I wonder if those folks who cast a protest vote for Jill Stein will be sleeping soundly tonight… I sure hope not. I hope they’re fucking terrified.

Disenfranchising large swaths of states is what the GOP wants to do. Don’t play into their hand.

Good thing our justice system is just and fair, and applies equally to everyone regardless of social or economic class, otherwise he might just get away with it!

Which is why they should be at every polling place in the nation. Every single one.

Isn’t this also illegal? He promised consideration (e.g. an entry in a sweepstakes) in exchange for specific performance (signing a petition), and is now claiming that the consideration he promised was not given, after people had already performed in accordance with his stated requirements. How is this different than if I tell you I’ll give you a lottery ticket if you give me $1, then after receiving the dollar, I decline to give you the ticket?

Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you’d keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.

It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were… so you’d get to know people ‘outside the game’, too.

Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There’s still group-required content, but it’s very action-heavy; you don’t have a lot of time that you’re just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.

I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago… we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren’t playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first “date” was killing bugs in Silithus together. We’ve been together for about 18 years.

Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn’t at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.

And if Trump has another go at the presidency, then it’s only the Democrats to blame, not the voters who defected.

This is honestly the worst part of this whole thing, because if it happens, they won’t even have a come to Jesus “Wow, maybe I shouldn’t have done that” moment that might influence their actions in the future - instead it will just galvanize them against the party that they are ideologically closest to.

Correct, there’s currently no way to migrate post / comment history to another instance.

Surely we’ve all seen it before at this point, but it’s never too late to be reminded of The Enigma of Amigara Fault.

That would make Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa the only places in the universe an American can’t vote for President

An American who is registered to vote in a state can vote from Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands or American Samoa just like an American who is registered to vote in a state can do so from another country, or from space. An American who is not registered to vote in a state cannot vote from anywhere, regardless of where that is.

Penalties if found guilty range from a fine to jail time. I wonder which he’d get… 🙄

There’s no real difference between $213 billion and $270 billion when it comes to buying power. Both are effectively unlimited. Both could buy small countries if they wanted to. But there sure is a difference when it comes to ego, because when we talk about it, we’re always treating it like a great thing to be the richest person in the world, instead of sociopathy.

There really needs to be a global fund that every country pays into, that’s dispersed to countries with significant forestation in proportion to their contribution. If money is the barrier to climate action, we need to make it the best option economically to maintain forests and other similar areas.

As long as we keep treating wealth like a scoreboard, this will continue. If we collectively demonized people with unreasonable wealth, ostracized them from society, and stopped glorifying it and treating them like celebrities because of it, we might be in a better spot.

Good to know; I only knew that usage from movies and whatnot, had no idea it was still used like that!

86 is a slang term that means to get rid of something. See the Green Day song ‘86’ as an example. The origin is from a really long time ago, when it meant a menu item at restaurants was no longer available.

This statement pretty much summed up my feelings on this issue exactly. This is an excellent, succinct summary of the only sane viewpoint to have.

If the ‘If’ isn’t true, then the ‘you’ doesn’t apply to you, that’s how conditionals work.

I know our electoral process is bullshit, and I believe our government is corrupt as hell.

I’m also a pragmatist. I can either work within the confines of the system we have to try and effect the least harm possible, or I can register a protest vote now in hopes that some time in the future it’ll help fix things. I’m taking the first option.

If we manage to change the voting system to allow for third party votes without sabotaging our own self interests in the meantime, I’m all for it. If third party candidates want to run for lesser offices where they have a chance of being elected and have a chance of making a difference, I’m all for it. But voting for a third party candidate for president, or declining to vote as a protest maneuver, is simply the worst option. It’s looking for a long-term solution to a very short-term problem, and I simply can’t see any good argument for taking that approach.

Electing Trump right now is ‘tearing it all down’, but not in the way I want.

This is such a brilliant idea. I love low tech solutions like this. The scope of the solution is temporary and not too broad in the grand scheme of things, but to the 10 villages that are currently being helped, it’s a big deal, and it’s low-cost and has low environmental impact.