Lurker > mrmallard

My former best friend got started with Crowder, then fell into Ben Shapiro. It started with the "Change my Mind" videos, then he began watching his main content (I remember a video where he's talking about the native American dude with the drum facing off against some high schooler, and he kept showing like racial caricatures of native Americans and making loaded comments about smoking too much of the peace pipe). Then that went to ground and he began watching like conspiracy YouTube and empathizing with the plight of the Flat Earth community, and it became clear that we were headed in totally opposite directions.

Our friendship dissolved about halfway into 2021. The crux, outside of an eventual backstab that shattered our relationship, was that I felt unhappy and that I couldn't stand being put down for everyone else to laugh at - which he was a massive instigator of. And another wedge that popped up and turned that jokeyness into outright hostility between us was when he basically "came out" about watching Ben Shapiro and being anti-abortion.

It was the most awkward shit walking home with him when he pulled that, he was upset because he thought that no-one would accept him for being conservative and I had to basically "debate" him about Shapiro's dumbfuck culture war horseshit because that's what Shapiro's content had trained him to do. He was just full of gotchas, and while I'd been debating it for a while, I think that's where I really began to distance myself from him. Not that it made the eventual fracture any less shitty.

Sometimes I wonder how far into this shit he went, and if he's still there. I wonder if he's so far gone that this batfuck insane coverage is the side he's chosen to associate with. The majority of me never wants that backstabbing cocksucker in my life ever again regardless of the context, and that's the side I'm going to listen to. But I do hope that with his whole seperate life he's got going on, he's happy and content enough that he hasn't fallen any deeper into this abject fucking lunacy.

On second thought, it's very overwhelming. I'm not so sure about it after having a cold one.

I'll pop a couple after work going forward, maybe a prolonged exposure will help me get into it. And I'll be drinking them warm, because that hazy sweetness is gone when it's cold.

What's up with this influx of bitter Harley Quinn topics? Reminds me of the Lizzo hate.

Like if you don't like it, that's your business. But topics like this come off as petty bitchiness.

I forgot to roll it before opening it up, so I poured it. Fucked it up and it foamed up, so excuse the lack of foam in the picture:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/4/8/AAbh80AADjvw.jpg

It's got a really strong bite. Very sweet, like the usual hoppy flavor of the IPA mixed with coffee grounds. It's really strong, and it coats the mouth with a strong, lingering residue.

It's a little bit overwhelming, and I don't think I like it warm. But I'll be damned if it isn't a delicious Cooper's. I'm really looking forward to trying a cold one.

I'll be sipping on these for a while, the whole case is 50 standard drinks.

Also! I got myself a seasonal release ale from Cooper's - they're one of the only big Australian brewers left who are still Australian owned and produced. It's still in the Cooper family, too - I'm not much for pointless nationalism, but Cooper's is a tasty brew and knowing it's Aussie is fantastic.

The "standard" Cooper's is a pale ale, color-coded green:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/3/9/AAbh80AADjvn.jpg

I used to throw these down in longneck form, and they're still my favorite beer to get on-tap. It's cloudy, thick and full of flavour.

This is the 2022 Vintage Ale:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/4/0/AAbh80AADjvo.jpg

They went all out on the packaging. It's not like a cardboard loop carrier, it's a glossy sleeve carrier. The label quality is fantastic, the creamy colour looks great - this is a high quality product, at least in presentation.

I'm gonna have one warm and one cold. I might also do a pour if you guys wanna see what the beer looks like. There's gonna be a lot of floaties in there, I can see it through the glass, so what I'm gonna do is roll the bottle gently before I open it - it lets all the sediment spread back through the beer without shaking it up.

I paid $85 Aussie bucks for this carton. Good news is that it's 7.5% ABV, but the novelty alone is worth the price.

I only have a surface level appreciation of Gordon Lightfoot. If You Could Read My Mind is GOATed though.

I'm glad this convicted child rapist is dead, but fuck him for being a coward on top of being a piece of shit rapist.

Hoodroar posted...

No, there were three ways, and one of the three was keeping the character as a feminine male. There is nothing wrong with feminine men.

I feel like that would have been a rehash though. "Haha oopsie doopsie I'm a boy in a skirt, aren't I cute tee-hee" has been done. This is a choice that pushes the character forward.

Like Bridget fulfilled her character arc in XX/AC. To have her in a femme outfit years later would require some other convoluted reason for her to still be presenting as a woman. That, or you make her a metrosexual or queer-coded guy with a flamboyant dressing style, which doesn't feel like Bridget. And frankly, the queer coding is still right there - so I don't get why the distinction between cis and trans is that much of a sore spot for you.

So to me, there are two options. You can have Beefcake McMuscles with a carpet of blond chest hair, or you can have a femme Bridget that addresses her character and fan-favorite presentation in a way that feels fun and validating as well as staying true to the visual design that people love about her.

Like even if you had Bridget remain a cisgender guy who dresses like a really cute woman, with the explanation being "he likes dressing like that", the queer reading is still very much there. The only thing that changes is whether that reading is text or subtext.

Like I've seen you in multiple topics being assblasted about Bridget. Legitimately asking, what's your baggage regarding this character development? Is your beef solely "femboy erasure", or is there something more?

Lost_All_Senses posted...

The Killers have way better songs imo, but it's pretty good.

Music is so subjective, I don't really get too surprised by any song getting high status that I don't understand. Everyone has songs that's high status for them and not the majority. It's just that except for someone else. You basically eluded to that in OP yourself.

Why does this one specifically warrant a topic for you?

Because this song has a sort of fervent reputation as one of the Killers' best songs ever, let alone as one of the best songs of that era. It's described as perfect in overly gushing memes and posts. And I never see anyone speaking about it outside of that context, which is probably the instigating factor.

Like I'm perfectly willing to accept that it's loved, and I have enough self awareness to know that this is an issue of taste, not objectivity - objectivity in art is almost impossible to talk about because different shit does different things to people, whether those effects were intended or not. But in regards to this topic: when Somebody Told Me exists, and plenty of other music that I feel like has way more to get into, I don't understand why this is the one that people single out. So I thought I'd get people's opinions on it.

KhlavicLanguage posted...

i mainly see it meme'd in the context of being "the millennial white people song"

That scans tbh

I swear, I saw memes about it on Tumblr in like 2013 and I only heard it five years later. And when I heard it, it was fine, but I didn't get the whole hype about how amazing it was.

It's punchy and focused, and I can see how other people would enjoy it, but when you have people calling it iconic or one of the best songs of that entire era of music - I just don't get it. It just doesn't sound that special to me.

I'm not a stranger to simping for pop music at times. Blinding Lights by the Weeknd is currently my favorite song of the entire 2020's. I just don't get what's so flash about Mr Brightside.

I think Jirard is a nice guy who puts a lot of work into his channel, but it's not really my vibe. I like checking in on Jirard from time to time.

I agree with baiken2 for once. Bridget is portrayed as trans and suddenly there's all these freaked out weirdos going "this is an affront to the original character! It's in a bad ending!! BAD ENDING!!!".

Granted, the Guilty Gear community took Testament pretty well, and they were the character I thought people would throw massive bitch-fits about. But that makes the Bridget backlash that much stranger.

There were jokes for years about how Bridget was so feminine that you could post them and get people thirst-posting, and then reveal that the character was canonically a guy for lulz. There were two ways they could reconcile Bridget for a modern audience: make the character a massive beefcake like Potemkin or Kum, revealing them like a new character and catching people off-guard by revealing it's Bridget, or you could make Bridget a trans girl.

The first one might have been funny to a point, but frankly, the second one preserves the visual appeal of the character and I personally like the journey of finding yourself, as unexpected as the end goal is. Bridget is a girl. It's very life-affirming - she's been through a lot, she's never comfortable being perceived by people, and she finally embraces her womanhood with the care and support of others.

But according to this fuckin army of naysayers, this is disrespectful to the character and it's a jarringly bad turn that makes the game worse. And I do want to ask, how many of these people are dyed in the wool GG fans? How many of them enjoyed the games and waited out the hiatus? How many of them played the Xrd games? Because I'm seeing more backlash to this Bridget scenario than I've seen people talking about the franchise over the past 10 years.

There's gatekeeping, and there's seeing a disproportionate reaction to a property you love and being wary of this wave of supposed lore purists that you haven't seen for the majority of your fandom. I don't agree with most of baiken2's posting, but they're right about this.

If TeaMilk posted The Subscription-Based NSFW Site or like one of the other big porno sites or whatever, that'd be one thing. But for saying "I have a copy of blackmanass if you wanna see it" to a user who was asking to see it? A suspension seems harsh.

TeaMilk is one of the more constructive users on this board. They drew my avatar, they seem to always have something reasonable and genuinely conversational to say. I like them a lot.

Like they didn't even post blackmanass. The hell?

Rikishi posted...

As the facts stand now, his defense would be, I declassified those documents. I am not therefore in possession of classified documents now,' said Charles Stimson, a senior fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former federal prosecutor.

Trump says he declassified all the documents that the FBI took from his house. So if he did actually declassified all of those , then they can't charge him with anything pertaining to keeping classifieds.

Funny how a user I've tagged as Qanon is bending this far backwards to downplay Trump stealing classified intelligence.

No Paine?

Michael_Booth posted...

Knew her growing up, our parents introduced us, and we were basically childhood friends.
We always hung around, the first time I cried was when I discovered she was moving away and wouldn't be attending the same school anymore.
Eventually we re-connected through AIM, and it was eventually agreed by her parents for her to move back here and live with us, and we went to high school together.
We knew when we were dating age, that it was meant to be, and we went to the Prom together. We were called names by our supposed "friends", and a lot of push back because of what she was, and I'm not going to lie, it was tough....

We eventually decided to go out of state to go to college together, and faced a lot of issues, because she's who she was, again -- but worked through them, and found out who our friends were and cut myself off from the bigots -- now living in a state where cousin marriage is legal, and we're married!

God fucking damnit lmao, you had me on the ruse cruise

DeviantArt in shambles

I was born, and it was attached to the end of my arm.

Problems with the wife?

BlueTigerLion posted...

Isnt Sky News the Fox News of Australia?

Yep.

Most disappointing, not the worst one.

Agent_Stroud posted...

Also, just curious now that I think about it. Is your GameFAQs handle a reference to I, Monsters album A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars? After all, Mr. Mallard is one of the characters/song titles in that album.

No, I got a 24 hour ban from an anime chatroom when I was a young teenager but I could reset my details due to using dial-up and could get back in under a guest name. I made like 12 usernames that night, but MrMallard was the first one and the longest lasting one before they caught on and got me again.

It was also the one that rolled the most naturally off the tongue, so when I needed a new username later in high school, I chose MrMallard.

If this is Persona I s2g

GhostFaceLeaks posted...

People will forever associate any movie adaptation of The Flash with Ezra Miller.

I sincerely doubt it.

Jared Leto's Joker was absolute dogshit, and the whole "forced method acting" of sending people dead animals and used condoms arguably made that dogshit performance even worse because the Joker was all edge no point. The guy with the teeth grills and the "damaged" tattoo on his forehead, whose establishing Joker moment is telling a guy to fuck his girlfriend before killing him for being uncomfortable, didn't kill the Joker. They simply made a better movie about the character.

The Ezra Miller Flash is dogshit too. Not because it's actively and irredeemably bad like Suicide Squad's Joker was, but because the character is flat and boring. Oh, he got more character in the Snyder Cut, and he saves the day in that movie instead of being a bland, featureless sidekick. Oh, they set him up with the Flashpoint storyline in BvS. He's still just an absolute filler character, just like he always was. It's like DC were trying to make a third-rate Quicksilver, so they made the blandest version of a quirked up white boy who plays video games and zips around everywhere really quick.

But you know what else the Flash is?

He's the guy who had his own live action TV show in the nineties. He's a character who was a great support in the Bruce Timm/Paul Dini Justice League show, with just as much star power as that universe's Superman and Batman. He has the best original animated movie in the Flashpoint Paradox, and his Arrowverse version outlasted the originator of that canon, Green Arrow, just by being more popular.

Miller's Flash is unwatchable because it's such a dismally bland side-character in a movie franchise known for being bland, overblown and shallow. But their Flash isn't as bad as Leto's Joker is, and the Flash character - forgive the pun - has legs. Nothing about the character has been ruined for future generations to come.

All this means is that a reset is imminent, and at some undetermined point in the future, there may be a Flash movie that isn't tacky and bland. There may be a series of DC movies that don't run to the finish line with none of the effort required to make an engaging network of characters, like what happened with the Snyderverse. If anything, this cancellation might be one of the best things to happen to the Flash in ages.

I sincerely think that only good things will come from this. Be upset by all means, but whatever they make about the Flash is almost certainly going to be better than whatever horseshit this movie was gonna be. I think that's worth looking forward to.

I'm glad you're seeing a psychiatrist, I've been working on some heavy shit for a while and we've just hit a point where I'm gonna start working on some self esteem stuff. Mirror work, unhooking negative thoughts, that stuff. It's good, healing shit, and regardless of your sentiment itt I hope it all goes well for you.

That being said, were you having an episode where you jumped around going "ooga booga" at a black guy?

Kim_Seong-a posted...

Do a full Ash run where you use his exact party for all major battles.

That means solo Haunter against Sabrina, btw

And to enter Erika's gym, you have to either play FR/LG as a girl or you have to play Pokemon Pink before you can enter as Ash.

Schools and daycares and stuff should be safe and secure. You don't know a homeless person's personality or potential to harm others based on a glance, and obviously you want parents and children to be safe getting to school.

The issue is that this measure assigns criminality to any homeless person, people whose defining characteristic is that they have nowhere to live and they need to survive through extreme means, based on the same law that the government uses to monitor and arrest sexual predators.

You have to understand that holding a group to the same standard as rapists and pedophiles is going to associate that group with rapists and pedophiles. And the effects are sweeping and exponential as soon as those measures come into law. Right off the top of my head, this is how life changes for homeless people the second this comes into effect:

• They have less room to exist in. This pushes them into a smaller area, of which there may be less utilities (public bathrooms, gyms, motels) for them to use. This means they have less opportunities to clean themselves up, which means less chance of getting job interviews or meetings with accommodation specialists, meaning more time in extreme poverty. This also means that the police and other hostile groups now have a smaller area to cover to harass homeless people.
• People suspected of being homeless will face more hostility and outright violence if they're seen within half a mile of a school. Again, that connection between sexual predators and homeless people will give people license to assault homeless people, believing their presence can only be to bring harm to others - children in particular - because their presence has become further criminalised. What happens when a homeless person gets assaulted and goes to the police? Well, they were in 500 yards of a school. So the police arrest them.
• On top of having less room to cover to pick up vagrants, police now have an added excuse to treat the homeless poorly. And they'll be lauded by the people who see the 500 yard law as evidence enough of criminality, meaning that the police will be given as much leeway to treat the homeless as they want.

Nothing good will come of this. At best, it's a false sense of security that will stop a handful of harmful people at the expense of everyone else. At worse, it will lead to a whole new level of violence against one of the most vulnerable demographics of people in our society. What measures are being brought in to help the homeless? Where's the funding for shelters, where's the support for organisations who want to help the homeless get back on their feet? Where's the funding for harm reduction? All of that would be infinitely more effective at cleaning up the streets and getting people up on their feet instead of further criminalising them and giving them less of a shot at recovering.

This law is moralistic dogshit that lumps the homeless in with pedophiles and rapists, and more people will be harmed by this law than there would be without it. The only difference is that when harm comes to the homeless, most people won't care. Because they're stinky, druggy, violent bums, and the less of them you have to see, the better - right?

Number090684 posted...

GG Novels, etc.. aren't games.

I mean either way, through novel form or drama CDs or whatever, Guilty Gear has been going in on that characterisation shit for years. The games only got particularly fleshed out stories from Xrd onwards, the other games had either personal character episodes (XX/AC) or like a bit of unique dialogue and a story-related boss fight during an arcade ladder (GG1). But the drama CDs and novels definitely fleshed out the world and characters before that.

Because being scolded by a NARC over something stupid makes you want to do it more. Not everyone who downloads an album illegally was ever gonna pay $20 for it, so measuring piracy as a loss of "potential sales" is always going to be a more inflated statistic than it should be. There's also the matter of companies making their media harder to access and enjoy for consumers in the hope that the difficulty will make it unstealable - when that tends to get cracked the fastest, and they lose sales because their potential audience is alienated by the DRM restrictions.

We know now that even before streaming, artists got paid to produce albums, and they were given a pittance of the album's proceeds while a majority of it went to the record company. Nowadays, artists receive fractions of fractions of cents every time one of their songs is played on a streaming service. Then and now, artists make a majority of their earnings through touring or through releasing music themselves through services like Bandcamp. So the piracy panic of the 2000's over Kazaa and LimeWire, where the hot button issue was how much it was hurting the artist, was mired more in the genuine dent it was putting in the music industry at the same time. It was bad for artists, but it was significantly worse for executives.

Same goes for video games. Developers are hired to develop the games, and there are only a small handful who receive royalties. It's a common practice to work in the industry as a freelancer, work for years on a GTA or a Last of Us, and then get laid off before the game ships because you're only ever a transient employee and the company doesn't want you to own a slice of the game because you're not one of their core employees. Publishers make a majority of the money from every games purchase, initial and recurring via in-game shops and DLC. Buying a game from a triple-A publisher is like throwing your money down the toilet. Now, an Arc System Works or an indie studio with no publisher? Pump those motherfuckers with cash. Your Activisions and EAs, the ones who exercise the worst DRM practices in the industry, feel the burn in their executive's pockets, not the developer's.

Piracy isn't great, but the sort of hand-wringing moralizing that some people get up in arms about is enough to drive you to spite them and their message. You should use Bandcamp or other services to buy music. You should support indie devs. But Metallica and Call of Duty devs get paid for developing their art, and they rarely see more than a pittance for the sales of the games. They themselves are choked by greedy industries with greedy layabout executive hands taking money from the coffers. If you're going to pirate - which I'm not encouraging - at least think about who you're impacting. That being said, moralistic chest-thumping makes you look like the most high-strung nerd in the room, and of course people are going to see that petty ass-blastedness and go "fucking lol that guy's a prick, time for me to download my Programs now".

Seasons of The Blacklist, if you prefer the more middling season arcs over the over-the-top episodic plots and high-stakes schlock of the first few seasons.

Honestly, my favorite part about Bridget coming out (and getting released for Strive ohohohoho) is that it happened on my birthday. It was August 9 in Australia when she went live.

Anyway in summary
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/7/AAbh80AADiyV.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/8/AAbh80AADiyW.jpg

Apparently Bridget's placeholder name is "Chara_Name_L_BGT"

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/0/AAbh80AADiyO.jpg

Her story mode is SPECIFICALLY ABOUT her correcting people with "I'm a boy" in a really downbeat sort of way, leading to characters saying that she doesn't sound so convinced - only for the resolution of her arc being to say that she's a girl, openly and free of reservations, meaning that her Arcade Mode story is more or less the journey of her coming out as a trans girl.

And yeah, I'm seeing plenty of trans-positive coverage of Bridget. This assertion that Testament "makes sense" and Bridget "is disrespectful to the original intentions of the character" is dumb bullshit.

I honestly expected Testament - a character who was vitally important to the first game and who plays a huge role in the second game's breakout lore character Dizzy - to be a bigger shitstorm than BRIDGET - the character presenting as a cute girl despite being AMAB, infamous online for how attractive she was despite being AMAB - in one game nine years ago. What makes Bridget a step too far? Shit is absolutely bonkers itt.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Guilty Gear Strive is literally the best selling guilty gear game of all time, lmao

tremain07 posted...

But he's not trans, he's a cross dressing man

That may have been Bridget's story in XX/Accent Core, but if they've taken the character's story in another direction in Strive - which is likely, given Judgement's reimagining as a transfem non-binary person - then shit, Bridget is a trans woman.

I mean let's face it, Bridget was prime egg material when she was first introduced anyway. The fact that she was so feminine despite being AMAB had the character infamously known as a "trap". But as the trans community has grown, as they've been able to see themselves represented through different facets of media, "trap" characters like Bridget can now be seen as formative characters in the journeys of some trans people. I mean two media properties that have made significant headway in the trans community, at least from what I've seen on Reddit and elsewhere, are MLP and Fallout: New Vegas - a cartoon franchise traditionally directed at girls, and a game lauded for being surprisingly queer-positive. So making Bridget transfem is kind of a no-brainer given their status as a notably feminine presenting AMAB person, and it's not entirely a surprise after Judgement.

At one point in the character's life, Bridget was depicted as a cross-dressing teenage boy because he was raised by nuns, and he wanted to become a big famous manly bounty hunter. Now, Bridget is a transgender woman.

shoved in your face for about a year before slowly disappearing off the face of the earth?

ZevLoveDOOM posted...

the dude on the left got the most disturbing cum face imagineable...

He's also got the worst name out of the entire ASAP crew.

The one with the death camera. He takes a picture of the entire battlefield as skeletons and runs away. Then everyone dies under mysterious circumstances.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/8/7/AAbh80AADiqD.jpg
Do you let them have it?

38 years old and a trailblazer in her own right?

Trans-formers

Bad Ben movies

Eat and fuck. Those are the two things that animals are put on earth to do.

Honestly, if anyone wants to give the game a go either to poke fun at it or check it out, I'll join a party and play some time. I'm kind of in the honeymoon period of the game all over again, and I'm down to play. Connection might be busted on my end through, and Aussie times are gonna severely fuck up the ability to line up schedules

It tells me that it's a fully realised vision of what Legends Arceus began, and it's going to be a full BotW-like open world adventure in a brand new region.

It doesn't tell me the state of the Pokedex, the nature of the combat or the vibe of the game. All I know is that you have motorbike Pokemon who can climb mountains, cross the sea and fly, and that you're a schoolkid getting a Pokemon from an academy. It also confirms a new context-dependent battle mechanic and more exclusive region variants, as have been standard since Gens 6 and 7 respectively.

There's a solid look at how varied the region areas are, like a mud plains area and a snow area, and there are glimpses of the scope of the open world. It's not going to break the open world adventure game model wide open like BotW, it's clearly in the camp of "imitator" rather than "trail-blazer", but it looks nice. With any luck, it'll be more of a step forward than SwSh were and won't be held back as much.

But there's also the fact that Game Freak have been working on mainline Pokemon games and the Let's Go/Legends Arceus spinoffs since the Switch launched. People are worried about the working conditions at Game Freak, and if they can create a truly great Pokemon adventure within 9 months of releasing their most recent Pokemon game with Legends Arceus.

So what I'm getting from this trailer is that it looks alright, but it's not going to blaze any trails and its position in the Pokemon franchise's release line-up is somewhat worrying. As it stands, I could take it or leave it, but I would definitely need to see another trailer closer to the game's release to really make up my mind about it.

FFS dude, even the "we can be friends with benefits, sorry if I was being a dick" comes off as incredibly passive aggressive. Don't even consider it. You're done with her.

This is the sort of relationship that will keep reeling you in and fucking with you, and then your life will be shitty and she'll come back into it and you'll go back for the booty, and then it'll fuck you over again. Just cut the cord, get on Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid, and move on.

Also lmao @ post 59

The Switch is a high 8. It could have been a 9 if it wasn't absolutely riddled with shovelware, though that could be an issue with every digital storefront nowadays for all I know.

The concept is ingenious. It has that Nintendo flair for innovation, and it combined the strengths of Ninendo's handheld empire with the development opportunities of their main console divisions. No-one had executed this idea this well before, and it launched with possibly the best Zelda title since Ocarina of Time - in both popularity and franchise innovation. The Switch was a knockout from day one.

The things I would criticize are the shovelware, as well as the Joy-Con drift. That shit was inexcusable, and whatever their next console is, they need to fix their fucking controllers pronto. And while their first-party and second-party games this gen have been very good, the diminished hardware capabilities have made the Switch harder to port for, with only a handful of truly phenomenal studios like Panic Button meeting the challenge head-on.

The Switch is a phenomenal piece of tech, and if Nintendo can bring this concept up to par with current gen tech for a Super Nintendo Switch, they're probab going to print money all the way through to 2030. The Switch is one of those gaming milestones that make me happy to be a gamer, and I think it'll go down in history as a phenomenal invention. I know there's baggage attached to this rating, but the Switch is an easy 8.8/10, impacted only by a glut of garbage games and apps as well as some unfortunate tech setbacks.