just justified them raising prices and never ever lowering them. That's one thing I will be salty about.  

Trump vs Musk: no matter who wins, we lose

 So....Trump and Musk are having a pretty open split. "The girls are fighting" is how its being framed, and in a sense, it's glorious. Musk is pissy over the spending bill, in part because he's an ancap who actually cares about the deficit and didnt like how bloated the "big beautiful bill" is, and in part because he may be losing some of his funding in it. Trump fired back, then Elon said Trump is in the Epstein files, and now Bannon is encouraging Trump to investigate Musk's immigration status, and yeah, this is a major schism. 

A lot of the MAGA base are acting like kids when their parents go through a divorce, saying they love both and stop fighting, but it's clearly "over." 

Some people are trying to pick sides even on the left, and I'm just gonna say, don't. No matter who wins, we lose.

Trump is an authoritarian. He's dangerous, he wants to suppress anyone who criticizes him, and he's fronting some serious dystopian crap. However, Musk, if he had his way, would basically turn us into like techno feudalism. He's a dark enlightenment type, and say Trump went down over legal troubles stemming from this or was 25th amendmented by his cabinet or something. Well...Vance is ALSO a dark enlightenment guy and then these guys could push such an ideology with more credibility. In a lot of ways trump weakens the right. In other ways, perhaps without trump the right would have zero charisma. On the substance, musk is probably correct on this issue as the BBB is just designed to give handouts to the rich while screwing the poor, and trump's tariffs are a threat to the economy, BUT...just because a terrible person makes a great point doesnt mean he's not terrible. 

You know that scene from halo 2 when master chief is on high charity and cortana tells him to "sit this one out" while the two factions of the covenant are killing each other? This is that kind of situation. Let them fight. Dont take sides. Let them implode their own movement. There's pros and cons to either side winning and i dont think either is necessarily better.

If I HAD to choose though, I'd choose trump simply because i think trump's loud incompetence actually does more damage to them over time. Trump himself is a weak leader. If vance took over, all of the same crap would be happening, it would just be done in more subtle ways. Give my own interest is in the right's failure, I'll side with whomever is weaker. And that is trump in a sense. 

Still, I dont formally endorse either of them. I'm just enjoying from the sidelines.  

Discussing my impressions of the switch 2 at launch

 So...the switch 2 launched, and I know, people are gonna push weird narratives that I'm focusing on it because "copium" or whatever, but I just wanted to give my impressions on it based on what I've seen so far. I never touched one, or seen one in person yet, I still have no intention of buying one, and honestly, now that it's here, I'm more underwhelmed than ever.

Game wise, the only thing that really calls out to me is mario kart world tour. Of course, that isn't much of a surprise. The only point of buying such a machine is to buy the nintendo first party titles. On third party titles, which are most launch games these days...just buy a steam deck. And yeah, I know i dump on steam deck too, but no, really. People are comparing the steam deck and rog ally to the switch 2 and quite frankly, the handheld PCs speak to me more here. You could have had most switch 2 launch games on handheld FROM STEAM, and paid a fraction of the price of a $70-80 launch title, for YEARS now. And the base steam deck is cheaper than the switch 2.

The battery life seems to be about 2 hours when playing cyberpunk 2077, which tracks with the steam deck's 1.5-2 hours based on the model. 

 And yeah. It doesnt seem that impressive. Most communities I hang out in, which focus on PC/mobile gaming seem to find this new machine underwhelming. Again, mariokart seems to be the only reason to buy it. otherwise you're overpaying for the same games you couldve gotten off of steam years ago with a steam deck.

Despite this, it allegedly sold 3 million units in the first 24 hours, which is insane, and that is the part where I'm gonna have to be like, full copium on that. Like...WHY?! It's expensive, its software library is weak, and in practice it literally doesnt offer anything a handheld PC doesnt other than first party titles. 

Then again, tons of people buy playstations and xboxes when gaming PCs exist so...yeah. Normies be normies. 

 You gotta keep in mind these are the same kinds of NPC type people who end up voting for like, biden or trump when better options exist. Ya know, their opinions are so bland and generic you have to wonder if such people actually exist, only to later realize that not only do they but they're somehow the majority. 

Anyway, the fact that the switch 2 is making me suddenly praise the steam deck in comparison when i normally trash handheld PCs too is something, but that's where we're at. Really. I just find this thing so underwhelming. And I know, I'm anti-hugboxing here, but whatever. My blog, my opinion.  

Your daily reminder that the right is literally EVIL

 So, Kyle covered Nick Fuentes today, and generally speaking, this guy isn't on my radar. While I do occasionally dive into the right in terms of commentators, and I have tried watching crowder and asmongold before, I never really watched Fuentes. I've heard Kyle refer to him as a "nazi" before, but wasnt sure how literal it was. Well, in the above clip, he finally showed us what we're dealing with here. And it's not good. 

The dude was the "my body my choice" guy, ya know, that psycho. He was saying rather than go back to 1999, let's go back to 1099. He wants to undo the enlightenment. He wants women to be breeding stock with no rights. He wants non christians to have the death penalty. He even said he admires Hitler in some ways. Like...this is messed up. This guy is EVIL. 

I keep saying it, the right is depraved. I've grappled with them a lot over the years. My original stance was simply that the right was devoid of good moral values, but as I've watched this evolve over the years, no, they're just evil. Straight up. It's not just that they're intellectually a bunch of idiots who dont know what good is. No, these guys WANT bad things. They WANT people to suffer. They will find some justification to be against good things and they will want the bad. And then they'll act like they're "owning the libs" in the process. It's not just a difference in opinion. These guys are genuinely depraved in my view. Full stop. We should stop trying to see shades of grey here since post 2016, they're just straight up as black as black can be. Heck, even before that with the tea party they were going that way. That's why i left the right. Like, I might have falling outs with the left, the democrats, disagreements over strategy, and sometimes I will say they are half evil...because they keep trying to meet the right and their straight up evil value system hald way. But generally speaking my values are left wing mostly. Unlike Nick Fuentes, when I talk about the good old days, I AM talking like 1999 or like 2009 culturally. Probably closer to 2009 since i like gay rights. Im not the most woke left extremist, I encourage some more moderation of those fronts, but the older i get, the more I sometimes realize that the "max left" or SJW left has a point about the right sometimes. Do I think they overdo it? Yeah. But the right is just...straight up evil. There's no point in compromising with them. We just gotta propose an alternate vision and defeat them. F the right. They're for bad things, we're for good things. It's literally just that simple. 

So yeah, let's discuss the NEETs playing video games thing...

 So, I know I'm citing Kyle a lot tonight, but he's the one inspiring these posts, but like the other one, I kinda wanna go in my own direction on this. So another video today discussed how MAGA hates young men. It especially focused on republicans demonizing young men in their 30s who live with their parents and play video games all day and don't work. Given, I fit the stereotype of this, I wanted to address the subject. 

Kyle approached this from the subject of MAGA actually being bad for young men if that's what they think of them. I have a different take. Yeah, we exist. Young men who dropped out of the work force? We exist. I think Yang pointed out theres actually a few million of us. it's not a ton, only like 2-3% of the population or something, but we exist. And yeah, a lot of us...have been voting MAGA because hey, guess what? WE DROPPED OUT BECAUSE THE ECONOMY ISN'T WORKING FOR US AND DEMOCRATS AREN'T HELPING!

I discussed this with Asmongold's clips. Hell, that's the only reason I find common ground with that guy. I'm not an alt righter. But I understand, when the democrats seem to abandon young men and seem to struggle to reach them, why many of us would go MAGA as an alternative. But MAGA is kind of...the antithesis of what we need. Because at the end of the day, the republicans will cut safety nets and tell us to get a job. And it's kinda funny, but a friend today sent me a link talking about how the republicans just cut "job corps", like how are we even supposed to get a job when they cut tools to get a job.

And let's go beyond that. MAGA. "Make America Great Again", isnt this whole movement originally based on "bringing back the jobs?" So it doesnt make sense that they'd also cut stuff to help people get a job, while telling us to get a job. It doesnt make any sense. Unless you're just some 19th century virtue signaller out of a charles dickens novel. Which...is basically what the republican party is. Let's face it. 

The point is, the economy doesnt work. As I said before, there are only so many jobs that can be made before the economy becomes inflationary, and we've already been at or near full employment, with the economy being relatively inflationary the past few years. The economy is the best it's gonna get, and it's still dogcrap for us. Because, again, our society is regressing to a 19th century charles dickens novel. 

Which brings us to one Mike Johnson, who was going on about how lazy men playing video games need to get a job and learn the "dignity of work." Kindly F off, mike. Keep your religious bullcrap to yourself. And yes, it's religious. This is protestant work ethic type crap. About how we need to be punished to learn the proper way of doing things, F right off with that, Mike. That kind of mentality just exists to punish the poor and to justify the rich owning the wealth. They're pushing the narrative of young men playing video games as a 2020s version of the "welfare queen" to drum up working class resentment against unemployed people, when in reality, we all should be resentful toward mike johnson, his brand of conservative politics, and the wealthy who control society. 

Seriously, the real problem with american capitalism is we give all of the money to the wealthy, expect them to create jobs with it, tell people the wealth will trickle down, blame the poor when it doesnt, and create narratives about how the real problem with society is lazy people. Like, we don't even do anything, literally. But the wealthy like to blame us, because, hey, it's not fair to joe working man that he has to work so hard while someone else just sits on the couch getting free healthcare, so let's punish that person and make them get a job too so we're all miserable!

Why don't we make a society where NO ONE is miserable? And in order to do that, we need to do the opposite. We need universal healthcare, we need basic income. And before the right starts coming in with their "oh yeah, well how are ya gonna pay for it?" I just wanna remind people, I do have funding plans for this stuff. And most working class people would actually be BETTER off, not worse off with it.  

Okay? So let's cut the crap about how people like me are the real problem with society. We're not. The real problem is all of these unhealthy attitudes we have toward work, and how we let these psycho republicans run things in the first place. Seriously, stop looking for people to hate on who aren't those at the top of the system who benefit from its current structure. It's just a distraction to drum up resentment, make people angry over nothing, and to cut social programs that not only should we have, we should expand. 

Again, I'm not saying that young unemployed men who only play video games don't exist. I'm just saying that rather than blame them and see them as the big problem with American society, we see the fact that they exist in the first place as a symptom of larger economic issues like Andrew Yang pointed out. Because again, I'm as stereotypical as we get with this, and let me just say, we don't get here for no reason. Something in American society isn't working for us to get into these situations. 

And beyond that, let's talk about employment in a real way here. Okay, so Kyle Kulinski, he's a political commentator. He doesnt have a traditional job. Making videos is his job. He has a patreon, he makes money off of it.

I don't have a job. But I'm also commenting on politics. But I don't make money off of it.

I'm also working on a book, which intersects with a lot of these subjects. Im not making money on it yet, but I might in the future. Am I unemployed? Technically. But I'm also trying to do something and "make it" in my own way. Who qualifies who has a job and is worthy and who doesn't? Does what really matter is who is successful? If kyle lost his career, would he be unemployed and be unable to get medicaid? What about a less successful content creator like me? 

Really. This is where we kinda get into the socialists and their work obsession, but honestly, we dont seem to have a problem with unemployed people as long as they're independently wealthy. We just hate them when it comes to redistribution of wealth, ie, paying taxes. And when we think about that, again, look at the links above, I brought receipts to this convo in terms of what policies I am for. On UBI, it would be a net benefit to the bottom 70% of the income distribution. On Medicare for all, if we implement a plan like I support, or bernie's plan, the employer contribution to healthcare is subject to a flat payroll tax of the same amount. The househouse tax is 4% in bernie's plan, 5% in mine. People currently pay 8% of their incomes on healthcare. So people are actually saving money. The only people who pay more would be relatively wealthy people. Like, this is why these narratives are dumb. Do the math. Think about your own interests here. Unless you're in the top, say, 20-30% of the income distribution, the kinds of universal ideas I am for would help you.

So for the love of god, stop blaming young men playing video games for your problems. We're the last thing you should be caring about. The republicans make up these narratives to justify insane cuts. And honestly, their cuts go further than just us. They wanna cut off many of the so called "deserving poor" off of medicaid too. people are screaming at republican town halls about how these cuts will kill them and we got ghouls like fricking Joni Ernst, the breadbag lady, going on about how "well we're all gonna die..." These people are evil. Literally evil. How many times do I have to say it? Stop listening to them. Stop supporting MAGA. The entire thing is a scam to enrich the already wealthy anyway. 

So let's talk 2028....

 So...Kyle Kulinski covered a poll by Atlas that discussed the early numbers for the 2028 presidential primary. it's only one poll, but I really felt like giving my own commentary here as this is giving me 2020 PTSD. 

The poll had the following candidates:

Pete Buttigieg- 31.8%

AOC- 19.4%

Kamala Harris- 16.6%

Cory Booker- 10.4%

Gavin Newsom- 7.1%

Josh Shapiro- 4.8%

Gretchen Whitmer- 3.7%

Raphael Warnock- 1.4%

Chris Murphy- 0.4%

Ro Khanna- 0.3%

Stephen A Smith- 0.3%

Andy Beshear- 0.2%

Rahm Emanuel- 0.2%

JB Pritzker- 0.1%

None of the above- 3.6%

So....yeah. let's discuss.

Here's the thing. This reminds me of 2020 in a way. I remember Joe Biden started off around 30-35%, Bernie having less, around like 15-20%, and then the field being split between a bunch of other, mostly centrist candidates. And that's what's happening here.

Pete Buttigieg is the new Joe Biden. He's an inoffensive white male centrist after they ran a woman/POC and yeah, he seems to be getting the nod here. And I just have to ask...why?! Why do people like these boring ### centrist candidates? Like, really, Buttigieg is like...well....like a piece of the pre cut store bread to me. Ya know, bland, tasteless, you kinda gotta put stuff on it to make it good, even then, it's not the best bread in the world. It's inoffensive, but it's maddeningly so. 

And I kinda get it, a lot of democrats have this weird mentality of wanting boring and inoffensive candidates, believing running candidates that can actually run on something and are "too spicy" are risky. We might "lose" if we do that in their mind. And a lot of democrats are like these conservative gen Xers or older who just want a stable leader who wont do much. Like, they should be conservatives, because they are, but because trump is, himself "too spicy" for them, want bland crap.

But the problem is, the country, as a whole, wants more tasteful options. While after the roller coaster that is trump, bland and stale might sound kinda good, kinda like, well, saltine crackers (biden reference) when you just ended up puking your brains out from food poisoning,  it's not actually gonna stop the country from wanting that spicy meatball full of e coli again. So in 2032 we'll be in the same situation, we'll vote for some batcrap insane republican again, and the cycle will continue. We are in hell. 

Now, AOC is the second choice, and that's good, but bernie was the second choice in 2020. Again, 20% for the progressive wing is normal. And even if AOC takes off, the dems can still rally around their candidate, get the others to drop out, and everyone is a team player around buttigieg. Just like with Biden in 2020. 

And yeah, then we got Harris at #3. I'm kinda surprised, i thought she was still the top candidate, but I guess she might be falling off. I think she's kinda done as far as candidates go. The country was clear they didnt want her in 2024 and I think her running again would be a mistake. 

 Beyond that, numbers drop precipitously. Cory Booker is at like 10% due to his filibuster stunt. Not gonna lie, he has balls, and balls is what we need. he might be another bland centrist, but he does have a little more spice right now just from that.

Gavin newsom, ew. His numbers for 2024 were TERRIBLE and honestly, he's been going full compromise mode post 2024. Now he's for work requirements for medicaid and he's selling out on everything. Even if I could vote for a bland centrist at this point just to stop trump, newsom is just too compromised. He's literally making too many deals with the devil thinking his political future is kissing up to maga and becoming half republican.

 Josh shapiro, meh, I'm from PA, i dont mind him as governor, but after seeing how he was around harris with how ambitious and forceful he was, I really dont like him for president. Stay here in PA, josh. 

Gretchen whitmer, I discussed her before, mixed thoughts but somewhat negative. 

And beyond that, do I even need to bother?

But yeah. That's the field according to this one poll, and I'm not going to lie, I don't like this. At all. I honestly think the whole centrist brand is toxic. I think running another corporate moderate who runs on "abundance" or some crap is gonna just be a losing strategy. And even if they pull off 2028, they'll lose 2032 again. When are dems gonna get the memo? PEOPLE DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE CENTRISTS. I guess there's a lot of dem primary voters who do but general election wise these candidates are just horrible and boring and no one likes them. There's a reason why even with as bad as Trump is acting, people will still approve of republicans more. Because at least they have flavor, even if they give you a bad case of food poisoning after eating them. I hope this is an outlier and that things change as time goes on.

As a matter of fact, let's look for more data. Race for the white house does seem to be aggregating stuff. Their results are:

 Kamala Harris- 24%

Pete Buttigieg- 20%

AOC- 14.1%

Cory Booker- 8.9%

Gavin Newsom- 6.6%

Josh Shapiro- 4.8%

Tim Walz- 4.4%

This isn't much different. Harris is better. Buttigieg is worse. AOC is worse. People still seem to be hanging on to Harris, which shows how unimaginative a lot of dem voters are. Yeah, let's run the lady who JUST LOST again...Buttigieg is challenging her though and within range to pass her. She's on the down based on the trend line they have, while buttigieg and AOC are gaining ground in her place. So the atlas poll is probably...where the trajectory is going. Buttigieg is looking to be the #1 pick. AOC is at #2. Harris is probably gonna continue to decline. 

Again, I dont really see buttigieg as an improvement over harris. He's the same thing just about. Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, they represent that same crappy centrist lane of politics. The same kind of politics that needs to just drop off faster than harris herself is dropping off here. Seriously guys, "abundance liberalism" isnt the answer. Outside of maybe housing where legit supply bottlenecks exist in the biggest cities, it's just rebranded third way crap AGAIN. It's not gonna solve the problem. They're trying to address the issues in conservative terms, arguing that instead of focusing on redistribution, we focus more on things like "growth" and "opportunity." It's BS. When will we fricking learn? How many times do we have to keep losing to the fricking republicans? Jesus christ, these guys are like the 85 year old who wont hand over the keys already. You cant drive any more, youre just gonna crash the car again. STOP!

...*sigh*...I hate these people. Not as much as the GOP right now, but almost as much. If the GOP is evil, these guys are half evil because they meet them half way on everything. And if the GOP wasn't literally dismantling our democracy and trying to go full 1984, I'd still be protest voting them. 

Issuing a challenge to homophobic Christians

 So....a voice actor for King of the Hill was shot and killed in a homophobic hate crime yesterday. Sadly, this isn't the first time I've heard of such stuff. It came as a shock to me when I went to college, but this stuff...happens in our society. And it's really messed up. I remember my introduction to learning about this crap was reading the Laramie Project and learning of Matthew Shepard. And then seeing all of those Westboro baptist ghouls waving around signs saying God hates...you know. 

ANYWAY, I remember learning about that had a really profound effect on me, having come from a more fundamentalist Christian environment. I learned all through high school how homosexuality was evil, and it was a sin, and blah blah blah. But hey, whatever, homosexuality is, well....let's face it, this is worse. i know some christians will deny that, claiming all sins are equal. Well, ask yourself this. 

Is murder REALLY equal to homosexuality? Even if you believe it to be a sin, that's messed up. One actually deletes a person's existence. The other...well...let's face it, it's just a weird sex sin. It's kinda minor in the grand scheme of things. The consequentialist nature of it is indistinguishable from hetero sex. And I know christians get so high and mighty over hetero sex, but they aren't so gung ho on it that they wanna do what say, the islamic fundamentalist countries do and stone people to death over it. Ya know?

If you think something is a sin, there's nothing wrong with you choosing not to engage in it. But just as christians would often say that even if they dont agree with divorce, adultery, premarital sex, etc., they arent gonna punish people on it.

And yet a lot of people seem to just be okay with deleting LGBT+ people. I also seen a story lately where people were celebrating the death of a trans teen who jumped off of some bridge somewhere. It's sick. And let me ask you...do you think Jesus would approve of this crap?

 Jesus once said that the whole bible and all of gods commands could be boiled down to two commandments, love god, love your neighbor. How the #### is THIS loving your neighbor? This is the opposite of love, this is HATE. Even if you think homosexuality is a sin, how can you guys live with yourselves or your religion having so much hate toward them to the point that people wanna kill them, or celebrate their deaths? What kind of culture are you guys cultivating over there?

You know, this stuff also played a role in my own deconversion too. I'd see gay people in my own life and I knew one was explicitly anti christian because they "hated her." And to be fair, given the crap they get, I dont blame them. And as I developed my own understanding, at one point, I faced a dilemma. The word of the bible is that men sleeping with men is sin an abomination. It's in the bible, it's there, I can't deny it. But at the same time, how does this lead to loving one's neighbor? Should christians accept the bible even when it makes them hateful? 

 And that's the challenge that I'll offer you guys. What's more important here? The letter of the law? Or the spirit of it? The spirit of the law is supposed to be love. The letter of the law leads to hate. But if you undermine the letter of the law, you end up rejecting the bible, which many christians will see as their holy book and source of their morality, and in a sense, you become like adam and eve eating the apple, choosing to "be like god" if you do that, you decide morality yourselves. You dont just obey. You make a conscious decision to be moral. 

 What say you?

 I left religion in part over stuff like this. It wasn't the only reason. I had so many reasons to leave that this guy's video series is a good synopsis of what the process is like. It was many things that drove me away.  But this was one of them.

 Look at what you guys are bringing into the world doing this. You're not being good examples of your faith. You're not showing yourself to be signs of gods love when you hate on gay people. You are showing yourselves to be hateful and bigoted, and everything that Jesus himself wasn't. Just think about it.