Awesome, thanks for that detailed response. I'll keep an eye on the sales.

I've played the literal Card Battle game that Firaxis made after Xcom 2 (Midnight Sun)

Was it any good though? It's finally trending towards a decent sale and I've been considering it. (Lot's of other games I'm still more likely to pick up though.)

I genuinely thought the pictures of this show were complete satire until just a couple days ago.

Hubris.

He was out to prove himself with LotR. But by the time the Hobbit was greelighted he was "mother fuckin Peter Jackson!" And everyone was guaranteed to love it.

The Tolkien Edit is actually pretty good. Though it cuts a few things I would not have, and leaves a few more than I would have. There's still quite a few scenes that can't properly be salvaged, but it's still way better than the unedited.

It's funny, LotR isn't half as good if you don't watch the extended edition, but the Hobbit must be watched in abridged form.

No, he's right, it was Arwen, Elrond's Daughter.

They had this whole Xena Warrior Princess vibe going and DID actually film a lot more scenes with her all the way up to the Battle of Helms Deep (many people don't even know she is still visible in several background shots). This is why they had her save the Hobbits in the beginning, and take over Elrond's job of summoning the river, instead of being book accurate and only meeting her inside Rivendell.

I've heard two version why, one there was a leak at the time and there were enough real book fans paying attention to pitch a big fit about how much they were changing the books. Or, that Liv Tyler was so bad at acting the role, Jackson couldn't stand to see her pretend to fire one more arrow. Either way, the whole thing got dialed back, and they decided to add the weird dream sequences to keep her in the story.

I can only imagine they planned to have a whole love triangle cat fight between her and Aeowyn too.

Pretty sure it was always women?

Going back to the very beginning (2000's ish?) of the claims that more women play games than men, it was because of Farmville on facebook.

Facebook and Zenimax pioneered the idea of paying to bypass waittimes just a few years before the iPhone became a thing. They focused entirely on the dopamine hit of getting a happy little poppup telling you that something had happened, then making you wait to get the next one, unless you pay just a little bit of imaginary money from you imaginary credit card.

Then mobile phones made the scam 10x more profitable.

But that's only the pure numbers. The "whales" are inevitably autistic men with tones of disposable income and absolutely no friends.

There's that one case of the saudi prince who owns every game on steam, and likely every dlc, just because. He's probably done the same with his phone. But I doubt that's a particularly large demographic.

In case you didn't realise, these comparisons are the in-game model to the face of the paid human it was based on. Not just ugly v pretty, the women on the left are literally supposed to be who the game model is made to look like.

There were. Before the hundred flowers campaign.

Let these people think the Dems are fully power, then let them "freely" criticise anything they want to about the Democrat party (for democracy, you know?) and you can bet they will have something to complain about.

Then round them all up and call everyone "far-right" and boom, Mao's your uncle.

You're thinking physical reaction times, not mental.

If I asked you and Kobe to solve 87 * 22 / 2, odds are pretty high you will trounce him in reaction time. And if not, well you might have to reevaluate how intelligent Kobe is.

This is normally taken into account in clinical IQ tests, as those who answer the questions quickly will score higher. It doesn't play a roll in standardised online tests.

The difference between an IQ of 160 and 190 is usually going to come down to reaction time, not individual levels of subject knowledge. It's reasonable to think it is a likely sole indicator, but it's pretty hard to measure accurately without the rest of the test.

It's a VR game, and they now have a shitty track record. They deserve all the criticism they get, even if it's bat shit retarded and misplaced inadequacy issues. They still deserve it.

Yeah I'm gonna read those comics eventually because his writing in B5 is so good.

Can't believe I slept on the show for so long.

B5 is unique because the majority of the show was written by one man. Other shows have whole teams of writers, and even the "creator" of the show might only write 5% of the episodes. Straczynski wrote like 95% of the episodes, so yeah, skip the filler and get a decent show.

Pay very close attention to which episodes were actually written by the lead writer, and which were not. The ones that were not are the worst, most propaganda driven episodes in the whole show.

I'm almost done with season 2 on a first time watch. Once I realised who the subversives were (and reading their bios lead you to the worst episodes of trek, and how those episodes could have been even worse if the author had gotten away with it) I started ignoring anything not written by Straczynski.

I think it's a damn good show so far, but those "filler" eps were absolutely hardcore propaganda. It was the one where "parental rights are a bad thing!" that got me looking into who was actually writing this trash, and why was it so clearly bad in every way compared to the episode before it.

And 2 of those never aired, the rest aired out of order, and Fox kept changing the timeslot so anyone who did like it couldn't find it, couldn't follow it, and had no idea if it was any good beyond the two episodes they managed to catch before it was cancelled. (Speaking from experience as someone who did actually try to watch it when it aired.)

Firefly was sabotaged because one of the board members at Faux hated Scifi so much they didn't want it to succeed.

They would realise that, but at this point all the people in marketing are themselves giant faggots.

If they sent the letter threatening X the day of, they absolutely sent the letter to every other platform. And as we already know, the other platforms kowtow to government demands immediately.

Used to call that behaviour "black bagging."

Secret courts and tribunals for ordinary citizens who SAY the wrong thing is as dystopian as it gets.

I pay a lot more in annual taxes for my "cheapest care in the world" than ever did for medical care in the US. If Canadians were actually billed each year, specifically, for the medical system, they wouldn't be so smug about "not paying" for healthcare.

The bottom line is sadly weighed down by the write-down of Life By You

As for overall revenue, it fell by 22%

This is a big blow, but it's not as bad as it sounds. They just deducted the loss of LBY from their gains this quarter. All bills and payroll is still being paid, and next quarter they will brag about the increased profit margin while announcing whatever new project is going to replace LBY.

"where individualism has formed the basis of their ideas, when it has come to Communism, they have found it unacceptable, so that now they are about to do away with their traditional individualism."

You see it here in the west now: appeals to individualism, particularly the darker sides of it (degeneracy and vice, victim Olympics, selfish want for gibs) were the honey that brought the flies to the collectivist table. Pretty much all communist revolutions began by appealing to the darker nature of individualism to begin their revolutions. After which, they do away with individualism by killing off the revolutionaries themselves.

It's an interesting point of view from an outsider born in a society where collectivism was the traditional and fundamental mean.

Indian culture keeps their unmarried women away from the men. An unaccompanied woman on the street is likely a prostitute (and even they travel in groups).

Keep any group of single men completely separated from women for most of their life, and then release one into the middle of them and see what happens. See: clipper ships and their rules against women on a ship full of men who were away from port for weeks or months at a time.

Apply that to an entire civilisation that also has a caste system, and women who are not part of your cast are either seen as nobility or subhuman. This behaviour should be entirely expected with even a cursory understanding of their culture.

Of course, that's racist. Knowing shit about different cultures. The whole world is a kumbaya leftist utopia, don'cha know?

as far as there have been records

Source: the hilarious graffity in Pompe.

You missed it:

In addition to the once common usage of expressing unfamiliarity with someone,

Because that's what u/m0r1arty said was his reason for using a non-specific pronoun.

Both uses were very much common grammatical uses before this woke shit started. Downvotes and disagreeing don't change reality.

No doubt in my mind she was already prepared/coached to do exactly this after Trump had died. Someone would have been prepared to be the fall for it, and this is exactly what it would have looked like. Stonewall, step down, vanish, book deal six months later.

It was a pre-approved script, and the only thing she regrets is that the attempt failed.

This whole pronoun shit has made people completely forget (or just refuse to learn after the fact) how proper grammar has worked for centuries.

In addition to the once common usage of expressing unfamiliarity with someone, They/Their has pretty much always been used to refer to someone of unknown sex (the most frequent pop culture references I can think of are mystery novels where the perpetrator is being described without giving clues to who it is).

But there's a big group of uneducated insisting on some form of pronoun purity just to spite the woke, and don't seem to realise they have allowed 'them' to subvert our language even further.