Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Mead posted...

Based on what happened earlier this month I think we need to strongly consider kicking out a few of the people who were born here

maybe a few million

I'd say more like a couple hundred million. But I also suspect we'd be disagreeing to some degree on precisely who those people should be.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I forget if it was ever actually said, but I think it was implied at least a couple times that the reason why Slade wanted Robin was it was sort of an underhanded fuck you to Batman. But because of licensing issues, they couldn't actually refer to Batman by name.

As for who to recruit, Starfire seems ideal - she's pretty powerful but also kind of dumb, so probably fairly easy to manipulate or break (and potentially gets you a connection to intergalactic influence and tech). Raven's the real powerhouse, but also so unstable and powerful that she's too likely to backfire on you. Cyborg's got tech and skills (in theory, though moreso in the comics than in the show), but he's a bit too strong-willed to control (hence the later Hive storyline).
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Mead posted...

Its also making me think that anyone under the age of 18 should just flat out not have access to the internet.

Based on prior experience, I'm not sure anyone should have access to the Internet.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

So, are you Sunny's alt, or someone making an imp gimmick account to troll him?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8aoHCCW35A
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI7YHZVc7mM
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Ferarri619 posted...

Why do people say Paint it Black by Rolling Stones would be controversial if released today?

I tend to agree with Mead, in that I don't think anyone has actually ever said that.

But if I tried to put myself into the mindset of Twitter assholes who find literally everything offensive on the slightest of pretexts solely because they live their lives on a constant quest to be offended and outraged...

I suppose one could argue that Paint It Black could be seen as a song that trivializes depression?

There's a line about someone's face being painted black... so blackface and implied cultural appropriation? The color black is being treated as a negative, therefore automatic racism and bigotry?

Everything being painted black is totally a metaphor for how black people want to take over the world and put white people into camps and thus pushes a white power agenda?

There's a line about girls wearing summer clothes, so radical feminists have a reason to be pissed at ocular sexual harassment and the Patriarchy?

It's actually a very good song, and thus could never be released in the current era of studio manufactured content where most popular music is kind of shit?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

What, no KFC?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The inevitable end of all things being one year closer.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I prefer these way more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV6kN_z8HIw
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

LuciferSage posted...

It's almost as if Covid fatigue is driving people to lash out after a year...

A year? People started lashing out a couple months in.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ReturnOfFa posted...

looks like we have a catch-22 of restaurant owners not giving a shit and consumers not giving a shit. fabulous.

Most countries don't tip, and find it kind of insane that Americans do. If everyone else has seemingly figured out how to keep food industry employees alive without resorting to what is effectively extortion, there's no real reason why the US couldn't solve this problem either.

The real Catch-22 is that, because tipping IS a thing, employers can deliberately pay employees less because they know people are going to tip to offset the difference. It's really only cultural expectations for tipping that make tipping necessary in the first place.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Judgmenl posted...

lol google censors it.

It didn't for me.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everdell

...hmm. Seems incredibly twee from that description.

Did you play with any of the expansions that Wikipedia mentions?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ReturnOfFa posted...

Excuse me?

You heard me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Oh, and on the subject, this is actually a pretty good book for anyone who is interested in the Romanovs (good and bad):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Romanovs_1613%E2%80%931918
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Sarcasthma posted...

Eagerly waiting for PO to slap Rev until he abandons this topic.

See, when you do this, now I kind of don't want to. You're giving me performance anxiety!







Ahh, fuck it...



Revelation34 posted...

They were leaders and then replaced by Stalin who was much better obviously.

People on this board have been overusing the term "whataboutism" a lot lately, but this is a pretty clear example of it.

Stalin being a shit leader doesn't retroactively make anyone prior to him not-shit so long as they didn't reach his personal level of shit. Just like the mere existence of Hitler doesn't retroactively make Kaiser Wilhelm a brilliant strategist and political negotiator.

The Romanovs in general made a ton of mistakes. The family as a whole tended to get a bit of slack early on because they were successors to Ivan the Terrible's reign and the Time of Troubles afterward, so any sort of stability/sanity seemed like a blessing. But the family produced its own share of terrible shitty rulers (*cough*Peter III*cough*) as much as it produced great ones, and at the very end it was Nicholas' own ineptitude, arrogance, and unwillingness to compromise that helped make the revolution inevitable - a better ruler in his place might easily have been better able to defuse it. Instead, he spent most of the last 20 years of his reign throwing fuel on the fire.

He was a control-freak, an autocrat, a racist, nepotistic, painfully indecisive, and generally overwhelmed by the level of responsibility thrust upon him. His father kept him isolated from politics for most of his early life, which left him unprepared to actually run things once his father died. He was the sort of weak ruler who might have been able to maintain the status quo in a more peaceful, prosperous time, but ruling in a time of chaos and crisis made it almost inevitable that he was going to fail, and fail hard.

He was never as evil a man as the Bolsheviks/Soviets painted him out to be after the fact, but he was never the saint the Russian Orthodox church portrayed him as either. And his numerous mistakes certainly cost millions of lives and helped lead to much of the suffering that followed after him.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

shadowsword87 posted...

Yeah that feels like "old man yells at clouds".

It's more like "Young gay Israeli man yells at clouds". And then he pulls a Sunny and suggests we should all learn to meditate before the Singularity turns us all into cyborgs.

BUT!



shadowsword87 posted...

People weren't suddenly more pure and wholesome before we could talk to someone 500 miles away, people have always gotten angry and riot-y, and then things changed.

It's a cycle of the world, the internet hasn't changed that fact, just made it more noticeable

Nah, his view way more complicated than that. And you're actually kind of agreeing with him without knowing it.

His theory is basically that, because humans see the world in stories (and we basically do, this has been a thing sociologists figured out a while ago), we feel most comfortable when we have a single defining story that explains how things are "supposed" to work. For most of human history you can kind of point to the dominant paradigm (whether religion, or the concept of nobility/royalty being better than the masses, etc) and know how most people are defining the universe and their place in it. It's not always the SAME story, but there usually IS one.

When a given story "fails" (ie, events in the world call that story into question, because the story can no longer explain why things are happening, or because a new story has come into being that seems to explain things better), that story essentially "dies", and is replaced by a new one. So most of human history is basically one long chain of humans in different places and times shifting from one story to another. Conflict occurs when two contradictory stories overlap and fight for dominance, chaos occurs when a story collapses with no alternative to replace it.

(A similar theory is actually sort of discussed in Tamim Ansary's book "The Invention of Yesterday", where he discusses the dominant paradigms of various historical regions, how conflict occurred when they would butt up against neighboring paradigms, and how they would ultimately either replace each other or or "blesh" - blend/mesh - into a new paradigm, and why some paradigms could easily move into some places while seeming being antithetical to others.)

Harari's theory is essentially that the 20th century was dominated by three major stories (nationalism/fascism, communism/socialism, and capitalism/liberalism). WWII sort of killed the allure of fascism for most people, and the fall of the USSR did the same for communism. Which mostly left "liberalism" as the dominant global paradigm. But over the last decade or so faith in that has waned as well (he draws the line back to the financial crisis of 2008, but there's probably other potential causes as well - which includes the fact that the rapid growth of technology and inter-connectedness isn't necessarily handled well-enough by existing ideological models, so the overwhelming glut of information is leading to disillusionment), so people are sort of left without any comforting fiction or narrative to believe in.

In essence, we're a bunch of children panicking and drowning in existential terror. He points to things like Brexit and Donald Trump getting elected as symptoms of that decline, as people feel more and more helpless and lost in a world they thought they understood. I'd go farther to say that it could easily explain riots as well (especially when you factor in the increased hysteria generated by a year-long pandemic lockdown), and if we really want to feel saucy, we could pull things like identity politics and "the culture war" into the mix (because that's literally people who feel alienated with how they see the world desperately trying to redefine their place in it).

Not saying that it's 100% the answer to everything, but it's an interesting theory to consider. Especially if we're trying to understand why everyone seems to be going a bit batshit crazy lately. Doubly so because, if anyone ever wants to FIX things, you sort of need to understand why/how those things are broken in the first place. Short-term quick-fix solutions that address symptoms rather than underlying causes rarely ever solve anything at all.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

"No fate but what we completely retcon every few years."
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Alex1976 posted...

I have the mini Commodore 64 and mini Genesis, last I checked.

I'm waiting for the Commodore PET mini myself.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

This book had an interesting theory:

http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-21st-Century-Yuval-Harari/dp/0525512195

It pretty much boils down to the idea that most people today have been left completely bewildered and unbalanced by the growing disruptions caused by technology and the loss of cultural narratives that were once comforting illusions, and we're all mostly just freaking the fuck out until we can come up with another story to define the universe with. Because humans basically see everything through the lens of narrative, even when it's kind of bullshit.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Revelation34 posted...

There was nothing wrong with the Romanov family.

There was quite a lot wrong with the Romanov family.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

CaptainStrong posted...

Then you missed out on a lot of great games.

No he didn't.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Shadowbird_RH posted...

Other: No.

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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

trodi_911 posted...

Adept?

Came in to say this.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Mead posted...

Computers can explode if they get wet

You're thinking of Mogwai.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

argonautweakend posted...

Why would you ever legitimately need to blow up a computer? Why even have that as an option.

It's not necessarily a deliberate function:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)

40 years ago it was possible with some computers to send them a command that would literally do physical damage to the computer. That's essentially what you're doing in KotOR - using your superior hacking skills to exploit existing weaknesses and causing the entire system to overload and explode. It's not like any asshole can walk up to that console and get Space Clippy showing up asking if they want help blowing up a nearby terminal.

Is it realistic? No. But then again most future-tech in sci-fi rarely is. A realistic cockpit/bridge wouldn't be exploding into sparks every time a ship is damaged, but it happens pretty much all the time in Star Wars, Star Trek, and every other show ever made. Holodecks like the ones in Star Trek wouldn't be wired into the rest of the ship in ways that a single programming bug could cause catastrophic crises, but that happens every other week on the Enterprise. Most robots would be so hardwired to obey that it would be nearly impossible for anything like a robot rebellion to occur, yet that doesn't really stop 80% of robots in fiction from killing their masters. And so on.

Also, kind of a neat coincidence if you're actually playing KotOR2 right now - I'm playing as well (I just finished Dantooine and am moving on to Onderon, with Korriban as my last planet waiting until later).
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

wolfy42 posted...

You'd make a cute pixie. Can I hire you with pizza slices?

No.

I'd be the kind of pixie I made for 4e D&D - an assassin who sneaks in the cracks in your windows and pours poison into your ear while you're sleeping.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I'mma be a pixie.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Sarcasthma posted...

I use superior Japanese engineering to have cold water shot straight at my b-hole.

Cold? Definitely not doing it the Japanese way, then.

If you were doing it right, the water would feel like resting on a warm cloud, and there's be Jpop music playing and a light show.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Well, I was a bad enough dude to save the President once, so I guess that counts.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Solid Sonic posted...

I'm starting to feel like I don't have a home on the Internet. I'm increasingly more interested in antagonizing every community I join because they piss me off for one reason or another.

You're reaching that uncomfortable stage where you no longer relate to the young idiots who dominate most of the social media online, but still know too much about technology to relate to the older demo who mostly stick to places like Facebook and complain about Millennials.

You're a man without a people. And you're lashing out because you feel abandoned by a world you no longer understand.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I'd rather do similar things to her actress.

http://i.pinimg.com/originals/97/a2/2b/97a22b9ff71f006a91f538bc1014ce60.jpg
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

We need the good old days of the Hays Code back again.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I have a special poop harness that raises me about two feet above the toilet.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Just found this, and I absolutely need to post it now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTEeGCkGl2Q
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The Spellcasting series:

http://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564779-spellcasting-101-sorcerers-get-all-the-girls
http://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564780-spellcasting-201-the-sorcerers-appliance
http://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564781-spellcasting-301-spring-break

I almost submitted a FAQ/map for Spellcasting 101 but it got rejected on a technicality and I was too lazy to resubmit it, so it was not to be.



LuciferSage posted...

Does anyone remember Bungie's Pathways Into Darkness, or the direct ancestor to Halo, Marathon?

I've got one of the Marathon games on the Xbox 360. I think it was Durandal.

I'm aware of PiD, but I never really played it, because Mac gaming was shite. I really only became aware of Marathon when Halo first hit big, and only played Durandal because it was the one that got a PC port originally (and I actually named one of my old laptops Durandal when I named it for network use).
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I remember watching MTV in 1987. And kind of having a crush on this girl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOex5nXqgM



I also remember a time when TLC actually stood for The Learning Channel, and it was about science and education instead of shitty reality shows and mostly terrible people.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG0e8_foDmU
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

A normal person is going to fare a lot better.

Most people who actually have a good head for money don't play the lottery in the first place. It's a large part of why it's been referred to as a "poor tax".
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

funkyfritter posted...

it's not something I would recommend binge watching as it will drag at points.

I'd argue that this isn't really a failing of the show as much as a failing of the audience. People today have the attention spans of hyperactive gnats hopped up on meth, and if something doesn't explode at least once every 30 seconds they start to get twitchy. Most of the greatest films of all time would bore the shit out of modern audiences if they were made before 2000 or so.

The show is very much trying to imitate the style of film noir in a lot of ways, and deliberate pacing and building suspense is part of that. It can be slow, but it's less meandering slow and more slow-burn rising action.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zangulus posted...

physical exertion that causes my aerosol droplets.

Came in to point this out.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Very, very good for the first three, less so for the last, but still pretty good.

There's a reason why most people say it's the best version of Batman Warner Bros. has ever managed to produce. And why people keep demanding that Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill voice Batman and the Joker in basically every video game ever made.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Solid Sonic posted...

Deliberately get yourself banned in protest so everyone can see how you feel about it in the hopes it spurs more users to speak out.

...with the added advantage that you're most likely only going to spur most users to think you're an asshole.

If you actually care about what other people think, as opposed to just wanting to throw a selfish childish tantrum and justifying it after the fact as a brave attempt to spur glorious revolution, you'd be much better served just trying to politely and calmly ask other users privately whether or not they agree with you in the first place.

If you've somehow managed to hit on an actual raw nerve that no one else was ever clever enough to notice and brave enough to point out publicly (which you almost certainly didn't), you could then help organize a campaign of some kind to push for positive change, preferably without turning the whole thing into a massive shit-flinging argument (ie, don't act like an asshole and get dismissed out of hand for being an asshole).

Even GameFAQs admins would cave under pressure if they kept getting messaged and asked about specific issues that could potentially be solved to the benefit of the site as a whole - the real problem here is just that most users couldn't give a shit about anything and most of the people who do focus on inconsequential BS or selfish entitlement, and then rant about it like spoiled children so no one in a position of power feels overly compelled to listen to anything they say anyway. And even when a large segment of people ARE annoyed by something that's fully justified, there's no real organization or concerted effort to do anything about it other than piss and moan in multiple random topics for a week before everyone just sort of loses interest.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

You know you're even older when you don't have a favorite Aaahh Real Monsters character because you were already a senior in high school when the show debuted.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

adjl posted...

Does the offer of free parts/maintenance also ensure that new parts will always be available so the vehicle is never rendered obsolete? If not, this sounds like a great way to be left with a very heavy paperweight and no ability to drive after 20-30 years (possibly even 10-15, depending on the car).

Zeus posted...

This is pretty much why my answer would be no, except I'm also thinking of the possibility of the car getting totaled where I'd just be left without a vehicle.

This would be my concern.

Anyone offering me that deal would have to absolutely assure me that I will always have a car, and that no extenuating circumstances will ever leave me without one. If the car they give me is ever totalled, they'd better be able to completely rebuild it from scratch or replace it. Because under no circumstances am I going to accept a bargain that could theoretically leave me incapable of ever driving any car for decades to come.

Though presumably if they abrogate their responsibility to maintain the car they provide you with then you'd be absolved of any obligation to limit yourself to one car anyway. Though you might want a good lawyer to check the contract for fine print and make sure you're not bargaining with a demon or a genie who is going to exploit every possible loophole.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

SoftClock posted...

i don't know anything about oingo boingo

If you've ever watched a Tim Burton movie, you've basically heard them.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zangulus posted...

This actually is a byproduct of the 2008 market crash.

This was a thing long before that.

I remember people making jokes 20 years ago that programmer jobs would ask for things like "10 years experience coding in Java" when Java had only existed as a language for 5 years. So literally no one on Earth could ever meet the requirements, unless they were time travelers.

The usual upshot of the "You can't get jobs in the field without experience, but you can't get experience without having jobs in the field" Catch-22 is that most of those jobs wind up getting filed by people clever or determined enough to lie about their qualifications and skilled enough to hide that fact.

It's made even worse when you consider a lot of those jobs will tell you they require X amount of prior experience, and then once you're hired they deliberately "untrain" you to forget all of your prior experience anyway, because they want you to do things THEIR way. So prior experience is almost more of a detriment than a plus.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

They exist?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Yes, I know I'm like 4 years behind the times.

Zeus posted...

If you're 4 years behind, I must be 8 years behind.

I just finished playing KotOR and started playing KotOR2, so at the moment I'm technically 16 years behind.

Though to be fair, I HAVE played those both before (multiple times). It's just that the current scene is such a bleak hellscape of games I will never, ever care about, that I'm psychologically retreating back to the time when I actually enjoyed games.

I do still have to finish PS4 God of War, Uncharted 3/4/Lost Legacy, and Syberia 3 at some point, but I just can't motivate myself to start any of them. I was also in the middle of perfecting Dishonored: Death of the Outsider a while back (ie, beating the entire game with no detections and no kills), but I lost interest about halfway through, and by this point it's been so long I've probably lost all the skills I'd honed and would have to start the whole thing over from scratch anyway.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family