Walt, all in all, was a consummate Futurist (and idealist), and I feel like his take on it was more of a utopian thing - people working for the company that owned the community, and the company providing for the people, in a non-antagonistic, mutually beneficial way. Sort of a corporate arcology but without the dystopian aspects to it. Now, we all know that would never work in the long run, because people inevitably find some way to fuck it up, but I can see what he was aiming at.

Flash forward, and we have the rainbow-haired brigade wanting us all to live in pods, own nothing, and subsist on insects and mealworms. Something definitely went wrong between Point A and Point B.

Not to pick nits, but it should have happened back when Walt died and the powers that be at the house of the mouse decided to turn the land into EPCOT instead of the actual company city that Walt had envisioned. The state was too busy counting the money rolling in and gargling Disney corporate's balls to actually look at the groomer shit that was being pulled even back in the day.

Bingo. Write up your hit-piece, have it ready to go in the barrel of the CMS, shoot off the message to the person you're all-but-libeling, wait five minutes, and hit Publish:

"We reached out but have not received comment at the time of publication."

While I can't speak to the difficulty level in relation to the other Souls games (yeah, I'm a pleb newcomer to the genre) I don't really feel like Elden Ring is punishingly difficult. Yeah, it's hard at points, and there's plenty of times where I've been killed due to overextending myself in fight, but I recognize that as my own stupidity and learned from my mistakes. I can see it being massively confusing if one were going in blind, i.e. no referencing a wiki or talking to friends that are playing it, but it's not like it's so full of cheese from bosses that you can't progress unless you have frame-perfect timing. Getting slapped around by bosses? Level up more and learn to stop flailing around like a moron in the fights. Barely doing chip damage on the enemies? Level up more and buff your weapons. Getting lost in quest lines? There's a nifty thing called a pad of paper and pencil - take notes and learn to use the map markers. There's solutions for everything in the game, you just need to learn how to use them. There's no need for any sort of "easy mode" in its context.

EDIT: friggin' typos...

Funny how all of these things start lining up when you start noticing the common factors, eh?

Because it's not what the groomers actually want. They don't want kids treating everyone the same regardless of race, creed, color, or blatantly obvious mental illness. They want to bend the kids minds, and then bend the kids over.

"Oh, look, those darned people with kids are using up more carbon than us rich people who are flying back and forth across the pond!"

Bullshit.

"If you live car-free then you will save even more carbon!"

Right, and exactly how the fuck am I supposed to get these kids back and forth to daycare while I'm working?

"Eat a plant-based diet to be more eco-sustainable!"

And kill yourself from a lack of vitamins and nutrients in the process? Oh, wait, that's where eating bugs and grubs comes in to supplement the diet, right? Screw you, give me a steak.

Damn, I hate this stupid new world order they're pushing.

I had a look at the church's website. Looks like they're some merged variant of Presbyterian and Congregational. Not surprised that they're also some sort of woke. I'd bet they probably were all about supporting BLM back during the "peaceful protests", too. If I were a white person that was going there, I'd be fasting by ditching that church and finding a new one - but then again any white person going there is probably also woke and bending the knee to the almighty sacrament of wokeness and the original sin of being born into "white privilege".

This isn't the first story I've seen in recent days indicating that an agent of the state (in the other case I read, it was the guidance counselor at the kid's school) was effectively grooming kids into thinking they're trans.

In the other case the parents pulled their kids from the school and opted to home school them after discovering their teenage daughter was being groomed as trans, and - surprise, surprise - CPS turned up knocking on their door. Not once, but multiple times. The CPS worker didn't find anything amiss and warned the family that they felt the reports they were investigating were being made with malicious intent, but they still had to investigate them. The family has filed counter-complaints which are being investigated, and while the state can't divulge who made the complaints to the state, the family pretty much knows it was the guidance counselor, based on the details that were given in the reports - stuff that only someone close to the family or who had pumped the kid for info would know.

This is the type of thing parents are up against. They have to worry about the very people that they should be able to trust with the health and education of their children, planting ideas in their kids' heads and trying to bend them into something they aren't, then punitively retaliating via legal means when the parents try to take their potential victim away from them.

Fine and dandy to regret it (because everything was fuckloads better before the Eternal September), but exactly what the hell will he be doing to make up for what he did?

Exactly zero.

This is just another performative act by someone knowing they're universally reviled by a good half of the Internet. He doesn't get to play the "I'm sowwy" card and get away with it.

In reverse order:

• E3 was dead long before they canceled it this year, and they really shouldn't bother trying to revive it. The damn thing has only existed in the last decade so "journalists" can go have a trip on their company's dime, and collude in real-space.

• Let's be honest. At this point, if I had kids that were of an age where they were getting into Disney stuff, I'd straight-up ban anything produced after the year 2000 from entering my house. That company needs to be purged of its leadership and cut off from any benefits they may have enjoyed in the state of Florida.

• Sarkeesian must be feeling the pain of starting to hit the wall, combined with fading into irrelevance yet again. Otherwise she wouldn't be poking her head out into the light.

• Sam Maggs, professional victim. Gotta love how someone can make a pest out of themselves at a job, screw with a character design (that was later made back into a female-looking critter by Internet artists), get canned from said job, and STILL act like they're the victim in their case.

• I've already seen plenty of takes on the VG247 article and how the dude previously had a hate-boner over GoT, but it never ceases to amaze me how assholes like him can justify acting like they know better than the ENTIRE POPULATION OF JAPAN whether a game is good or not.

That's par for the course with woke doublethink. Woman writer that doesn't toe the line with nu-feminism? Internalized misogyny, they must be crushed. Black writer that doesn't go for the "white man bad, we wuz kangz" line? They're an Uncle Tom with internalized racism. Gay dude that doesn't make their characters all about "I'M GAY! I'M GAY! Did I mention I'M GAAAAAAAAAY!"? Internalized homophobia. It's the same pattern, on repeat, for any of their precious protected classes that don't meet their standards of performative wokeness, and par for the course to ostracize and eliminate the outliers that don't fit the narrative.

General thoughts:

• When I heard about the D&D adventures, my first thought was "So are they writing the adventures with Orcs as protagonists? Because that's what the wokies keep telling us the Orcs are the real-world equivalent of..."

• As soon as we learned that the Halo TV show wasn't going to feature Master Chief as the lead, we knew it was going to be a shitshow. As such it is unsurprising that Ash Parrish would be BLACK WOMAN'ing it up over the trash.

• Cheaters in games are scum. Full stop. They shouldn't be looked at as a reason to do anything other than find ways to drive them out of the legit play or segregate them to playing with the others of their ilk.

Correct. As the life cycle of a virus progress typically each generation of it gets weaker in its effects on the host, but as such it becomes easier for it to spread around because people can be carrying it for longer periods of time without realizing it. The comorbidities are usually the deciding factor at that point - it's like how a person with AIDS usually doesn't die from AIDS itself, they die from stuff like pneumonia or cancers that the body would normally be able to fight off if their immune system wasn't weakened. In the case of COVID, if the person didn't already have trouble breathing (asthma) and they didn't already have a weakened immune system (unhealthy lifestyle or old age), then they're likely going to survive any case of it they come down with.

The only way it's going to be deadlier for individuals is if they have some other comorbidity that contributes to a worsening of their situation. Old age, obesity, weakened immune system, etc, can all make an infection with a lesser variant of a virus more problematic. But the media aren't going to tell you if the person that dies from it weighs in at 450 and has asthma and diabeetus, they'll just report it as a COVID death and pump their statistics.

That she's one woman, they had her in custody, and she's an embarrassment to the people and businesses she grifted? That's about the only thing I can think of. If she'd been some nameless illegal that was working for less-than-minimum-wage under the table in some farm field in Texas or California she'd have been less likely to have been caught. Hell, if that were the case, you'd probably have some leftist trying to get her registered to vote and trying to find a way to keep her here.

I watched the Netflix documentary on her, as well as several interviews with the chick after the fact. She's obviously a grifter, as well as a total narcissist (blaming other people for being taken by her actions, not accepting fault for what she did, etc). If they deported her early, then I say good riddance.

I saw this pop up over on the Gaming subwin and immediately went out and spite-bought it. The game was on my radar anyway, but I had held off on picking it up in anticipation of the next sale. The review-bombing it's getting just popped it to the top of my purchase list.

Quite likely it's supposed to be the site formerly known as Gamasutra. I just copypasta'd the body from the Reddit post, and Scrivonaut is known to occasionally screw up the name of a site or developer in the actual podcast, so a typo here and there doesn't surprise me.

Osaka has struggled since winning her last major title at the Australian Open in 2021, withdrawing from the French Open ahead of her second-round match, opting out of Wimbledon and then announcing she would be taking an indefinite break from the sport after a third-round exit at the US Open in September. She returned to competition at the start of the season but lost in the third round of the Australian Open to Amanda Anisimova. Her ranking plummeted to No. 85.

Well, sounds like she does actually suck and that her win at the Australian Open was a fluke. If you can't take the mental heat, get your ass out of the competitive kitchen.

I've long been a fan of Journalist Bait in games - stuff like the music getting better in relation to your play style, or having the ending of the game be different in Easy Mode playthroughs. That way we know immediately that they're full of shit and didn't actually play the game if they call it out in their review.

The notion that a producer of a global game should grab their ankles and bend over for the West's neo-puritan takes on what graphics should and shouldn't be displayed in a video game is utterly laughable. We need developers to say "fuck this noise" and stand up to the mouthpieces that think they can push devs around.

As far as Elden RIng not holding players' hands - that's the way it's been in Souls-likes for years. Anyone bitching about it needs to pay attention to the game and the clues that it does give you - if there's a save point and a summon point right before you enter an area, you know there's going to be some shit going down. If you whack a boss with your meatiest attack and it barely does tick damage to them, you back the fuck out and go level some more. No quest log? Keep a pen and paper with you when you're playing and drop markers on the map when you find someone who asks you for an item or you find a place where a rare item drops. They give you the tools to play the game, you just need to Git Gud and learn how to use them.

I'm not even going to get too deep on how stupid it is to have race-lifted dwarfs, hobbits, elves, et cetera in a Tolkien-based work, because it should be evident to any fan of his work. Middle-Earth is a friggin clone of the whitest part of Europe. If you take this Amazon crap as canon, you're going to have to accept that at some point between this and The Hobbit the entirety of the shire went through a race purge. Moronic wokies don't even think about the implications of their actions in relation to current continuity, they just do whatever they want and then scream about how everyone is -ist/-ism/-phobic.

$65K for their lowest position? Shit, if I wasn't a white dude I'd be all over trying to get my foot in there (because you know they'd turn me down because I didn't fit their diversity quota. Let's hear it for anti-White racism). That's more than I'm making at my IT job, with 5 years' experience.

That brings to mind an interesting point - are all of these "stunning and brave" race-lifts just the new version of Blaxploitation, with the trained seals barking and clapping for it because they're too dumb to realize they're being race-baited?

At first I thought it was Gerry Conway shooting his mouth off again, but this is Erik Larsen. He had fuck-all to do with The Punisher's creation. That dude is a raging, TDS-infected, douche canoe of a libtard, and has been since 2016.