That opposing force is the sheer amount of desperation people are putting into chasing voters to the polls

There isn’t an opposite manifesto because the opposition to Project 2025 is a big tent coalition of several groups that in a proper democratic system would be entirely different parties.

It’s a beast with 20 heads that all have to agree to make any significant movement in any given direction, and so all that this monster can agree to do right now is to keep keeping the other guy out and hope a resolution comes in the process.

Only sometimes one of the heads decides to be a privileged little twat and not even agree to that, and then gaslight everyone else about how they all made the twat decide to let the worse guy win.

Anyways the point is someone would have to beat down the egos of a lot of big names to unite the democratic coalition enough to put out a counterproposal to Project 2025.

You probably could do it too with enough being the biggest most confrontational douche ever seen in the DNC to literally everyone until you’ve successfully bowled everyone else over and browbeaten them into line, but congratulations now the only thing they’re more united about than The Project for All is how much they all hate you and want to ruin you so they can all go back to being the petty lords of their sub-partisan fiefdoms.

Basically every character who’s worst sin is just being kinda annoying

It makes no sense to me how an annoying person can catch so much more vitriol than a genuinely malicious person.

Like “sure he murders puppies as a casual past time, but at least he isn’t a bother about it!”

I’m staying with them while on bedrest from the nastiest mono infection I’ve ever witnessed, but once I’m recovered I still have my own place I can get back to

I also stay the night regularly when my dad needs to leave my mom home alone for travel because she’s old and has old people problems

I’m in a pretty unique situation with how my life in relation to theirs turned out though so probably not a median example of a person who crashes with their parents for occasions outside of celebrations or family trips.

“I did something I didn’t have to because I wanted an excuse to say yes to going on a date with you. :3”

Defense of a country in the case of direct attack, or more complicatedly in the defense of an allied country in cases like NATO where all members consider an attack on any member as though it were an attack on them.

I will add the caveat though that not having a well funded, trained, and staffed military prior to hitting the conscription button is certainly a point in the column of incompetence if not unacceptable behavior.

I think that’s what people really ought to fear about our future. Once there are enough of us, once we’ve spread out widely enough, horrors and disgusts the likes of which we speak of in hushed tones praying we never find ourselves even adjacent to them will be cut loose into the universe.

Until we develop means of consistent and viable FTL travel and communication, we’re going to all live with knowing that any heinous act we can possibly imagine is not only playing out somewhere, but the victims of it were probably bred for the purpose of making the show as enjoyable as possible for whatever freaks arrange for it.

Even when we regain the proper footing of being able to enforce basic rules of prevention of the worst things we can imagine, the sickos will always be finding another remote world, another star at the fringes where justice can’t reach reliably yet.

We will live in a universe of untold prosperity, and yet also one of an eternal game of whackamole against the worst kinds of us that could ever exist, and some that can’t yet but will come into existence with what we learn going forward.

Even colonizing the solar system, we will regularly see headlines that force us to ask if we are doing enough to protect others, if everyone can live like kings while some are made to be the victims of Caligula, or of Pol Pot, or of Jim Jones, or of any of the other depraved madmen of history who made those underfoot their playthings for the worst impulses that not even the call of the void dares give an ear to.

Yeah no the rest of the series outlines that he basically turned himself into a slave of fate and condemned humanity to having to suffer milenia of tyranny under a self appointed god king before they could achieve freedom.

Also that self appointed god king is a sandworm human hybrid that considers himself to be filling the role of a predator in an ecosystem oversaturated with prey animals.

Slowly dying out as our descendants evolve into divergent races and species and stop being technically classifiable as human.

People who think doom is upon us really don’t understand just how hard it is to kill all of us, it would take a confluence of several extinction level events at this point to completely wipe us out just because of how resilient we’ve made our society to collapse factors.

We’re gonna live, we’re not gonna escape living with the world we’ve made as easily as just all dying because of it, and someday one of your descendants is gonna regard you the same way we do the savannah apes that figured out how to walk upright to get a better vantage over the tall grass.

As for what our descendants will evolve into, honestly, it’s gonna be a much more designed process as we continue to master gene editing tech. I could genuinely see several branches just being different “forks” of the base human body plan that try to resolve “design flaws” like disconnecting the respiratory and digestive systems or restoring partial water breathing or fully activating our potential for bioluminescence.

I think 40k is on to something too, the practice of the mechanicus of augmenting their bodies with tech to the point of even enabling their own brains to perform mass data analysis akin to a binary computer will be where a lot of folks end up too.

In fact I believe that the moment a “third hemisphere” implant to the brain is successfully developed will be the actual singularity point for humanity rather than the development of an independently intelligent artificial being. Unlocking the potential of human pattern recognition in harmony with binary number mastery would instantly change so much about how people even understand the world let alone interact with it that predicting beyond that point is more an experiment of speculative evolution than of more standard futurism.

As for immediately, I believe we’re a lot closer to a solar punk world than anyone’s really comfortable with accepting, because doing that means giving into fatalism means them having personally failed a goal within reach instead of “just accepting reality.”

I was lucky and my parents were able to get me one of those ceiling projection globes that makes the shadows in your room look like a night sky in a forest clearing, been thinking a lot about inspirations from growing up because I was able to find one of those rare actual starter homes we’ve all been told of in myth and legend and have started to hype myself on all the ways I get to make it mine

As a kid, CD documentaries about constellations and astronomy

Modern day, video essays about the lore of soulslikes and random media I’ve gotten sucked into

Well it can certainly involve being a piece of shit

I dunno how much I’m about to date myself with this one but I still remember the heartbreak when my favorite squid shaped silly band snapped after I’d used it enough, whoever designed those was either a complete idiot for designing something that breakable for children, or a maniacal genius for designing something that would need to be replaced that often for children.

Either way, child targeted advertising should be completely illegal, that’s just hitting the parents with emotional blackmail.

I’ve started craving nostalgic foods for myself as a coping mechanism, for me it’s being unable to keep anything down save for like 2 things consistently

It could be the “haven’t been able to eat solid foods myself in over a month”, but this post just reminded me of my favorite order from dominos that’d usually cover me for a couple nights

Cheesy breadsticks and a large thincrust with fixins, and now I’m doing the Homer Simpson drool, yes it was garbage pizza but it was good tasting garbage pizza to a lonely college student!

Cold uncaring universe MFers realizing we are not separate from the universe and are, in fact, the universe itself observing, bettering, and caring about itself.

Importing and screen capping software can also have the certificate software on and sign it with the metadata of the original file they’re copying, taking a picture of the screen with a separate device or pixel by pixel recreations could in theory get around it, but in practice, people will see at best a camera image being presented as a photoshopped or paintmade image, and at worst, some loser pointing their phone at their laptop to try and pass off something dishonestly. Pixel by pixel recreations, again, software can be given the metadata stamp, and if sites refuse to accept non stamped content, going pixel by pixel on unvetted software will just leave you with a neat png file for your trouble, and doing it manually, yeah if someone’s going through and hand placing squares just to slip a single deep fake picture through, that person’s a state actor and that’s a whole other can of worms.

ETA: you can also sign the pixel art creation as pixel art based on it being a creation of squares, so that would tip people off in the signature notes of a post.

There are ways to secure signatures to be a problem to recreate, not to mention how the signature can be unique to every piece of media made, meaning a fake can’t be created reliably.

I agree pretty heartily with this metadata signing approach to sussing out AI content,

Create a cert org that verifies that a given piece of creative software properly signs work made with their tools, get eyeballs on the cert so consumers know to look for it, watch and laugh while everyone who can’t get thr cert starts trying to claim they’re being censored because nobody trusts any of their shit anymore.

Bonus points if you can get the largest social media companies to only accept content that has the signing and have it flag when signs indicate photoshopping or AI work, or removal of another artist’s watermark.

“That’s the neat part, you don’t!”

Actual answer, ya gotta learn to prioritize what you can manage at any one time, otherwise you’re gonna bury yourself under the weight of mounting project pressure.

My boss and I wanted to do some fancy data formatting shenanigans this year, but I’ve fallen sick enough that we gotta backburner it until I can get back at full capacity.

Usually it’ll be something like,

“If you try to put up a fight I’ll scream, guess who everyone’s gonna believe?”

Or if you’re really unlucky,

“Be my baby’s daddy!”, suddenly locks legs like a vise and begins grinding like there’s no tomorrow

With girl on guy it’s a lot less about physical overpowering and a lot more about weaponized social biases or lying about the intent of consensual sex for the purpose of trapping them into something.

If you’ve seen the infamous “Female Dating Strategy” forums, a lot of “tricks and tips” they come out with to “lock down your man” or “make him commit already!” basically amount to some form of Girl on Guy SA, either socially blackmailing them with the fear of you dragging them into a public accusation, which they aren’t ever gonna recover from even if found completely innocent, or by sabotaging contraceptives or tricking him into finishing inside to make a baby on purpose and then trying to shotgun wedding the whole thing.