24 yo ruroid trans woman from Missouri here, and the mission is clear: save up enough to move somewhere better. The question is where.

Should I work on moving out of the country? To a blue city in the US? And if the latter, what are some good cities to consider?

Thanks!

It came up on stream towards the end, and as someone who grew up as a rabid Blizzard fan and been on WoW for the majority of my life, I just gotta toss my two cents in. Gonna be very abbreviated, but here goes.

Mists of Pandaria wasn't just the peak of the series because of art direction, it was the last time the world felt like it was a coherent place where nations were real states and the interplay between them and their cultures MATTERED. There was the history between the two factions, sure, but there were also much more recent actions driving the plot towards the head it arrived at in MoP.

Thrall's is the failed reformer. He was an alien to his own culture - not even speaking Orcish until an adult - and only saw it at its lowest point. He imagined the nobility behind it but ignored the darker side which he failed to heal, especially as he celebrated Grom who was the antithesis of it simply because of his own personal feelings and his final sacrifice against Mannoroth. This leads directly to Garrosh, who embodies the most toxic and pernicious elements of orcish culture that Thrall was blind to, and we follow his story from Burning Crusade, through Wrath and Cataclysm, to its conclusion in MoP.

Varian on the other hand is a victim of the orcish invasion. He saw his homeland burn and then later in life he was enslaved and forced to fight in gladiatorial bloodsports in Ogrimmar - the new center of the supposed 'reformed' Horde under Thrall. His life was a nightmare because of the orcs, and his hatred of them is INCREDIBLY understandable given from his perspective they never changed. Given what he saw in the Undercity, coupled with the Broken Front in Northrend, it makes total sense he'd be willing to commit to total war against them. Varian is compelling because he represents all the reason the Alliance has to actually engage in the faction war the game so prominently featured, and in a lot of ways it is hard to disagree with his reasoning.

A key part of this too is that the lead of to what is arguably the ACTUAL 'Fourth War' in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria is that it wasn't something directly built up over the core text of each expansion. Burning Crusade was about Outland, Garrosh was a small character in that. Wrath was about the Lich King, but it gives both Varian and Garrosh their spotlight to really ascend to the leadership roles they were either in or destined for. Cataclysm is about Deathwing, but hot war breaking out between the factions is a major background element. That all of these threads come together to make the faction war such a key component of Mists of Pandaria makes it that much more satisfying, because you can see the paths that lead to this crescendo of the conflict.

I disagree with Vaush on only one thing, and that's the story stopped being good at Legion... It stopped being good when Garrosh's story concluded in Mists of Pandaria; or rather, where it SHOULD HAVE concluded, with his death in his fuhrer bunker. But it's clear to me that Bliz had no idea where to go when all of this build up finally paid off. Garrosh had driven the story for this entire time, and so they couldn't let him go. So they have to painfully contort themselves to have him escape like Cobra Commander, and then they had no idea what setting to do next so like fuck it lets do something with Draenor; that's untapped content right? But in doing so they totally destroyed how they'd established time travel to work and never even tried to square the circle.

Warlords of Draenor was a disaster, and Legion following from it is going to carry some of that stink. There was a lot of cool stuff in Legion too, don't get me wrong, but the fact the alternate Gul'dan was like the deus ex machina to bring the Legion in, and then they completely fucked it up by having us INVADE AND DESTROY ARGUS ALL IN ONE SEASON to end it off was just inexcusable. Argus itself could have been an entire damned expansion, but like always Blizzard couldn't help but completely burn through its roster of old villains at a rapid pace.

I was one of those people who quit in BFA, because trying to bring the faction war back apropos of nothing when the war in MoP was so satisfyingly setup to happen sucked... Especially when to make BFA seem bigger in comparison it started with Sylvanas doing a fucking genocide that everyone knew no one on the Horde was going to be punished for once they started bringing in the squids to be the big bads. I came back in Dragonflight because of friends urging me too, and I initially liked the concept they were going for with the idea to make a trilogy of expansions... But they've totally fucked it up all over again. But this is going on for too long now.

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Looks like the local school board chose to criminalize CHL licenses on their property.

I know Vaush hasn't done a firearm segment in a long time, perhaps now we'll get a new one?

I hate to be incredibly reductionist about this, but after watching the man-on-the-street interviews and Vaush asking about what to do, my first thought went to Lottocracy. The more that can be implemented the more people will be put in positions where they have to use different reasoning faculties than assessing whether they “like the thought” of something or not by virtue of exposure to information from experts.

The other two knobs are getting money out of politics (already popular), and getting former MAGA members more engaged to act as socially palatable missionaries that can cut through some of the fog. If Talrico in Texas or Hamilton in Kansas win or even grabs a portion of what we could call MAGA that’s a sign it could work.

That being said, Limbaugh and Fox worked decades to build what is there and we can be under no illusion that anything other than a catastrophe (God forbid) would cause the process to take less than decades hence.

As per title, I don't remember if segment was posted on main channel or second one.

It was hidden camera following some embarrassing chud from trump admin, it was less that a year ago, please help, they put trombone track under the whole thing and vaush was losing his shit, that the trombone sound is following him around.

I want to preface this with the fact that I play WoW Retail at close to the top level, last tier we were raiding World Last, I had almost 3600 M+ score, and I’m on track to topping that this tier. I’ve been playing since Vanilla but endgame since Wrath. But I wanted to address the myth of horizontal progression being an ideal in a game like WoW.

Ever since its inception WoW has had powerful cantrip effects that n its gear, most of these on the form of tier sets. These are things that change how you play your character, and are typically something that the devs have to carefully balance around, and this isn’t easy, especially with complex interactions.

For example in Dragonflights second raid tier Windwalker Monks s tier bonus did multiplicative more damage if a particular debuff was on a mob, but there was a bug. Any monk could apply this debuff as it was tied to an ability that was class universal. The set caused a follow up ability to deal 200% more damage. Well the way it was coded it was multiplicative. So if 20 instances of the debuff were there it was 200% applied 20 times. This meant 20 monks could kill the hardest bosses on the hardest difficulty in under 10 seconds.

Now that is just one example, but it’s a standout one. Yes it was fixed, however that’s the tightrope. Beyond that having access to all tiersets or all trinkets means class or character reworks are near impossible. A lot of, if not all, of the Legion weapon on use abilities have been removed from the game, meaning that a number of the tiersets, trinkets, and legendaries just don’t do anything. In a world where they still apply that’s wasted gear. Outside of very small power gains or situational improvements there’s no reason to do the content.

Then you have the fact that WoW is, for our intents, a mathmatically known game, meaning players and theory crafters already kind of know what is numerically the best options in most situations. This means unless new content offers a reason for you to engage with it the difficulty is in execution, not in tight dps checks, one of the things that makes WoW fun. Barely killing a boss before enrage is the most satisfying feeling in the game, very close is limping across with a handful of people alive at the very end.

By adding horizontal progression you effectively run the risk of immortalizing powerful yet uninteresting, or worse, powerful and frustrating, items. For example Devastation Evokers in Liberation of Undermine were at the peak of their relative power, they ran three on use items, 2 trinkets and a weapon. This was frustrating to say the least because you couldn’t use them at the same time, it was a rolling application so you’d need to weave them together in such a way to optimize with cooldowns. Or, during the first tier of Midnight an extremely powerful stat stick made its return with a Mythic+ dungeon that every melee wanted to use. The problem is it was a two second channel you had to be stationary for.

Finally I want to take it one level further the reason you have “current content” as being relevant is it gives player groups unified content to run together, meaning besides clearing the content player power upgrades all come from the same place, not 80. So if a new player joins they still want to do the same content to get their best upgrades as everyone else. This creates a unified and purpose driven community, rather than a splintered one where mages really want to run a specific raid, but no one else cares. So why would a tank want to waste their time if there is nothing for them.

I can go into more, and I can even address some of the perceived positives of horizontal progression, but a game like WoW at its core is opposed to it. I’m not sure how Guild Wars 2 does it, but I know how Destiny 2 does and it just wouldn’t work.

I'm not anarchist at all, I've always thought it was less a coherent ideology and more about being performative.

The shit Vaush says and the prescriptions he advocates for have never been more anti-anarchist than they are now, and he never brings up anarchism unless someone specifically says something like "Wait, aren't you supposed to be an anarchist?"

Anarchism is stupid for the same reasons that prison abolition is stupid, and if you don't believe in prison abolition that kind of suggests you don't believe in anarchy.

"Culture is dead. Everything is a pale imitation of what once was" says the guy who spent a full segment on 2 remakes he plans on playing. We are currently in the busiest most diverse video game release season of all time. The man proceeds to rag on a incredibly fun book series for being cringe/lowbrow minutes after slobbering all over WoW forever.

The whole "old man yelling at cloud" routine Vaush does when talking about everything is getting very very tiring. There is still great art out there. In fact I would argue there has never been a better time to be playing video games. Go play valheim instead of putting half your waking hours into another Blizzard skinner box or the 7th remake of the same game.

Vaush is right "the point of a critic is not to be right, it's to have an interesting perspective". Unfortunately "everything sucks now" is neither right nor interesting.