I am also not surprised.

Even Nicolle Wallace is uninformed about this.

one is against shithole. I really don't mind them fighting each other, but killings I don't approve.

and other innocents gunned down for these maga, expansionist beliefs. At this point, if they want to exercise 2nd amendment options, I'd much rather see them use it against each other instead of innocents just trying to live and let live.

Understand, I didn't use to be like this. And I certainly didn't come to this out of nowhere. But 10 years of trump has caused PTSD, night terrors, and makes living just incredibly hard to handle. However it can be put back under the rocks from which it came, I'm all for it.

. . . prepare to be informed then to be disgusted.

Last edited Fri Sep 12, 2025, 05:29 PM - Edit history (1)

Helldivers II is a popular video game that came out a while back on Playstation and PC, and is now on Xbox (I think). The game takes place in a fictionalized universe which is basically a ripoff of the movie Starship Troopers (which is a satirical adaptation of a Heinlein novel), where humans have spread across the galaxy and run into other alien species which they try to eradicate, while sending messages back to "Super Earth" that they're "spreading freedom" across the galaxy. From their wiki:

That trailer looks to me like it'd go right into Starship Troopers.

Never played it myself but I have heard it references Starship Troopers quite a bit.

Though the game corrects the error in the movie ficton that it takes several soldier to fight one “bug”… the rest of the game accepts the movie adaption that Earth is essentially a facist culture (which really doesn’t fit Heinlein at all - though many have repeated that mistaken critique)

...row of garden space, plant and harvest enough food for one week for one person. When they can do that, they will have earned the right to play unrealistic games such as this.

Edited to add: the original Canned Heat song drives it right over the top.

(with my SETI@Home team members, and that came out a couple years after Starship Troopers)

And it seems that most if not all of the FPS games are filled with snark, I suppose as their way to provide "comic relief" in what is a gory and graphic scenario.

But I expect the Chat streams that go on with those games when playing online, are where you see many of these types of memes pop up and get amplified, as well as where new memes are born.

The game is pretty ridiculous. You have a team of up to four players who don't always know each other, and friendly fire is always on, so half the time you're getting accidentally blown up or shot by one of your own team mates as opposed to by the enemies, which can create some funny situations. But the theme of the game is that these soldiers are just cannon fodder in humanity's war against the "enemies of democracy" (bugs and robots) which need to be "liberated." So every time you die, you just immediately drop back into the fight as another nameless Helldiver, only to be squashed or shot or blown up again thirty seconds later (if you're lucky enough to last that long).

The harder the difficulty level you select, the more enemies the game throws at you, so you have to work as a team if you want to complete the mission and make it to the extraction point at the end. But working as a team is quite difficult due to the chaos going on. Plus the Helldivers themselves are almost comically clunky to move around -- they're slow and heavy, they can barely jump, and they can dive to the ground, but if you do that you only dive a couple of feet and it takes a few seconds to get up again.

It creates a lot of what they call "emergent gameplay" moments where the sandboxy-nature of the game mechanics creates unique situations. Here's a gameplay video of a few newbies getting into the game:

That would require some definite planning by a team in advance! It's like a "Capture the Flag" thing on steroids.

Need to pick one or two to be the lead and others as back up/cover, but that "friendly fire" is pretty lethal.

After watching it I think it's going to be a stretch to convince a jury that that game radicalized anybody who wasn't already radicalized by something else.

One defense strategy shot to hell. So to speak.

He was one sick puppy.

and that is one sick way to look at a
fucking game.

All of the slogans on the bullet casings were dripping with ironic sarcasm and offered as insider LOLs to fellow Groypers. The game has absolutely *nothing* to do with the action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groypers

You'll be reading a lot about this shortly I expect. Taken from Bluesky today, which was generated by Grok/AI:

In my view, these inscriptions on the ammo casings -"Notices bulges OWO," "Oh Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao," "Catch this fascist," and "If you are reading this you are gay, Imaoooo"-aren't random or left- leaning signals like some early reports claimed. Instead, they trace Tyler Robinson's political beliefs squarely to the fringes of the alt-right, specifically the Groyper movement led by figures like Nick Fuentes. This crowd positions itself as hyper-patriotic, pro-Trump conservatives who see
mainstream Republicans like Charlie Kirk as sellouts or "fake conservatives" infected by globalism, liberalism, or even fascism-lite. The "bulges OWO" bit is a crude, mocking nod to transphobic memes that originated on Tumblr but got co-opted by right-wing trolls to "spot" trans people in crowds-pure Groyper-style bigotry. "Bella Ciao" flips an anti-fascist WWII partisan song into ironic ammo for ridiculing leftists, while tying into their beef with "fascist" establishment figures like Kirk (whom Fuentes has repeatedly trashed). The "gay" taunt is straight-up homophobic bait, emblematic of the group's anti-LGBTQ venom. And "Catch this fascist"? That's a direct shot at Kirk, framing the attack as purging a traitor from the right.Overall, it's not antifa or trans activism-it's the toxic underbelly of the MAGA ecosystem, where online radicalization turns personal grievances into violence against perceived ideological impurities. Robinson's Republican registration and Trump donations fit the profile: a young guy steeped in gun culture and pandemic- era echo chambers, lashing out at "the enemy within" on his own side. Tragic, but a reminder that extremism
doesn't care about party lines-it just amplifies hate.

The game represents the reality,
and vice-versa.

Not some initials.

you can generate some of the smilies manually using the alphanumeric characters like = the ":" next to a "D".

I believe the point of that, which is popular among the GenZ crowd, is to use the text equivalents of emojis for "reactions" when texting (and they spend all day and night texting and swiping ).

You might have stuff like this -

8^D

or

:^D

or

:-O

when it's much easier to just type it up on paper or email it or post it online. So weird to do it on bullets.

I feel some satisfaction knowing how many RW homophobes have read this:

Gosh! Color me surprised!

A 22 year old who has access to a rifle and knows how to use it?
Gosh! Color me surprised!

A 22 year old who plays violent video games and then acts out the violence?
Gosh! Color me surprised!

/sarcasm, and lots of it.

I just Googled 'head shot in video games'. Got a worrying number of hits.

It's the guns.

I don't have a record with violence despite the games and am now in my late 30s though I prefer to play games like College Football but I will probably purchase the new GTA game if it ever comes out.

As far as guns I would amend the 2nd Amendment or it seems like a lot of Constitutional amendments have a lot of exceptions to them and so should the 2nd Amendment.

Japan's video games are much more violent but they have a much lower rate of gun violence. It was often the religious right that blamed video games for crime.

What does the US have that enables them to turn their illness into murder?

However women in the US also have mental illness but you don't see them doing mass killings.

There is something about being a young male, right wing ideology, and guns in the US.

Mental illness is an often used narrative after mass shootings but they are actually more likely to be victims of violence than the rest of the population. Considering the often used narrative I'm not surprised the problem of gun violence never actually gets solved.

Or did he do it?