I mean, I decided to not have kids because I don’t want to subject anyone to the existential horror that is life, and I feel no obligation to crank out miniature replicas of me.

Which policies has he enacted in CA which mirror or support trickle down? All I ever hear is how he’s not progressive enough, but when I look at his record I see a LOT of progressive action

Because locking up homeless people is a) totally effective policy making and b) totally progressive.

more directly, to the economy, his buddy-buddy relationship with the techbros is… obvious.

• 25 million to help fund a microchip design facility,
• 85 million on generative ai
• downsizing a deal with google to protect local-to-ca newsrooms

while when faced with a ballooning deficit, instead cut healthcare, education, and enviromental programs.

Further, He dropped the ball on his promises and only signed a small handful of progressive goals. for example, allowing striking union members to collect unemployment benefits. The most common excuse was “oh we can’t necessarily afford that, and employers can’t either.”

Remember: Tweets are not policy… and all this fun shit trolling trump probably isn’t even him tweeting it. (most likely, he’s only scarcely aware of it at all.)

It’s pretty funny watching the left split and splinter this far out, because of all the purity testing. No one will ever be progressive enough, pure enough. And if somehow they were perfect enough to appease the left wing, there’d be 0 chance of getting red votes.

The next Dem who gets elected will do so using some centrist attitudes including towards social issues which we’re losing on badly. Might be time to get wise to that.

The last november election day, every democratic candidate that won, won on progressive platforms. Specifically, platforms that Newsom has a shitty record on. Your argument cuts both ways.

Also, how did all those red votes Harris got work out for her? She’s an awesome president- Oh. wait. that’s right SHE FUCKING LOST.

Do you see how that argument is holding us back? Centrists do not win elections. Alienating your actual base loses elections.

What, and keep the oligarchs from buying a yacht to ferry them from the yacht their helicopter can land on and their main yacht?

Newsom isn’t exactly a paragon of progressive virtues and certainly would continue to benefit from trickle-down policies.

It’s not hard to imagine that he actually likes Reagan’s policies here, never mind that his corporate donors gave him his marching orders.

kinda looks like my uncle. (Complete with the whiskers.)

I dunno, but I’d probably be dropping tips about creepy old men demanding to see girl’s genitalia outside women’s restrooms.

I’ll make sure to give them his description.

Probably make more in clicks and adds than they can make buying and scraping a very limited amount of probably-not-actually-pure gold.

Certainly less work.

(Edit: this is the irregular reminder to crack addicts and meth heads- flocke cameras have copper you can sell.)

(Chuckles in evil DM)

Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)

That’s like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.

This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?

Because we like our unobtainium, okay?

Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)

So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.

I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)

(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)

Puffins are cuter, usually less, ahem, fragrant, too.

1. people are stupid and this is all just hypothetical
2. <you should read this one in Badge 502’s voice>NO!

with those disclaimers… I suspect they were trying to make a mold of their poopchute and didn’t think it all the way through. I’m not sure if that was then going to be directly used, or if it was going to be used as a negative for something else… but that’s my guess.

are we sure we didn’t confused for a giant piece of shit?

I guess it’s a matter of perspective.

it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with “Solarians” who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter’s orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they’d pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)

meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.

the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.

meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)

Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.

My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual’s instructions were basically “tell the AI to update the blueprints.” which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)

It’s kinda sad.

I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)

One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)

The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres

That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.

Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.

It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)

Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.

Sure, but I’m pretty sure the playbook goes back to the dawn of civilization.

Santa knows his cookies.

It’s pretty unoriginal. They’re following the Nazis playbook.

And I’m pretty sure the Nazis were following someone else’s playbook, I just can’t be bothered to go look at the list of historical assholes

Wouldn’t be surprised if he nukes everyone.

So yes.

Or was it a Putin-esque apocalypse bunker?

That’s just the pattern buffer.

O’Brien has taken over the ship.