When I was in college, I found a hand-bound report from the Department of the Treasury, written in 1939, about the financial situation in Nanking during the Japanese occupation. I was writing a report about the Rape of Nanking for a history class, and I stumbled upon it while searching the university library.

I was shocked that it wasn’t in their archives, and even more shocked that they let me check it out.

Shadowrun (the arena shooter) probably would’ve been better received if it were named basically anything else.

I’ve tried this. They don’t listen; it just goes in one ear and out the other, and that’s assuming you’re on good terms with the person you’re talking to. Otherwise, they just get very angry that you’re attacking their worldview.

The long and short is that these people have been lied to virtually non-stop for the past 40 years, and the first step is depriving them of their disinformation stream. From there, it’s a slow process that could take years, and that process is reset if they go back to listening to lies on Fox News or on Facebook/Twitter.

“It is not the severity of punishment that deters crime, but the certainty of punishment.”

I feel like there is a difference between voting for someone and voting against someone.

I don’t like how noted war criminal amd possible lizard person Dick Cheney endorsed Harris, but Cheney has never said, “I like what Harris is going to do”; instead, he tried to frame it as a vote against Trump because…well, it’s Trump.

And of course, right-wingers don’t have any capability for self-reflection, because the proper response to fucking Dick Cheney calling you evil is to look in the mirror and ask yourself some hard questions.

Both things can be true.

The plot badly needs some pruning shears taken to it; to say that it moves at a snails pace is an insult to snails. Like, why did we need an entire faux high school arc? There’s plot-relevant stuff there, but they can cut most of that and the game would be better. Filler arcs in a story that’s…what, ten games now? That’s why this series is still obscure, despite there being a lot to like here.

If you need something to scratch that JRPG itch, you can do a lot worse, and there’s a reason this series shows up on “hidden gems” list. But…damn. There’s so much content and story, and a fair chunk is little better than filler.

Mark Meer is great, and definitely worth playing thru to experience. Not quite at the same level as Jennifer Hale’s performance, but it was still absolutely brilliant.

Still, I hear this every time I hear Shepard talk to Dr. Chakwas.

A bunch of inbred royal fucks beefing over turf.

Which aptly describes basically every war in European history, honestly.

Journeys (the shoe chain) and Hollister Co. both use Linux distros on their point of sale machines. Hollister’s machines are pretty locked down and can basically only run the RPoS software, but a lot of Journeys’ software is browser-based, so they have to be a bit more capable.

Pretty sure they’re both custom distros, though.

An entire fandom has been pronouncing “Evangelion” wrong for the past quarter-century.

It’s supposed to be pronounced with a hard G, like hair gel.

Time is a flat circle.

To my knowledge, it’s the first time in history that a non-nuclear power invaded and occupied territory belonging to a nuclear power.

So, that’s even more dubious history Putin played a part in.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

I’m thinking someone went nuts with the Photoshop. It’s what Elon Musk thinks he looks like, and I don’t think AI would be able to get that look just the way Elon wants it.

Super famous singer “offers” to be featured on your track

“Sure! I had my lawyer write up a contract; let me send it to your people and we can go from there.”

If they’re cool, they’ll negotiate and sign a contract. “Just trust me, bro!” is never an acceptable answer. Protect yourself; have a contract before collaborating with anyone.

and the story takes a while to get started.

That’s the problem the game has always had, though.

I played for a bit right as Endwalker came out. I went in blind, played consistently for two months, and by then, I had just finished the first third of Shadowbringers. In contrast, it took me a month-and-a-half to level my first WoW toon back during Wrath of the Lich King.

People may praise the story, but while there was a lot of great stuff, it just takes so loooooong to get there. They really do need to go through and prune the filler quests or boost experience gains.

In DA2’s defence, the game went from concept to release in 16 months. With a development cycle that fast, it’s a miracle it was even playable; I wouldn’t call its rampant copy-pasting “lazy”. I’d call it many bad things, because that game had tons of problems, but that’s what happens when the beancounters have an unexpected success and want to capitalize on it yesterday.

instead of just playing the game as intended.

I feel like you just unwittingly hit on the problem many series veterans have been having.

People are approaching bosses in Elden Ring like they’re Dark Souls bosses, and in my thousands of hours across the series, the only bosses I summon help for is Sister Friede and the Demon Twins. Everyone else I was eventually able to defeat on my own, because that’s how they were balanced.

But in Elden Ring, you have the open world to grind in and Spirit Ashes and crazy weapon arts that are far beyond any that were in Dark Souls 3, and the bosses are balanced around these things. It’s harder to make a good guess at how powerful a player is at any given time in Elden Ring, so in order to counter the player’s bullshit, the bosses need bullshit of their own.

This, naturally, throws a wrench into the plans of veterans who are used to bosses that are tough but fair and approaching them in that manner. They then promptly get their shit pushed in because they aren’t using the things the encounters are balanced around having simply because they didn’t used to need them.

It makes the bosses binary. Either you get your ass kicked, or you summon help, use a Mimic Tear, and run a train on them. They’re either frustrating or boring, and fights that are frustrating or boring just aren’t fun. I’m not having fun getting comboed to death or just pelting the boss with spells while my goons beat them up.

The magic is gone. Bosses used to be the highlight of Souls games, and now I just want them to be over.

The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player’s settlements.