missingno

Rather than worry about trying to be universally attractive to everyone, think about the type of partner you want to be attractive to. There’s certainly no shortage of potential partners who are into that. Anyone who isn’t wouldn’t be the right fit for you anyway.

It’s a stone, Luigi. You didn’t make it.

Anime. There are plenty of great shows I like, and seemingly no way to discuss them with people who are actually normal about it.

Still waiting for more info on it, not to mention games, but I’ll almost certainly be buying a Switch 2.

Fighting games: I’m a solid upper-intermediate player in most of the games I play. I’ve got a few tournament wins under my belt for smaller local brackets. At majors, I usually go 2-2 or 3-2, consistently finishing in the top half. Best I’ve ever done in a large bracket was 9th in Them’s Fightin’ Herds at Combo Breaker 2022.

Riichi Mahjong: Master 1 on MajSoul, 7th Dan on Riichi City. Our local club runs a seasonal league where I took 2nd last season and am currently ranked 4th this season, though with IRL games the sample size is a bit small. I know I have a lot to improve on still, my deal-in rate is akin to repeatedly putting my hand on a hot stove.

Versus puzzle games: Retired out of spite for the sad state of the competitive scene today, but I used to be the top Puyo Puyo player in my state, peaked at a 2700 rating back then. That is a big fish in a small pond though, top Japanese players are so far ahead of us because barely anyone in the west ever took this game seriously. Which leads into the long rant about why I called it quits… I’ve dabbled in a lot of other games as well, but when it comes to competitive scenes everything else is even more nonexistent than Puyo. There are a lot of games I can call myself good at just by default.

If you asked me this question a month ago I would’ve said Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&.

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Sounds like you making excuses for a shitstain party who sits around waiting for wins to come to them instead of learning from mistakes and fixing those mistakes next time.

The biggest flaw is not being inspiring. Like yes, Trump told a bullshit story, but at least he told a story, and that’s what the DNC didn’t do.

Look at Obama in 2008 and 2012. He had an uplifting slogan of hope and change, and he focused his platform around a popular and easily-understood issue, healthcare reform. That’s how to run a good campaign, we’ve done it before, we can do it again. We don’t have to be blue fascists, we just need to be appealing.

It is a candidate’s job to convince voters to vote for them. That is what campaigning is. Sitting here and wagging your finger, on the other hand, is not campaigning.

We cannot tie the entire US electorate down and force them to “be more responsible”. That is not a useful or productive way to look at the problem. If that is all you fixate on, you have no actionable solution out of it.

But what we can do is run better candidates with a better campaign, that will inspire voters to want to vote for them. That is how it works, that has always been how it works, and if we ignore that, we will lose in 2028.

The point I am making here is that we need to talk about things we can actually do something about, instead of shutting down the conversation by deflecting to things we cannot do anything about.

We can’t do anything about that, wagging your finger at voters will not accomplish anything. But we CAN do something about the party itself, the candidate, and the campaign strategy.

Fixating on things we can’t change is a way to deflect from having actual productive conversations about things that we can change. It’s a way for the DNC to avoid taking responsibility.

Did the DNC’s strategy work? No? Then the Democrats were wrong.

It’s their job to convince voters to vote for them. And if they won’t take responsibility for failing at their job, then they’re on course to do the exact same thing in 2028 and get the exact same results.

You said you had this conversation about Elon years ago, but obviously a lot has changed since then.

Try asking some deeper questions about why he still supports Musk now. Is he just trying to plug his head in the sand because he just likes Tesla/has a financial stake, or does he genuinely align with Musk’s fascist leanings? Did he vote for Trump?

The point is that blaming voters isn’t actionable or useful. It isn’t a lesson we can learn for 2028. And when that’s what people keep deflecting the conversation to, it sure seems like a way for the DNC to avoid taking responsibility.

When you ask the question “what are Democrats supposed to do?”, the answer is not “nothing”.

So what lesson are we going to learn from this in 2028? Continue running status quo moderates that no one actually wants?

Well the voters did pick the fascist fuckwit, and if we don’t want that to happen again then we have to have a deeper conversation, rather than terminating that conversation with the unhelpful observation “voters bad.”

Because the point here should be to ask real questions about what we’re gonna do differently next time. Deflecting away from our candidates’ failures is an attitude that leads to doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Doesn’t make it a smart fucking choice. If anything, context makes it stupider.

So we agree that the DNC did not make a smart choice?

“They didn’t go far left enough; therefore, the smarter choice was to vote for the furthest right option available.”

They didn’t offer any meaningful change at a time when voters were upset with the status quo, therefore the voters chose a fascist who was offering something rather than nothing.

At the end of the day, we lost. And we have to talk about why we lost if we want to learn any lessons next time.

What Democrats are supposed to do is sell those voters on a platform of meaningful change that addresses their fears and concerns. It’s a candidate’s job to win voters over to their side, and if they can’t do that, you have to actually ask questions about what went wrong and learn lessons from it instead of throwing your hands up and declaring it’s everyone else’s fault but the DNC’s. Otherwise that attitude is what will lead to doing the exact same thing in 2028 and getting the same results.

So we agree that voters do not want status quo? Because that’s what moderates were offering.