my relationship with this website has been extremely unhealthy. if you check the stats page, you'll find that i am the most active user here by a significant margin. on top of being the #1 most frequent poster, with almost 50K posts since 2014, my overall time spent on this website is 787 days—over two full years, which is nearly DOUBLE that of the second most online user, and almost 7% of my total lifespan.

all that time spent, and what did i do? i posted a lot of negative shit. had lots of arguments. made a lot of people dislike or even hate me because of my lack of respect for them, or because of my capacity to "shit up threads" with my negativity.

i don't completely regret my behavior—if i were to think of myself as a character, i think i added a lot of good to the narrative of this forum, the way any dislikable asshole character in your favorite show might add a lot of entertainment value to that story. but i think i did go over the line rather frequently—particularly in 2016, which is where a lot of my most regrettable posts can be found.

almost 10 years later, i wish i could tell you that i'm an entirely different person now, but in many ways, i'm still the Verbatim you knew—i am still a bitter and resentful person with a chip on his shoulder for everything—but i have certainly mellowed out in a lot of ways. i do not spend nearly as much time arguing with people on the internet anymore, for a few reasons, but certainly not because i've lost the energy to do so. rather, i've lost the passion. i haven't become a full-on nihilist, but i've certainly become more nihilistic. i just don't really see much of a point to internet debates anymore, whereas before, in my post-adolescent naivete, i could still halfway convince myself that i really was contributing positively to the world by incessantly arguing about the morality of childbirth on a backwater internet forum to a group of disinterested center right gamers who just want to talk about how bad the new star wars movie is, or whatever the fuck.

this is one of the few online communities that never banned me permanently for being an asshole—which is really saying something—and honestly, i do need to thank Cheat for that. i have to imagine i've been on thin ice on a number of occasions, but you've always erred on the side of allowing me to express myself without any limits, often to my own detriment, and that is VERY MUCH appreciated. it was having this forum as an outlet that prevented me from posting in horrible places like 4chan or what have you. sep7agon really was all i had for a long time.

that being said, i'm almost 30 years of age at this point—i have more than sep7agon now. i don't know if i really need to join the new website. if i do, i have no interest in starting arguments or "shitting up threads" with my unwanted contrarian opinions, so you won't have to expect that from me. i'll likely just pop in here and there to throw in my two cents on whatever interesting topics happen to come up. or maybe i'll forget to join and you'll never see me again and this'll be the last post you read of mine.

if you appreciated my presence here, i hope to still see you around.
if you hated my guts this whole time, i'm sorry. i get it now—not that i entirely didn't before, but yeah.

Lets see the physique

fortunately i know better now than to post pictures of myself on a public forum containing people i do not trust, so i'm afraid you'll have to take my word for it

i don't look impressive or muscular, because that wasn't my goal, but objectively speaking i'm in better shape than i've been in my life. i was told this alone would give me a "boost" to my mental health, but it hasn't done a goddamn thing, i'm just as miserable as ever except now i waste an hour of my life at the gym 4 days a week when i could be playing street fighter

Reading though this thread is hilarious.

MAGA!

go rape your wife

Alright, the dust has largely settled, post mortem time on why it went wrong for Kamala:

>The vast majority of exit polls are indicating this was about the economy. Whether you can attribute that to the Biden administration or the post pandemic recovery period is utterly irrelevant to the average voter. It happened under Biden's watch. Voters associated Kamala as the continuity candidate for the current state of economic affairs. She was doomed from the start. The Trump team nailed it on the head by hammering home the simple question of; are you better off now or when I was in charge?

>She lost the POC voting bloc, particularly with males. Latino and black men abandoned her in the droves. I think this is largely down to her west coast elite upbringing just not resonating with POC men. It also doesn't help that she was the Attorney General of California, and if I'm not mistaken, locked a lot of POC men up during her tenure. Not a great image for securing POC votes.

Just genuinely a horrendous pick from the Democrats in hindsight. I'm starting to think she might actually be worse than Hillary.

Of course she was worse than Hillary—let's not forget she was an "also ran" in 2020. She was never considered a serious candidate for anything; when Biden stepped down and the DNC didn't hold a primary, it had the same energy of crossing their fingers and hoping things would just work out.

>She relied to heavily on vibes and not enough on policy. In retrospect I really think we should have been sounding the alarm bells as her short lived campaign went on. Seriously, I never once heard of a policy position or a concrete step by step plan on how she was going to fix the economy or deal with Gaza if she was to take over. She really just thought coconut memes and brat girl summer tik tok edits were gonna win her the white house.

This is untrue, however. Kamala had several policy positions which she discussed frequently, such as

• Expanding the child tax credit, and wanting to cut taxes for middle class families in general
• Providing first time home buyers with $25K to help with down payments
• ACA expansion
• She wanted to stop price fixing by landlords
• Protecting and strengthening Medicare and Social Security
• Restoring Roe v Wade

...among others.
You can criticize these policy positions by saying she didn't have a concrete step-by-step plan—but I would argue this is totally irrelevant and wouldn't have made a difference. I think you nailed it on your first and third bullet points. She was doomed from the start. The MAGA cult is literally just too big now, and I genuinely believe that we were going to lose no matter what. But she DID discuss policy and she had several of them, especially compared to Trump who had tariffs, and uh.... uh.... uh.... wanting to glass Palestine?... Wanting to kill minorities?... Trump was the one who lacked policies, but policy literally doesn't matter anymore.

The most salient observation you can make, I think, is that she was a generally lame and uncharismatic woman running against an extremely charismatic cult leader in an increasingly racist and misogynistic country where being a liberal is seen as being soft and weak and uncool (lefties hating liberals so much certainly doesn't help—thanks Hasan Piker, you fucking piece of shit). The democrats have utterly forgotten the concept of charisma—they don't know how to be inspiring anymore. Trump knows how to inspire people with sub 100 IQs, and that's how you win. In this country, that has proven to be an unbeatable strategy.

well, we lost, although it's not official at the time of me typing this
PA going red puts Trump at 267, and AK (worth 3) will be a layup for him, so it's over
we also lost the senate—and will likely lose the house, too

i don't know what to say. i don't have the energy anymore to spit bile at those who allowed this to happen, and i can't think of anything to say to those who did their part to prevent this from happening.

just stay safe, i guess. tough times ahead. there is no silver lining to this outcome—no light at the end of the tunnel.

Am I missing some positives about him?

genuinely, no.

anyone who supports trump at this point in time is simply an anti-american cultist in support of an increasingly demented 34-time convicted felon, seditious traitor, rapist, and hateful bigot

his followers will tell you things like
- "he's going to fix the economy" (even though tariffs are his only economic policy)
- "he's anti-woke / he's not politically correct"
- "he's going to solve the immigrant crisis"
but these are just distractions built on falsehoods. the fact of the matter is that anyone who supports this man is in a cult. it's either that, or they're an ontologically evil person. the former could be (charitably) described as victims of their lack of education and susceptibility to propaganda. the latter should be considered enemies of the state.

it cannot be overstated that Trump has literally zero redeeming qualities to discuss—and even if he did have any, there is simply no overcoming the mountain of things that damn him.
i do not recommend attempting to reason with any of his supporters; most of them are too far gone. all we can do is hope he loses and fucks off forever.

Made one earlier—turns out, we're in 100% agreement.
My PA  selection is more wishful thinking than anything else, though, since I think we're fucked if Kamala loses it.

Allow me to rectify.

I was dead, no heartbeat, for 8ish minutes before I was successfully resuscitated. The previous me died, there is no getting that brain matter back after being so oxygen starved. I don't write the same, I don't talk the same, I don't think the same way I did before that happened. The me before died and I am the one living in this body until it expires.

I have the same wants, the same dreams, but what I (probably?) gained in emotional intelligence, I lost in the actual thing.

I saw nothing. Just the void ripping shit away from me and I am lesser for it.

that's still not the same thing as outright death, obviously—so it's silly to say that you've experienced it.
i abhor the term "clinical death" because it mindfucks people into thinking they know what it's like to pass on just before being resuscitated, when the reality is, you still have no idea what happens when you truly do die

i should hope you'd find that somewhat reassuring, because you could do what the average person does and simply believe whatever you want. you should allow yourself to entertain alternative possibilities if it gives you peace of mind to do so

anyways—no, i think i've reached a point in my life where i don't really fear death at all

i think it's because i know it's going to happen and i know i can't do anything to stop it, and at my age i've become pretty good at just accepting these realities without fussing about them. unfortunately, i can't really describe the process to you. it came more or less naturally to me

of course, i would prefer to keep living for at least five more decades if i had any say in the matter just to give me ample time to accomplish the things that i intend to accomplish in this life—but even then, if i learned that i was going to die tomorrow, it would actually be quite easy for me to accept that idea

and now biden has COVID

biden could look like that crusty old fish in spongebob who hates chocolate and i'd run over a mile of hot fucking coals to vote for him if it means stopping trump

but of course, all for naught, because trump is obviously going to win now. thanks thomas

i don't suppose it can't be about both

increase supply (build more houses)
decrease demand (stop having kids, normalize living at home)

yeah, that's fair enough. SFV at least let you buy characters with grindable in-game currency, though, if you didn't want to cough up real money for them. i was able to get everyone up to season 3 without paying an extra dime (though i stopped playing after that season). it's yet to be seen if SF6 will allow you to do the same thing, but we'll know when Rashid comes out on the 24th.

Very nice.  I'll be picking it up in a few years once it's out of early access.

if you think SF6 looks like it's in early access now, you should've seen SF5 at launch