Lurker > MrMallard

This topic reminds me of the topic where someone posted these heartfelt lyrics they'd been working on all year, and #2 was "that song sucked".

OP took it in good humour, but shit was incredibly funny regardless. Not saying anything about your script bc I didn't read it.

Doe posted...

It's a motif, not a theme. A theme isn't one word, it's a message you'd write out like a thesis. A theme of Pokmon Diamond might be "Friendship is good."

'Mythology' is a motif, in other words a recurrent symbol or feature.

motif deez nuts

Torterra is a version of the World Turtle, a mythological being appearing in Chinese, Hindu and native American folklore. It carries the world on its back, much like how Torterra has both grass and a fully grown tree growing on its shell. That's why it's Grass/Ground - it's the World Turtle.

Infernape is based on the legend of Son Wukong, the trickster god whose epic journey across the continent of Asia has inspired fiction to this day, whether it's Dragon Ball, Enslaved: Journey to the West or the upcoming Son Wukong game rendered in what looks like Unreal Engine 5.

Son Wukong tends to be regarded as a good fighter, and the fire part comes into play when he survives 49 days in Laozi's furnace which grants him the power to see evil.

Empoleon is a penguin because birds don't exist

Yakuza is the Metal Gear Solid of a new generation, change my mind

Enya West, Sail Away (Bound 2)

PatrickMahomes posted...

remember when we worshipped austrailia for severe lockdowns

Throughout this entire pandemic, we've lost just over 2,000 people. America is losing almost 2,000 people a day.

Don't get me wrong, the government here are a bunch of incompetent fatcats and all-around boobs. But the issue is that they're dragging their feet on lockdown, trying to play to your average anti-masker joe schmoe who throws beer bottles at police during an anti-covid protest.

The lockdowns themselves, when we go into them, have prevented a significant amount of death in this country. Hence why I've commented twice before on how I think the government should have been more flexible and transparent about the worsening covid situation instead of stripping away all of the COVID protections before having to put them back in place on Christmas Eve, 9 days after they lifted them.

We're not as good as NZ in terms of locking down, especially when it feels like the Liberal-National Party are almost trying to sabotage lockdown at every turn, but again - our 2,000 total COVID deaths to America's 2,000+ a day.

Trumble posted...

MrMallard is known to downplay the effectiveness of vaccination.

Omicron has been billed as a vaccine-resistant strain, so excuse me for not being 100% up to date on this shit. If it is true that Pfizer boosters are Omicron-resistant, that's fantastic news because Pfizer is the vaccine I got - I just haven't seen this in the news.

I get that you're trying to get a rise out of me by lying about my stance on COVID, but all the same - shut the fuck up and stop lying about me.

PatrickMahomes posted...

you described the action you took but not the circumstances that caused you to take said action

He posted the email. He and his department have been taking working breaks, which under Maryland law entitles them to pay during those breaks since they're still working while they eat. According to TC, it's understood between the staff and the business that what they're taking are working breaks, not regular breaks.

The company, against that law, hasn't been paying their workers for the working breaks they have to take. Hence the email.

Like did you read the OP or what

In Australia, you could go to the Fair Work Ombudsman who would conduct an investigation and get you that money, and also possibly issuing the company a fine.

In America, you might be SOL. I mean, unions have been doing pretty good lately, so maybe seek out a labor union who represents the sort of work you do, and see if you can sit down with someone and pick their brain. Unions have lawyers who - if they're a good union - are well versed in worker's rights and corporate law, at least to the extent that they can take a case like this to court and try to get your backpay.

Maybe it's different in America where if you're not a member, a union wouldn't cross the street to spit on you if you were on fire - but you should at least be able to sit down with someone and get an opinion. I imagine they wouldn't go to court for you unless you're a member, but it can't help to at least ask someone who's in the know about this sort of thing to better orient yourself.

All things considered, I hope you get your backpay and I hope these bastards don't fire you.

Punished_Blinx posted...

Isn't it just mask restrictions and QR check-ins?

idk how interstate travel is faring, but I saw on the news that JetStar and Virgin both grounded a ton of flights this morning.

ModLogic posted...

how many resets is it gonna take for these idiots to just stay hard until the end.

It's like I said, if they were more flexible and transparent about the pandemic maybe they wouldn't keep fucking up the re-opening. The absolute hubris of setting a date 2 months in the future, witnessing another COVID event unfold, opening on the planned day despite the worsening COVID situation and then going back into lockdown nine days later is fucking stupid.

Like maybe there wouldn't be as many resets if the government did their job and governed in the best interests of their constituents, instead of trying to play the role of Cool Uncle Dave who lets you have a VB with him on Boxing Day when you're 15.

Alucard188 posted...

Knowing what I know and have seen of government's handling of covid, I make no long-term plans to go anywhere or do anything. That way I don't have to scramble if I have to cancel. Sucks for those families that have to cancel Christmas plans.

fr. I'm set because my Christmas plans are 64 kilometers away and I don't think they're restricting travel by that much, but a ton of people got fucked in the ass when the previously mentioned airlines dropped all their flights. Gotta keep your goals achievable in the face of a force that can take everything away from you if you get too ambitious.

1337toothbrush posted...

Remember when the news of viable vaccines caused celebration as the end was in sight?

For real. It's like, sure you can still get COVID, but you're less likely to drown in your own mucus and die in agony. Except nevermind, here's a strain that's resistant to vaccines. Slightly less dangerous, but the fact that it bypasses the vaccine makes it more dangerous than if it had just gotten kicked in the nuts by the vax like it's supposed to.

With that being said, the closest point of comparison to COVID as far as global pandemics go is Spanish Flu. I don't know the specifics, but it took something like four years to squash that flu for good - it exists in pockets of the world, but we spent almost 100 years without having to loom in the shadow of Spanish Flu outside of some isolated cases. Just because COVID isn't gone yet, doesn't mean it's never going away - vaccines will get better, people will adopt preventative behaviors and one day COVID will be one of those diseases that we occasionally have brief scares about that doesn't destroy our entire way of life. I would say that the age range of CEmen skews between 22-38 or something - we're still pretty young in the grand scheme of things. We're going to live to see the end of this pandemic.

Until December 15 we had to show a digital certificate of vaccination to get into non-essential businesses like clothes shops and bars and QR codes we had to scan to track COVID outbreaks. The government set the date a month or two before it was meant to go into effect.

A week or two before December 15, Omicron started fucking shit up. A thousand cases a day at one point. And the government lifted all restrictions anyway - no QR codes, no masks, no vax certificates. Freedom Day was the marketing term they hammered in through the news.

Today is Christmas Eve, and we're seeing over 6,000 new cases every day. So under incredible pressure, the government has decided to bring all of the COVID restrictions back in.

We're talking grounding airplanes, which cancels a shit ton of flights on Christmas Eve and strands families from seeing their relatives, limiting the amount of people who can be in stores, reintroducing the QR check-in system - everything they lifted nine days ago has gone right back into place.

I feel sorry for people whose Christmas plans relied on travel, but I think it's fucking hilarious to see the government with this much egg on their face. At every turn, they've been chest-thumping about "no more lockdowns", lifting lockdowns as soon as possible and getting everything "back to normal". And all that has done is cause COVID to become an even bigger threat than it would have otherwise been if they had been flexible and transparent about the COVID situation as it developed.

Like as sympathetic as I might be towards people who are negatively affected by this, it's all worth it to see this dogshit government go down in flames like the incompetent turds they are. Nine days of total, unrestricted freedom. That's all we got because they ignored rising COVID infection rates for their "Freedom Day" press coverage, and now that's been ripped out of the grasp of every NSW resident after we barely had enough time to enjoy it.

Last night I made this thing my nan invented called red salad. It's a mixture of diced gherkins, onion, beetroot and potatoes, with sauerkraut and baked beans. It's called red salad because the beetroots dyes everything a reddy purple colour.

I didn't have beetroot so it didn't end up being red - guess it's just "salad" - and I also forgot about the potatoes. but I made a decent portion of it, and I'm taking it to work for lunch every day.

But the side effect is that I have a jar of plain sauerkraut sitting in my fridge. It's not going anywhere, and I only used a quarter of the jar, so I'm eating it straight out of the jar for dinner. Probably gonna go to bed after this.

I'll probably have enough to make another batch when this current mix runs out.

I was wary about using baked beans, even though that's what my nan uses. But if you leave it overnight, the tomato sauce it comes in emulsifies and the acidic flavor of the sauerkraut and gherkins take over with a bit of the earthiness that comes with beetroot. The onion soaks up that mixture like a crunchy sponge, and the texture is mostly the sauerkraut holding everything together with occasional mouthfuls of soft gherkin, meaty baked beans and crunchy onion chunks.

party_animal07 posted...

Was expecting this

https://youtu.be/DPC9erC5WqU

This guy's like the Lil Pump to Stillichimiya's Beastie Boys

If you watch this one, skip to 3:00 because there's an awkward extended intro where Mr. Maro (the voice guy) acts out a scene from like Evangelion. But I'm posting it because the pop-off is insane:

https://youtu.be/C4JxfNcEpgU

They also collab with a lot of artists, pretty sure this is them partnering with a couple of Thai performers:

https://youtu.be/ngBPAHvBbfs

I've found some more recent live performances, they're still together and performing as of 2020. This one starts off kinda bad but it gets pretty hype by the halfway point.

https://youtu.be/C4JxfNcEpgU

They did a Honda advert, real chill vibe and the lyric translations really add to the atmosphere of riding a moped around.

https://youtu.be/LZNuWCM_2yo

https://youtu.be/UB4ouaYwXL4

This song was on the front page of a Prominent Data Sharing Website back in the day, and I decided to click it for once. They didn't have many songs, but I actually really enjoyed it while it lasted.

There's a better showcase of their rapping ability in another video that also lampoons multiple Japanese comedy tropes, but the first guy dresses up as like Mickey Rooney's racist Asian character in Breakfast at Tiffany's and farts in another character's face. Even though it's a Japanese guy donning the makeup for the purposes of comedy, I don't want the mods blasting my ass for posting racial stereotypes or anything.

doot

Do you remember the Vice City Stories radio plays? One of them was a hardboiled detective character in The Case of the Exploding Breasts, and the other one was about a time traveller who travels through time by jerking off.

For real. Loved jailbreaking the PSP and Wii back in the day. I love how everything has its own janky, shitty homebrew Minecraft clone, lol

Does the PS4 have a janky homebrew clone of Minecraft, or just the Bedrock Edition?

that shit is super expensive, not even at the height of my PS3 playing days did I play 3D Dot Game Heroes. Looked okay though

Fuck Burger King until they get those delish pickle nugs down under at Hungry Jacks

I was gonna be like "lmao loser #humblebrag" but then I thought about it and it's been ten years for me too. First fucked at 16 and now I'm 26.

It's a blessing to still be young, so maybe I shouldn't be such a prick until I get older. We're all in the same boat.

Were they hesitant, or were they virulently and publically antivax to the point of calling people traitors for getting vaccinated and using their free time to convince other people not to get vaccinated?

Because I've said time and time again - condolences to their families, but I'm not going to mourn or act surprised when someone who refused to take every available precaution to protect themselves ends up dying of something they thought was a hoax despite the massive fucking death toll. We've had COVID for 2 years now, we've seen how masks, proper hygiene and vaccination lowers COVID rates, and a majority of people have the common sense and decency to mask up when this fucking contagion takes root in their neighbourhoods and towns.

If you're going to eschew face masks during a global pandemic and convince other people to do the same, let alone lie and fearmonger about a vaccine that makes it less likely for you to fucking die, then I'm going to call it how I see it - you not only made the world a worse place by spreading your idiocy to others, but you rejected everything that could have saved your life because according to you, aborted fetuses are in the vaccines and masks are a deep state cover-up to kidnap children. If anyone's going to comment on their legacy, the extremely heinous shit is just as valid as the unfortunate end they came to.

The sort of shit people get away with is fucking condemnable, and I refuse to mourn someone who had such disdain for everyone around them that they undermined the attempts of others to protect themselves with lies and deceit, and such an inflated ego that they refused to protect themselves.

There was a young anti-vaxxer woman who was admitted to the ER after a particularly severe case of COVID. There's video of her crying, saying she didn't want to die as her family panicked around her.

She went on a ventilator, then into a coma, and then she died. Over the course of a month or two, she went brain-dead and died of a COVID infection. And her last words before this happened were "I don't want to die".

That is an absolute tragedy. Even for someone who was anti-vax up until that point, caught up in an anti-vax family until it affected her so severely she died from it, it is absolutely fucking miserable to think about people like her who realise the reality of a virus like COVID on what ends up being their death bed. I have nothing but compassion for the people who understand the severity of COVID only after it's in the process of claiming their own lives. Nobody deserves to die like that, painfully and in absolute terror.

But I'm never going to sit down and shut up out of some misplaced sense of respect for someone who, up until their dying breath, called COVID an overexaggerated flu and encouraged people to "remain pure" by resisting the vaccine. I have no respect for people whose entire legacy is feeding even more conspiracy morons by becoming an anti-vaxxer martyr, their social media turning into a qanon billboard as their relatives use their platform not to recount the reality of what COVID does to you, but to encourage other people to follow in their loved one's footsteps and die in agony.

Their deaths were preventable, and the world is a worse place for their passing due to this shitty fucking virus. Every one of them has inherent human value that makes their passing tragic and regrettable. In every situation, I hope for their family's peace of mind going forward, because whether I agreed with them or not, I can respect how hard it is to lose a loved one.

But I will never offer that blindly without talking about the abhorrent shit they did up to that point. If you spent the last two years convincing other people to sign the same death warrant than you did, then as far as I'm concerned it's fair game for people to draw attention to that. You hear about someone who was rocketed through the windscreen of their car because they didn't believe in seatbelts, and you might think "Jesus that's a shitty way to go, poor bastard", but the caveat of "how stupid can you be to reject seatbelts, especially when it led to your own extremely cruel and unusual death" is always there. The same goes for COVID.

At the end of the day? The passing of anyone from COVID is a waste of human life, and I offer condolences to the families of this virus's millions of victims. I affirm the inherent worth that every human life has, and I regret the fact that anyone has been made to suffer due to that pandemic. That's the bare minimum courtesy I can offer to anyone affected by COVID.

That doesn't mean anyone should roll over and let a bunch of conspiracy-addled people use the dead to further the absolute insanity of COVID denialism under the pretense of "you can't comment on that because it's too soon".

For the King is a three player co-op RPG, where you pick a starting class and have to work your way up in levels and gear over a mid-length campaign to defeat a final boss. The three players can be controlled by a single user, or one user can use multiple characters while someone else uses one character, or you can have three people controlling their own characters. The game has classes like woodcutter, blacksmith, herbalist, treasure hunter etc. - each with their own gimmick and stat speciality.

The hobo class is basically a joke class. They specialise in no stats, with all of them having 75 of each stat. That means their hits, with any weapon, only have a 75% chance of having a successful roll and hitting the enemy.

You can enhance their skills with gear later on to improve that percentage, but there's no gimmick or draw to using the hobo class. With the herbalist, you can heal an entire party with a single healing item. With treasure hunter, you can find treasure maps out in the wild. When you play as a hobo, you start with a pointy stick that can break if you miss all your rolls - which, due to the 75% chance of landing a hit, is possible.

This is how they started the campaign:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/5/8/AAbh80AACun6.jpg

And this is how they ended up:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/5/9/AAbh80AACun7.jpg

I used to play this a fuckton with my old best friend. We'd always have a herbalist on our team, and he'd get annoyed if I tried to add a hobo onto our team because they're a liability. Our teams were really samey, and he would also shoot down the possibility of adding gambling halls to the game, because he knew I'd use them - this is a game I like to take risks in because it's awesome when it works and it's funny when it fails.

Suffice to say, we had different ways of having fun with this game - I'd argue we had different ways of having fun with video games entirely. But this was still a game we bonded over. There were multiple nights where we stayed up until the sun rose playing For the King. This shit rules.

But in honor of me not being friends with him any more, and being free to play the game however I like - all-hobo team. And honestly I wasn't expecting it to be a success at all. But I just beat the Sea King in one of the game's later campaigns, and I did it my way - even if it meant using up my pool of 5 extra lives due to stupid deaths.

Kukagahic Mamusu, T'vontalus Vihan and Barnabus Dakhar were an unlikely team of bums - figuratively and literally - who were able to beat the odds and save the world. It was a good campaign.

Quick note to the people "concerned" about striking workers blocking busses, decrying scab labor for breaking the picket line and protesting loudly and publically the way they did:

Everything they did was to get a result within this ballpark. Fuck off the tier system, raise wages, increase pensions. Striking workers got the core pillars of their demands met - I can't say whether they got everything they ever asked for. And everything they got was because of things that vacuous morons tried to paint as violent or dangerous.

Well, fuck you - it was essential, and it worked.

Fair enough, I don't understand all of your American-ass terms and shit. Over here we have free TV and pay TV.

DarkChozoGhost posted...

And yes, the fog is exactly the opposite of the dark caves. Why don't you use defog?

First of all, it's garbage to have a second dehabilitating screen effect that makes it impossible to see where you're going. Requiring the use of Flash was already the worst part of the old games, so to do it again is a whole other load of horseshit.

Secondly, this is what that shit looks like:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/1/3/AAbh80AACuUd.jpg
Like are you fucking kidding me, I know it was bad in the old games too but I feel like this is a lot worse.

And third, this is a necessary route to get to Celestic Town, at which point I can obtain Defog and pass through safely - after I get the next gym badge, of course. So I can't use Defog until I'm past this fog-ridden route.

Edit: it appears I missed it somewhere earlier, I'll go get it now.

It was necessary for the show to continue airing, as the studio would have axed the show without the addition. It's also one of the best examples of executive meddling in TV history, and whether it was necessary or not, it's still arguably one of the best things to happen to network television in the past 20 years.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Yeah, gen 4 is okay. Like let's face it, even the worst mainline Pokemon games are fairly playable. And I have been liking the gym leaders and stuff tbh.

Compsognathus posted...

What blows my mind is that Pokmon had online figured out with Gen 6. All they had to do is keep it. Instead they keep fucking up perfectly functioning features for shiggles.

I mean Pokemon had online figured out for the most part in gen 8. Probably wasn't perfect, but I remember Wonder Trading and doing raid bosses and shit and it was perfectly fine. Right now the Global Wireless thing isn't ready - though I think it's locked behind story progression - and stuff like the union rooms are outright broken.

Considering all the shit the games launched without, to still have aspects of this game that are as incomplete as they are is borderline criminal. This shit sucks.

Proto_Spark posted...

This was an issue when they allowed random trades in Gen 5 too. People don't want to trade, they want to show off their cool pokemon. If you brought something they'd actually be willing to trade for, the trade would probably break because it those are also usually poorly hacked shinies.

Union Room is I think only 2 at a time right now, and a "future update" is supposed to allow more people at once.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The thing is, you press Y to access the global rooms, and they have screenshots of fully packed union rooms full of players. You're telling me they're presenting that aspect of the game in that light, despite being out for something like a month and having throttled those rooms to 2 players per room the entire time? What a load of horseshit.

DarkChozoGhost posted...

You could always just add the new pokemon to your party and keep playing with it a bit underleveled. It's probably good enough to do something, and it'll catch up fairly quickly with the way exp is weighted. It is stupid that you can't turn it off though.

And yes, the fog is exactly the opposite of the dark caves. Why don't you use defog?

I guess, but I like to start from level 1/5 and work my way up to the same level as everyone else. Something about EVs and IVs or something, I feel like getting a new Pokemon at level 26 is gonna leave it lacking compared to the core starters. I could certainly be wrong though, I barely know anything about EV/IV values.

First of all, the Grand Underground is great. Love the Grand Underground. I'm really enjoying the process of catching and breeding Pokemon. The music is fine, not great but fine.

But it's still gen 4, in all the worst ways. I think this has been my least favourite generation historically, and these remakes do nothing to really assuage any of that. There's something inherent to this generation that I just don't like very much, and while I was hoping my taste would have changed to really enjoy gen 4 after so much time, it just hasn't.

The Exp. Share has legitimately fucked up team building. I have to deposit all of my main team and train up any new Pokemon so that the levels are roughly the same without overtraining my entire team. I don't think I'm gonna catch a fifth or sixth Pokemon for my main party because it's too much of a pain in the ass.

The fog effect is literally just making the screen extremely white with a lot of bloom. Fog always sucked in these games, but it's just outright painful in this game. It's legitimately like the opposite of those dark caves you need Flash for.

The union rooms are busted, I keep trying to connect with them and there's always one asshole looking to trade. I go to trade them an Elekid, and they're trying to offload their Infernape or a shiny Milotic and shit, and the trade goes on with them offering the same shit until they get upset and disconnect. Like Christ you're trying to offload something massive that I have no frame of reference for, and I'm still offering you something nice - Elekids are hard to come by. I can't compete with a shiny fucking Milotic.

And the thing is, it's only one other person in these global rooms. You see the screenshot of these union rooms and there's like 20 people. Every time I've connected to a union room, it's been one asshole trying to trade their awesome Pokemon. No battling, no trade variety. The exact same process, over a dozen times.

Like is the game broken, or did enough people have the sense not to buy these games that there just aren't enough people to fill these union rooms? Or are more people hanging out in the Grand Underground? I just don't understand.

Pokemon SwSh was better at the multiplayer stuff, hands down. The gen 4 remakes honestly feel like they have the exact same limitations as the DS games, with borked wireless communication and repugnant weather effects like fog making the game next to unplayable in some parts.

I still like the game for the most part, but I'm incredibly frustrated.

What I saw in opposition to Liam Neeson at the time mostly amounted to "you could have said less to make the same point, while the point was well-intentioned it's pretty uncomfortable listening to a movie star talk about the time he went hunting for a black man with a concealed weapon".

I can't say for sure because I'm a white guy with the perspective of a white guy, so if I'm wrong about this let me know, but I was seeing a lot of stuff being said from a black perspective. Even if they're saying they were wrong and they regret that period of their life, I can imagine it's much harder to stomach as a black person to hear a guy dob himself in about the time he went looking for a black man to beat the shit out of.

What do you think?

bc he couldn't draw enough seamen

It's cluttered, but all you have to do is pause at railway crossings.

Not my type tbh, I respect him as a man but his face is too soft.

It's all marketing speak, but fwiw I do think the vision spelled out is the actual director's villain and not blatant hype bait like BvS or Suicide Squad.

Dakimakura posted...

Pokmon backed by Nintendo. Digimon came second so always seen as the Pokmon knock off. Advertising made Pokmon into the mass culture thing. No one knew what digimon was.

The only true threat to Pokmon at the time was Yugioh, but that never really took off in NA as expected.

speak for yourself, Yu-Gi-Oh was always #2 to Pokemon's #1. Incomparable.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/3/AAbh80AACtxn.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/4/AAbh80AACtxo.jpg

Nah, but Info want a Raimi Spiderman 4.

might not be likely given what happens in the new movie but hey

SDBZ posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/6/AAPc4GAACoJC.jpg

look it's foot porn, but at least the artist actually cares about feet

Questionmarktarius posted...

That sort of cooler will keep ice for quite a while.

I happened into a medical-grade cooler, that's meant for transporting hearts and kidneys, and it'll keep ice for a week.

Hell yeah.

Honestly I don't win shit, so I'm just stoked. I don't know shit, I'm just coasting.

inb4 "you put ice in it bozo" like of fuckin course you do

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/8/6/AAbh80AACts-.jpg Dude I am fucking STOKED with this Esky. It's much smaller on the inside, but it's apparently really good at keeping shit cold. It feels good to win for once.

This bar won't fucking open. Christ, I'm sitting at another bar sinking beers until I can pick up this cooler.

Tell you what, I'll upload a selfie with the cooler when I get it