https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI0doeZj-6o

IF Electric Universe theory is even fractionally true
THEN the standard Gravity-Fusion theory is going to be completely upended and “Normal Sequence” stars will be entirely decoupled from any sort of age assessment.

i was aware of this concept back in the 1970s, as a child.

the specific example that became apparent to me, was the survival rate of preemies skyrocketing partially consequent with the increasing viability of C-section deliveries.

i considered that increasing the survivability of premature births would, as a necessary consequence, result in women who tended to naturally deliver before full fetal development

AND

that common C-section deliveries would promote viable childbirth of children with such things as excessively large heads ( no longer capable of compressing to pass through the birth canal ) as well as facilitating preemie births by allowing the fetus to be removed before full development. thus deranging gestation periods to both delay them and compress them compared to the historical optimum.

being ~10 at the time, i was presuming that this kind of an observation must be “trivial” and that adults had to have already been addressing subjects of this nature.

of course, Vox’s Frozen Gene hypothesis is rather more comprehensive than my childhood extrapolations, extending as it does to almost every aspect of development whether physical, emotional or intellectual considerations.

the upshot of this being that Idiocracy has been both obvious and readily available to anyone willing to consider implications of social and medical policies for ( at a minimum ) generations now.

depressingly, it has also become very obvious to me over the years how few supposedly “mature adults” are willing to consider obvious consequences of the natural world.

100%

It would be nice if they overhauled the multiplayer. I got sick of it very quickly because if you could not 3-tap someone with the pistol, playing was pointless. 50-8 losses are no fun.

Meneer Rutte, ik kijk naar u: Wat u zegt over Rusland, gaat eigenlijk over uzelf.

Fair points. I’d say they’re conventionally ready for war with Europe, but the unconventional dimension that is Europe’s biggest vulnerability still needs to be fully recognized. Occasional defense infrastructure ‘accidents’ notwitstanding.

And I agree that if Kaliningrad is attacked, all bets are off. I deleted “nobody would be stupid enough to…” from my vocabulary years ago, though I would give that scenario low odds.

I’ll add that we can hardly blame the Russians for being slow to understand that directly affecting affecting Clown World personnel is the only thing those narcissists can possibly care about. A vanishingly small percentage of the people who live in Clown World have internalized that truth.

Eternal is an acquired taste. I kind of hated it when I jumped right into it after 2016 because it’s much closer to a 3D version of a “stylish hard action” game like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry than a DOOM game. But once everything clicked for me I got totally obsessed with it, to the point where I sunk at least 150 hours into beating it on all the various difficulties and modes.

I played through Dark Ages once and it was fun, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near replayable as the first two. I’m doing that anyway because my first time was with a wheezing RTX 2080 Super that could barely hit 60 FPS even with everything set to Low and DLSS turned on. Now that I have a 5080, I’m pushing 120 with everything cranked up and no DLSS. It’s glorious.