RED ALERT: Trump talks about not having 2026 midterms

 Okay, remember how I said Trump is such an existential threat to democracy that even I felt like I had to vote Biden/Harris in 2024? Yeah....this is why. After January 6th, I knew he would try this crap. I mean, he tried to overthrow election results once, of course he would try to do it again. 

Now, as articles point out, he has no authority to cancel elections, but I'm sure he's gonna try. Emergency powers to declare curfew on election day, ban mail in voting, crap like that. Not to mention the rank militarization of police and deploying the national guard on US soil to give blue states a hard time. Dude's a dictator. Or at least he wants to be. 

So yeah. Right now, the plan is to leverage the 2026 midterms to at least win the house. That will allow democrats to put checks and balances on him, given how right now he has the run of the entire federal government as the GOP is mostly falling in line behind him. But if he just cancels elections, we're kinda cooked, democracy is kinda cooked.

So yeah, we need to sound the alarm bells over this. We are at a very dangerous point in American history, and idk where this is gonna go. I don't even really wanna go there. And uh, yeah. I'm gonna end it here.  

As a consumer, I don't care about AI either

 So, I follow a lot of techtubers relevant to my own interests, and many of them were covering CES, aka, the "Consumer Electronics Show." However, many of them have noted that there's barely any coverage of actual stuff consumers want this year. The entire thing is a big AI hugbox. Barely anyone really innovated, they just pushed the AI stuff trying to make their stockholders happy. because everything is a hugbox about AI now. It's our entire economy just about. It's held up by like 5 companies all shifting money back and forth because everyone thinks everyone wants AI.

But here's the thing, no one really wants AI. At least not "normal" people. Normal people are starting to hate the idea of it. I mean, it's driving up the costs of computing substantially. RAM is quadruple the price it used to be. GPUs have been increasingly expensive for years. Some say we're witnessing the death of traditional computer, and you'd think at a consumer oriented electronics show, we'd see consumer oriented electronics. But no, most of CES is just AI AI AI AI AI! 

It's been like this for a few years now. I remember right after I bought my i9 12900k two years ago, I was reading about how they wanted to shoehorn "NPUs" into CPUs to have on board AI. And how this was the next biggest thing. And despite having little interest in it, I was like "oh great, planned obsolescence!" Like, fearing that these NPUs would obsolete me where games in 5 years are gonna start wanting onboard AI chips to do things. Well...as it turns out, NPUs were mostly a bust, and no one actually cares. They just want more powerful CPUs. 

And then there's stuff like microsoft copilot, which is being shoehorned into everything, and no one cares. Gemini, no one cares. The fact is, for the most part, NO ONE FRICKING CARES! 

Like really, these rich people need a reality check. AI is this trendy 2020s era buzzword, but I really know next to no one who genuinely cares about it or who uses it to make their life better. I mean, I admit I use it to bounce ideas off of once in a while, but that's about it. I dont talk to it every day. Quite frankly, the more I learn of its limitations the less I want to. It just isn't a revolution in a positive way. Most breakthroughs are negative. Like grok undressing people including minors, which is a big story this week. Or people having AI write papers for them in college. Or people going insane as AI tends to exacerbate peoples' mental illnesses. AI kinda reminds me of guilty spark from halo at times with that. Like, yeah, helpful computer thing, until it goes absolutely insane for some reason. 

Of course, again, I'm not entirely against the tech. I'm just against how forcefully it's being rammed down our throats and the negative societal consequences. It isn't making life better for the normal person. If anything it's making things worse. People are losing their jobs to it. Normally, the argument is when corporations do well so do people because trickle down economics and "job creators", but when people are literally losing their jobs over this stuff and no one is hiring except for the gestapo (ICE), yeah, again, I can see why people become luddites. I dont agree with the logic, as for me it's just a call for a UBI instead, but that's who AI is truly benefitting. It's corporations, professionals. They can replace human workers with it. They can do more with less. It has positive value for industry. But it does F all for normal people. \

And you know what? I wish this AI bubble would just pop and that this whole obsession with it would die so I can afford actual...consumer electronics again. I dont want 32 GB of DDR5 RAM to cost $300-400. I dont want to be stuck with 8 GB GPUs forever. And I dont wanna rent computers from Jeff Bezos or Nvidia or something and connect to the cloud for gaming. 

Like that's the thing. Given how this was originally about consumer electronics, let's discuss what consumers want. We want cheaper computers again. Cheaper game consoles. Affordable computing. We want to be able to build a computer for under $1000 that isn't entry level (hello, gabe cube pricing). We want to be able to buy that stuff for like $500-600. We want GPUs that are $200 and actually play games well. We want ones that are $300 to have more than 8 GB VRAM. We want 32GB DDR5 to go back to being like $100. We want cool new tech that can play games better. We want more powerful smartphones for less money. We want the switch 2 to be like $300, not $450. We want the other consoles to be around $500, or maybe less on sale. We dont want to pay more than $600 for a next gen console at launch and we want the cost of that to go down. We want our current hardware which we paid good money for to have reasonable longevity and not be obsoleted because tech bros decided to chase trends we don't care about and then ram them down our throats.

I'm not saying AI has to go. Again, I'm not anti AI, but let's be frank about AI in the 2020s. The tech is in its infancy, its power inefficient, and while I can see why the US government has use for it as the race to invest in AI is the 2020s version of the space race. It has a lot of important, say, DOD style applications. Corporations can use it to do things more efficiently, it's not all bad. But let's get rid of this idea of having AI in every PC for now. Maybe it'll be relevant in say, 10-20 years, but not now. Again, trying to push it now is like pushing for people to have PCs in like, 1960 or something. We'll eventually get there, but PCs didn't become a thing until 1980s at the earliest, and I'd argue they didn't go mainstream until the 90s or even the 2000s. But yeah. Imagine trying to shoehorn 1990s tech in like 1960....it's the same problem AI has now. Sure, that stuff had DOD style use cases....like....calculating physics for the literal space race. And it arguably had industrial uses too. But back at the time most people were like "yeah normal people will never need this" and now it's in everything. So yeah, I'm not gonna say it'll never get to that point for the rest of us, but again, we're talking a time scale of decades here. It's not there yet, and trying to force it is as disruptive to the economy now, as trying to force everyone to adopt PCs in the 1960s would've been. The tech just needs more time to cook before it's ready for widespread adoption. And trying to force it now is just disrupting the entire economy and making a lot of normal people very unhappy. 

Even as far as like DOD applications go...we need to be careful with this stuff. I mean, properly regulated, it could be useful. However, we current got a fascist government consolidating power, going around normal protections to build corporate databases like Palantir with data on every American. And that crap is 1984. And who else knows wtf these people are doing with AI behind the scenes. Plotting authoritarian takeovers, predicting and preparing for citizen resistance to said authoritarian takeovers. This AI stuff is being associated with the baddies. It's being used for evil. I mean, there's a lot of grim talk recently about how Palantir was founded to help kill left wingers, which....is rather forboding. And given how Peter Thiel and Elon Musk seem to be quite frankly anti democracy itself, yeah, there's a lot of concern there.

Again, this is why a lot of people are just anti AI in general. I recognize it's not the tech so much that it's how it's used, but when a bunch of out of touch billionaires with fascist sympathies are using it at the expense of normal people, can anyone be surprised when normal people grow to hate it?

But yeah. I'm tired of this AI crap. I kinda wish this bubble would just pop so we can move on with our lives. I know it'll cause a recession, but we all know it's coming anyway. The bubble is already there. It's just a matter of when it pops already.  

Battlefield boomers are gonna ruin battlefield 6

 So...Battlefield 6. I got it. I play it all the time. It's my main game. Ive barely touched my other christmas games because BF6 is so good. It's the best battlefield since BF4. The game play is great. I can't say it's a perfect game. Some matches are insanely unbalanced, and the progression is so slow it's like watching grass grow. But all in all, solid 9/10 game. 

But I'm not here to review the game, I'm here to bash the haters. I've noted this phenomenon through the BF5 and 2042 eras, but forums like reddit are overtaken by what I call the "battlefield boomers." These being the people so obsessed with the past and hating on current thing while looking at least thing through rose colored glasses, it's ridiculous. And with BF6, their big problem is "OMG THE MAPS ARE TOO SMALL, IT'S NOT REAL BATTLEFIELD, WHAAA!" The reality? Well, I'd say about half the maps ARE tight urban maps that have relatively high player density. And I admit when I participated in some play tests and the beta, I have to admit it was jarring at first, all in all, I've gotten used to it, and the game now feels pretty nice. If anything, these maps are well built. The smaller ones arent too small. They're rarely operation metro or locker style player densities. They're like small-medium type maps like we've seen in the good old days, and those maps were often the most popular. because this is gonna shock the battlefield boomers, but a lot of people *gasp* LIKE infantry focused gameplay! They dont like those massive maps where you gotta walk like 300m to the next point only to get farmed by tanks and snipers. 

And it's not like larger maps dont exist. They do. There are quite large maps in this game as well. The game has something for everyone. But then these guys are like REEE BATTLEFIELD 3 and 4 were so much bigger and blah blah blah. Like...are we playing the same games? It's like they just selectively look at the maps and look at the games with nostalgia goggles.

And a constant complaint I keep hearing is we need bigger maps. And I'm gonna be the anti circlejerk here. No. No we don't. No one actually enjoys playing massive maps but snipers and vehicle drivers. Most people played small to medium sized maps. Im not saying we cant have a handful of larger maps, but to be fair, they're typically less popular.

Anyway, I hope dice learns to never ever listen to these people. They're morons and they ruin everything they touch. They're a vocal minority that hates on current thing no matter what it is and acts like similar thing from 15 years ago was so much better. I admit, I have nothing but love and respect for those 15 year old or so games these days. They're the best era of BF games. But this latest one replicated the magic and these guys are STILL complaining. Why? because much like the equivalent players in the halo community, you cant satisfy them. They're perpetually stuck in their own little golden age that only exists in their heads, and they hate on current thing no matter what. I've seen the halo community complain when they literally remastered halo 2 in a new engine with better graphics. Im serious. it's the same game, and they'll still complain because it's not the same as the 2004 one. I've seen people complain saying halo 3 on MCC is bad because it's not exactly the same as the 360 version. You can't take these people seriously. They're stuck in the past, they'll never ever be happy. Because their entire worldview is run by nostalgia. It's like the member berry thing from south park. Everything modern is bad, everything in the past was great, and you can never make them happy. 

BF6 is awesome. It's the best battlefield game in a decade. I'm addicted to playing it. I love it far more than I ever did 5 and 2042. Just fix the fricking progression system to make it less oppressive. That's literally my only major complaint.  

Doom: The Dark Ages is everything wrong with modern FPS gaming

 So, people who know me will know I've always been a HUGE doom fan. I got the first game 30 years ago on the Genesis 32x and have been addicted to it ever since. It's always been simple. Here's a gun, there's a bunch of demons from hell, KILL. RIP AND TEAR UNTIL IT IS DONE! 

The OG games were classics and still hold up to this day. Even more so with modded engines like GZdoom.

Doom 3 took the series in a survival horror direction that kind of was divisive, but I didnt DISlike it. I mean, it still felt like doom. It was slower, and more corridor shooty, but that was the zeitgeist of the times, and the 2000s era FPS games are kinda my thing.  

After that, Id kinda dropped the franchise. THey made quake 4, Rage, Wolfenstein games, and eventually came back in 2016. And Doom 2016 was arguably the best FPS of the 2010s campaign wise. 2016 was the peak of gaming for me, and after that, everything went to crap.

In 2020, they released Doom Eternal. That one was a bit divisive for me. here's the thing. When I play doom, I wanna shut my brain off and shoot things. Doom eternal added too much strategy to the game. Now it's like, use X gun to kill X demon in specific way. And then you face giant arenas full of varied demon types and you either switch between the guns every 5 seconds to kill X demon with Y gun as intended, or you just blast everything with the super shotgun and hope it works. And I'm...the latter. I dont got time for that crap.

I also disliked the direction the DLC took where they made the game more punishingly hard, the levels tedious and long, and doubled down on "use X gun to kill Y demon" not even making it optional.

So....after eternal, I went into dark ages with a mixed view on the direction of the franchise....and the dark ages seemed to double down on the bad stuff. Now there's a shield with a gun, you gotta parry and dodge at the right moments, use the shield at the right moment to block attacks, and it's like despite being like 6 levels in they're dropping more and more mechanics and sub mechanics on me. I'm frustrated with it. This isn't the good I grew up with. it's not the doom that I love. I wouldnt even call it doom any more. It's more like....some warhammer game or something like vermintide with guns.  

Really. ANd it just begs the question: why? Why did the game have to go in this direction? Again, originally it was here's a gun, there's your enemy, shoot them until you win. But now we need tons of mechanics and sub mechanics and parrying and all of this complexity and difficulty. Just having an experience of shooting stuff isn't enough. It has to be hard, it has to be complicated. 

It feels like every game is like this. It's why I'm nostalgic of the 90s and 2000s where games were just, shoot things until you win. But those are like "uncslop" type games now or whatever. Zoomers have more sophisticated tastes. They want more complexity. Normal deathmatch is no longer a thing. Now we need extraction shooters. We need tons and tons of recoil for a high "skill ceiling." We need mechanics on top of mechanics in doom now. Everything has to feel like an RPG. And everything feels complicated. And I hate it. I miss how we can't just have simple FPS games any more. Everything has to be complex, everything has to have a motif, a gimmick, and it isn't fun. Games in the 2020s kinda suck at times. And it's not even just the nostalgia for the past in this case. because this is the grandaddy of all FPS franchises just about. And they're messing up. 

Oh well, at least old games still exist and are fun. 

Discussing how the right lies about everything

 So....this has been a hell of a week, hasn't it? Last year we were ringing in the new year, and it feels like we've experienced a whole year, or at least 1-2 months of collective trauma already. We've invaded a foreign country and stole their oil, and now ICE shot that lady in Minneapolis for no reason, and now two more in portland. And the most baffling part about the latter is the Trump administration's lies. Here's the video, warning, it's kind of graphic, but you dont see blood or anything. Anyway the trump administration is trying to frame this like the woman was some radical leftist trying to run over ICE officers with her car. And it's like...WTF. No. That isn't what we just saw. 

Like, if I were to be as objective and fair to ICE personnel as possible, I can KINDA see an argument for why pulling away from cops can be seen as dangerous, but the only danger the ICE officers were in was the danger they put themselves in by being that close to the car. The woman was clearly trying to swerve to avoid hitting anyone, just trying to flee. And while some of more authoritarian persuasions would argue she should have complied, well, yeah. Either way, this wasn't a justified use of force. This is what happens when you give untrained morons guns. Because let's face it, ICE people arent well trained. They accept literally almost anyone and are just giving these guys weapons. 

And honestly, let's not miss the big point, THIS SHOULDN'T HAVE EVEN HAPPENED. Like, okay, even if we grant the ICE officers every possible excuse under the sun. Okay. Well, why are they being deployed to Minnesota? They afraid Canadians are gonna come over the border? Why would they wanna come here? And no, that's not the real reason. They're there because 1) they're just deploying people to blue cities/states to make the citizens there miserable for daring to vote against the orange one, and 2) there's a community of Somali Americans that MAGA is making a big deal about and acting like they're turning the place into Mogadishu by virtue of being uncivilized or something. Ya know, more of that "they're eating the cats and dogs" crap except more like "this is literally black hawk down." So...hassling somali immigrants by virtue of being somali immigrants because MAGA are a bunch of racist, white nationalist, pieces of crap. 

And that's the big thing. Trump/Noem just deployed these people to Minneapolis without the local government's consent (hell, the mayor of Minneapolis in response to the incident literally told them to "gtfo"), and this incident happened. And when called on it, well, suddenly the woman was a radical leftist who tried to run over ICE agents intentionally. No, no she wasn't. She was some single mom who dropped her kids off at school or something, got stuck at an ICE checkpoint, and when a masked agent pulled up to her window shoving a gun in her face and telling her to get out of the car she freaked and ran. 

Again, this incident never should've happened. because ICE should've never been there. Sorry, not sorry. And that's the real moral of the story. THis is a policy failure, and this is directly on Trump and Noem's hands. Again, you can argue maybe she shouldn't have run as running from law enforcement is never a good idea, but still again, kinda ignoring the even bigger problem here that this deployment was technically illegal, it was unwanted, but hey, its okay for mr law and order over here to do whatever he wants because it doesnt account as illegal when he does it because he's trying to sieze control of the law enforcement apparatus. 

Anyway, can we at least agree that he's lying when he calls her some radical leftist terrorist? I mean, wtf? This administration has no shame when it comes to lying. Just like they called Kilmar Abrego Garcia a gang member or drug trafficker or whatever BS narrative they made up about him. Disgusting. 

The "millennial uncle" is my spirit animal

 *looks sternly at zoomers and gen alpha whenever one of my interests is brought up*

YOU DON'T KNOW CRAP ABOUT THAT, DO YOU? I WAS THERE WHEN POKEMON CAME OUT. I PLAYED GEN 1. I WAS THE FIRST ONE IN MY SCHOOL TO FIND THE MISSINGNO GLITCH. I SPENT 9/11 WATCHING DBZ. 

True story...

 Okay, so....I've been finding these kinds of videos making fun of us millennials now in our 30s when we try to relate to younger generations, and I'm just gonna say, yeah...I get it. I own being the quintessential 90s kid. I own being in the age range that is being made fun of here. And I own sounding like that in trying to talk to younger people. 

Heck, these zoomers and alphas have even called the games I grew up with "unc slop." Once again, I own that. And a lot of those games are better than the newer stuff that exists today, sorry, not sorry. 

Compared to the 90s, I thought the 2000s sucked at the time. I mean, 9/11, the stock market crash, and us being in this weird awkward age of digital stuff that never really aged well. I dont glorify that stuff as much as SOME do, but I do have some nostalgia toward it. 

Still. I miss the 2000s. They were a better time than now. Even if Bush-Cheney functionally ruined the 2000s in effect, Trump is like Bush Cheney's worst attributes on steroids. 

And culturally, it was better. It wasn't woke, or alt right. It just was. And everyone fricking understood it. We had more productive conversations on the internet. Games didnt suck, and we seemed to have a lot more of them a lot more quickly. And they got cheap quickly too because tech was ever advancing and stuff that was 4 years old at the time was considered ancient that could be run on your new family computer with integrated graphics. Again, it wasnt perfect, but it was better than now. 

And...on the whole divide between us millennials who have inherited the role gen x used to have as being the chill middle aged generation, and gen x turning into the new conservative boomer stereotypes, well...at least we can relate to you guys. And at least we try. And this millennial uncle stereotype, it's us trying to relate to you guys, to teach you more about the world and what came before you. We're trying to teach you our proud culture as the first generation to walk in the digital divide in a reasonable way. Because trust me, that's...the biggest cultural divide between generations. The pre internet people don't get the modern world at all. They dont. They can't relate to us like...AT ALL on things sometimes. They think that our PS2s were "nintendos", that's how out of touch they are. You hand them a video game controller and they wont know what to do. They might even struggle with simply turning on a computer or a tablet, let alone using it. 

Us...we get it. We get gaming. We were the forebearers of it. The franchises you know and love, we love too. And we remember the old stuff. You guys play pokemon legends ZA, we're here still going on about how great gen 1 was. You go on about anime, we tell you about toonami. You talk about the PS5, we talk about the PS2. We're basically you, just older. And we're just trying to relate to you. Would you rather we do that, or to do what our parents did and try to ban video games because they thought they caused violence? 

I admit, sometimes we push too hard. We act like the 90s and 2000s were perfect. They weren't. And I know some 90s kids can be quite annoying. Still. Again. You could do worse. You could end up with older generations who cant relate to you at all. Trust me, that's worse. 

Anyway, that's what I call aging gracefully. Basically being in my late 30s and still having an inner child that wants to play video games. Maybe our classics are....15-30 years out of date by this point. But they're still good. Kinda like action movies from the 80s were still good in the 2000s. Thats basically what "uncslop" is. It's stuff from 20 years ago that's still cool today. Just like how when it was the 2000s some of us still liked stuff from the 80s and 90s, especially in movies. But I digress. Respect your elders, kids. You don't know crap about that 30 year old franchise you happen to like the latest game on. We were there when it was created. 

I don't care about "AI slop" in video games

 So...AI is a complicated topic for me politically, mainly because of the political divisions involved. The right LOVES AI, wants to inject it into everything, destroy all the jobs, not have safety nets, MONEY MONEY MONEY! And the left...HATES AI, and acts like it murdered their dog because of the likes of Elon musk and silicon valley just pushing it in such an obnoxious way.

And here I am, in the middle, a pro technology progressive who loves the idea of AI, even if I hate the actual implementation at the hands of all of these corporations and billionaires. I don't care if AI takes jobs. Because, my whole thing is, we shouldnt be forced to work for a living any more in the first place. We should change our social structures to accommodate people in the 21st century away from an economy based on work, and quite frankly, I feel like the left are just luddites on this, becoming derangedly against AI in an absolutist, tribalistic fashion. Meanwhile, the right is basically going way too far with it, pushing it super aggressively into everything when it just doesnt have as many consumer uses, and now we cant afford computers any more because these corporations are buying up the entire world supply of RAM. And electricity is becoming expensive because they're buying up all the electricity. I've heard some call AI like the tree of might from DBZ where it's just sucking up everything and destroying the earth in the process.

But, again, for me, this isn't even AI as a concept that's bad. It's the implementation. It's pushing too much too fast. If we tried to do this with computers in the 1950s, we'd have the same problem. The tech just wasnt advanced enough, and it was super inefficient. And if the wealthy decided to suck up all the world's resources to bring us computers in the 1950s through, say, our TVs and radios, we'd have the same problem. It's energy efficiency that's the problem. Not the tech itself. It's the ownership among billionaires that's the problem. Not the tech itself. Basically, the problem of AI is a problem of rich people and billionaires, not a problem with the tech itself. And we can hate the rich people and the billionaires, I mean, no argument from me. But hating AI itself is dumb? AI IS the future to some degree. Every decade, we see innovation and new tech. Radios, TVs, computers, the internet, and they always revolutionize our societies. And AI is just...another step of that. And if we oppose it, we're gonna sound like our boomer parents going on about how great things were back in the 1970s. Yeah, okay mom, let's get you to bed already. Ya know? Seriously, a lot of US are turning into that in our 30s and 40s and it's dumb. 

If AI saves companies money on artists and they put it in games, what do I care, as long as the quality of the final product is good? but it seems like people just categorically hate AI in games. Like we should only use real artists, and they should be paid salaries, and jobs are good, shouldnt we have jobs? NO! We should fricking long for the day AI can replace work, so we can work less, again, the problem is our societal model of expecting people to work for a living...to live in a world where everyone is expected to work for a living, and if suddenly people can't work for a living, that's bad because our entire economy is designed around forcing people to work for a living. So maybe we shouldnt have to work for a living. Unpopular idea, but thats how I see it. Let them take all the jobs. I don't care. Just pay me for doing nothing instead. Ya know? 

Again, AI isn't bad in and of itself. AI is bad because our societal model is bad. We should address those societal issues. If we do that, AI becomes not just not a problem, but a solution to a lot of problems. Again, you just gotta break your mind out of this weird job centric mindset and suddenly it all makes sense. AI is good, it's not bad. It's billionaires that are bad, and it's our economic model that is bad. Tahnks for coming to my ted talk.