About the only time our TV gets turned on anymore is for 1) videogames or 2) watching youtube.

It’s mostly just a giant monitor at this point

Incredible game that can be a little jarring for people who are probably expecting something like Baldur’s Gate 1&2, Fallout 1&2, or some other kind of isometric killfest RPG. It essentially turns the dialogue into 90% of the game, but the dialogue is so damn good that it doesn’t matter.

It also takes getting used to damage, as sometimes you can “die” in seemingly random ways. I was on a rooftop, I think trying to reach for a scarf or something, and failed my roll. That caused me to apparently get so depressed that I lost the game. I can’t remember which stat/trait it was but I think there’s a morale or mental trait you have to watch out for too.

Pirate this game if you wanna give it a try, don’t ever buy it. This is what the developers have actually advocated for and it actually fits right in with parts of the game itself.

Really great party game, kids love it. There’s a constant push-pull to make the level just hard enough. It kind of breaks down though if somebody has made it effectively unwinnable for everybody and you can’t find a way to unblock it. Otherwise though, it’s a fantastic game.

A Planescape area/sidequest, just make it so far out there and weird, but let it have almost nothing to do with the main plotline. You find some random portal that dumps you there and it’s just this weird sort of thing you get into that you never talk about again afterwards.

Why don’t YOU go ahead and write me up a 2-page essay on why Trump isn’t planning a dictatorship, cite your sources. That’s essentially what you’re asking me to do and it’s guaranteed you’ll give a short, flippant remark that doesn’t actually address any of the issues brought up, basically wasting my time. It’ll be a bunch of whataboutism, gaslighting, misdirection, and BS, that’s the standard MO.

I can waste my time going through that exercise, but it’s pretty clear to any thinking person that that’s what the plan is on the Republican side, just look at the words, rhetoric and actions they’ve been taking for the past 10+ years. Otherwise, you’re maliciously asking me to go through the mental effort of writing up an attack on Trump that you’ve already decided to ignore and/or counter with some feeble bad faith argument. You’re a waste of my time and everybody else’s.

Biden is well past his prime, had a shitty performance last night, hate his record on Israel, but I’m still voting for him because he’s not Trump and I’d prefer that our representative democracy continued. Moving to a braindead, functionally illiterate dictatorship just seems like an all-around worse move in every respect. Not sure about his chances, but whatever, there’s not really any other alternative at this point.

If/when they screw up gmail, I’m blacklisting Google for good, that’s gonna be such a goddamn pain to disentangle myself from.

Yeah, they’ve had shitty elections for years now. Odinga has been in like every election and contests it everytime, even causing really bad election violence at multiple points. This led to them reviving the role of Prime Minister specifically for him to placate Odinga that election. They’ve literally only ever had two prime ministers in their history (President is their head of state), they abolished it again after Odinga’s term was over.

Google translate says it means ‘Planetary Defense Cannon Commander’.

Kenya may be a relatively stable democracy in Africa, but there’s still rampant corruption in their police forces. Police officers are typically underpaid, so to supplement their income they’ll do things like set up random checkpoints on roads in order to shakedown drivers for money. Them going to Haiti doesn’t seem like it’s really going to help with anything.

Huh… if they can attach it to the face… could they attach it to… other places?

Most disasters, fires, mass shootings, etc that you see on the news are actually created by the News organizations themselves in order to grab people’s attention. Those news vans you see driving around, those are sabotage squads going around committing all the violence. How else do you think they’re able to get on the scene so quick to report the news? They’re literally creating the news themselves. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!

(I don’t actually believe this, it was an idea for a short story I had at one point though)

So useless that they’re probably just going to convert over to AI chat apps and you’ll just know from the get-go that everybody you talk to is a bot (instead of just 4 out of 5 users being bots). I’m guessing they’ll farm that sweet, juicy user-data from however many years now to train their AI on. Base level will be a semi-interested friend, but the higher-subscription level you pay into will unlock romantic options, naughty (ai-generated) pics, and they’ll eventually add a feature where you can go on virtual dates with your AI companion and they can scan your pictures/photos and make comments on what you “saw together” on your date. Maybe they’ll even insert themselves into the images to make it seem like they were really there. Hell, they’ll probably even get to a point where you can have live voice chats with them.

Who knew game design could be such a Sisyphean task?

There’s so many games that I picked up that I’d played through/completed in my childhood, but they’ll likely forever show as unplayed in my Steam library. I’ve been slowly going back through my Steam library chronologically though, to try to at least reduce my unplayed games amount, and also to at least check out games I might’ve missed. I’m not forcing my self to actually finish the games, just play them for at least a few minutes, maybe mark it for follow-up later, but the point is to reduce my unplayed games list so I don’t feel as bad about it.

After living 7.5 years in an Ecuadorian embassy, I wonder if he feels like that portion was all a waste of time, going to those lengths to avoid extradition. Though maybe the timing worked in his favor in this case, given its been years since Wikileaks was relevant, whereas had he been extradited years ago he might’ve be faced a harsher situation.

At this point, why is Hamas still even holding onto any hostages? Whatever the original plan was has obviously blown up in their face and the hostages aren’t really giving them much leverage. If anything, it gives Israel a thin veneer of an excuse to continue with the genocide, they don’t really seem to concerned with accidentally killing any of them. If Hamas released the rest of the hostages though it takes away one more excuse Israel can hold onto, though at this point, it may not make a difference one way or another.

I loved RTS games back in the day, played through all the Command & Conquers, Warcrafts, Starcrafts and all that, but then gradually it felt like the genre starting morphing into DotA and other games and I just sort of moved on. I was mostly single-player, though got into multiplayer later, but remember it being so fucking nerve-wracking and having to click hundreds of times a minute and trying to optimize everything, I’d be so worn out after playing. My best game I ever remembered playing was Starcraft 2, there was one match where multiple players tried ganging up on me in a FFA match, it was obvious they were coordinating, and I somehow fended them off and took the game. It wasn’t an important game or anything, but that was one of the fond memories I have from that time in my gaming life.

I think I eventually just shifted over to turn-based strategy instead and I don’t know if the genre ever really returned from DotA.

Nobody seems to talk about in the US either, one of the most basic human rights is in crisis and it’s just business as usual.