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Dusty Gerkin

@dustygerkin.bsky.social

Barely human until fed coffee. Part time archer, occasional climber, infrequent game dev. Wanders across Yorkshire. Games can/will be found here https://cc-workshop.itch.io/

497 Posts72 Follower144 Folgt
Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 3w ago

🍿 so, everything about this is the most interesting thing ever to me. If you think having to read other people's AI-generated documents is boring, at least you can skim those. What happens when someone gives a circuitous and overblown AI-generated speech? You just have to sit and listen.

Archie Hall@archiehall.bsky.social · 3w ago

1/ This is bottom-up, not top-down, and reflects choices MPs (and their staff) are making. I spoke to several. Reactions ran the gamut from denial to defence: "for every half hour saved on speechwriting, 'that is another 30 minutes we can put into supporting my constituents.'"

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas.bsky.social · last mo.

You cannot placate fascists because they have neither a ceiling nor a floor. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

You’re the sensible centrist government watching this take place. The far right pulls off votes to independents and fringe parties from you, the very sensible moderates whose managerial capitalism has actually caused the degradation they ascribe to foreigners. But they’re small enough in number that you dismiss them, and continue with the self-same policies which actually impact their voters’ lives. Next time, they do well enough that you take notice. It is at this point you enter the spiral that has redrawn the electoral map of the Western world for the past decade. You say you recognise ‘legitimate concerns’ and take a tougher line on, say, refugees. You accept the far right’s entirely false premise that immigrants increase crime, that the housing crisis is due to migrants rather than your own bad policies, or that foreigners are swamping the health service, rather than holding it up with their bare hands in the face of your own drastic underfunding of the system. And you become less popular. You, the sensible moderate, continue to slide in the polls against the very parties whose policies you were trying to steal. A sizeable number of your own base are appalled, and you have failed to impress a single racist. Because everywhere, from France to Germany to the Netherlands to the UK, as with Fanta and its supermarket imitators, it turns out people prefer the original to the copy. You’ve driven away your traditional base, while sanitising the racism of the far right for low information voters, who now consider them more reasonable. You have moved the sensible middle position toward the far right — where you now stand, boxed in, by the ghouls you’ve just baptised as moderates. And the slide continues. Because you cannot placate these people. You cannot reach an end. Round up every refugee in camps and they’ll want the next cruelty. Their concerns are not about society, the economy or public safety, they’re an ever-moving target of fear and hatred that cannot be sated, it has to be challenged. And now it’s too late, because you thought that you — and you alone! — would be the first centrist to steal the fascist’s lunch by agreeing with them rather than fighting them with every fibre of your being.
Alasdair Mackenzie@alasdairmackenzie.bsky.social · last mo.

No: it isn’t “genuinely bad news for the far right” that the framing & salience of its pet subject has been adopted by the entire political-media system. That assumption mistakes the far right‘s demands as genuine & limited, & thus manageable, rather than being a proxy or wedge issue for much worse.

Post from “Otto English” QPing one from Sunder Katwala: Sunder posts ‘“Small boat arrivals fall to six year low" - Telegraph. June, July, August were lowest for six years’ and screenshots a headline from the Telegraph; Otto comments in the QP: ‘Genuinely bad news for the far right’
Dusty Gerkin@dustygerkin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Taking the elderly in-laws out for the day is like the worst escort mission possible. They keep wandering off, constantly bump into things, walk far too slowly (unless there's cake involved) and never do as you expect.

Keza MacDonald@mackeza.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Six months of Super Nintendo! And it's my birthday this week! This book is the culmination of 20 years' work as a games journalist - all the time I've spent interviewing Nintendo creatives and thinking deeply about games and the place they occupy in our lives. Pick up a copy linktr.ee/super_nintendo

Keza with the colourful UK and US editions of her book Super Nintendo, a cultural history of the world's most beloved game company
Dusty Gerkin@dustygerkin.bsky.social · 6mo ago

First two dungeons defeated. Trying so hard not to play it through in one sitting. Great game.

Jake Birkett - Veteran Indie@greyalien.bsky.social · 6mo ago

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT Forbidden Solitaire is out now! We are immensely proud to release this awesome game made by two veteran indie studios and we hope you really like it. Steam: tinyurl.com/ywj43ptj GOG: tinyurl.com/2s3sv45j Itch: tinyurl.com/3k4bjt8m Please share, many thanks! #indiedev #FakeOS

Dusty Gerkin@dustygerkin.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Time to get my thinking hat on. Need to design a little veranda for my cat. She loves the sun but not too much of it. Tinkering with adding a turfed roof so she has something to calm her stomach. Hmmm