Lurker > MrMallard

Life is Strange 3? I'm 120% here for this.

Empath game. I fuck with this hardcore.

This dude is dubbed as fuck, lol

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Yeah, Balan Wonderworld looks bad.

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I feel like all the Taskmaster suckifying is gonna rub off on the Black Widow movie. No-one's gonna take this guy seriously, lmao

Hey, Steve Blum! I was wondering about him when the Outriders part was on. Dude sounded like a cheap imitation.

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damn, they refuse to give up on Avengers.

Kinda like Goron Hulk tbh. Not interested enough to watch this gameplay trailer though, lol

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MOTHERFUCKING BUBBLE BOBBLe

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MC_BatCommander posted...

Mobile game announcements, I sleep

anime games, you wake?

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Space Invaders Go

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Brand commodification has really eroded the gaming space, who the fuck needs a tomb raider cookbook?

also Lara Croft in fortnite, lmao

Speaking of brand commodification - here's the Squeenix mobile showcase, lmao

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Since 2017, but I bought it for Christmas so I had it for all of 6 days in 2017, lol

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I've heard I Just Love You in different Spotify mixes before, I actually really like that song lmao. This thread found me another Five for Fighting song I don't mind.

The way the song gets quiet at "when are you coming home? I'll be there soon" is great.

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Beefbud posted...

The first two Coldplay albums are really very good, including the non-single tracks. after that they go downhill fast tho imo

five for fighting i won't touch with a 10-foot pole

I like pretty much every Coldplay single I heard up until Hymn for the Weekend. That song is the anthem for shallow, gentrifying spiritualists who dress up vaguely "nature-y" and talk about the cosmos while they're fucked up on E at music festivals.

LookANinja posted...

The Riddle is fine.

I put "I Just Love You" on a mix CD for my ex before i even listened to it. It was a trip and when both her and her sister were singing along to it the next week.

I'll give those two songs a go and report back.

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By which I mean the only songs worth listening to are the singles. Other examples, imo, are Coldplay and Foo Fighters.

I think America Town could be a really solid album if I gave it a chance, but having just put his discography on Spotify shuffle play, all of his songs seemed to bleed together in a really unappealing way.

Superman (It's Not Easy) and 100 Years are great pop ballads, I've been cranking the latter for weeks and I only recently re-discovered the former. I really like those songs - they're excellent pop songs. The issue is that every other song I heard sounds like it's structured the exact same way - two verses, two choruses, a bridge and a final chorus - and the lyrics and melody just don't hold up to scrutiny. Despite being structured the same as the hits, they don't have the same punch and charm of those songs. They're like drinking room-temperature water.

All of his ballads fit the basic pop structure, even his biggest hits, but there's a marked difference between those two songs and the other songs with that same structuring. They sound like bland retreads. Nothing that makes those songs so good, barring his voice maybe, makes it into his other material - from what I heard at least.

You've gotta wonder how a guy who makes the same song over and over again makes two incredible pop ballads without some of that rubbing off on the rest of his music. He committed to the style and put out perfectly listenable ballads. But his other ballads just kind of... exist, in the same way that oxygen kind of exists. And the majority of his music sucks because of that. It's a real bummer to realise that a band you want to like just isn't meeting the standard of quality you expected from them.

And if you're gonna get on my nuts about shuffle play, I've found some of my favorite bands through shuffle play. I wouldn't have delved as deeply into Rachael Yamagata, Maria Mena or The Weepies if I didn't say "fuck it" and put their shit on shuffle play after hearing one or two really nice singles. Maybe I'd like America Town at least if I listened to it in chronological order, but I feel like I'd get the same vapid hollowness from Five for Fighting's discography as I did from James Blunt's discography when I went through that chronologically. And I actually enjoyed the first two James Blunt albums, to a degree - I don't think I could get 2 albums worth of enjoyment for FfF, given what I've heard.

I'm always on the lookout for new music, and I was hoping that Five for Fighting would be a diamond in the rough. I really enjoy Counting Crows, even the albums after their relevancy dropped off - not too hot on Somewhere Under Wonderland, but it is what it is and I could argue for every album they made before that. I wanted Five for Fighting to be that scrappy underdog, a band where I could be like "you can understand why they faded away, but they had some pretty decent material even past their point of relevancy". I'm disappointed that this didn't end up being the case.

But hey, we got two great songs out of Five for Fighting. That's something.

https://youtu.be/GRz4FY0ZcwI
https://youtu.be/tR-qQcNT_fY

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Dat_Cracka_Jax posted...

Looks like he got all his aging out of the way early

I think he did. He looks pretty good for his age nowadays, dude has aged fairly gracefully all things considered

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Ushiromiya posted...

Does this image mean anything to you? >_>

The original version of this ending had Shinji making headstones for people like Misato and Ryuji. Asuka's survival would have been revealed by her headstone being kicked over and her calling Shinji an idiot or something. It was storyboarded and I think lines were recorded, but it got scrapped for time or something.

More vividly, that picture reminds me of an AMV set to Hurt by Johnny Cash:
https://youtu.be/HFSfWT0ScAU

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cjs28 posted...

50s shows were weird

Fun fact, the Brady Bunch bathroom didn't have a toilet in it because they thought it would be too vulgar or unseemly or something for the sanitized programming of the 70's. But the first live-action depiction of a toilet on American primetime TV was on Leave it to Beaver from the 50's.

I went on a Brady Bunch kick recently with that CE topic about the pastiche movies in the 90's. I looked up Robert Reed, the guy who played Mike Brady - really interesting guy with a sad life. He was a closeted gay man for decades, and the news broke out after his death because he phoned Florence Henderson about his terminal cancer so she could let the rest of the cast know before he passed.

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Blue_Target posted...

I remember a very old porn movie based on I Dream of Jeannie and got the two mixed up when reading the title

I Deed on Jeannie

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cjs28 posted...

As far as I know, Yui is stuck inside that floating dead unit-01 in space. Seems like a boring existence to me

but bro, eva-01 became an immortal symbol of humanity's existence, and thus became the sole proof of mankind's existence. the fact that she discusses this with Fuyutsuki in the voiceover at the end proves that she wanted to become immortal and outlive everyone else of earth, and the only way for her to achieve this was to commit global genocide. she wanted this to happen, bro. she was evil and greedy and more abusive than gendo because her orchestrations made gendo the way he was and was the cause for Shinji's abuse throughout his entire life because of that.

The fact that I can still recite that bullshit off the top of my head goes to show how entrenched I was in Eva fandom as a teenager, lol.

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I don't think I have the perspective to properly discuss this. What I do feel confident in saying is that if universities and clinics can see fit to leave bowls of condoms out for people who need contraception, whether they're subsidized or not, there should be an equal effort to make menstrual products just as accessible. Menstrual products are a necessity, and menstruation happens whether the person who's subject to it wants it or not - and while condoms are important and safe sex is to be encouraged, it's kinda fucked up that open sexuality is normalised while menstruation isn't. They should both be accommodated.

Like, let's keep the condoms out for people who need them. I'm not saying abolish free, accessible contraception, and I'm not against sex ed or normalising contraception. But I think if we can make those accommodations for contraceptives, we can make the same accommodations for menstruation. If we haven't taken that step yet, shit's properly fucked up.

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cjs28 posted...

Legit question: Is that why Asuka says "How disgusting" at the very end of the movie? Or is it because she's stuck with Shinji in an apparent hellscape? or is there a completely different reason for that?

The production story is that the voice director or someone asked Asuka's VA what her response would be if she learned someone had gratified themselves to her comatose body. Her response was "how disgusting". That became the line at the end.

Saying that, info about classic Eva is mired in bullshit fanwank and willful manipulation of the facts by dipshits in positions of power in the English fanbase. Reichu, the admin of Evageeks for example, has a pet theory that Yui orchestrated the entire series to become immortal and was the true villain all along - so that theory was treated with an air of legitimacy for years and might still be taken seriously for all I know. So take that apocryphal production story with a grain of salt, unless you can track down a reliable source yourself.

Otherwise, I think it's up to interpretation. Eva only means as much as you want it to mean sometimes. Have fun with it and make it yours

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Thought this was a Rebuild spoiler from the recent movie or something, saw "deed" as "dead". I haven't seen the new movie so I'm trying to avoid spoilers until the dub comes out.

Should go without saying, but having not seen the movie, explaining what I thought was a spoiler for that movie isn't intended to spoil anything in that movie. Gotta cover my ass so no-one can misinterpret what I'm saying - I got spooked before I realised this was an EoE topic, is what I'm saying.

I think #2 has this one on lock. If command didn't see him gunk all over his hand, then the entirety of humanity saw it when they became whole. I would say that would be in dispute if Shinji rejected instrumentality, but Asuka told him that she knew about his jack-off fantasies in one of the scenes on the train - so I don't think it's out of the question that everyone, everywhere, saw what he did during instrumentality and that his thoughts were added to the collective before he rejected it.

In hindsight, he saw Misato get pounded by Ryuji when she was in college, so there wouldn't be a reason why his thoughts would be off-limits. If he's in the Tang pool looking at people's thoughts, other people in the Tang pool can probably see his thoughts too.

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I'm not big on patriotism or nationalism, and I think that falling into authority worship when they're opposing the "wrong" side is extremely silly. It's important for the citizenry of any country to keep an eye on their elected officials, police force and military, and to do whatever they can to hold them accountable for the shit they do. The individual acts of a handful of good eggs shouldn't supercede wider criticism of the institution they stand for.

I just want to get that out of the way because I've seen supposed leftists turn around and support war crimes committed by Joe Biden's administration because they were silent and untelegraphed attacks without Trump's trademark bluster. Joe Biden is just as worthy of criticism and condemnation for acts of evil perpetrated by his administration, the same as any leader of any nation in the world. Nothing is more important than holding powerful people and the institutions that empower and benefit them to account.

With that being said - the Capitol police who defended the Capitol building on January 6th should be awarded congressional gold medals. The event that took place on January 6th was an insurrection attempt, they brought weapons and flexicuffs and they erected a fucking gallows. Some members of the police force took off their Capitol uniforms and put on MAGA hats, helping the insurrectionists get into the building and locate the offices of politicians. The ones who didn't were attacked, pushed back by rioters and harmed in an attempt to get into the building and harm senators as well as the President-Elect. Capitol police members died. Some members of the force killed themselves after what happened.

The officers who didn't commit treason, and who put their lives on the line to repel armed insurrectionists from storming the capitol and taking elected officials hostage, deserve recognition for the threat they faced. They were one of the only lines of defence between America's politicians - both good and bad - from people who explicitly had plans to harm them. If anything deserves an act of appreciation from Congress, it's acting to save the lives of Congress members.

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I don't dislike pitbulls, but they have to be taken care of properly. They need proper stimulation, and they need an outlet for all their energy. Pitbull owners should be aware of that and they should meet the care requirements of their pets.

Exterminating the entire breed is a fucking stupid idea rooted in fear - it's like a shark cull, where attacks are usually exacerbated by something in their habitat and they're painted as bloodthirsty, evil monsters. If anything, pitbulls should require a license and a microchip - greyhounds too, for the sake of their wellbeing.

I love shitty pitbull memes, like "Heroic pitbull swims out to drowning child to bite them", but the reality of the situation is that pitbulls that "snap" like this aren't cared for properly. Whether it's some meth-mouthed redneck fuck who gets into dog-fighting or a well-meaning pet owner who keeps their pitbull in an environment that doesn't enrich them or meet their exercise requirements, pitbulls only "snap" when they're not taken care of properly.

I can't support a pitbull cull, because to exterminate a species of animal for its supposed moral centre is stupid as fuck. We should go out and start exterminating venomous snakes, and wasps, and dingoes if we start thinking along those lines.

No - I think that we should consider preventative measures such as registration and welfare checks for pitbull owners to ensure the wellbeing of the animal. Pitbulls aren't evil, and if your first instinct is to assign morality to an animal reacting to its surroundings, I think that's stupid. Regulate the ownership of the animal, and hold the owners accountable.

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I was reading the comments of the GameSpot review, and someone mentioned that WW84 was at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes before it came out. Now it's somewhere in the 40s or 50s, and we all know how it turned out in the end.

Personal bias aside, if this is true, there's absolutely room for a drop-off in critic review scores once the movie comes out. You might be counting your chickens before they hatch, TC.

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InuYasha?

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Wutobliteration posted...

no one looks at metacritic though.

Also, it's only 20+ critics. RT has 100+ critics aggregated

I pay more attention to metacritic than rotten tomatoes. Though I tend to take review aggregates with a grain of salt.

Honestly, I just don't like Zack Snyder and I don't want to watch any superhero shit he puts out. I think he's an edgy fuckwit with an inflated ego, and I think the people who defend his dogshit movies like BvS are a bunch of nuthugging sycophants. I've accepted that I have a bias against him and his movies, and I'm choosing to sit out whatever DC movies he cranks out instead of wasting my energy going on the same vitriolic rants. I clearly don't like his superhero movies, so I'm not going to bother with them going forward.

If this movie is better than the other crap he's put out, then I'm genuinely glad for its audience. I hope that he can finally realise his creative vision over the course of this four hour epic. But I'm not hopeful, and I'm not wasting four hours of my life for the slim chance that this movie will prove me wrong about a director who's spit in my face over and over again.

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Eminem is a 50+ year old man who dunks on kids half his age and spits rhymes like "like a liar's pants, I'm on fire". He's struggled to put out well-received albums for about half of his career at least, and he's basically had to adopt this "Rap God" persona after his irreverent jokester persona devolved into corny, purile nonsense within his initial window of relevancy. Occasionally breaking to rap really fast is his main gimmick, but it's basically just gibberish. He's an old man playing a young man's game, and it's catching up to him with the off-putting freestyles, the humour that would have sounded cringy at the peak of his popularity and the all-encompassing boomer energy he gives off. His GOAT status and name recognition is maintained by a small window of superstardom in the mid-00's that he's never been able to match since.

Pink is in her forties making the same sort of pop as always, but her material tends to be consistent and she tends to try out new production with most of her projects and evolve her sound incrementally. While her music is hit or miss, she's maintained mainstream popularity for about as long as Eminem has and she's had less outright duds. Her songs can be annoying (Funhouse) and overplayed (So What, Perfect), and her music is slightly edgy radio pop, but she's evolved with the times and maintained a consistent career for over 20 years. If nothing else, she's hardworking and successful, and that's kept her afloat in the music industry for her entire adult life.

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The Big C

Boston Legal

Broad City

The Good Place

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JlM posted...

There's a few people here saying that after they are sober for a good while they will try having drinks in moderation.

I really don't recommend it. That's not how alcoholism works and I think you damn well know it. I quit for two years and felt pretty good. My wife and I went out for wings one night and I thought "Fuck it, I've been good for two years. I'm gonna have a beer".

Since then I've drank almost every day. I just stopped again about ten days ago. It sucks but it's going alright. I have to taste the beer at the brewery, but I've been spitting it out.

If you can't drink in moderation now, you won't be able to drink in moderation a couple of months from now, a couple of years from now, or most likely ever.

Just quit.

I appreciate the heads up. I'll do this.

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Xerun posted...

World of Final Fantasy is a great Final Fantasy game that combines itsef with the monster capture of Pokemon. One of the best games Ive played in the last few years

I'm looking forward to the fanservice, what with the chibi FF protagonists and the monster designs and stuff. idk about monster capture though, I think I'd prefer jobs from a Final Fantasy game.

sabin017 posted...

Digimon honestly does a lot with the license, perhaps too much at times. It's also good that Digimon can have superior gameplay to Pokemon. IIRC it was primarily developed for the Vita so that explains some of its presentation.

That explains a lot. Like I'm sure it'll be a good game when I get into the swing of things, but I can understand why things are the way they are if this was originally a Vita game.

Also I guess this is my last bump, Ni No Kuni is tied with WoFF. I'm leaning towards Ni No Kuni tbh, if it's more of a casual, basic beginner's RPG I might whet my appetite on that before I okay these other two games. Could save WoFF for a rainy day.


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Gonna bump this again, and the one more time later.

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I remember this being a thing

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I'm happy for him.

There's definitely a lack of representation in regards to transgender men. Trans rep as a whole can be spotty at best, with a lot of the better media experiences involving trans people coming out of the indie scene with trans creators - but of those experiences, I feel like a solid majority of them are about the trans experience through the eyes of trans women.

Media about trans people has been trending more sympathetic, and has been featuring more trans involvement, since around 2010 I feel like. And media featuring trans actors has been on the rise lately, which is good too. But of that growing pool of representation, trans men don't get as much focus. Unless there's some media from when I was a kid I've forgotten about, I think Levi from The Last of Us Pt. II has been the only trans man I've seen in the media I've consumed. As such, while I've been around trans media and seen trans discourse, my experiences tend to trend towards trans women.

I haven't had a face to put to the trans man experience. I've played indie games and stuff that I can point to and say "that's what normalised the transfem experience for me", but I simply haven't had that for the transmasc experience. While I care about the broader trans experience and defend trans people in equal measure, the side of things regarding trans men is less defined in my mind compared to what I know and how I feel about trans women.

Elliot Page is the connecting thread. His transition is the piece that completes the puzzle - it shines a light on that side I didn't know so well before. I understand.

I cared before, but my view of the entire transgender experience was primarily coloured by the experiences of trans women. Elliot Page fills out the whole picture.

This is why representation is so important.

There's a lot of weight on his shoulders - I think Elliot might be the most visible trans man in the media today, and I imagine his transition is going to inform a lot of people in the same way it informed me. But I imagine that being able to transition and express the person you see yourself as is a great relief, and I hope it finds him peace and calm going forward.

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Deepfakes are fucked up, and this was inevitably going to be where they progressed to.

Like I love these wombo.ai memes, especially the ones that don't register a mouth properly, but we have to acknowledge how fucked up they can be when the people making them are irresponsible and selfish like this woman.

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Digimon Cyber Sleuth and World of Final Fantasy are tied

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If you're anything like me TC, sobriety will probably click about 2 months in.

It's a shitty 2 months, but it's a pretty neat feeling when you get over the hurdle. I still crave a drink, and I might still go back to alcohol after a while and see if I can enjoy it in moderation - I still crave a drink every now and again. But I think I could just as easily avoid alcohol indefinitely.

It's like, I used to have to go out of my way to avoid drinking. Now it feels like I would have to go out of my way to have a drink. It took me 2 months to get to that point, but now I'm there. If you can make 2 months, sobriety should hopefully kick in.

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I'm not a big fan of how Octopath Traveller looks. The realistic, shiny water mixed with a bunch of bloom makes the sprites look muddy imo. I really dig the pixel style, even if it's something a bit more low-key and silly like Brave Dungeon or something that's aged pretty well like Final Fantasy 5 - but mixing it with realistic fire and water physics just turns me off.

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Njolk posted...

I do not understand how people enjoy jrpgs

Honestly, I think it's for the same reason people like clicker games and musou games. Grinding for bigger numbers appeals to people. Though while your interactions with a clicker game is meant to be shallow and recurring over a long period of time, and your engagement with a musou game is meant to be a series of fleeting play sessions that scratch the big number itch in your brain right away, JRPGs offer more of a immersive, consistent journey with its progression - as well as more of a focus on music, story and cutscenes. It's a journey.

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teep_ posted...

Did you finish P5? Cause in that case

Play Royal :P

dude, by the end of my second playthrough, my playtime was 167 hours. I fused Satanael. I am well and truly done with that game, lmao.

Looking forward to Strikers though. That's another game that's on my wishlist, but it's a commitment all of its own.

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BignutzisBack posted...

.... Please add more choices

These are the three big JRPGs in my back catalogue.

I took a break from the musou/minecraft/mmo grind recently and tried Xcom: Enemy Unknown recently. That was pretty cool, though I thought it auto-saved and ended up losing all my progress lol.

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Bit of background for each game:

• I started playing Cyber Sleuth a little while back, and turned back at the lack of dub. I just wasn't vibing with it at the time, but I'm willing to commit with enough positive feedback. I was always a Pokemon kid, though I remember really liking the Digimon show that was on around 2005 or so.
• I only know that Ni No Kuni has Ghibli animators doing the cutscenes. My understanding of it is that it's just a really great, classic, cel-shaded JRPG with that Ghibli charm.
• I like Final Fantasy fairly well, so World of Final Fantasy appeals to me with its boatloads of fanservice. I hate the ever-present Funko aesthetic in today's media, but the design of the WoFF characters kind of gets a pass - it's very cute.

Aspects I like about RPGs are jobs, collecting/fusing stuff like mons or gear, and replayability. I played Persona 5 twice in a row, back to back playthroughs, and I've been playing Final Fantasy X-2 on and off for about 10 years because I really dig the gameplay loop. I actually finished Via Infinito last year on the PS3 version, the only reason I would play it again is to max out the job system.

I'm also casual Atelier trash, but I only like when a game focuses on whatever unusual aspect of gameplay it's presenting. I fucking hate cooking/crafting mechanics that get grafted onto games for the sake of content, but if there's a focus on cooking/crafting as well as the regular JRPG touchstones, I can live with that.

Which of these RPGs do you think would appeal to me the most, going forward? I'm gonna get to all 3 in time, but after the false start with Digimon a little while ago I figured a bit of a push in the right direction would be nice.

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I remember when some moron on CE tried pushing him as a measured leftist who weighed the pros and cons of both sides equally. What a fuckwit.

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It's been said so much, but such a loss happening in such a short, unexpected period of time like this is incredibly fucked up. I can't imagine how hard this would be on you, especially as a parent.

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. There's no wrong way to grieve, even at the best of times.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

A prominent point that came out of the research of Nazism post-WWII was "the banality of evil". Cruelty was an integral part of the Nazi ideology, but it became so mundane and accepted by people that they could divorce the evil of their actions from the everyday reality of their jobs. Send 3,000 Jewish detainees to build a railroad to a concentration camp where they'd ultimately be detained and executed, if they didn't die while making the railroad? Well, it's text on a form that gets filled out. The Jewish people are barely referred to as people, so the people working them to death see them as subhuman animals with no humanity, and the work they do as advancing the German Empire to a state of permanent prosperity. You clock off when the job's done, go home to your wife, make some babies and sup on some kippers. Then you go in the next morning and process Jewish arrests, and condemn 3 bread thieves and 2 jewish dissidents to hang in the town square.

The people who adjusted to life under Nazism - the people who weren't harmed by it, and/or who actively benefited from the status quo - lived with such evil because they were brought into that evil one step at a time. They came to hate the Jews because of violent, bigoted fervor - because of events like the Reichstag fire, and Kristallnacht, demonizing them and normalising displays of force against them. People genuinely believed them to be an enemy of the people. So when they were incarcerated, when their property was redistributed by the state to "worthy" Aryan families, when they were worked to death to manufacture the tools of their own destruction - Germans saw it as a logical step. They didn't see the persecution, and then genocide, of "undesirables" as evil. Because they were undesirables, and the people were the chosen race to reclaim the glory of their ancestors against the machinations of the undesirables to keep that potential from the German people.

Any population on Earth could be whipped up into the same fervor that led to the Holocaust. If a class of people are dehumanized enough, if the majority of people are led to believe that their ilk are being undermined by a "lesser" class of people and that the prosperity of their kind is linked to the persecution of a "lesser" class, anyone can embody the violent bigotry that led to genocide.

Evil is banal. Evil is a process of justification and delusion. Anyone can be evil if their ego is fed in just the right way.

So yes - Nazis are people. And any one person has the potential to be a Nazi. No-one is immune to propaganda - not even me or you.

So if Nazis are people, and I explicitly state that there's remarkably little between a regular-ass person and someone who's bought into Nazi ideology - how can I reconcile punching a neo-nazi? You're not challenging an ideology, you're injuring another human being. Fascists hurt other people to keep them down, isn't this the same?

And while deprogramming is an ideal that we should strive for, the simple fact is that fascist ideology thrives on power. It thrives on victimising and persecuting other classes of people, with the ultimate aim of gaining enough power, spreading their rhetoric to enough people to establish more of a foothold and cowing enough "undesirables" that they can begin a process of violence that leads to genocide. That's the goal of a white ethnostate - make enough white people feel victimised, and direct them at other races as the cause of their victimisation to try and push them out in any way possible.

The fastest way to stop a growing fascist movement is to remove their sense of power. You can have foppish racist pricks like Richard Spencer conducting a news interview on a street corner, gaining legitimacy in the mainstream media, and you can communicate that his ilk are a bunch of high-faluting pussies by making him look like a bitch. You can make racist pricks like Fraser Anning or Piers Morgan into laughing stocks by pieing them or egging them. All they have is an air of authority and legitimacy - if you take away both of those things and reveal them for the wet noodles they are, the rhetoric they spout becomes less meaningful because their social position has dropped.

Richard Spencer, Piers Morgan and Fraser Anning are people. The people who push this narrative of white victimisation, who advocate for the persecution of other "lesser" classes as the cause for white victimisation, are people themselves. The shitty, fuck-eyed, racist old bastard who lived a few doors down from your childhood home was a person. To claim that they've lost their humanity only serves to shield you from the reality of the situation - that given the right stimulus, that could easily be you. It could be your parents. It could be your uncles and aunts.

I advocate for those people being brought down a peg or two, because the alternative is that they use their influence to dehumanise a "lesser" class and invite violence against them for imagined crimes they're not responsible for. There are no jobs because immigrants took them all. There's so much rape in capital cities because of all the immigrants. Refugees all come from war-torn nations where terrorists thrive, so we should treat each and every one as a terrorist.

The people who have made it socially acceptable to blame other ethnicities and classes of people, who have made it a reality to detain people for decades without a trial and who would see people of a similar ilk outside of that system join them in time, are people. They're people who thrive on power, who've been corrupted by it, and who've been fed a narrative of inherent potential being stifled by a class of undesirables who would see that potential squandered. They're people who've been brought into a violent ideology one step at a time, and the only way to end their intolerance is to challenge that power - whether it be through cutting through the layers of bullshit that led them to that point, or by directly challenging the narrative of superiority and power by showing their "powerful" leaders as the snide, weak little shits they are.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

They had some okay songs. I think the issue is that we gave them too much of a platform.

Drops of Jupiter - neat song, before you've heard it 50 times. Hey Soul Sister - honestly a pretty neat song for the time it came out in, but it should be delegated to the dustbin of history because it is cringe as fuck today. And from that point on, it's been a downward spiral.

Train is the kind of band that should have come back for one reunion album and then went their separate ways again. They subscribed to the Maroon 5 school of "milk every ounce of brand recognition out of your fame until you're a soulless, generic husk of a band that makes music that's blander than plain gelatin".

I'm bummed out about Blur only getting one reunion album compared to Train's entire career revival they got last decade.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

As an epilogue for this cluster fuck I've been through - my laptop can run Valheim, but it's completely unplayable. It froze on the title screen, on the character creation screen and when I created a new world. Then when the game itself loaded up, the frame rate was sub-10fps.

No joke, after I landed, the frame rate was roughly 1 frame per second. The game would literally only move once every second. So yeah, this was all for nothing and I can't play Valheim.

I might try and get back into Wurm Unlimited to make some lemonade out of this whole situation. And at least now I can play those games from the itch.io racial justice and unity bundle.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

Well, I am a fucking moron.

I went into Apps and clicked "allow apps from anywhere", and that did the trick.

fwiw, the option it was on before was "warn me about unverified apps", not "only allow apps through the app store". Microsoft was still strongarming me, but this is all on me and I feel really fucking stupid.

I think the main lesson I'm taking away from this is that if I ever get another computer, I'm either keeping on top of updates the entire time or I'm installing custom firmware or some shit to prevent Microsoft from fucking me in the ass with this. Or maybe I'll try Linux out or something. This is getting way out of hand.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

If they're that in love, let them decide what to do with their shared name. Whether they amend them, change one of them or don't change them at all.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

I'm back with a new problem.

I'm trying to download the 1903 update. I'm using the update assistant. It's downloaded, so it breezes through that part, but the updating portion slows to a crawl around 80%. After that, it takes about an hour or so to hit 100%.

The problem occurs after my laptop restarts. That's when the update really begins. It gets to around 30-50% and then my laptop shuts down on its own.

Sometimes a computer will restart multiple times during an update, sure. But my laptop isn't restarting. It's shutting down completely.

So when I go to turn it back on, I have to sit through 10 minutes of a "Removing changes to the OS" screen, at which point it spits me back out at my homepage. I'm still at update 1803, and I still can't run my own applications.

This process has failed me twice now. I'm on my third attempt. The installation is up to the "updating" part and it's stuck at 84%, and it'll be at least another hour before it gets to the end of this phase. Then my laptop will restart, and I'll basically have to roll the dice on whether it'll shut down or not.

I can't stress enough how much this is pissing me off. Computers need updates to address functionality issues and security updates and shit, sure, but I can't at all justify why I can't install the fucking Steam client or run game setups without an update. I could understand if Steam had functionality issues with an outdated version of Windows, and the issue was on their end - but this is Windows refusing to let me install new applications without an update. It'll let me use the Microsoft Store to do so, but it doesn't have the fucking app I want to install. It just sits there and goes "uh-uh, sweaty, U need a system upgwade uwu" and puts me through an entire weekend of this horseshit.

Please tell me this is a known issue, and I can fix it before I have to do this over again.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape

Trump supporters just couldn't give up their right to mobilize and lick doorknobs, could they.

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
Now Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Old-School Runescape