???

The terrorists in that case managed to outlast a billion/trillion $ anti-terrorism budget, I don’t think the US had much negotiating power or a choice to not negotiate in that case. Ironic considering how many times that it’s been the other way around.

YES, because OP is typing words that can be misconstrued as being a shill or a bigoted asshole. I’m smart enough to recognize it if you point it out, but I’m not fucking psychic, and I’m the kind of person who believes in dream prophesies so that just shows that neither potential delusion nor intelligence have anything to do with people misreading things online. It’s just human and technical limitations, but your italics are clear so: if you don’t want people to be annoyed at you, maybe respond without being condescending.

It’s also 2023 and I’m sick of pretending what happened didn’t happen just because the internet doesn’t like hearing about it.

I wish I could go back in time, “buy” those kids and raise them in safety and comfort. This is not an okay “joke” OP, and I see people are finally starting to realize what I realized in 2017 after watching that shitty movie “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” that literally drove me to insanity.

A lot of people don’t care about children, instead seeing them purely as a burden unless the child is forced to work. It’s disgusting and rooted entirely in overly conservative values.

Many who don’t fit into the above category are simply sexist and hate kids as being the result of either “being a traitor to your gender” (if you’re female) or “pussy whipped” (if you’re male).

This seems to have been the majority view since at least 2015, though I only noticed it when I realised children were being cast exclusively as villains, victims of the villains, or heroes who are forced to “grow up” over the course of the story. If proof is needed, I can provide a list of not one, not two, not three, but 33 different stories that do this and almost all of them are either made in the 2010s or became popular in some way in the 2010s.

Because nobody made a Steam Deck until 2020. Everyone plays video games now and have for years, and unless you have a console, the only way to play 99% of video games is using Steam’s windows version or a specially adapted Linux .

Don’t get me wrong, the moment that Windows 11/12/etc. outright requires logging into a Microsoft account (Protip: As of this writing, using the email “no@thankyou.com” and submitting a blank password forces Windows 11 to let you make/log into a local user account) to use it, I’ll be installing Steam OS on my OneXFly, and it’s why I don’t use my “free” upgrade to 11 on my Windows 10 gaming desktop. I just don’t think you realize how big a deal compatibility really is for gaming.

It’s only recently been proven untrue… IIRC… because it apparently turns out crude oil is actually the poop of a particular ancient microbe that is still around and that’s partially (along with Oil Fracking) why we still have fossil fuels and why a far future non-human civilization will have plenty of fossil fuels to work with.

You’re right, though, we have 5x more fossil fuels than have been burnt since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If we DO use the rest, the climate would be so unrecoverable that 99% of multicellular life will die, but even the most corrupt oil executive would be dead years before the last animal because most - especially the wealthiest - humans need agriculture to eat, and if shit hits the fan the poor outnumber the rich and the crop-killing pests outnumber the poor.

I wish I was making this up or delusional or cynical. I want more than anything for souls to be immortal. I would have no problem living in my dreams forever, but I’m not the one who said it (or if my unconscious counts as being me, I’m not able to type a fediverse post using the part of my mind which is more aware of why there’s no afterlife).

If anyone can post scientific evidence disproving how I’ve come to interpret what I experienced, I’m content to let that have the final say rather than make any attempt to dispute it. For now, I know it sounds insane but this is literally a Cassandra Truth, so at least recognise that I don’t expect you to believe it’s the truth, only to recognize that if ascending to the astral plane could be done, I would be persuing doing so at this very moment.

I’m sorry, but I know what happened between me and my unconscious mind, and I’m not just relying on my memories but also my now-decade old dream logs. I asked it for the honest truth. It said the truth is what I feared, death is not (yet?) followed by anything but oblivion.

To be fair, if you’re not happy about that concept, neither am I because fuck the Atheists and screw the guy who wrote His Dark Materials. I’m just one poorly-recieved sci-fi writer, though, I never even got to go to university. I am not qualified or capable of building an afterlife, or determining whether souls are singular entities unto themselves or merely a process that our minds use as “the third rail of the subconscious train of thought”, or testing if continuity of self across time is real or illusionary.

Aside from that, I will say one thing; I have never ingested hallucinogens, at least not to my knowledge, and I don’t go to parties or have any IRL friends. So no, you don’t get to say I’m high when the only way I got OUT of the maddening despair I experienced in 2017 was because my dreams helped pull me out of a complete mental breakdown. Fight me, I don’t care if you think I’m telling the truth and I don’t need you to believe your unconscious mind is somehow independently acting on your behalf, but don’t fucking tell me I’m not sober when I’ve been completely sober of everything including tobacco and alcohol my entire life.

5 years later, sure enough, everything I value became critic-repellant in the writing industry; “you have to grow up”, “dark and edgy is realistic and realistic is mandatory”, “escapism is evil”, “children are spoiled little shits”, etc.

I now am extremely certain the dream characters who talk to me are avatars of my unconscious. I know that sounds really weird and I have no proof, so believing me on that detail can be taken with a grain of salt. As for my sanity, if I was crazy, I’d be seeing or hearing my unconscious while awake, I swear this is just in dreams that this being talks to me and it gives advice like “don’t worry about the average fictional character, they’re just inanimate puppets, it’s the ones who are people’s favorite hats to wear that - like you - are important because some hats are helmets that keep the wearer alive” rather than “KiLl EvErYoNe It WiLl Be FuN!!!11!1!” so my best guess is my unconscious mind is trying to communicate with me on a level my conscious and subconscious mindstates can understand.

I damn well know there’s more to dreams than they appear, that’s WHY I call BS, because a year ago, a dream character that was the first character to appear in two different dreams of mine since ever, and I asked it “Is there really a dream afterlife?” and it said “No.”

I also asked it in another dream to be sure, even broadening from “dream afterlife” to “any afterlife at all”, this time using an old red landline telephone and voice contact. In a snooty french accent, it confirmed and warned me very strongly and angrily not to ask again. The only upside is it said it didn’t know for sure whether it is possible to create an afterlife using technology and/or biology.

I’m sorry but unless someone builds one, there is no afterlife or ascension to another plane. I literally have the info directly from the source.

I call bullshit. You know why?

I literally had a dream that predicted the worst year of my life, 5 years in advance, by having a friendly dream character tell me I died and went to a dream afterlife.

The catch was that I am autistic and I acted and act much like I did when I was 10 years old, and that was reflected by me taking the form of the kid sidekick in the fictional world that I was trying to write a story about at the time. I was told I was adorable and intelligent-looking (I was not the smartest kid but I was well-read and paid attention to what was in my textbooks) and not particularly unlikeable, and all of that was because that dream afterlife was a place where your personality determined your appearance. Yet despite the fact that I did not look monstrous or untrustworthy and that people who died quickly realised that in the dream world people are exactly what they appear to be, I was warned people would discriminate against me anyway, and there was nothing I or my apparent dream friend could do; said dream friend told me they thought I at least deserved to know it would happen and to just try and enjoy eternity, since I would never wake up, but that it would be hard because people would hate me unfairly.

I woke up anyway. That’s not why I call BS. I recorded that dream in a text file and I keep backups of all my unique files.

I’ll finish editing this soon but my phone is at 2% battery…

That’s the new guy. Old guy’s being driven home after he got plastered at the retirement party. RIP, I hardly knew ye (I live in Canada, lol).

I know, right? God I am so done with arguing about how (or who gets) to decide what kind of society we live in. I just want to talk about OpenTTD, Star Citizen and pics of Lego builds.

That’s a fair assessment. Sorry if I was over-reactive.

This. I appreciate everyone who has learned English, but more so than that I think having to learn it before moving to an English speaking country like mine is like expecting a baby to walk before it has been born. Take it from a half-Colombian who can’t understand a word of what my mom says on the phone to family members and friends, if you want someone to learn a language, the easiest way is complete immersion into a society that speaks it.

Worst of all is any asshole who, say, goes to Mexico and thinks “because I’m an American and we are nationally owed $$ by Mexico I am entitled to be so arrogant as to think people should have to speak English when I go to Mexico on vacation”. It’s not just America to Mexico obviously, I could say Quebecios to Western Canada or Englishman to (insert country here) or Chinese to (insert country here) but I’m sure you get the general formula. Arrogant wealthier-than-average tourist, different culture with less material wealth, inevitable offensively bigoted comment.

In such a case, I would absolutely tell the arrogant tourist that just because they’re rich and live in Nation X, does not make them entitled to being catered to, albeit with more colorful language because somehow idiots like that tend to realise they’ve gone too far and either apologize and stop or give one last angry quip and storm off to ragequit the conversation.

The meme feels too accusatory, but I understand that language-wise I got lucky and most people have to work up to knowing a language with critical user mass. I will never expect anyone to HAVE to speak my language for any reason.

I mean, with the specific caveat that if it’s an emergency and they know some English, ANY at all, we should probably go as far as we can to speak each other’s languages in a temporary pidgin until nobody is hurt or in danger. Aside from such time-sensitive situations, I’m definitely willing to learn from them as long as they acknowledge I hope they try to learn some English from me, but no obligation should be involved either way.

Dude, I get it, but I don’t have anything against you and I’m not demanding you learn English to cater to me.

Please stop assuming I’m racist or selfish for only knowing the language my parents spoke most when I was a baby, I probably could have picked up Spanish from my mom’s family but sending a teenager with Asperger’s like me to stay with relatives in South America in 2007 like my normal-brained brother did as a foreign exchange student would have been infeasible.

I just want to write speculative fiction in my own language and in return be grateful to people who are willing to learn a trade language, not be told I’m a monster just for speaking only a language that’s commonplace, is that too much to ask?

Maybe so, but… That might be because China and America have too much international power. Power attracts the corrupt and global power attracts the most corrupt on the globe.