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Have they seen the cover art from Heavy Metal magazine, even?

But there is no skill or experience here

Even setting aside the grotesquerie of it all, you can't help miss how much of the image is stapled together. The petite head and arms attached to an enormous torso. The... six-pack abs in between balloonish chest and thighs. The poorly rendered blandly colored dinosaur in the background. Meteorites falling in from different angles for no discernible reason. Oh, but hey, they did shading and texturing reasonably well on the primary model, woohoo! Art!

Like... there's no story here. Its a confused jumble of adjectives even before you get into whatever prompt they used to produce this.

I guess if you're so cum-brained that this does it for you

You can be cum-brained and this still looks like shit. And in a period of time that's never produced more porn by volume or category, it seems absurd to rely on AI for images a catalog of dirty sci-fi pop magazines from the 1980s had in abundance.

Israelis think they're immune to this shit because they've been so heavily propagandized on the "Making the Desert Bloom" shit. None of the proles realize how fucking energy intensive and how much waste desalinization actually produces. And nobody at the top cares about anything except packing as many new Israelis into the settlements as possible.

There's a special irony in it all, as Israel's in the hot zone. Neighboring Jordan clocked 113 °F this year. Even Jerusalem, a low-altitude and historically cooler city, reached 95 °F. The country was full of brush fires all through the summer. There's a real reason to suspect that the Oct 7th revolt was fueled by Palestinians simply seeking to escape the extreme weather conditions in Gaza. And even before the revolt, you had Israelis abandoning the settlements in favor of cooler climes.

Even if you can just ignore climate change, you can't ignore all its knock-on effects.

I genuinely enjoyed the Twisted Metal tv series, so I won't complain too loudly.

There's definitely still a place for man-child gamelets full of exploding corpses and blood-drenched screens. But when your franchise is 20 years old, your target audience isn't going to be horny teenagers anymore.

His problem is that he's also an old dude. He doesn't know how to make a game that appeals to a bunch of horny teenagers anymore, because he still conceives of "horny teenager" through the '90s/'00s era lens and not the '10s/'20s revival. Jaffe will never make the Vaporwave Transfem-Catgirl FALGSC climate apocolypse game that the modern generation craves. So he either has to mint off the Millennial Greek Classic nerds who all grew up and turned into family guys or retire to his mansion in SoCal and give up on releasing another platinum title.

The original developer wanted Kratos to be a 20-something blood-drenched murder machine forever. But subsequent producers recognized the original God of War demographic as no longer being 20-somethings exclusively fixated on fuck-murdering and murder-fucking everything in their path. So they evolved the franchise to fit an audience of older, more mature, more parent-focused gamers.

Also, the original premise was... worn a bit thin, maybe? You can only murder-fuck your way through the Greek pantheon so many times before it gets a bit stale. GoW 3 was a remake of a remake and certainly felt it. So I don't even know if it was "Character en-changening" as much as it was "Marketing Re-upholstering". The dad-and-son dynamic was intended to (in some sense literally) inject new life into an old, exhausted franchise.

That's not Jesus. That's AJ Styles. You can tell, because he's the pastiest-faced white boy on the block and not some short brown guy with giant pecks and a neck like a tree trunk.

Under no circumstances would any of our global north socdems say something overtly praising putting communists in positions of power.

I think they do pop off, once or twice, before they get piled on by liberals and social fascists. Sanders was openly complimentary of Chavez's Venezuela, Ortega's Nicaragua, and Castro's Cuba a decade ago. Rashida Tlaib has been a vocal advocate for Palestinian resistance in Gaza as recently as a few weeks ago. You can find comparable statements from AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush, particularly early on in their first campaigns and terms in office.

With perhaps the sole exception of Jeremy Corbyn who was quite obviously only a socdem of necessity, it's clearly not his actual ideology.

Corbyn is a great case study in how the national far-right media treats anyone even tacitly supportive of left wing governments and organizations. The British Press has made it some kind of contest to see how many times they can demand everyone in the Labour Party condemn Hamas, as a result of his Palestinian advocacy. Every third question in any given interview boils down to "Do you condemn?"

So there's a certain amount of attrition that occurs, as even the tangentially left-wing Congresscritters and Parliamentarians avoid these issues entirely because of the way the press hounds them in the most annoying way possible. Because national right-wing media narratives whip up constituencies into a confused and angry lather, and because left-wing media in this country is heavily curtailed and censored, it is difficult to have a coherent conversation about foreign policy that doesn't end with a bunch of liberals accusing a sitting Congresswoman of being the unibomber.

The criticism of social democracy ultimately boils down to "you're not doing a juche-style degrowth to decouple from imperial satraps". Which is fine and perfectly arguable on its face. But it does lead you to breeze over the policies social democrats are most commonly championing - public sector professional services free at the point of consumption - that would, in fact, get you some of that juche-style degrowth you said you wanted.

Global North

Global South

Flipping my globe upside down to get the words to reverse.

On the flip side, you'll definitely lose it if you're not protesting.

This guy is inches away from asserting that nothing east of the Urals exists at all.

Really love the theory that Biden is the guy holding Ukraine back.

And Russia has laid a lot of land mines, so its not a fun crossing