It’s not enough that the rate of inflation is slowing. The problem is that wages aren’t going up to match inflation. When people are working two jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, do you think it means anything to them to tell them that “um ackshually, inflation is down 0.4% from last year!”?

This kind of disconnect is exactly why we aren’t reaching voters.

Puyo Puyo Champions - After the video essay I posted two weeks ago ended up doing so much better than I expected, 11k+ views and 600+ likes, I decided to try streaming some ranked for the first time in 2.5 years. I’m still cracked.

Riichi Mahjong - This really ought to be worth a lot more for how rare it is.

Persona 4 Golden - Finally coming back to this, where’d I leave off again?

Bring back versus puzzle games. Puyo Puyo is more or less the only surviving IP today, and even that is only barely on life support now that Sega has banished it to Apple Arcade exclusivity.

The whole damn genre lies in ruins now and I miss it so much. Someone, anyone, make a new game please.

Do they though? The biggest and most profitable games right now are all live services. Consumers are very much voting for live services.

Rivals has found its niche, but I don’t think even that is pulling in the kinds of numbers Warner expects for a AAA they sunk this much money into.

What’s a foot long and slippery? A slipper.

What’s red and smells like blue paint? Red paint.

Why did the blind man fall in the well? He couldn’t see that well.

A man goes to the doctor and says “I think I have hearing problems.” “Can you describe the symptoms?” “Sure! Homer’s fat and Marge has blue hair.”

Did you hear about the huge sale at the Lego store? People were lined up for blocks.

I sat down for dinner at a restaurant, and the waiter asked me, “Do you want to hear today’s special?” I said, “Yes please.” “No problem sir. Today is special.”

I’d tell you a time travel joke, but you didn’t get it.

I used to work at a toy factory making plastic Draculas. There were only two of us, so I had to make every second Count.

You don’t have to tell me the other guy is terrible. I know he is.

But did you actually watch the debate? The fact that he came out of that debate arguably looking even worse than Trump - in the eyes of voters, don’t even try to argue this one - was a clear red flag.

There was never any ‘advantage’ here, and Biden stepped down because even he knew it.

If you want to “do everything you can to win”, step one is not running the guy who was borderline incoherent in the debates. Staying by that would’ve been shooting yourself in the leg.

Did we watch the same debate here? There was never any advantage coming out of that one.

What I want to know is if Switch 2 will be able to run Switch 1 games at a higher clock speed, or if it’ll just do what N3DS did. My fear is that every game that ought to be running on Switch 2 already got ported to Switch 1 poorly, and won’t get re-ported.

I’m basing my analysis on the observable trend that incumbents lose when the economy is poor. As well as, y’know, Biden’s abysmal poll numbers after the debate, the reason he dropped out in the first place.

You’re the one who started insisting incumbent advantage would’ve been a thing here, where’s your crystal ball?

Encumbant advantage? In this economic climate, it’s exactly the opposite. People who are feeling increasingly fed up with a world in which they cannot make ends meet vote against the status quo.

4 years of Trump got people to vote against Trump. 4 years of Biden got people to vote against his VP.

Biden himself would lost even harder than Kamala did.

I feel justified in being pissed off at people whose first reaction to all of this is to blame the left. Because y’all do this after every election we lose, and learning nothing is how we go on to lose the next election.

Blame the people who voted for Trump. Think for a minute about why they did, and then think about what we can do differently next time.

Not learning is what will drag the whole country down.

I am just as horrified as you are that more than half the country got excited about a man who’s actively aiming to destroy it. But you are blaming the wrong people.

The question I am asking you is, what lesson will you learn from this? If pointing fingers at the left is all you can do, we will lose 2028 too.

They should’ve, yes. And yet more than half of this country did not.

I urge you to think more critically about why this happened. The margin by which we lost cannot be attributed to a few leftists making memes.

You know what the difference between Harris and Trump is? The difference is that the right actually likes their guy. And when the base likes their guy, that excitement resonates with voters.

Running a milquetoast candidate that nobody actually likes didn’t work in 2016. We barely got away with it in 2020, but it should never have been so close. And now that it isn’t working this year, should we try to actually learn a lesson here, or would you rather just keep blaming the left for everything?

Do you want to just do the same thing and expect different results in 2028?

I can’t stop thinking about how in 2016, my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points.

And then she went on to vote for Donald Trump in November.

This, I think, is the disconnect the DNC keeps failing to recognize.

We just keep nominating milquetoast centrists whose message is little more than “maintain the status quo”, when nobody is happy with the status quo.

But we have to run centrist candidates, they say, or else we’ll lose all the voters in the center!

If that’s how it works, then why is the GOP winning by doing the exact opposite?

In a world where rent keeps going up but wages stay the same, people are scared and frustrated, and they don’t feel like their frustrations are heard.

Along comes a smooth-talking con man who tells them, “I know you’re angry at the world, and I’m going to give you a scapegoat to blame it on. It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s trans people’s fault. It’s the woke left’s fault. It’s whatever target I tell you to hate next’s fault. And if you elect me, I will stick it to these people in order to Make America Great Again!”

Meanwhile, the best we can do is “Vote for me because everything that other guy said is horrifying.” That’s it. That’s the only real sales pitch we have for Harris. But no matter how terrible the other guy is, it reflects horribly on us that we can’t even talk about our own candidate’s merits at all.

We need to run a candidate who can say, “I too know you’re angry at the world. And I’m here to offer real solutions, not snake oil, and more importantly, not the status quo either.”

The difference between the right and left here is that the right actually likes their guy. And if not even we like our candidates, why should voters?

Alas, we learned nothing in 2016 and I suspect the DNC will continue to learn nothing now.

Is what we’re doing right now getting anywhere?

I’m much more scared of Trumpism than I am of the man. The next guy is taking notes on how to wield his rhetoric, and will actually be competent at pushing through even greater evil.

The system is rigged. Rent keeps going up, wages stay the same. The world is going to shit, and people are feeling increasingly desperate.

Along comes a smooth talking con man who tells them all the problems they’re facing, it’s the immigrants’ fault, it’s trans people’s fault, it’s the woke left’s fault, it’s whatever target he paints next. He knows they’re scared and angry and he leverages that fear to tell them that only he has all the answers.

And they’re desperate enough to believe him.

Lie down, try not to cry, cry a lot.