Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.
So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he's still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he's in.
Which to your average adult viewer means... he's a bland and uninteresting character.
That said, he's still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.
Pseudoregalia is a PS1-eta low-poly aesthetic 3D metroidvania with really, really slick movement mechanics. It's the kind of game that really could've existed back then, had developers just known all the little quality of life design choices we have these days.
On the one hand, if the people are armed, the government should theoretically fear the people and want to keep them happy.
But even with millions of armed citizens, nobody is even close to putting up a fight against the US. And they know that. And they keep shitting on you because they know you ain't doing shit about it.
And then you look at the countries that are more democratically reflective of the will of the people... and they have strong gun regulations. It's almost like maybe governments that at least work even a little don't need the fear of popular revolution to keep them in check.
I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).
I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans' ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.
I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That's a real monkey's paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.
Speaking personally... yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It's not a scar... it's still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There's been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.
Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.
I used Bing by default for several months just because that's what my work laptop's browser had for default.
I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I'd find something useful on the first page of results.
DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.
Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.
I know Google search has gone down the shitter... but it's still far and away the most useful search engine I use. Every now and then I try to use bing or ddg or whatever, and they waste so much of my goddamn time I just run the same search in Google and get something usable on the first page of results, even with all the kludge.
At this point I'd rather pay for a search engine if it meant better searching and no ads.
The good news is, this sort of thing doesn't reach the vast majority of Americans, since most of us aren't hyper online, and definitely not on Twitter.
The bad news is, this rhetoric seems popular (from what I hear) on Tiktok, where the youths are. And if the youths don't vote for Biden as much as we need, then yeah we're boned.
And that, everybody, is literally not the correct usage of "enshittification".
Jk, but for real though, it's not a direct synonym for "degraded" or "gets worse". It's more specific than that.
Plus, "literally" now literally has an alternative definition in the dictionary meaning "figuratively". So y'know, maybe get over the needless linguistic prescriptivism.
This is the line of reasoning I used with my parents as a kid. Dollar per hour entertained.
But I think differently about it these days. I'm looking for maximum value per hour, with an eye towards minimal hours, and with a definite end point if applicable.
And value in this sense could be raw entertainment, but it could be something else, like exposure to new ideas and novel perspectives on life etc.
But I suppose that's what happens when you get older and you've got less and less free time to fill.