It's far from a certainty, but I wanted to float the idea before anything happened.

It's weird timing, him saying he "might" step down (which is politics for will step down), him saying he has Covid and is "sick" so publicly.

He's very likely getting out, and his handlers know this. The timing might be done to (try to) overshadow Trump's speech. What would be more overshadowing than him dying suddenly?

President Biden might be dead this time tomorrow. Which is not just dramatic...but also leaves us with President Harris. Yeah...

Shit.

I know we're a relatively small community, but I thought it could be fun to put this out there, and see what goes from there. I'll try to work up something more official later on.

It could be fun to try to have a (or multiple) meetups.

I'm in Oregon, USA.

EDIT: I'm drunk, not a glowie, and I resent that bullshit. An IRL meetup could be fun, I stand by that. I'm not asking for coordinates, just general area. And we can go from there.

EDIT 2: Didn't expect this to be so controversial. LOL.

EDIT 3: Yeah, I'm retarded sometimes. This was stupid and impractical, for a number of reasons.

1. Not just bad opsec, but negative opsec. And I often talk about opsec, I should know better.

2. I also should have been more clear, to share as little or as much as people felt comfortable, and that I wasn't looking for, like, street addresses or anything.

3. It also just wouldn't work anyway...our community is too small. Even if people had wanted to do this (which they were right to reject), we'd only have enough people for like three people or so in any one area, probably. And that's being generous.

I got carried away, when other people said they'd also done some homebrewing and stuff. I thought a get together would be fun. My bad, I was drunk and retarded. Hahaha.

I can be a lazy sonofabitch, sadly. I let something sit for a while, because I'm too autistic (not literally) to do things in a sensible and linear fashion.

Well, what do you know, it turned out good anyway.

I just turned a gallon of store-bought juice into actually fucking delicious 14%+ ABV fruit wine.

Tastes a fair bit like a brandy. And very on-brand for my current piratical mood.

I. MADE. GOOD. BOOZE.

Get on my level, scrubs.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.

Long story short: Was listening to music, heard something vaguely sea-shanty-esque, and am now in a piratical* mood.

So, yeah, what's everyone's favorite (visual) pirate media?

Actually, although right now I'm in the mood for visual media, feel free to throw out any written/audio recommendations as well!

Cheers, and hope everyone is still having a good one!

* Good fucking word, by the way. Piratical is a Hall of Fame contender.

I know meta-posts accomplish nothing, but I hope he'll be allowed to stay. He's a staple.

I don't agree with him, but he amuses me and, as said, he's a staple. And he often gets banned for bullshit reasons. I think last time he was banned for simply saying "worse halves."

That really shouldn't be considered an "identify attack" or whatever. Then again, nothing should.

Like, seriously, how gay is that? (Answer: Super-duper gay. Like, mega-homosexual.)

Dom, stop banning Imp. He's great. Again, I don't agree with him generally, but he really livens up the place.

Likewise, stop banning gopower, now that you finally caught on that he's actually a hilarious troll. He's the only actually funny troll we have.

I was just thinking about the sorry state of modern gaming, and that video of the Diablo 4 level designer chicks (trying to) play the game they helped design popped into my head.

This also ties in to a comment I made somewhere recently about being tired of anything "white" or "male" or "straight" or just generally normal being derided, and the destruction of those things being celebrated.

"Dude bros" is generally just code for passionate young white men. Now, sure, there are some negative aspects to young men of any race (usually overshadowed by the never talked about positives), but it was weaponized as a smear by fucking race communists to try to invade and take over...well, everything.

Things were better when "dude bros" ran (or at least contributed) to things. Back in the day, these creative innovators were genius nerd gamers who were hyper-passionate about their work, and it showed. They were rockstars, who actually played and cared about the field they were contributing to, and pushing forward.

Today, we have a bunch of diversity hires (anyone non-white and/or non-male, and/or non/straight) who often clearly have never seriously played a video game in their lives, much less the game they're spending their time designing. They're not passionate about the field, they're not passionate about the project. They're either just there for a paycheck or, worse, they're there to take shots at the imaginary "dude bros" in their minds that haunt their every waking hour. They're out for revenge, and to rub it in the faces of the dude bros that came before, and the dreaded largely straight white male demographic their games are still appealing to. I'm not even sure they have the self-awareness to realize their own work will never even hold a candle to that of the dude bros.

TL;DR: Put nerdy White/Asian male gamers back in charge of game design, and kick out the harpies and queers. Simple as. Same goes for society, probably.

Ninja Edit: The dude bros could make really impressive shit run on a calculator. Modern game design makes supercomputers sweat doing basic fucking shit. Save me from this nonsense.

One More Edit: Excellence used to be rewarded. Now it often gets hitpieces written against it by jealous journos working for the megacorps who churn out the shit games. If you don't pay the tithes, you don't get attention.

That's all, hope everyone is having a good one.

This isn't the first, second, third, or fourth time we've been overrun by retards.

This shit is much more damaging to a community than any of what Dom lashes out against could ever be.

He claims to care about keeping this community healthy, but continually let's shit like this happen, while simultaneously over-moderating legitimate users. While also not listening to the users, the majority of which think his rules are bullshit and counterproductive.

Reminder that he recently said that this comic is "pushing race war" and...

What is the message of this comic? Pretty straight-forward: In the inter-temporal race war of jews against all civilization, the republican party exists to serve jews and jews alone.

He also says people here want to murder him and his family.

He's also said comparing cops reactions to BLM to reactions to anti-Israel protests is "Asserting hypnotic control of the police to foment an international race war."

It would be one (still bad) thing if he was spinning out, but was at least doing his job in moderating other things. But he's not. Again, he claims to want to keep things healthy here. Are things healthy here, with how he does (or worse, does not do) things?

I've defended him in the past, too. I'm not one of his die-hard haters. He's good on many issues, and I appreciate his hands-off approach when it comes to many issues. But there are issues he weighs in on that he shouldn't, and issues he needs to weigh in on that he doesn't, at least in a timely manner.

He's lost the fucking plot, and is pretty much tanking this community which would otherwise be completely functional. He's the biggest danger to this community at this point.

Personally I think it should be posted in the side bar below the rules, as that's how it's generally been done, and is a good way to go about things. But it can still be accessed via link.

Here's the Scored version, which has a bunch more context and functionality, but you can't see what a removed post title or image was. Here's the .win version, which is generally less functional but is a useful fallback to take you to the .win links to see what it was about.

Cheers.

I was in the mood to turn my brain off witch an action movie I hadn't seen before, so did just that.

I won't do a full review since I'm only 30 minutes in, but the movie is Ambulance, 2022; Jake Gyllenhaal, some black dude, and some hispanic chick.

It's competent enough so far, generally. It's not doing anything too fancy, but I appreciate that from an action movie. But the Modern Audiences™ nonsense is unavoidable. I wish I didn't notice this but, once you know, you know.

Every black person is competent and in a position of power. Every white person is some combination of psychopath, loser, or incompetent. There's only been one woman in focus so far, but she's - no kidding - "the best paramedic in the city," and extremely competent. Hobbled with some newbie white dweeb...who's probably going to die or otherwise get damseled, at a guess.

Gyllenhaal and Black Dude are brothers. Black Dude was adopted by, wait for it, Gyllenhaal's psychotic criminal father. Black Dude is a patriotic veteran who's trying to get his life together, while his white brother is a criminal who drags him into shit. Gyllenhaal's criminal crew are, I believe, all white...and some of the most ridiculously incompetent or insane people around. Hilariously, they're also a very diverse set of whites for some reason; you have I believe an Italian, Irishman, and some sandal-wearing hippy hacker or something. It's bizarre.

It's all so tiresome.

I know we all get tired of meta posts, but this has been a complaint for ages.

Can we please simplify the rules and then enforce them equally and consistently? As is, we've had pretty sporadic enforcement, where bad stuff - porn, clearly bad faith trolling, and pedophilia advocation, to name a few recent standouts - have stayed up for around a week. Meanwhile, some much less offensive stuff, from established and active members, sometimes gets taken down immediately, which just stifles discussion. (And, no, I was not moderated, this isn't me bitching about something done to me.)

This isn't Reddit; we don't need these rules. We can simplify this all down to 'no porn, no advocating illegal activity, and if you're a handshake you don't have human rights.'

That's all. That's the thread.

Disclaimer: I went for a memey title, but hear me out. Also, I want to stress this is a theory, not something I think is reality...just something that could possibly be real. I don't think it's the likeliest explanation, but it's something that popped into my head. We'll see what happens if she drops out today, too.

What this comes down to is the age old question: Is an organization - in this case the GOP - more evil, or more stupid? Essentially, are they running things competently?

They don't seem to want Trump. But they know swapping him out would be a disaster. What if Nikki Haley is a sacrificial cutout to try to dampen the blow? Here's my idea: They're pushing Haley to stay in, precisely because she's hated but, if Trump gets taken out one way or another, they're not going to put her in as the candidate, even if she's still in the race...they're going to swap back to DeSantis, who recovered some of his popularity after dropping and endorsing Trump, and was also polling higher. It would make the whole process seem much more palatable to some. I personally don't think it would be enough, but it's certainly better than running Haley.

Essentially, Nikki Haley is in the race to be hated, so the GOP can stab Trump in the back and swap back to DeSantis or something, and pretend it's for the good of the people and the party.

And, since I know we probably still have some DeSantis fans, I'm not even saying he's in on it in this hypothetical situation. He could be, in one version, but it's certainly not required. Dropping out and endorsing Trump was a fairly natural move, and is in no way a condemnation on DeSantis.

No matter what happens, this election cycle is going to be a chaotic mess. The cleanest option is somehow a Trump v Biden rematch. Anything else gets even stupider, and even less representational.

Firstly, despite the name...no, it's not horny, and is in fact quite wholesome.

I'm only halfway in, but so far it's one of the better comedy animes I've see. In my opinion, comedy isn't one of anime's strong suits, and only a few have seriously amused me. Those being things like KonoSuba and Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious.

This has been funny so far, though. Basically, an antisocial sorcerer who lives alone in the woods happens to rescue a, well, as the title says, disgraced noble lady. Due to his antisocial nature, he's known to the nearby town as the Demon Lord, and he often cackles manically over his totally evil plans to...try to make this lady happy by "corrupting" her to enjoy life.

That's the sales pitch. If you're curious, check it out.

By the way, two other animes I'd recommend, but won't go into full detail about in this post: Synduality Noir and Dead Mount Death Play.

Thought I'd let people know, in case they were curious.

I've only played a few minutes but...I'm very underwhelmed. For all the hate a lot of woke games get, you're often hearing only one side, and so they're often better than you might think. Not excusing wokeness, and I hate the state of modern gaming, but point is if you just hear the negative sides of a game, you might be impressed on playing it, even if there's plenty that annoys you.

This is not the case with D4. It feels like a fucking mobile game. I'm only a few minutes in, as mentioned, but it starts with a decent cinematic (not as mindblowing compared to past Blizzard games when compared to the technology of the time, but not terrible or anything), then hits with "connecting to servers" and stuff, with "accessibility" options turned on, including text-to-speech. It has an AI voice telling you it's connecting to servers, that's your next intro to the game. Already leaves you with a weird taste. Next thing is it pushes you right to the aforementioned accessibility options. Next is character creation. I suspect the characters are randomly generated, but I had four blacks, and one fatass female (Druid is always fat.)

As to the actual gameplay, as I said, it feels like a mobile game. Not far enough in to fully judge, but my initial impression was very underwhelming. And, again, was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I think a lot of woke games get an exaggeratedly bad image, since we're hearing only the one side. But, yeah, just feels kind of clunky so far, and zoomed in a bit too much. Music is good, though, from what I've heard. Classic Diablo-style music. Mutes on Alt-Tab by default though.

Anyway, I'll stop rambling. I don't want to color anyone's opinions and, if you are curious, I do actually suggest you try it while it's free. But I was surprised at just how much I didn't like my first dip into it, and thought I'd share. For all the woke nonsense, I expected to like it more than my initial impressions.

I ended up on the Yahoo main page after reading an article that someone had linked here.

I saw this, and was curious how obnoxious Pence would be.
Headline #2: After Israel attack, Pence slams Trump and DeSantis as 'voices of appeasement'

When I clicked on the article, I got this, and what immediately stood out to me was DeSantis was no longer mentioned in the headline. It just said Pence condemned Trump and "the GOP."
Headline #3: Pence slams Trump, GOP ‘voices of appeasement’ as Israel comes under attack

I couldn't find an earlier Yahoo archive, so I tried to hunt down the original Politico article, and was surprised to find this.
Headline #1: With Israel under attack, Pence decries GOP isolationism

So, as far as I can tell, the headline initially had Pence "decrying the GOP," but then the headline was shifted so he "slams Trump and DeSantis," but I guess that still wasn't the right message, so they shifted it to "slams Trump, GOP." They either wanted to focus exclusively on Trump, or protect DeSantis.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting. I wasn't expecting to find a third headline.