Yeah, that seems to align nicely with the instincts I outlined in my comment. No need to apologize. Thanks!

From what I googled, it’s especially bad when you pair “man” and “female” together, which makes sense to me.

No stupid questions time: This kind of lurks in the back of my mind and I sometimes find myself hesitating to use the term “female” to refer to female figures in any context. I don’t have to do that, right? Like, would “woman lawyer” be better than “female lawyer” in contexts where specifying gender might be relevant? I would conversely prefer the term “male lawyer” in the same context and “man lawyer” sounds just as odd to me as “woman lawyer”. “Lawyer who is a woman” is a little verbose, too. Am I overthinking this?

It already exists as the intro to one of the maps in Nazi Zombies in COD: Black Ops

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zv61MWfg20&pp=ygUPamZrIGNvZCB6b21iaWVz

CIA, too. I thought they sort of just did their own thing and aren’t really beholden to the president. People think the CIA is such a rogue organization that some people have suggested they killed JFK because he sought to shrink the org and make them more accountable. Seems unlikely, though, since apparently all it takes to completely take it over is just to change around some personnel.

Like, my head cannon is that the new leaders would be figureheads only and that there’d be someone secretly chosen to keep things running behind closed doors and pulling the real CIA strings to resist such changes (and maybe have an encore, pretty please?), but that’s based on nothing at all. I’m no fan of the CIA or anything, but I do fear what such a shadowy government org might do when wielded by Trump cronies even more than the stuff they usually get up to.

That’s true and part of me would love to see that, but some utilities (such as water and electric) going under would probably be a bad thing if there wasn’t a plan to swoop in and bring them under public control right away. Otherwise, things would get bad really quick in a lot of places if power and water stopped being available for everyone for an extended time. Things like hospitals, grocery stores, repair shops, etc. would all be working at greatly reduced capacity and capability. Barring a full-on revolution where the people could seize these utilities for public ownership and operate it themselves, I don’t see that happening because the government would be likely to simply bail out a lot of the companies, or they’d be bought up and probably end up being consolidated by an even fewer number of people.

If this is how I hear about Quincy Jones dying, fuck you

People always freak out over this picture but it’s just a joke about motorcycles. Bumper stickers say “Yamaha” and “Look twice”, a common motorcycle-awareness safety slogan. “[MO]TORCYCLE” is written on the same sticker below, but you can’t really tell due to the low image quality

Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1600% since 1996. In just the seven years between 2015 and 2022, attendees with household incomes of less than $100k dropped from around 56% to 40% and attendees with household incomes of $100k-$300k+ have risen from 43% to 59%. Over the years, it’s seemed like the crowd has been increasingly yuppie and increasingly white collar; these numbers appear to back that notion up. I remember seeing a video from a few years ago where Andrew Callaghan was talking about how he paid $10k for an RV spot and 2 tickets. He also complained that a lot of the people there seemed like “weekend-warrior-types”. I can only hope that price is with an insane scalper markup or a super deluxe VIP package or something. $10k is an unthinkable price for a weeklong camping trip in the desert, even a really cool one.

That, the heat as you mentioned (I found a chart that demonstrates rising averages and most in the comments are saying the reported highs are far too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of the core demographic away. I dreamed of going to Burning Man for years, but I haven’t even thought of it in quite some time since I learned how prohibitively expensive it would be to go.