supersquirrel
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
…and then went on to betray everything their parent’s generation fought for (some with their lives) in terms of workers rights in the US because some dumb ass actor President convinced them to throw it all in the trash in exchange for nothing…
The “hippie” thing was a flash in the pan beyond changes in superficial cultural habits when you are talking in broad terms of US society and it mostly sticks in the popular US consciousness because it is a reliable punching bag for conservatives rather than a genuine generational force for good.
Fast forward a thousand years from now and when a child sees pictures of all the animals and habitats that used to exist on earth in kids books and they ask “what happened?” the answer will have to be the boomer generation. Yes it was just the rich ones in power, but zoom out and I am not sure how much that shit matters on the scale of civilizations. Boomers like every other generation of humans inherited the earth to steward it for future generations and they literally did such a bad job of it that it is impossible for future generations to do worse or else we will just all outright go extinct.
Boomers failed catastrophically to steward the earth for future generations and honestly I hope future generations never forget that. I hope they are remembered in stories that retell and retell what happened. They deserve nothing less, especially because half of them are always lecturing young people about how climate change isn’t real, about how the devastation their generation wrought that is bloodily unfolding in front of our very eyes, is just nonsense.
I really hope we make sure to record in the history books that we absolutely had the capacity to save a heartbreaking number of human lives if we waived the vaccine IP and let India crank up production but instead we listened to murderers like Bill Gates who argued we had to protect intellectual property….
Pathetic is the only word for it.
We’ve endured far worse things than this before and we’ll do it again and again. We’re good at that.
Let me be clear, we as the species Homo Sapiens, have not experienced catastrophic climate change on the level and speed we are now. We have also not lived through a mass extinction on the level we are now. Though we did live through an extinction of megafauna at the end of the last ice age, that is far different than a full scale mass extinction that is also decimating tiny animals like insect populations and the like, which is far more disturbing.
We really can’t say for sure how bad things are going to get before we (hopefully) get old and die but it is likely going to be very bad.
but not to civilization as a whole.
facepalm no, I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what is occurring here. I am not going to sit here and argue semantics but suffice to say there is absolutely zero evidence that we won’t wipe ourselves out through habitat loss, collapse of the biosphere and climate change (that themselves cause a litany of other quick and slow moving disasters).
To think civilization will inevitably make it through this is to understand the human organism as just a single species of ape, not a dizzying constellation of bacteria, viruses, plants, fungus and animals that sustains what we think of as “human”. We destroy that and there is no “us”. We can’t just take the human species and transplant it to mars and expect it to survive without the diversity of all those other species. You might as well pluck out a single ant from a colony expecting it to be able to survive alone.
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead - Sky Islands Mod: By far and away the most interesting survival singleplayer game I have ever played. Complex? Yeah there is a lot of stuff but don’t let anyone convince you CDDA has an obtuse UI, it has easy to remember keybindings and the interface is easy to navigate. Can’t remember the key to do something? Hit “?” and type the name of the action and boom there it is.
Sky Islands turns CDDA into a run based game (sort of like tarkov I guess? idk) and it is just what CDDA always needed for me. Instead of being free to roam the procedurally generated landscape of CDDA going wherever you want, each time you venture out from your island in Sky Islands you spawn in a random place and must make it to a portal home within a couple of hours or you die. There could be any number of obstacles in your way between you and the portal including zombie infested cities, swamps, craters, mass graves, massive fungal towers with deadly spores or shudders worst of all RIVERS… (No joke, surprise rivers you get stuck on the other side of will more thoroughly doom you than anything else).
If you reach the portal home you can only take back through the portal what you can hold in your hands and on your back. Stay as long as you want on your sky island before returning for another run but don’t exhaust your critical supplies and remember that with every day that passes in CDDA the monsters grow more horrific…
It exhausts me how dumb the country I live in is (the US) and I appreciate that there is another country out there that can at least make me feel a little bit better about how dumb my country is.
Texas treats being the dumbest state in the US as a serious trophy that it aggressively defends by constantly shooting itself in the foot and screaming to the rest of the country “hah, SEE WE SHOWED THOSE POOR PEOPLE WHO IS BOSS”.
The other states always feel really awkward and kind of traumatized by seeing Texas repeatedly empty a firearm into their foot while screaming at…themselves? but whenever another state offers to drive them to the hospital Texas spits in their face and starts screaming even louder about how they don’t need handouts… which usually culminates in them emptying another magazine of rounds into their foot to put a pin on the point. Eventually they mercifully pass out from the pain and Connecticut takes them in the back of their Camry and just never says a word about it and Texas usually has lost enough blood by that point that it doesn’t remember.
Motor Town is awesome on the steam deck.
Every single open world game with box vans I have played in the past, I hijack one, drive it for two seconds and realize it is a boring slow joke of a vehicle you aren’t meant to actually use to get around.
Cut to Motor Town, I am downshifting into a massive power slide, crates of oranges in the back slamming into the wall and committing the back end to the oversteer, and I have a shit eating grin on my face. Seriously “boxy” is a beast just make sure to put it into “drift mode” and take all the assists off…
How cool would it be if all the smart people working at massive tech companies like google actually were working in places where their efforts could improve the world instead of being swallowed up by the dumb dysfunctional politics of a too-big-to-fail company that hoovers up interesting ideas through acquisitions and unceremoniously strangles them.