And now for something completely different: discussion about video games.

Life circumstances have made it very difficult for me to game these days. An hour to myself to play a proper video game is something I get maybe once a week. I do, however, have one thing going for me, and that's my phone. It's always on me so I can just whip it out and play something for five minutes here and there, which is like offering an alcoholic a light beer once a day but it's good enough to fight off the shakes.

I really hate using virtual buttons on a touchscreen, which is why the DS has been my saving grace lately. I've been playing Phoenix Wright, Advance Wars, and some JRPGs like the Dragon Quest DS remakes. All of them work pretty well with minimal button use and thanks to save states I can play them in short sessions.

Any other suggestions? Suggestions for actually good mobile games that would be playable this way are also welcome, but I have a feeling I've already played all of the incredibly small number of mobile games that meet those criteria.

I'm a lifelong JRPG fan who's played just about every 16 and 32 bit RPG there is. Massive fan of anything Square, can tell you just about anything about the first 12 Final Fantasy games, etc. I've even beaten some really obscure shit like Paladin's Quest. But one series I never played was SMT.

First off, the only way to play almost all of the games in English is fan translations, and I tend to shy away from that sort of thing because they're often crappy. So if there are any really good translations out there, that'd help.

Second, they had a reputation for being grindy. I can handle a certain amount of grinding. Dragon Quest games are about where my limit is. I like DQ for the most part, but I don't like walking back and forth just outside of town, mindlessly mashing "A" for hours, and most of them devolve into just that around the halfway mark. I haven't played anything newer than 5 though, so that may have changed over time. Basically, if SMT is any less grindy than the early DQ games, I'm good to go.

Third, I don't really know where to start. I've got forty years of content to sift through. Do I play the DDS games? Do they hold up? I'd be playing the SNES remakes, almost certainly. How about the side games like Nine and If?

Oh, and for what it's worth, I didn't like Persona 4 at all. The level design was insanely bland (nothing but identical hallways) and the battles were too easy. But I've heard P4 is the least SMT-like of the Persona games, so that might not be a problem.

If not, don't bother. It's a bunch of establishment opinions couched in "why can't we all just get along" boomer bait with some of the tamest "edgy" humor I've ever heard.

It goes straight from a famous millionaire telling working class white men that their problems are all imaginary to lamenting that America is too divided. Oh, he's also pro abortion, pro tranny, and thought January 6th was horrible, just in case you might have thought he was /gasp/ right wing.

The only thing that makes it any different from any other pseudo-comedic propaganda is that he brings up the Will Smith slap, which personally I don't give a fuck about.

Inspired by this post.

In the land of U.S. there lived a woman named Jennifer. This woman was blameless and upright; she trusted Science and shunned fundies. She had seven cats and three parakeets, and she owned seven thousand Funko Pops, three thousand Marvel movies, and a 150 square foot studio apartment.

One day, the establishment came to present themselves before The Science, and Fauci came with them. The Science said to Fauci, "Have you seen my servant Jennifer? There is no one on earth like her; she is blameless and upright, a woman who trusts Science and shuns fundies.”

“Does Jennifer trust Science for nothing?” Fauci replied. “Have you not put a hedge around her and her household and everything she has? You have blessed the work of her hands, so that her Funkos and birds are spread throughout the land. But now stretch out your hand and strike everything she has, and she will surely curse you to your face.”

One day when Jennifer was drinking wine alone in her apartment, a messenger came to Jennifer and said "The pandemic has been declared over despite vaccination rates well below what we were told were necessary."

While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said "The Science Juice is causing heart attacks and strokes, and I am the only one who has survived to tell you!"

While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, “The research is clear; masks never worked! They're polluting our oceans and rivers and they did nothing!”

While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came and said, “Your doctor just called. The jab gave you Bell's Palsy! You have been injured by a vaccine that was promised to be Safe and Effective!”

At this, Jennifer got on her iPhone 13. Then she opened Twitter in worship and Tweeted:

“Paralyzed I came from my mother’s womb, and paralyzed I will depart. The Science gave and the Science has taken away; may the name of the Science be praised.”

In all this, Jennifer did not sin by charging Science with wrongdoing.

Not shootings. Killings. Some of the worst mass killings in history didn't involve a gun. The Kyoto Animation arson is a great example. Higher death count than any mass shooting in US history except for two.

However, it's virtually impossible to find a list like this. I'm specifically thinking random attacks by one or two people, so things like war crimes don't count.

I'm sick of people declaring that mass killing only happens in America. The fact that trying to Google this inevitably leads you back to lists of US mass shootings - obviously on purpose - certainly doesn't help. I don't expect to change any minds using facts and data, but it makes them feel stupid and that makes me feel better.

The left is correct about one thing: racism and hate are a huge problem in the western world right now. They're just wrong about who's doing it to who. They're always talking about sunlight being the best disinfectant and not allowing hate to escape justice. Let's give them exactly what they want.

Something as simple as an excel spreadsheet would suffice, and it could be decentralized via git, torrent, or simple file sharing. Every time someone decides to publicly support oppression or tyranny, they get an entry on the spreadsheet with their name, the type of racism, and a link to an archive. For posterity, local backups could be included. This wouldn't be hosted on any single server, although it could be hosted anywhere. The more data held by the more people, the better. The main concern here would be not allowing it to be destroyed no matter how many tentacles of the establishment go after it.

Does something like this exist? If not, would anyone be interested in launching a project to create it? I'd be happy to spearhead it right here, but only if there's enough interest.

For those wondering why I ask this and why now, it's because this insane anti-Russia fervor is really reminding me of the forgotten oppression of US citizens who happened to share an ethnicity with a country we didn't like at the time. Irish, German, Polish, and even Ukrainian people were treated like shit and put into camps. The reason this is forgotten is because the people who supported it can simply lie and say "I was always against that". We have no proof any more. If we want people to start being held responsible for mob rule atrocities, we need to start ensuring that the evidence cannot be destroyed.

For posterity, and as a show of good faith, this database should include genuine evil of all types. This includes white-on-black racism, based and redpilled people going too far, etc. I expect these entries to make up maybe 1% of the total database for a number of reasons, but we can't show any bias if we want future generations to take this information seriously.

Also, it should probably only include people who qualify as public figures. Making a list of private citizens could easily be considered libel at the very least. It should be kept to bluechecks, talking heads, government officials, and the like. Even with this restriction, there would still be gigabytes of hate to document, because people like that tend to be the most reprehensible of them all.

Disclaimer: the point of this project would not be to encourage direct action against people, no matter how vile and hateful they are. The point would be to halt the cycle of "commit atrocity, go into hiding, deny committing atrocity, commit another atrocity". These people only do these things because they think they can get away with it. That we'll all forget. And they're absolutely correct. Unless someone does something, evil will always be forgotten in a generation or two and permitted to rise again.

Everyone here knows the importance of archive sites. They fill in the memory hole. That alone makes them incredibly valuable. But they're centralized, which means once they're down all that filling gets dug up again. Plus it costs money to host that much data.

What do you guys think of a program that essentially does the same thing as archive sites, but it downloads the archive to your computer instead? I'm a software developer and could create it myself rather easily.

Now I know what you're thinking: archive sites are valuable because they're probably not tampered with, because tampering means they can be dismissed by their opponents as fake. Local archives can be tampered with, making them useless. However, this program would encrypt the archives such that they can only be viewed if first unecrypted by that same program. The user would have zero power over the encrypted archives, and would act entirely as a host for them.

Considering how tightly the iron grip of progressivism has become around the throat of the internet, it's only a matter of time before archive sites are made illegal, or at least taken down under some bullshit excuse. Local archives would make this less of an issue, because each archive would continue to exist as long as at least one person still has it.

Do you think people would use such a tool? It would be completely free, but couldn't be open source for security reasons.

I know anyone can already just download a page and encrypt it themselves, but most people wouldn't even think to do that much less know how. This program would make encrypted local backups normie-friendly and standardized, because the important thing is having as many as possible.

Whichever way this election goes, I don't care. The reality is that America is so divided that a horrible, violent conflict is completely unavoidable and I don't want to raise children in an environment like that, nor do I care enough about this country to put my life on the line for it.

I'm a grown man with a wife and we're about to start a family. Neither of us want to live here any more but we just don't know where to go. So many places sound great on paper but have hidden terrors once you dig a little deeper.

All we want is to live in a country where NO racism -actual, overt, hateful racism - is tolerated (unlike America where anti white racism is not only tolerated but rewarded), there's a sense of community, and crime and corruption are low. Does a place like this exist? I don't even care if it's not majority white as long as they won't hate me for my race like they do here. Certain eastern european countries look promising, but they all seem to have the same political strife and internal hatred that America does, and even the most peaceful South American countries are corrupt as hell.

Politically we don't care how the country leans. What we're trying to run from is the hate and the violence, not any particular ideology.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.