Matthew Tanous

$30K is plenty to live on for a single person, it just doesn’t get you much more than subsistence. You could afford a $1K/month apartment and food/gas/etc. with just a bit left over. But as I already pointed out, a large plurality of Walmart employees don’t need to subsist on it, because they are teenagers with parents or college students with student loans covering much of their basic needs. If you’re older than that, and haven’t managed to move from the lowest wage, that’s an incredible failure on your part.

@MatthewTanous @Jacksonsrule This is laughably ridiculous fantasy. $144 per shift (about $30k p/a after tax) is not enough to live on anywhere in the country, and Walmart employees are the top employed recipients of food stamps and medicaid. It hollows out local economies and leaves towns empty.

You don't find it weird that not a single billionaire wants to end world poverty? Doesn't it strike you as bizarre that no one with that kind of wealth wants to be the hero who actually solves the world's biggest problems when they literally could? lsn't that suspicious?

The work doesn’t have to be overtly political (though a lot of it is these days). The issue is that tradpub authors are selected based on their political views and personal identity, not the merit of their work. So if you’re a conservative, you’re just not going to get an agent to represent you, or if you do, you won’t get in with a big publisher. This affects what is written: lefty authors tend to lean towards “self-expression,” even to the extreme of “spicy” romance and self-insert “representation”, while conservatives tend to write more timeless myths and values-laden heroes.

@pensandpoison What is a conservative fiction author? I read a lot of fiction, and it's almost never overtly liberal or conservative (the exception seems to be modern YA, but the target audience for that is pretty lefty). Most fiction is mystery or romance. Where does con/lib even fit in?

I recently spoke to a woman who works in marketing at a big five publishing house. She told me that her imprint represents zero conservative fiction authors. Zero. But a healthy literary culture should feature novels written by conservatives, liberals, Christians, atheists, feminists, socialists, traditionalists—and everyone in between. Instead, we're getting an ideological monoculture.

Won’t be the Big Five in 20 years.

@J0hnADouglas @SmashJT I’m also not a great fan of killing the gameboy. The Switch is “mobile” in a way that a laptop is, not the way a phone is. But phone games are all gacha suckfests these days.

@J0hnADouglas @SmashJT Wii and Switch are great, but they don’t match the Cube, IMO. And the non-Nintendo side of things seems to be trying to commit a slow suicide.

This image lives rent free in my head daily.

I think it should be up to market rate sales, but I think a lot of it would probably be used in a similar fashion, just without the government “rent.” Though I’m sure some people would set up new towns in some of the cheaper areas, if that’s potentially profitable. One option is actually nature parks that actively manage the property to attract tourists, rather than the minimalist “off limits” nature of much of the national forests and other BLM land.

@MatthewTanous @rexthundercock What would you put in BLM land if it were up to you

My two biggest gripes with conservatives are their retarded libertarian tendencies, like attacking nature preserves and glazing oil interest. And Zionism, as I cannot stand Jewish niggas

@steakdriven @jmgwritten Like “we are murdering people openly on the grounds this protects society.”

@MatthewTanous @jmgwritten Like Devil worshiping Cult of despair fetishists?

So long as we're talking Tropes, if I never see another "Secretly Evil Church" it will be too soon It's not even a bad trope, its just been beaten into the center of the earth by some of the cringiest people imaginable

My experience is web dev and data engineering, not games, but it’s a lot of prompting now. Genie’s not going back in the bottle, either, I don’t think. In some ways you can do more in a given timeframe, but the aspect of solving the logic of the code yourself is significantly diminished.

@MatthewTanous @ThePrimeagen Did they force you to prompt over coding yet? Getting into the field atm looks depressing ngl

its been a long time since i did one of these tweets, but i was reminded of this gem... where are all these video games? I WAS PROMISED BESPOKE, UNIQUE, VERY FUN VIDEO GAMES

@ManaByte The GameCube was $199 at launch, and adjusted for inflation remains at less than half the price of a PS5 or Xbox Series X.

Reminder that this photo was taken in 2006 (five years after the console launched) when retailers were having a fire sale with their GameCube stock because the Wii was completely backwards compatible with it (people forget that the Wii even had GameCube controller ports) and no one would buy a GameCube when they could get a Wii that would play all the new games and their entire GameCube library.

The people screeching for free health care also make you pay for her diabetes and do nothing to stop her

I know this format is to roast the video essay folks, but they are incredibly brief by comparison to what it would look like in academia: The English verb to roast has historically denoted the application of dry heat to animal proteins and select vegetables, a process rooted in pre-modern culinary practices that emphasized the Maillard reaction, moisture retention, and the development of a crisp exterior. In more recent decades, the term has undergone metaphorical extension into the domain of verbal performance, where “roasting” describes a structured, often public form of humorous insult directed at a human subject. Against this established semantic range, the commonplace phrase “roasting marshmallows” presents a clear lexical anomaly. The confection in question—a sugar-and-gelatin matrix—is not subjected to the sustained thermal treatment characteristic of roasting meat; rather, it undergoes rapid surface caramelization and internal softening when held briefly over an open flame. This usage therefore sits awkwardly between the literal culinary sense of the verb and its figurative social sense, raising questions about the mechanisms by which everyday speakers extend and repurpose established lexical items. The present article examines this minor but revealing instance of semantic drift as a case study…

"Roasting" marshmallows doesn't make sense. We only roast meat and comedians. In this essay I will...

This is too good.

@MapEffects Makes it feel more like waves building on the shore, rather than just a boundary zone. The non-gradual hatching looks like a “this is my territorial waters” modernist political map to me.

This simple change can make the coastlines on your fantasy maps feel much more natural.

I think it’s the right choice to do just one at a time, to be honest. It’s a lot harder to justify a bigger expense all at once. Though I say that having used this Kickstarter opportunity to get $200 of After Moses hardcovers - I am definitely an outlier on the free cash availability side. Looking forward to the books! The idea sounds super interesting.

"But, Michael," you say, "the Kickstarter is cool and all but I'm just going to pick up the book when it's released, if that's okay with you." It is. But let me talk you into backing the Kickstarter. *Short version* 1. The book costs the same right now as it will later. 2. Buying it now gives me a return on capital up front. 3. This lets reinvest on the NEXT book much faster than if I have to spend the next year or two getting a return. *Long version* This series will be deliberately shorter books. At one time I considered very strongly releasing the first three at once, but I wasn't confident in being able to raise enough money on the Kickstarter for all 3 to do them justice. So I start with book 1. Does well enough I hope to do book 2 and 3 back to back to finish the series opening trilogy. Back the book now and I can keep the money flowing. For now, I'm a one stop shop and everything has to move through my hands. There isn't a company willing to drop 5 digits on production for me. So I have to work leaner and meaner and watch that bank account. That's what the Kickstarter is for. You may look at it and see 5k and say, "Wow he's walking out of here with money!" and that's not quite what's going on. 5k means working capital. It means I'm covering costs and supply capital. More people backing the Kickstarter means numbers go up. Which means capital I can keep moving ahead with. So check it out. If you read my books, consider backing this one up front. No additional cost to you. But valuable capital up front for me. (Link below)

@esjesjesj Yeah, sure, how many copies of The Camp of the Saints is she stocking?

Right wingers love to pretend they don’t know what words mean

@AlysssaHazel I think that deserves an out of context Biden motivational line.

>Be Me >Weigh in this morning >Less than three pounds away from a fifty pound weight loss >Still have around twenty pounds to go

@J0hnADouglas @SmashJT Everything since the GameCube was downhill.

@SmashJT I loved that little cube, I don’t care what anyone says

Obviously, if we engage with engagement bait, that’s how we get followers. I don’t make the rules. I just am forced to follow them.