That word you are looking for is ‘maddening’.

This is why so many Americans identify with the Joker, use terms like ‘clown world’, why I have an extremely dark sense of humor at this point.

Being well-adjusted to a deeply sick and dysfunctional society is not a sign of mental wellbeing.

And yeah, I would have gotten out some time ago now, but unfortunately I’ve been crippled by injuries, and thus, impoverished by the rest of US society… so I’m here for the long haul, untill I more fully recover both my body and my finances… though the good news there is I am making good progress… but the bad news is it may take a while longer still.

In the mean time, … welp, just gotta hope Trump and the Reps don’t cancel the Disability Insurance part of Social Security, otherwise I’m homeless in a month or two, and then likely dead or in some kind of prison or internment camp in another couple months.

The current plan for the homeless is, as with brown skinned people, concentration camps.

That is pretty much my take away on it as well.

However:

It could theoretically be useful in some kind of psychological horror game where you actually just want the player to feel like an actual schizophrenic or person in a drug fueled psychosis, whose reality is fundamentally unstable and filled with inexplicable, sometimes subtle, sometimes massive, discontinuities.

Instead of jump scares and spoooky scary ambience…!, just here, put the player through the fever dream hallucinator, now they’re gonna have a whole different flavor of a bad time, hahah!

EDIT: Another funny way you can do mindfuckery in Doom is to set pi to be exactly 3.

This subtly but eventually infuriatingly warps the 3D rendering uh, paradigm of the world, of perspective itself, with sort of similar just… weird fucking nonsense going on.

I appreciate the praise and sympathy both, hah!

Yeah its… well, in one way, its very, very tragic and sad, essentially just in my lifetime, the US has gone from ‘sole world superpower’ to ‘absolute laughingstock / basket case’, to see the massive amount of unnecessary harm this does to ourselves, and to others.

Once upon a time, a patriot was defined by love of one’s country, one’s countrymen, a broad sense of collective empathy and desire to see the maximum good for the maximum number of them.

But this is no longer the case, now ‘patriotism’ is, to many, either a dirty word, or a jingoist and fanatical cult that worships at the altar of the God Emperor, who sits senile and deranged atop the throne of a long dead sense of American superiority, doing and believing whatever the mad king says in a vain hope that this will somehow re-manifest a mythical, falsely remembered past ‘greatness’.

But, in another way, it is fucking infuriating to people like myself, and many others of apparently uncommon intelligence / insight (for an American), who have been describing the bad trends, outlining how to fix them, then screaming that they need to be fixed soon or essentially all will be lost…

Only to be broadly gaslit and patted on the head and told ‘dont worry, its not that bad, you are catastrophizing!’ by most of society… as all our worst fears just objectively are occuring in realtime.

People did not realize Carlin was not joking when he said that line, they did not take him seriously enough.

… Its… its like being in a car with an overconfident, drunk or high driver and other passengers.

You ask them to slow down, to be more careful, to stop, let me out, and their responses are braggadocious, then angry, then the car crashes, and they blame you for ‘distracting’ them.

To give you a non American cultural reference: I agree with David Bowie, I too am afraid of Americans.

‘Bogey Actual’

A goddamned armored golf cart.

That sets a new personal record of my ‘most out of touch, elitist thing someone can have or do’.

…

Well, Scotland basically did invent sniping, so it does make sense that a man with a tiny penis fragile ego, who’s been targeted by at least two snipers, would want some protection on a series of giant, open fields…

… at least it isn’t painted gold.

smdh

A true model citizen.

Didn’t he already like, steal a bunch of credit cards by breaking into cars?

Who gave Harvey Weinstein a cattleman hat and a Senate seat?

Fucking Oklahoma, goddamnit.

No, that is not how that would work.

It is, actually, allow me to explain:

Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.

The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.

They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.

If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.

Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.

Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with.

No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.

Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.

EDIT: In itch.io’s case, they even delisted their totally free adult games.

So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.

But also…

If MC and Visa won’t budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games…

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.

This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn’t know, PayPal technically isn’t a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank… which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive…

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they’d have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

… Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

…

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am… uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

…

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago…

They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward…

They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.

Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.

They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.

Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system… but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for…

Well, then basically no one does that.

Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.

Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.

And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.

Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.

Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading… people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.

Well, given our low voter turnouts…

Roughly 1/3 of our population is so stupid and hateful that they would rather have a President that hurts people they don’t like, than uh… anything else.

I feel like a lot of non US people really do not fully comprehend the level of just literal hatred that fuels many Americans, as well as how common it is to be extremely charismatically performative in a massively hypocritical way, in just every aspect of life.

We are a country of adults that read at an average of a 6th grade level, with astonishing levels of religious extremism and cults (compared to other countries with similar levels of economic development), who are aware our society is collapsing, but are largely too stupid to even understand why.

We were sold the lie of American Exceptionalism, were indoctrinated into it as a sort of secular cult, it is now apparent this is/was all a lie, and people are (have been) essentially having a kind of mass psychosis in terms of how they handle this revalation.

Our systems are massively corrupt, they’ve been incrementally corrupting for decades, but the effect has been snowballing.

A few people and groups would pop up from time to time and point this out, and push for a specific, meaningful reform to actually stymie this at a systemic level, and they would be crushed by both corporate and political PR campaigns, but also just a general sense of ‘you are overreacting and hysterical’ in the broad population, that came from that smug security of the American Exceptionalism ethos.

Basically, we are largely a nation of incurious, brutish, overconfident, malignant narcissists, who revel in biased reasoning ortiented toward justifying an already held belief, who are often already taught from a young age to evaluate the world with the irrational magical thinking of religious cults, which normalizes cognitive dissonance and conspiracism, which then leads to the present outcome you correctly find to be so absurd.

Unleas you ‘watch’ the game with some kind of image training AI, that then learns how to approximately hallucinate a game.

https://gamengen.github.io/

So, technically, you can “watch” a game and sort of cause that to result in a sort of playable game.

This is however vastly more time and compute intensive that just ripping a movie, and results in… something of a fever dream version of a game, that tends to lose accuracy and stability the longer you play it.

This is the same guy who effectively overrode the seperation of church and state, and mandated bibles in every single school, basically just makes teacher teach PragerU propoganda instead of actual curricula, and is now also using a PragerU designed political purity test to weed out non-theofascist teachers.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/oklahoma-woke-teacher-screenings-ryan-walters.html

Porn for me but not for thee!

What a hypocritical piece of shit.

Hooray two tiered legal system, huzzah!

/s/s/s

I mean…

Looking at mic_check’s figures…

Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.

We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman randomly picking a Rep instead of a Dem.

Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man…

Just pick a random, single, never married dude.

Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.

…

We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?

Where people like, talk, get to know each other?

Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?

Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or… talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them…?

Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush… when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.

Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.

Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.

…

Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.

To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.

Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.

Tea isn’t a dating app, it is… I guess you could call it … dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?

A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).

But it doesn’t actually directly link to

[(EDIT: whoops I accidentally a sentence there.)]

It is named ‘tea’, as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.

Literally this is their own marketing:

https://www.teaforwomen.com/about

It is literally just a replacement for Facebook ‘Are we dating the same guy’ groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.

…

So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.

I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.

…

Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with.

Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of… is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don’t mention untill they’ve been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they’re committed when they’ve in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?

These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.

Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking…

But its not like this doesn’t happen to men.

I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.

But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn’t look like they’ve fucked with this page.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:1

About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.

Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists…

About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I’d be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, ‘shut up and deal with it’, whatever you want to call it.

…

Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:

Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app.

I agree that it wouldn’t represent the average man, but we’ve got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who’ve been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.

Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.

But I don’t think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.

Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.

…

Also, uh:

You say that,

The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.

But what I am seeing is:

To access Tea, women have to verify their gender by submitting a selfie, which is then verified by the app’s team.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91374409/everything-to-know-about-tea-the-viral-and-controversial-app-that-lets-women-mark-men-as-red-flags

The rest of that quote is that the picture is ‘verified by the Tea team’, but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.

Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver’s liscense… basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is… so uncommon I cannot think of an example.

So…taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who’s already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.

…

EDIT 2:

Occured to me on reviewing this:

… Yeah, an AI face recognition to verify gender?

How… does that work for trans folks, or even probably just non white women, and are women who are maybe bald or have more typically masculine coded shorter hair cuts, with less stereotypically/heuristically feminine facial features?

AI has fucked up this kinda shit in the past quite badly.

Wow that was fast.

I did not even know this app existed untill about 8 hours ago.

Already comprimised.

EDIT: Also, lol, this arguably is not even largely a hack.

These idiots just had everything stored in a fucking publically accesible firebase bucket… amazing.

They didn’t delete anything they claimed to.

Either way you look at it, anywhere on the spectrum from:

A ] A bunch of women reasonably concerned for their safety

B ] A bunch of gossip mongers

… well, they’ve now all been doxxed, ironic from each angle.

What a fucking disaster.

Peter Thiel was also a major, early investor in the project.

That’s another ‘this one thing should let you know this is radioactive.’