Old Dork Yells at Clouds

So, fellow citizens, you voted for a fascist. Remember that when a fascist says that they are going to do something, they are going to do it. It is not idle bluster. Here is what is likely going to happen in the next four years.

The deportations will begin as soon as Trump is sworn into office. All the immigrants with asylum cases will be rounded up first as they have their addresses on file with DHS. The stereotypical "illegal" immigrant, the one who has crossed the southern border on their own without documents will be harder to find. This will lead to police in friendly states detaining people who don't look like the "typical" American under suspicion of being "illegal" immigrants. The Trump administration will try to deport the people they have rounded up, but the countries they are trying to send them to won't accept them. This will lead to the expansion of the private immigration detention system and of temporary detainment camps. People will die in this system, not out of actual killings, but of neglect. There will be too many people in too few detention centers - tens of thousands will die. The Trump administration will refuse access to the detention centers as the people being detained there are not U.S. citizens (even though plenty are).

Once the detention system runs out of the readily available people to detain, the administration will revoke birthright citizenship. They will try to pass an amendment that removes it from the Constitution, but it will fail to be ratified by the required 3\4 of the states. Birthright citizenship will start to be revoked anyways, as the executive and legislative branches argue before the Supreme Court that it is within their power to regulate citizenship. By a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the Supreme Court will agree. People who have their citizenship only due to birthright will have it revoked, and they will be fed into the detention system. The administration and friendly states continue to push this line and revoke the citizenship of any naturalized citizen convicted of even a misdemeanor. They, also, disappear into the camps.

In the judicial branch, the Trump administration will manage to appoint even more judges at every level including the Supreme Court. The judicial system will be completely subverted, and will become yet another arm of the Trump administration. The law will not matter, only loyalty to the Republican leadership.

On day one, Trump will fire the majority of the non-partisan federal bureaucracy. Only DHS and DOD are immune to the purges. The workers will never be replaced, and most federal departments will wither and die. No federal regulations are enforced, especially after the packed Judiciary repudiates the Chevron Doctrine. This leads to corporations having no oversight and having free reign to do whatever they want. Consumers have no recourse as there is no federal bureaucracy to issue rules, and no judge will ever rule against a business supported by the Trump administration. It is a time of record mergers and layoffs that always result from them. The rich get even richer and they get even more tax cuts from the friendly government.

One of the reasons why people claim to have voted for the fascists is that they would "Make Groceries Affordable Again". The opposite will happen, as all the immigrant farm workers and food processors are caught up in the alien pogroms. Prices of food skyrocket far beyond even the COVID era. The prices of other goods also increase exponentially, as the administration has instituted a 20% tariff on all overseas goods. Everything is far more expensive as everything has a supply chain that includes things from overseas. Inflation doesn't quite get to the levels of hyper-inflation, but the inflation rate is at a rate that has never been seen in the United States.

Healthcare is in shambles. Early in the administration, the Affordable Care Act is repealed in its entirety. Insurers, free from regulation, deny nearly every single claim and refuse to insure people with existing conditions. Inflation increases the cost of healthcare even higher than other sectors as the healthcare industry has always been at the forefront of cost increases. Abortion, needless to say, has been outlawed in all states. It clearly did not affect how the electorate voted, so why bother to keep it legal? It keeps the base happy!

LBGT folk are harassed and indicted as "sex criminals". Anyone who has received gender affirming care or has had a same-sex marriage is thrown into the detention system that was created for immigrants in the first days of the Trump presidency.

War has returned to the world that thought it had moved past it. Trump pulls out support for Ukraine, and Russia pushes back the under-supplied Ukrainians all the way back to the NATO frontier in Poland. Emboldened, Russia then seeks to finish its other frozen conflicts in Transnistria and South Ossetia. The Soviet Empire is back in all but name. The United States leaves NATO, throwing the world's entire security apparatus into disarray. China and North Korea seize their opportunity to settle their scores with Taiwan and South Korea. These wars leave the semiconductor industry in ruins, but it doesn't really matter as Americans can't afford things with semiconductors in them anymore anyways.

Is this doomerism? Yes. But many of these things have a good chance of becoming reality. I really hope I am wrong.

So, Donald Trump is a fascist; he is promising to do fascist things, like the violent suppression of opposition. The ideological movement he leads, which we’ve termed ‘Trumpism’ here, is quite clearly a species of fascism, fitting every point in the most common taxonomy of the ideology.

Little Dork is playing with some Amiibo. In front of Little Dork is Princess Daisy, Princess Peach, Wedding Princess Peach, Rosalina, the Squid Sisters, Ryu, and Terry Bogard.

Old Dork: Which toy is your favorite?

Little Dork: I like this one! He's doing the dab!

Poor Terry Bogard. None of the youth respect you.

I really enjoyed Persona 3 Reload. I didn't play the original Persona 3 as I came into the series with Persona 4, so I don't have some of the baggage that some long time players have regarding the combat changes. On the contrary, I think the combat in the game is the best in the series. It took the combat in Persona 5 and made it more balanced and engaging.

That doesn't change the fact that the meat of the Expansion Pass, Episode Aigis, gives you nothing but combat. I enjoyed the combat of Persona 3 Reload greatly, and I quickly got tired of the dungeon after dungeon in Episode Aigis. At the end of each dungeon, you get a 5 minute character scene. That's it. Everything else is dungeon crawl. It's not the eighties anymore Atlas - the Wizardry format doesn't work.

I will give Atlas credit for the climax of the Episode Aigis, it is very fun and engaging. All of the characterization and plot of Episode Aigis is crammed into maybe the last hour out of thirty hours of gameplay. I don't care how engaging your endgame is, it is not worth thirty hours of non-stop dungeon crawling.

The extra music and costumes in the expansion pass are not worth discussing. No one would have bought the costumes or music DLC if they weren't bundled with Episode Aigis. Someone must like this kind of garbage DLC, as companies keep publishing cosmetic DLC. I have yet to meet this person - they are probably very deranged.

In Plano a couple of weeks ago, some company opened a goofy licensed Minecraft LARP in an abandoned Buy Buy Baby. For some reason, the company decided that our plain suburb should be the first stop for their "experience". Seems inconsequential right? No one would notice its coming and passing besides some Minecraft enjoyers.

Wrong. Local social media has been flooded with free tickets to this thing. Why?

If you buy a ticket and attend this experience, they e-mail you a code for cosmetic DLC for Minecraft. A cape. A really ugly cape. That is selling for 200 dollars. The catch that you can't get the code without actually going to the event and getting your ticket scanned. So people who live all over the world are spamming local social media with free tickets. Locals go to this dumb thing, and the buyers get a $200 item that they can scalp online since the code is sent to the e-mail that bought the tickets.

Hey, kids, you can mod Minecraft and put any texture you want in there. It's one of the selling points of the game - modability. Please don't incentivize the Internet to scam locals in my city, Minecraft Experience. I hate our lame cyberpunk present.

I haven't bought a car in 7 years. The last time I bought a car, I bought it from Ewing Subaru in Plano. It was simple. I didn't even have to haggle much, and I got a great deal as it had some very minor hail damage. It was a good experience.

That was not the case for me yesterday. After a 6 month experiment of going car-light in a sprawling Texas suburb, my family and I decided it wasn't working. Expect a post on this at a later date.

I wanted a car that was reliable, and preferably electric, since I have gotten spoiled driving my wife's EV. Right now, the best deal for the majority of EVs is to lease, since many of the cars on the market do not meet the requirements for getting the Inflation Reduction Act's $7,500 tax credit.

The base model 2024 Subaru Solterra is easily the best deal in car leases right now. You can get one for 329 down, 329 a month (plus tax and title). It is this low because it is selling really badly - at least until they announced this deal a couple of months ago.

Interested in this deal, I called Ewing Subaru. They said that they had what I wanted - even if they didn't have a car on the lot. They claimed there was a car that they could get from another dealership in the garish color I wanted. So I decided to head down there on my day off. On my way down there in an Uber, they called me and said that the car was sold the night before but they did have one in a higher trim. Classic Bait and Switch. They said they might be able to find another base model (spoiler: they couldn't).

Since I was already on my way, I figured I would humor them. I did a test drive, and got the numbers. It was $6,000 down instead of $0 and $329 a month. Needless to say, I walked out.

I ended up with a Fiat 500e later that day. To be honest, it's what I wanted in the first place. I always said that my next car would be small, bright, weird, and electric. That's the 500e in a nutshell. The Subaru lease deal was just too good to pass up - which ended up really being too good to be true.

I think everyone should write their representatives about allowing direct car sales in the United States and Texas in particular. As Robert Evans has said many times, it would be good for democracy and consumers.

I was in a weird spot in Plano as I was fleeing from a bait-and-switch at Ewing Subaru. Behold, the saddest DART bus stop in history:

You are standing in an undeveloped field. No sidewalk and no bench. Nothing around it except a gas station and a plastic surgery clinic. The stop is only served by the 239, which comes every hour. You can do better than this.

The general consensus of people who grew up on the early Internet is that it is dying. At least, the places on the Internet that still capitalize the word as if it was a proper place. However, folks slightly younger than me insist that the Internet has been dead since September 1993. I don't think either is the case, but the independent spirit of the Internet is gone. Everyone is siloed in the one site that they regularly use. For the olds, it's Facebook. For the kids, it's Tik Tok and the walled garden of app stores. My generation, the older cohort of Millennials, really doesn't have a place. Our places have nearly died out - the loose collection of blogs and forums on the open web. The perpetrator? The same thing that kills everything good - capitalism.

It's time to fix it. You can still host a blog on a box in the closet like this one. You can still federate via RSS, or if you are on the COPE-ing edge, something like the Fediverse. That's not me. I don't really care about amplifying my voice. If people somehow find this, that's cool. If people don't, I'm fine with that as well. Is yelling into the digital void better or worse than social media shitposting? If I write and no one reads it, that is far more ethical than writing junk that is consumed by the multitude through social media amplifiers. Perhaps a Hippocratic Oath for the Internet is needed - post, but do not amplify or publish beyond your network neighborhood.

I tried to find a platform to write on that I liked. I tried cohost. That didn't work out very well. I still like their anti-software manifesto, it's a shame that it didn't work out. I tried writing through Listed, the Standard Notes blogging platform. I didn't really care for their style options, but other than that, Listed was perfectly cromulent. Standard Notes has a less radical longevity statement than cohost's anti-sfotware manifesto, but that doesn't seem to have stopped them from being bought by Proton. Maybe the idea that capitalism ruins everything isn't so radical?

It's time to tap into the old Internet's DIY spirit. Host your blog in a box in your closet. Don't even try to be sustainable or ethical. Just post.