punk rebel ecks posted:

I prefer if it was like a shonen battle manga like the kid tries to date his dog, but it turns out that there are other dogs with superpowers who are interested in her. So the boy has to fight off these dogs via laser beams and ki blasts.

punk rebel ecks posted:

Okay, is there anyway I can request my avatar being changed back?

I'm very short on cash and I'm not sure if I have the money to change it back.

I promise I won't try to he funny and post weird stuff but please change it back. I'll take a weeks ban as punishment if that means I can have a non-avatar and tag again.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

"woke" liberals should join their "socially liberal" republican friends across the aisle and make the neo-neocon party

etalian posted:

Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famously skillful player of board games and other similar contests, lives on Chiark Orbital, and is bored with his successful life. The Culture's Special Circumstances inquires about his willingness to participate in a long journey, though won't explain further unless Gurgeh agrees to participate. While he is considering this offer, one of his drone friends, Mawhrin-Skel, which had been ejected from Special Circumstances due to its unstable personality, convinces him to cheat in one of his matches in an attempt to win in an unprecedented perfect fashion. The attempt fails, but Mawhrin-Skel uses its recording of the event to blackmail Gurgeh into accepting the offer and insisting that Mawhrin-Skel be admitted back into Special Circumstances as well.

Gurgeh spends the next two years travelling to the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud, where a complex game (also named Azad) is used to determine social rank and political status. The game itself is sufficiently subtle and complex that a player's tactics reflect his own political and philosophical outlook. By the time he arrives, he has grasped the game but is unsure how he will measure up against opponents who have been studying it for their entire lives.

Gurgeh lands on the Empire's home planet of Eä, accompanied by another drone, Flere-Imsaho. As a Culture citizen, he naturally plays with a style markedly different from his opponents, many of whom stack the odds against him one way or another, such as forming backroom agreements to cooperate against him (which is allowed by the game's rules). As he advances through the tournament he is matched against increasingly powerful Azad politicians, and ultimately the Emperor himself in the final round. The final contests take place on Echronedal, the Fire Planet, which undergoes a natural conflagration fueled by native plants that produce huge amounts of oxygen. The final game is timed to end when the flames engulf the castle where the event takes place, symbolically renewing the Empire by fire. However, faced with defeat, the Emperor orders his men to kill all the spectators, and then attempts to kill Gurgeh, but he is himself killed by a shot from his own weapon, deflected by Flere-Imsaho (who later refuses to tell Gurgeh if it was coincidental).

Flere-Imsaho reveals that Gurgeh's participation was part of a Culture plot to overthrow the corrupt and savage Empire from within, and that he, the player, was in fact a pawn in a much larger game. Although Gurgeh never discovers the whole truth, in the final sentences of the novel the narrator is revealed to be Flere-Imsaho, who had been disguised as Mawhrin-Skel to manipulate Gurgeh into taking part in the game.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The Game of Azad is really a metaphor for meritocracy, and like real life "meritocracies" it relies on a lot of hypocrisies and institutional bias to maintain the dominance of the empire and its ruling classes, including racial prejudice against non-Azadians despite nominally being a game that anybody could participate in.

MizPiz posted:

How close are we to the point where revolution becomes a serious, genuine option?

Fallen Hamprince posted:

you'll be pleased to note that the dems have officially renounced idpol, the new platform contains no mention of LGBT rights lol

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Given her publication history, this'll be the one in which she inadvertently admits that not only did she own utilize prison slaves in the 90s, she also was unhappy that she was not allowed to physically punish them from time to time or something

Frijolero posted:

Look, it's the same with Liberals.

They'll defend gays, women abroad —just look at any of the Obama/Hillary rhetoric regarding the ME and Russia— but they won't do much about women and gays at home.

got any sevens posted:

i love the smell of salt in the morning


if politics was Robocop, Hillary would be Dick Jones, Trump would be Bob, Sessions is Clarence, Pelosi is the old ceo

zegermans posted:

I'm mostly wondering how a trill can be a socialist given their highly bourgeois-biased symbiote selection process.

Agean90 posted:

dudes lest of progressive he literally got am empty luxery apartment buidling siezed to house victims of that big project fire yasssss jezza slaiiiii

loquacius posted:

Remember that episode of Mad Men where a former cast member whose character got fired comes back and he's joined the Hare Krishnas and wrote a Star Trek TOS screenplay that was a horrible analogy for race relations and he's trying to get it made into a real episode

Ytlaya posted:

There are a non-negligible number of people in that twitter thread who unironically seem to believe the "Bernie wing" is mostly Russian bots. Those people are no less crazy than conservatives who thought Obama was a secret Muslim. Heck, if anything they're more crazy, because the idea of millions of people actually being fake is a lot less plausible than a person having secret religious beliefs.


From their perspective, the mainstream Democratic Party is a bunch of smiling, well-educated people trying to solve problems, and they view leftists as someone bursting in and creating a ruckus over nothing (or worse, they view them as a malicious actor, since they've learned to frame everything in terms of "us versus the bad conservatives").

Jazerus posted:

zegermans posted:

hot take tho inner light was sappy garbage designed just to give Patrick Stewart an acting platform instead of be scifi in any way

steinrokkan posted:

Reminder that she dealt with campaign upsets by making interns sit in a room, assigning assigning arbitrary failures to each one of them, and yelling at them as if they were personally responsible.

gradenko_2000 posted:

It's so goddamn toxic because it's the same kind of behavior that lets serial harassers sic their sycophants on targets while maintaining plausible deniability.

loquacius posted:

Zeg, stop posting so much, you're keeping me out of my rightful place in the top 5 Suck Zone thread posters


The more time he spends in the company of Bernie and out of the company of Obama, the better

Shinjobi posted:

Look at the president.




Anything is possible.

Vox Nihili posted:

lmao people said this about hillary about 500,000 times without realizing that mobilizing the opposition is an enormous loving weakness. hell, they still havent realized it

Tunicate posted:

Turnout was higher in 2016 than it was in 2012. The graph you saw was made by an idiot who compared the numbers before all the votes were in for the 2016 elections to the total number of votes in past elections.

KomradeX posted:

Jesus them all being unemployable mentally ill shut-ins is the best case scenario. This country is hosed

Rand alPaul posted:

I remember reading Cracked Magazine and Mad in like the early 90s and every other joke was about how the Japanese were going to completely own America's economy. Then they had a huge banking crash and never fixed their poo poo.

Hopefully America has great cartoons.

Squizzle posted:

please never give me cause to write "racially charged portmanteau" in a mod note again