My setup is my smartphone in my hand lol. I use the app 'Japanese Dictionary Takaboto' to look up most things, along with 漢字辞典 when I want to look up a kanji by input rather than Takaboto's radical search. I actually kind of hate it; I'm accustomed to looking up Japanese on an ancient Canon electronic dictionary which gave up the ghost last year, so touchscreens and inescapable adverts in apps make me want to puke.
I've seen Textractor mentioned and I could probably save myself countless hours with it, so I'm going to give it a look.
Thanks for the rundown, that's exactly the kind of info I needed. Yeah my Rance 2 is the remake. The title theme is a banger but in a quick dabble I got the sense that it wasn't quite as good as Rance 1. Still, if it's shorter, and if it fits in the continuity and Rance 3 is a big improvement, then I'll stick with it and do the full series with as much thoroughness as I can. Like you, I've heard a ridiculous amount of good things about Sengoku Rance as well as Rance X, so I'm looking forward to eventually burrowing my way through to those ones.
Who knows how long that'll take though. I'm a bit burnt out on Japanese after spending hundreds of hours getting through AI Somnium and Fata Morgana this summer. I thought about re-reading Cross Channel Final Complete, which I half-assedly skimmed through once long ago - while absorbing enough to realise that it was an excellent story, I highly recommend it if you like basic VNs - but when I fired it up, the author's obtuse writing style was already hurting my brain within the first couple of scenes. Think I need to just stick with my handful of indie roguelites for a little while to recover from language fatigue and from eye strain.
Speaking of all that, you mentioned the Alice Bundle. Do you know if the Mangagamer version lets you switch language? Part of the reason I pirated the Japanese versions of Rance 1&2 is because I wasn't sure if you could play the western ports in anything other than English. If you can switch easily, then I might try purchasing them as I go forward in order to support the devs a bit, assuming nothing is censored.
I played the remake of Rance 1 for the same reason and I have Rance 2 chambered and ready to go at some point. They're pretty primitive for what they are though. Are you familiar with any other games in the series and if so would you recommend I skip ahead to any particular one?
Have you played Yakuza 0 yet? Personally I found Kiwami a bit of a disappointment after 0, so just a heads up that the series has more and better to offer, depending on how much you enjoy Kiwami 1. Kiwami 2 was good though.
I just finished reading House in Fata Morgana for some language practice and I was saving Disco Elysium for afterwards. But in the meantime I've been dabbling in Spelunky 2, Noita and Ring of Pain, which are all absolutely kicking the shit out of me in terms of difficulty. Noita in particular has a strong pull on me - I'm a sucker for physics nonsense and I love watching the environment get screwed up in unexpected ways, but it leads to me taking stupid risks all the time.
For the first time that I am aware of, @tedwheeler has stated antifa by name. In an OPB mayoral debate, he calls out @sarahforpdx for her support of the violent extremist movement & her early refusal to denounce arson attacks. In response, she says this will get her death threats
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1315907132085198848?s=19
Haha this bitch really just spoonerised by saying 'we do not see a night to the endly protests' lol. What a tard.
rofl at the way they all run as if he's radioactive...
"He's disagreeing with us, using the power of blackness!!! WHAT THE HELL, is he malfunctioning?! I thought these things were always on our side! FLEE"
With idpol having infected the zeitgeist this much, any black people who are not on board with progressive ideology needs to realise what a nuclear weapon their skin colour can be, just like this man. Telling them to bow and kneel, haha.... I mean he's right, why wouldn't they if it's all just about giving black people the respect they've been denied??? Right...?
It's still quite dangerous, since if they outnumbered him sufficiently enough (say, 40:1) I suspect they'd still happily rabbit punch him and steal his phone. That's the only recourse this pussified ideology has.
He has selective blindness to the media manipulations of the American Left and he uses his close experience with the LA riots to downplay the breakdown of law and order which is happening today. The fact that multi-billion dollar megacorps are stumping up the bail funds of rioters while mainstream political opposition stokes the fires - and the unprecedented nature of all that - is conveniently ignored. I assume this is because it complicates the landscape beyond the current political mode Carlin wants to engage in, which is just 'Orange Man Bad'.
As a fellow fan I was sceptical of your characterisation of him, since I hadn't heard the latest Common Sense podcast and I remember in the March episode he was still careful to single out the concept of partisanship, itself, as the major divisive factor in US politics. However I caught up on the latest Common Sense and you're right. Carlin's gone from a simple dislike and unfavourable characterisation of Trump - which everyone is welcome to indulge in - to saying that Trump is the most dangerous president ever. All the while he's still trying to play the enlightened centrist game as if he's saying something reasonable that everybody should accept at face value.
It's a slow burn case of TDS which has taken slightly longer than average to reach severe symptoms. His trigger condition is the fact that Trump said something along the lines of 'the only way we can lose this election is if it's rigged'. According to Carlin, this is a power grab designed to attack the democratic process itself. Never mind the fact that Trump's opponents and the press have spent 4+ straight years attempting to de-legitimise the concept of any Trump victory, never mind that Biden's said similar things about a Trump win, no, suddenly, this one thing Trump said is an incredibly dangerous signal of his intentions (and of course he's well known for thinking deeply about what he says).
Bit depressing, but I'm optimistic that some of the milder TDS cases will eventually correct themselves, when this particular period of history eventually comes into focus in hindsight as one of the biggest examples of mass retardation on record, and people become embarrassed to have been associated with it.
I remember sympathising with SJW-adjacent talking points as late as 2012. The original trailers for TLOU1 didn't impress me... they just seemed to be revelling in violence for impact's sake. So at that time I remember shitting on TLOU just because I felt like western gaming could be something... more, idk.
In 2013-ish I remember shitting on EA because of their development of games featuring military action, specifically their chosen marketing where they promoted the games as if they were an authentic slice of military experience. It seemed phoney and cynical as fuck.
I recall that it was really valid to say whatever you wanted until... until the press circled their wagons over gamergate. At that point, basically everything became ideological warfare. It's gamergate, bro. Probably 2014.
Hey I promise I'll attempt to read it first. Then I'll rape however many chilldren it tells me is acceptable, kill however many jews and apostates it tells me to, wage war against the infidel and apostates as it dictates... then I'll commit the ultimate sin of burning a few pages.
EDIT: damn just remembered it puts limitations on how exactly I beat my wife. I'm out.
How easy is it to obtain a Koran? Do Amazon-ordered English language versions even count? I feel inclined to order one and torch it myself for the social meedz.
I abhor book burning. Any single Koran is a thing of value, in my eyes. But I'm equally if not more disgusted by the idea of riots in response to the destruction of religious idols. That goes double for media-acceptable riots in response to the destruction of a book that can't possibly be suppressed. We need a bunch of Korans burnt, to take some for the team.
Knife wielding black guy shot dead by Philly cops just a couple of hours back, so in the coming days expect that to be another flashpoint of riots in support of a good boy who was just turning his life around.