They did a revamp of the moderators a while back, but that felt more like they were shuffling the deck chairs and moving the problem children to new accounts. I never really frequented the shithole that was general chat so I didn't have the "joy" of dealing with "misan" in any of her forms., but I heard it was pretty bad.

The whole crew working on the game suffers from massive wokeness. Hell, the lead dev cut someone off from the affiliates program due to the person espousing pro-conservative/pro-Trump views on Twitter.

white people are not allowed to make [ethnic food], but fuck them

Word. I do Tex-Mex, full-Mex, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Indian, and just about any other nationality under the sun's food all from the comfort of my own kitchen. Sure, it sucks having to special-order spices and the like from online vendors when I can't get them locally, but that's the joy of the Internet. The "cultural appropriation" crowd can get bent.

Based on the headline I was like "WTF is 'needle spiking'?", so I had a look at the article. Then I rolled my eyes so hard it felt like I could see the back of my skull from the inside. The likelihood of some random dude carrying a syringe of something that could be used to drug a woman into a club, sneaking up behind her, and injecting it without her noticing is pretty slim. This is just women trying to deflect the fact that they went out, got shit-faced, and didn't want to have to deal with the real-life ramifications of their actions.

Not into the bars scene

Right, so I can go pay a to get into a place where there's 100% markup on alcohol, I get snubbed by people who think they're better than me if I try to start a conversation, and get to stumble home at the end of the night? Hard pass

Don't care about the arts

What, so I can go see Hamilton for the millionth time? I can go to an art museum where 3/4ths of the work there is indecipherable modern bullshit that looks like someone gave themselves a paint enema and then shat it onto the canvas? I can go get overcharged for the price of a concert ticket so I can sit in the nosebleed seats and look at the postage-stamp sized supergroup on stage or effectively watch them on TV on the Jumbotron? Or maybe I should be hitting the trendy dive venues so I can stand in a cramped butts-to-nuts room and listen to some pretentious indie group navel-gaze for their entire set? Fuck that noise.

Besides, you can't do any of that anymore without being quadruple-vaxxed and showing your PAPERS PLEASE at the door. Miss me with that shit.

Don't care about sports

Again, why should I pay for an overpriced ticket to go watch overpaid millionaire crybabies play what amounts to children's playground games? Screw them and the culture they represent.

Don't care about great cuisine

Overpriced, pretentious "molecular gastronomy"? Frou-frou gastropub fare? Bitch, please. Give me a cookbook with those recipes in them and I can make that stuff at home for a quarter of the cost you're paying for it in the city.

Don't care about immersing yourself around others unlike you

Nope, don't give a damn about that. I did my traveling earlier in my life, lived in a bigger city, and saw different people and different cultures, and I really didn't care to deal with having them around me. Despite the "melting pot" that the USA is supposed to be, most of them didn't give two shits about trying to meld themselves into American culture. If they're not going to try to learn to be like my culture, why the hell should I try to learn to be like theirs?

All in all I don't give two shits about being able to find a food cart that's open at 4 AM, because if my ass is up at 4 AM it's because I had to get up that early to do something, not because I'm stumbling home from the bar so I can no-sleep it through my shift at work the next day. I don't give a tinker's dam about there being shows and museums within 15 minutes, because once you've seen the show or been to the exhibit then there's no need to go back until the show changes. Internationally acclaimed universities only matter if you're attending classes, and them not being near me is why dorms exist.

I wouldn't trade my Midwest semi-rural life for anything. Anyone trying to convince me that city life is the epitome of living needs to get their head checked.

This is the thinking they need to be taking on it. It seems damn fishy that AT&T decided to drop the network just after Biden goes out and reads the message from his handlers stating that they want outlets to cut the news that they believe is mis-/disinformation regarding the Party Line.

Honestly, given the type of content people watch, it'd probably get views. Treat it like a cross between an instructional channel (teaching people how to play manual forms of solitaire), a "let's play", and "just chatting", and you could probably pull some regulars. Rotate between different games every few sessions to keep things interesting and it might have some legs.

I remember the whole thing going down and being a bit of a Streisand Effect moment for her, and after taking the time to hunt down copies of the pics I was like "That was it?" Nothing to write home about.

Kat Schwartz. She was doing a magazine shoot where she was depicted topless and smoking a cigarette, although the actual shots for the mag/web were cropped so you didn't see much past the top of her breasts. Unfortunately for her and the mag, the person editing the images didn't sanitize the metadata, and it still included the full-size thumbnails of the images. Those got recovered and released to the wild.

Fwiw, I wasn't really that impressed, but then again small boobs don't really do it for me.

Been saying this since his senile ass got elected. Two years and a day, and he's out the door.

Last one I used was an old-school Logitech Trackman Marble Wheel, ages ago. I had a desk that didn't really have the space for a mouse, and a trackball was my only option. Given the day and age, if you don't want to use one that's pure Chinesium, your best bet is probably going to be a Logitech unit. Be warned, though, they are not good for playing any sort of first-person games, especially if they're a shooter. They're honestly barely a step above a trackpad on a laptop in that respect. They're fine for other stuff where you don't need twitch reflexes to snap-aim, so RTS and sim games will be fine, but don't go out expecting to 360 noscope anyone.

If memory serves me when we hopped over to .Win, we were the first ones here and half-KIA swung by as an afterthought because they were starting to be afraid of being memory-holed. I think the KIA2 name came along because it was who we were, more so than anything, and quite honestly it deserves to stay, as a reminder of the shit we went through.

Morrisons said its research showed that milk does not need to be labelled as a perishable food. "The dates on the milk will stay the same - it is what we are asking customers to do which is changing," the supermarket said.

Unless that shit is vacuum sealed, ultra-pasteurized, and stored in a light-proof, temperature-controlled environment, it's perishable - and it's not like they're doing anything different, the dates are still going to be there. Any milk that has had the seal on it broken is on a ticking clock. Anyone who drinks it or uses it in cooking on the regular knows this, and knows well enough to give it a sniff test if it's been in the fridge for more than a week. These morons at Morrisons aren't doing a damn thing to reduce waste, other than patting themselves on the back for 'doing a thing'.

Shit like this makes me glad I left the church about 15 years back. I figure they don't want me because my wife and I got divorced back then, so screw them.

Honestly, pick any independent reviewer on the Internet and research them well. The more corporate sponsors they have the more beholden they are to someone else's money, so just be aware of who's paying their bills.

I never understood the need to read reviews on games and movies

Back in the pre-Internet days, even up through the early '00s, that's about all we had. Unless one of your buddies bought the game or watched the flick before you did and could give you a first-hand review, the gaming press and review media (think EGM/PC Gamer for games and "Siskel and Ebert" for films) were our lifeline for whether something was going to be worth our time and money. There was always some suspicion of payola and collusion back in the day, but we tended to overlook it as the reviews from multiple magazines usually lined up - if a game was a shit-show then there would be at least one mag that would be honest about it.

Obviously, things shifted pretty quickly between 2000-10, when we started realizing how deep the rot and collusion - both between the games press outlets and the publishers, and among the games press outlets themselves - ran in the industry. We now know how full of shit they all are, so anyone who takes the hobby seriously knows to go to independent review sources for any info they need.

Gateway drug for getting non-vegans into the lifestyle. If they can dupe the normal omnivores into eating soy/plants on a regular basis and treating it like it's meat then they can reduce reliance on farmed meats and SaVe ThE eNvIrOnMeNt. Never mind that the farming that produces the soy products pumps more toxins into the environment via weed killers and kills tons of critters that nest in the fields during the growing season once harvest happens.

So did sexism and racism, which provide the only explanation for why some voters think she’s worse than Cheney...

Sexism and racism has nothing to do with that. It's the fact that Heels-Up Harris basically screwed her way to the position she held in the state, and then took to helping the party screw the people of America. I wouldn't trust her to run a dog pound, much less the country, because she's completely unqualified for either one.

The Drifter taking fall damage really threw me off the first time it happened on the Earth level, because I damn near died from it. I ended up spending the next couple minutes hiding behind something and dropping stimpacks until my health was back up to snuff. It wasn't a problem for me after that barring a couple of glitches - in two separate instances I was trying to jump up on something, he got stuck in mid-air, hung there for a couple seconds like it couldn't figure out what animation to process, and then I took fatal fall damage and he'd ragdoll. It would have been pretty funny if I hadn't been so annoyed.

I've heard that about the Tennogen stuff, so maybe there's nothing to worry about there. I know the saying is that the endgame is FashionFrame but I generally don't go in for Tennogen on Operator accessories since you're not going to be seeing them 95% of the time - any suits I have for the kiddo have been bonuses in the packs, so I look at them as nifty freebies more than "I want that look".

As far as more Drifter sans powers goes, I could see them doing more with him if they go into flashback missions for what happened with him prior to the convergence at New War, but as far as content going forward goes I foresee them keeping him powered up.

I think I needed a stock, but I'd have to log on and check my inventory. Shoot me a friend request next time you're online, I'm [REDACTED - PM me for info] over there, too. Maybe we can meet up, swap, and run a couple missions.

Drifter without Void powers was a mixed bag for me. It would have been nice if they'd told us the smoke bomb could obscure the Deacons' line of sight. It took me more attempts than I care to admit to get through Nu-Fortuna because of that - my dumb ass figured "They're special enemies, they'll be able to see through it". Other than that, I liked his power set. It was a nice change from stumbling around as the kid.

They definitely did our boy Teshin dirty. I may not have liked him, but he didn't deserve to go out like a bitch. Plus, now who the hell is Varzia going to lust over with him gone?

I figure they're probably weighing the options on how many man-hours it's going to take to re-rig all of the Kiddo outfits to fit Drifter versus the community outcry if they either 1) don't do it or 2) try to make us re-buy all of it. You know the shit's going to hit the fan if they don't do it, but it's really going to hit the fan if they try to make us do a re-buy or split Tennogen accessories off so they're either for one or the other, but not both.

I really want that grapple glaive mechanic for our existing frames. It would open up so many more movement options it wouldn't even be funny. I hate to admit it, but it took me longer than it should have to figure out how to match Teshin's energy abilities against the attacking Sentient. I figured we'd have to go round robin and switch out like we do with the Frames, rather than just playing "match the colors". While I found the character of Kahl the most intriguing, I wasn't really that engrossed by his gameplay - it felt a bit more Gears of War than Warframe, and we've all played that before. Veso-R had an interesting gimmick, but it would have been nice to have had more combat with his pets than what we were able to mix up. I'd like to see them do more multi-faction stuff in the future. I think it'd be a nice change from the usual frantic "mow down the horde and leap through the level" gameplay.

...rewatching Supernatural until end of season 5...

As it should be. That show ended a long time before they finally took it off the air.

Preach on, m'man - I've been saying this ever since they started that shit with the trans insert NPC. DMs have been using the Girdle as a player trap (no pun intended) for years, so it's painfully obvious that anyone in a D&D world that would potentially want to be the opposite sex could be the opposite sex with relative ease once one of those was located. Anything else that is presented as "trans" in a D&D-based fantasy world is just a player with a fetish that they don't want to admit to, virtue signaling it up for oppression points.

Same here. As much as I hate DE's personal politics leeching over into their professional side of things, I've been playing the game since 2017 and I keep coming back for more. Now if I could just get the damn Necramech gun parts I need to drop, I could quit farming Deimos for the rest of eternity and be happy with it.

I have played through TNW, and I really wish they would have given us the option to replay it out of the gate rather than making us wait for it, because I'd like to be able to re-run through it and draw a few conclusions on my own rather than rewatching content creators' captures of it.

• Part of me feels like it opened a lot more doors to questions than it answered, and part of me feels like it was just a way for them to weave in an easy out for future plot inconsistency. They've basically introduced a way to handwave it as "lol multiverse" whenever something doesn't match up in-continuity.

• I feel like they've made Wally a much larger threat that we ever realized, and at the same time tied him to being the source of all Void-based stuff, so it'll be interesting to see where they take it.

• I do like the introduction of The Drifter, but I'm still annoyed by them not taking the time to update Operator outfits to work with the Drifter body. Same annoyance goes for them not paying much attention to Male Operator hair and face options, but that's been a beef of mine for forever.

• It's going to be interesting to see how the whole Multiverse thing is going to work in with Duviri being the next open-world section.

All in all, it was a fun diversion for the holidays, but once again it's back to farming those 4% drop chances, so all in all I guess I'm getting what I'm (not) paying for. :D

• Reading: Little bit of this, little bit of that. Currently working my way through the latest book in a guilty pleasure LitRPG series I read called Awaken Online by Travis Bagwell. Yeah, it's effectively isekai trash done by an American author, but it's actually a fun read.

• Watching: Since we moved my wife's cell phone back over to Verizon, the bill includes a free Disney+ subscription. As such, I've been working my way through the MCU TV shows I missed out on last year and couldn't be bothered to bootleg. WandaVision is actually pretty decent, but I'm just waiting for how bad Falcon & Winter Soldier is supposed to be. Other than that, it's been mainly nature documentaries or old stuff like Psych, Burn Notice, Leverage, Warehouse 13, and Monk

• Playing: My one woke-dev game I allow myself is Warframe, so I've been playing that as my primary. Beyond that I'm going to be looking at some newer stuff I picked up on the Steam sale, like Outriders, God Eater 3, and Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.

As a resident of Illinois, I feel your pain. Chicago is such a juggernaut that it doesn't matter that 90% of the rest of the state is solid red - as goes Chicago, so goes the state. People are leaving in droves, and the powers that be are so corrupt that their solution is to just keep raising taxes so they can get theirs and then get out before the ship sinks.

At this rate, it won't end. Not until enough people get over the mass hysteria of ZOMG NEW VARIANT and ONE MORE BOOSTER. Until enough people get sick of being sheep and running by the rules of the power-mongers that are getting rich off the backs (or would that be arms?) of the vaccinated, nothing will change. The question is how large will the societal upheaval be? Because the longer we put up with this, the worse it will be when the change eventually happens.