Tyfud

Indoctrination is a hell of a drug.

Not saying these guys should be absolved, but they're doing this because they think they're the good guys/helping out.

We should be lamblasting their leadership and all of Israel's parliament that's enabling this.

But sometimes, soldiers are just soldiers/grunts. US Soldiers have similar PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. Not absolving them of sins, but when you're trained for most of your adult life to take orders and not question them, and then those orders include killing innocents, it's difficult to break from the indoctrination/control a group has had over you in the moment. Usually it's not until you're finished with your tour and you're back home and had time to decompress that you realize the horrors you witnessed and perpetuated.

Again, not justifying it in any way, but if we don't humanize Israeli soldiers, we run the risk of turning them into boogeymen like we did the Nazis. They were human too, and by not acknowledging that and how far humanity can go when they are supporting nationalist movements, we do great harm to any attempt to catch and correct these sort of things early.

There's no switch that gets flipped that turns people into monsters. The worst atrocities ever committed upon humanity were by other humans. We need to acknowledge that they're all human, or we risk repeating history.

He seems fun

He intentionally chose it because his kids really liked the game. He didn't know what it was about, but he wanted to leave legacy of a fun movie to his children when he was gone (he had already known the diagnosis at that point).

So he literally did it for his kids.

And the whole dictatorial reign of terror thing where he deploys the army against citizens, mass deportation, tax breaks for the ultra rich again, and the whole christofascism biblical beliefs that get turned into laws.

Remember, like everything he says, it was projection.

Haha, I feel that! I've got dozens of almost games in my wake. 🙂

Thank you!

Thank you for that writeup, I suspect you're right, that's probably why a few people are downvoting :)

You're not wrong though. It is a little crazy, I admit.

I have a decent bit of funds saved up to live off of, so I think I could do that for a while, and my company has offered to hire me back if I need (but likely without the aforementioned perks...). Worst case, I could take it and take the step down in comfort/lifestyle and go back to kind of what I'm doing today.

Earlier this year I had a medical disability thing that hit and put me out of work for almost 3 months due to stress related to my career.

I had to make a hard choice of trying to continue down this path I was on in B2B, where to get to where I'm at and maintain it is an easy 60+ hours a week plus a boatload of stress consuming my life.

In the end, I decided to try and follow my childhood dreams. The near death-ish experience has given me a new perspective on what is important and matters to me most in life, before I don't have any more time left to do it.

Truthfully, I might be able to ride out the remainder of my days no longer working, if I pull in just a little bit of supplemental income. I own my own home, and have a modest lifestyle with no children and live well below my means. I've been saving pretty hardcore for over a decade, and while it's not enough to live off of forever, it should cover me for a good while.

Even if this fails, I get a sabbatical from the job that's killing me, and some new experiences to throw on my resume.

I sincerely appreciate your concern and advice, and it is well taken. I just don't know how much longer I can even do my job today, every day is burnout day, I'm hanging in there until next year to get my bonuses and to ensure that my role's successor-ship plan goes through so my engineering team continues to thrive when I'm gone. I'm also not burning any bridges at work, and for the most part, I'm pretty well respected/liked there so I have no doubts I could come back if I needed in an emergency.

But for now, onward :) Going to give this game dev thing a try for realsies :)

He could, sadly, do that a few dozen times and still be ok.

We need to eat the rich.

I sincerely appreciate that concern :)

I am good on funds for a couple years of living frugally. I also grew up poor and you are correct, it does indeed suck. One of the few benefits of having been in the industry for so long and trading my sanity and health for $$ is: I've got a decent bit of that saved up. Which I'll be trading away for survival during this :) If it makes money, great, if not, I gave it a shot and I can always get a job again doing the B2B thing, even though it likely won't be as comfy as the position I'm in. I'm just totally burnt out with it today. To the point where the stress of going to work caused a major health issue to manifest that's given me a new perspective on life.

Thank you for the well wishes! I'll be checking out your game when it's released!

That's because Soda was originally said by the most population dense areas of the country.

By default, that gives it a huge advantage in terms of shifting the cultural language. Especially since Hollywood often controls the cultural shifts and narratives of colloquial language.

So this isn't too surprising. It's kind of like the whole "Land doesn't get a vote" thing when you look at the Red vs Blue district voting graphs, without taking into account the majority of people live in the blue areas, and very few people, comparatively, live in the red areas.

This visualization is pretty much the same thing.

You understand that with a super-majority in congress, we get to make the rules, right? Companies can only do what is legal in the countries they operate in.

If we decide to take 90% of the money from fossil fuel companies and divert them to clean energy, reduce our DOD spending by 50% and funnel it into scientific research, NASA, etc. then we have a shot.

We are the people, and the government is intended to be a reflection of that. Not the gerrymandered, voter suppressed state it's in today.