Shittiest take on this community by far.

It’s an myriad of reasons from what I can tell. Americans are conditioned to think along the status quo lines even if there is certain degree of freedom of thought. The American corporate media carves the political landscape to intentionally but subtly influence folks to pick either only Democrats or Republicans.

Another reason is that, I suppose rugged invidualism won out in the American society for better mobilisation. As you rightly pointed out, there just isn’t grassroots activism among American people (not counting civil and lgbt rights which are undoubtedly grassroots activism and successful ones at that). But this isn’t what it used to be. Before and in the early 20th century, there have been other third political parties still gaining respectable number of votes, the last one being the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debbs. He won a respectable 1 million votes as a presidential candidate while campaigning from prison during World War I.

Not sure what happened why political grassroots activism that could counter either Democratic and Republican parties died out, but my guess is that the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century may have had a hand to convince people to stick with two parties, as well as heavy emphasis on individualistic values.

For me, the worst is either Batman and Robin, or the first 30 minutes of The Killing Joke where Batman fucked Batgirl (say what you will about their relationship, it is just plain weird of them to become romantically involved).

As for the Dark Knight Rises, I see where you’re coming from. I think Nolan directed the last movie in such a way so that people would not crave for another sequel. It’s not bad, but it is not titilating. A lot of directors “underperform” on their works so that the audience would not demand for another. Some movies just doesn’t deserve more sequels than needed.

In Germany, where there is stricter gun control, there was an incident in which a bystander tackled the knife attacker. The police mistook the bystander as the perpetrator, and because the police were distracted, the attacker got up and stabbed two more people including one of the police officers. https://apnews.com/article/germany-mannheim-stabbing-police-officer-death-a66c14970a53464aff0c1c77a7196481

I agree with others. The idea of “good guy with a gun will stop the bad guy with a gun” is pretty much wishful thinking if the police arrives on the scene and mistakes who. It does not matter whether there is gun control or not, the good guy could be mistaken in the midst of chaos.

You know what, the American obsession with guns has never been anything to do with “protection”, it’s about being ammosexual.

He’s still the pope, of course he’d say this. However, the majority of Indonesians are Muslims. As if the opinion of a Catholic leader would matter much.

Yes, we should prepare for the coming of AI. However, we overestimated the rate of AI development. Iirc 80% of investors lost money from investing in AI companies because the technology is not up to scratch yet. I mean, how many people asked something from ChatGPT and gave you wrong answers frequently?

I didn’t even know Mastodon has an exclusive club streak lol.

Hmm… that’s fair but it seems that Epic even forgot to think of end users-- the gamers-- in that regard before trying to compete with Steam. They prioritised devs first over the actually most important stakeholder.

To be honest, I totally forgot about Epic until articles are popping recently that it’s not going well even after all these years.

Also, what’s wrong about discussing this? Epic is a good example of a business venture not doing well for failing to do one of the most basic business philosophy: set yourself apart from the competitors.

I’m far from being a business savvy person, but honestly, from business perspective what exactly is Epic offering that sets them apart from other competitors? Even if Epic fixed their launcher issues, how would they be different to Steam that is already well established for 20 years? That’s why I like GOG as Steam’s competitor. GOG focuses on selling DRM-free and retro games. If a game also happens to be available in GOG, I would prefer to buy it from there than Steam. Moreover, GOG keep old games well maintained and updated to run in modern computers; something that Steam is very poor at doing. What does Epic even do differently, apart from doing exclusives which any companies could do?

I’m playing Witcher 2 and fighting the first boss and got stuck.

So, I’m screwed…a lot…

I thought it is already out.

Ireland has attracted many tech companies including Twitter, and the latter has a massive employment footprint here.

Somehow I read that in an English accent.

George Lucas said he wanted the prequels to be more like a children’s story, which explains a lot. I am one of those kids who enjoyed the prequels, but even at the time I saw some flaws but didn’t mind it. I always viewed the Star Wars as an adventure story and should not be taken as seriously. A competent enough creative team should be able to suspend the audience’s disbelief.

The original trilogy is better of course, but the prequels still has a sense of direction and vision. The sequels never had that with too many “creative” visions hampering each other. The sequels suffered from the case of having too many cooks in the kitchen but none of them have any plans whatsoever.

The sequels people like for the action and entertainment

I have the same feeling but for prequels.

I never took Star Wars very seriously and I always see the story and lore as being a fun adventure. But the problem with the sequels is that it doesn’t have the direction and vision. I don’t know about the others, but for me that made the sequels not click.

I’d be curious indeed what people in ten years will say about the sequel trilogy. But I have a strong feeling that it will still be disliked, because it did not have a vision and is a jigsaw mess unlike the prequels. The latter has a vision at least (thanks to Lucas still being at the helm), in spite of the cringey parts. The sequels did not have him and Disney just simply wants to milk the Star Wars IP which made sequels such a bore.

Fair enough except hell isn’t real. The Talmud/Old Testament doesn’t even mention it.

To be honest, even proselytisation can come off as being condescending. A Christian is basically telling to the person “my religion is better than yours. You are a sinful person and you will be cast into the fires of hell. It will not happen to you if you accept Jesus as lord and saviour!” And it is not like evangelisation is done out of pure power of persuasive words and good teachings from the bible alone. Aside from threat of eternal damnation, many missionnaries tend to incentivise people by offering food or help, in exchange for the locals to listen to proselytisation.

I’m no longer religious, but I find that religion has some sense in its own right. Provided it’s not shoved down people’s throats.