zanidragon

[zanidragon]

For everyone out there who needs some hope....

If politics is really getting you down, and need something to help you get through whatever comes next...this speech still makes me cry every time I hear it. Please vote tomorrow if you haven't already! We can do this together <3

[zanidragon]

[oc] Low Hum

[zanidragon]

The best scene in Nosferatu 1922, sound remastered because i felt that we had to have this

[zanidragon]

Druid

[zanidragon]

So I started veilguard and...

yeah... combat in veilguard fucking sucks. Like it really sucks. Maybe it’s because i’m playing a mage and this kind of combat feels more suited towards playing a warrior or rogue, but that shouldn’t be the case. You have three classes - THREE. Not five. Not sixteen. FUCKING THREE. If you can’t get combat right for *three* classes, your combat design fucking sucks. Maybe the combat will open up more as I level up and get more abilities, but that's not going to change the fact that the core loop of the combat fucking sucks. And if combat *doesn't* open up later on? Then damn combat encounters in this game are going to feel worse than combat encounters in DA2.

[zanidragon]

So I started veilguard and...

yeah... combat in veilguard fucking sucks. Like it really sucks. Maybe it’s because i’m playing a mage and this kind of combat feels more suited towards playing a warrior or rogue, but that shouldn’t be the case. You have three classes - THREE. Not five. Not sixteen. FUCKING THREE. If you can’t get combat right for *three* classes, your combat design fucking sucks. Maybe the combat will open up more as I level up and get more abilities, but that's not going to change the fact that the core loop of the combat fucking sucks. And if combat *doesn't* open up later on? Then damn combat encounters in this game are going to feel worse than combat encounters in DA2.

[zanidragon]

Everyone has goth sex hormones it came free with your fucking existence.

[zanidragon]

It’s true that America has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the industrialized world, with only 62% of eligible adults turning up to the polls on a good year, and about 50% on a typical one. But if we really dive into the social science data, we can see that non-voters aren’t a bunch of nihilistic commie layabouts who’d prefer to die in a bridge collapse or of an untreated listeria infection than vote for someone who isn’t Vladimir Lenin. No, if we really study it carefully, we can see that the American electoral system has a series of unique features that easily account for why we find voting more cumbersome, confusing, and unrewarding than almost any other voters in the world.

Let’s take a look at the many reasons why Americans don’t vote:

1. We Have the Most Frequent Elections of Any Country

Most other democratic countries only hold major elections once every four or five years, with the occasional local election in between. This is in sharp contrast with the U.S., where we have some smattering of primaries, regional elections, state elections, ballot measures, midterm elections, and national elections basically every single year, often multiple times per year. We have elections more frequently than any other nation in the world — but just as swallowing mountains of vitamin C tablets doesn’t guarantee better health, voting more and harder hasn’t given us more democracy.

2. We Don’t Make Election Day a Holiday

The United States also does far less than most other democracies to facilitate its voters getting to the polls. In 22 countries, voting is legally mandated, and turnout is consequently very high; most countries instead make election day a national holiday, or hold elections on weekends. The United States, in contrast, typically holds elections on weekdays, during work hours, with minimal legal protections for employees whose only option to vote is on the clock.

3. We Make Registration as Hard as Possible

From Denmark, to Sweden, to Iceland, Belgium, and Iraq, all eligible voters in most democracies are automatically registered to vote upon reaching legal adulthood. Voting is typically regarded as a rite of passage one takes part in alongside their classmates and neighbors, made part of the natural flow of the country’s bureaucratic processes.

In the United States, in contrast, voter registration is a process that the individual must seek out — or more recently, be goaded into by their doctor. Here voting is not a communal event, it’s a personal choice, and failing to make the correct choice at the correct time can be penalized. In most other countries, there are no restrictions on when a voter can register, but in much of the United States, registering too early can mean you get stricken from the voter rolls by the time the election rolls around, and registering too late means you’re barred from voting at all.

4. We Make Voters Re-Register Far Too Often

In countries like Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, voter registration updates automatically when a person moves. In the United State, any time a person changes addresses they must go out of their way to register to vote all over again. This policy disadvantages poorer and younger voters, who move frequently because of job and schooling changes, or landlords who have decided to farm black mold colonies in their kitchens.

Even if a voter does not change their address, in the United States it’s quite common for their registrations to be removed anyway— due to name changes, marriages, data breaches, or simply because the voter rolls from the previous election year have been purged to “prevent fraud” (read: eliminate Black, brown, poor, and left-leaning members from the electorate).

5. We Limit Access to Polling Places & Mail-in Ballots

In many countries, voters can show up to any number of polling places on election day, and showing identification is not always necessary. Here in the United States, the ability to vote is typically restricted to a single polling place. Voter ID laws have been used since before the Jim Crow era to make political participation more difficult for Black, brown, and impoverished voters, as well as for those for whom English is not their first language. Early and absentee voting options are also pretty firmly restricted. About a quarter of democracies worldwide rely on mail-in ballots to make voting more accessible for everyone; here, a mail-in ballot must be requested in advance.

All of these structural barriers help explain why just over 50% of non-voters in the United States are people of color, and a majority of non-voters have been repeatedly found to be impoverished and otherwise marginalized. But these populations don’t only feel excluded from the political process on a practical level: they also report feeling completely unrepresented by the available political options.

6. We Have the Longest, Most Expensive Campaign Seasons

Americans have some of the longest campaign seasons in the world, with Presidential elections lasting about 565 days on average. For reference, the UK’s campaign season is 139 days, Mexico’s is 147, and Canada’s is just 50. We also do not have publicly funded campaigns: our politicians rely upon donors almost entirely.

Because our elections are so frequent and our campaigns are so long and expensive, many American elected officials are in a nearly constant state of fundraising and campaigning. When you take into account the time devoted to organizing rallies, meeting with donors, courting lobbyists, knocking on doors, recording advertisements, and traveling the campaign trail, most federally elected politicians spend more time trying to win their seat than actually doing their jobs.

Imagine how much work you’d get done if you had to interview for your job every day. And now imagine that the person actually paying your wage didn’t want you to do that job at all:

7. Our Elected Officials Do Very Little

Elected officials who spend the majority of their hours campaigning and courting donors don’t have much time to get work done. Nor do they have much incentive to — in practice, their role is to represent the large corporations, weapons manufacturers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and investors who pay their bills, and serve as a stopgap when the public’s demands run afoul of those groups’ interests.

Perhaps that is why, as campaign seasons have gotten longer and more expensive and income inequality has grown more stark, our elected officials have become lean-out quiet quitters of historic proportions. The 118th Congress has so far been the least productive session on record, with only 82 laws having been passed in last two years out of the over 11,000��brought to the floor.

The Biden Administration has moved at a similarly glacial pace; aside from leaping for the phone when Israel calls requesting checking account transfers every two or three weeks, the executive-in-chief has done little but fumble at student loan relief and abortion protections, and bandied about banning TikTok.

The average age of American elected officials has been on a steady rise for some time now, with the obvious senility of figures like Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Diane Feinstein serving as the most obvious markers of the government’s stagnancy. Carting around a confused, ailing elderly person’s body around the halls of power like a decommissioned animatronic requires a depth of indifference to human suffering that few of us outside Washington can fathom. But more than that, it reflects a desperation for both parties to cling to what sources of influence and wealth they have. These aged figures are/were reliable simps for Blackstone, General Dynamics, Disney, and AIPAC, and their loyalty is worth far more than their cognitive capacity, or legislative productivity. Their job, in a very real sense, is to not do their job, and a beating-heart cadaver can do that just fine.

You can read the rest of the list for free (or have it narrated to you on the Substack app) at drdevonprice.substack.com!

[zanidragon]

can’t get over how fucked the three city blocks of Baldur's Gate we explore is. vampire den, mummy lord, hag lair, no less than two cults, haunted mansion, a demon lord whoring it up, evil clowns. is the rest of the city normal. why do they have a Spirit Halloween district.

[zanidragon]

two upperclass centaur ladies take a turn around a victorian ballroom in ironwall, which i did not draw. dancing was a very popular pastime as it has been for literally forever, and this one is a dramatisation of a stallion fight, performed for fun at the women-only dancing clubs popular at the time

[zanidragon]

[zanidragon]

top tier gas station stickers spotted

[zanidragon]

A Palestinian boy throws a rock during the first intifada

[zanidragon]

Mme Helena Blavatsky is the only human to have successfully achieved Horseshoe Theory. She was an ardent anti-colonialist and proponent of ethnic equality, because she essentially invented a new way to be racist towards ethnicities that only theoretically existed.

[zanidragon]

Do you play daily NY Times games like Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, or Strands? The NYT Tech Guild workers who make those games possible are currently ON STRIKE and asking you to not cross the digital picket line.

Spread the word! For other ways to help, you can also contribute to their strike fund here.

[zanidragon]

lol