Not sure if I’m not getting some cool kid joke now or what. He’s there near the center-right upper portion, but it looks photoshopped or something and off somehow, but I can’t zoom in enough to tell what’s going on.
There’s also a nerd walking on some guy’s dick just to the lower right of there as well.
This was a really interesting video on how modern wargaming is used by the military and its links to the recreational scene, I just got done watching it yesterday. I think Quinns, in typical fashion, seems to try to moralize a bit much, especially with his pointed questions, but then does a good job of coming back around to show the other point of view, though I think the overall view he had seemed negative. He tried to present both sides at least.
He did recognize the need for militaries in general, but then seemed to equate any use of wargaming as resulting in deaths, which was automatically bad. I think some of the wargame professionals made pretty good cases for why it was justified and how “wargaming” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s more a way of contingency planning and working through possible scenarios you might encounter, so wargaming just helps prepare for different scenarios by showing the range of actions that players/actors might take in a given situation. They’re mapping out probabilities using human psychology, along with boardgame and videogame mechanics.
I think the ending portion where he called on gamers to “do something” about making wargaming ethical was kind of whatever. As if the gaming community was any sort of unified bloc that could even do anything about it. Something like that would probably require like a wargamer’s guild or union that added some sort of restraints on the kinds of projects they would work on (only scenarios that minimize casualties) or something like that, but that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to map out probabilities, since you’d purposely censor certain probabilities from your line of thinking. I think wargamers will just continue to do whatever they’re doing.
I thought you were talking about synthehol at first and wondered why synthetic alcohol would cause something like that.
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I supported the ACA (though would’ve preferred a public option), but the one time I actually needed to use it, was for my Dad when his private insurance from his job kicked him off after retirement, the rates and coverage seemed bad, like it was just such a hassle with no great benefits. It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare). I have no idea why my Dad hadn’t been using it the whole time either, he probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars getting private insurance. I still think ACA is a step in the right direction, BUT public option still needs to happen, Fuck Joe Lieberman for blocking that.
I grew up playing FPS shooters like Doom, Quake, Tribes, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, etc, but I had avoided Fortnite for awhile because it just seemed like a kid’s game, whatever. Then my oldest son started getting into it and we’d play matches together, and suddenly I felt out of my element. The addition of building mechanics adds in a whole other element that you don’t really have to think about in other games. Granted, it’s not realistic being able to build shit that quickly, but whatever, it’s a game. And seeing some of the skill involved with these people running/gunning/building elaborate forts and the sort of battles that play out between two people gets insane sometimes.
Another interesting aspect of it is all the cross-marketing that goes on, you’ve got almost every major franchise represented in some way, shape, or form. It reminds me of Ready Player One. It sounds dumb, but Fortnite is probably the closest thing to a Metaverse that we currently have. I mean, hell, Emperor Palpatine somehow returned in between the movies in Fortnite (a dark day for Star Wars fandom).
It looks so sad.
Huh. War is apparently a bit harder to do when you have to try to not kill (your own) civilians.
Friend invite? Guess I’ll never get an invite then.
I just stopped eating fast food altogether and started using our company cafe, prices at the drive-thru got absolutely ridiculous and the service got worse. I just eat a small salad and a drink, still costs around $6–7/day, but it’s way better than fast food prices. I could probably get it down cheaper if I prepped at home, but fruit and vegetables go bad so frequently and our cafe’s rates are ok-ish, so I just make due with that.
Yeah, that was another spot I went through too. Under the seats, took everything out one by one, emptied out the trunk and got down to the spare tire. Found out that mice were apparently living in or had lived in my car, but sadly no Steam Deck :(
Only one is old enough to have friends in that range that they might be stealing stuff without their own parents seeing them with a new handheld console. They don’t normally have friends over without me knowing though, and nobody was over around the time it disappeared. Anything seems possible and I can suspect anyone, but that one seems to have a lower possibility.
That’s what I thought too, I was like, “Maybe I hid it from myself and I hid it too good,” but I checked through all the usual hiding spots and unusual spots. Maybe it will show up again years from now in some stupid place like taped to the inside a toilet tank or something dumb, but I went through every room as methodically as possible and checked/re-checked anywhere I might’ve hidden it from myself. I’m so annoyed.
I feel you, mine got lost/stolen about 6+ months ago, seemingly just inside my house, since I never take it anywhere. I’m not a hoarder, keep a relatively tidy house, though I have kids (so tidiness is only ever temporary). I turned over and looked through literally every room in the house, every cupboard, shelf, drawer, and piece of furniture was checked and re-checked and still, nothing. I only just got over it a few weeks ago and broke down and got another one, but this time got an AirTag for it. I’m just more annoyed at the not knowing part, hopefully it’ll just turn up in some stupidly ridiculous place that it hadn’t occurred for me to look, but I suspect I won’t see it again. I doubt it was stolen, since that’s seemingly the only thing gone. Potentially one of the kids broke it and, rather than tell me, they trashed it, but that doesn’t seem like them either or one of them would’ve broken ranks and confessed.
It drove me insane trying to find it before and it still bothers me, but at least I have a Steam Deck again.
Another milestone passed with seemingly no end in sight. It’s such a disgusting disregard for life for little apparent reason, and that the Russians keep throwing themselves into the meat grinder in mind-boggling.
Russia has total control over the situation and could end the Kursk assault overnight if they really wanted to. This is entirely their problem that they’ve created.
“But the doors to alternative modes of transfers are closing fast. Russia is now looking to crypto and barter trade.”
Huh, I wonder if this is partly why it seems like crypto has been popping back up in the news so much lately.
Except for southern “blue dog” Democrats, Abortion is a relatively “safe” topic to pander to single-issue voters on because the only people hyper-opposed to it are single-issue voters on the other side who were never going to vote liberal anyways. There’s virtually no down-side.
Israel is a more thorny & nuanced issue for Democrats though and not as clear cut. Israel is committing genocide and we shouldn’t be supporting them, but there’s alot of Jewish-American voters in key states, you’ve got AIPAC and a plethora of other Jewish/Israeli lobbies with alot of influence, you’ve got big military contractors who like Israeli money, and then you’ve got bigwigs in the military who see Israel as a strategic partner. Completely dropping support for Israel risks upsetting alot of interests and handing them over to Republicans to be used against Democrats. It’s shitty, but I’m assuming that’s the calculus going on with Democratic leadership.
Also, Israel is much much less reliant on the US for aid than in times past, and I think there’s a fear that if we stop supplying them, somebody else will and then we’ll have absolutely no influence over anything they do. We have much less influence over them than alot of people think. If they saddle up with China or Russia, the gloves come off and I think we’d see it much worse than it is now. As hard as that is to imagine, it can always get worse. And if we let Republicans get control, it will get worse.
I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn’t terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it’s like a tower defense RPG game. It’s kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to “Auto-fight” for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I’ve been playing for something like 6 months now, but I’ve been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I’ve stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I’ve put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I’ve wasted a bunch that way, but I’ve never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.
I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there’s so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you’re trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you’d have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don’t even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you’re that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this… maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn’t the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven’t mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they’ll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.