Lurker > Antifar

Snakebone99 posted...

Love this game.

Honestly, I do too

Gwynevere posted...

I'll be incredibly surprised if Republicans allow anything other than a conservative into that spot

Republicans don't have any say. Any failure here will strictly be that of Democratic Senators.

DarkChozoGhost posted...

Manchin won't break the filibuster for it and Republicans won't confirm anyone.

The filibuster comes pre-broken in this case

https://twitter.com/nprpolitics/status/1486383553994711046

Over the last couple years I've tended to have one Xbox game and one Switch game going at any given time, even if that Switch game was just something menial to kill the time at work. So lately I've been playing Tales of Arise, and revisiting Mario 3D World in those shorter gaps at work. Also trying to keep up with the weekly content in Forza Horizon 5, but I've slowed on that of late.

85 on Metacritic
https://www.metacritic.com/game/switch/pokemon-legends-arceus?

Gamespot: 80
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pokemon-legends-arceus-review-what-pokemon-is-evolving/1900-6417818/

In a mainline Pokemon game, simply catching a Pokemon would fill out its Pokedex entry but that's not the case here. Since you're building the first Pokedex, and since the stealth-catch mechanic lends itself to quicker finds, completing a Pokedex entry involves completing a series of tasks. A Pokedex sheet will outline tasks--often with multiple tiers--like catching a certain number of a Pokemon, defeating a certain number, catching a number without being noticed, seeing it use a certain move, feeding them a number of times, and so on. Once you've completed a number of these tasks, you can turn in your findings and the Pokedex entry is considered complete.
It's a remarkably flexible system that lets you play Pokemon your own way. If you love to do Pokemon battles, you can make almost all of your progress just fighting wild monsters. (I'll be exploring battles in more detail shortly). If you'd rather focus on stealth and barely engage with battles at all, that option is available too. At first, I found myself obsessively checking my Pokedex tasks and steering myself toward min-maxing completion, flipping through Pokedex pages looking for the ones I needed. But after a while, I found it was much more enjoyable to just wander the world stealth-catching and battling as I felt like it, and then letting the chips fall where they may for Pokedex completion.
This also leads to a much different sense of party dynamics than a typical Pokemon game. Since you're catching Pokemon by the barrel-full and evolving Pokemon isn't necessarily needed to complete their Pokedex entries, there's less incentive to keep a core team of favorites on-hand and passively level them up throughout the game. I was hot-swapping my team in the field constantly by checking in at base camps, substituting any Pokemon that had been outclassed by a newer catch. But that means some of my old favorites, including my starter, have been sitting in cold storage for hours. I found myself missing that feeling of forming a special bond with my starter Rowlet and keeping him with me throughout the game.

Game Informer: 8.75
https://www.gameinformer.com/review/pokemon-legends-arceus/pokemon-legends-arceus-review-learning-some-new-moves

Whenever I wanted a break from the main story, I could quickly lose a couple of hours trying to further my Pokdex progress on side activities. A day/night cycle further enhances the rewards, as different monsters come out at night, giving you a reason to return when the sun sets. Hisui is full of rewarding activities that include stronger Alpha Pokmon to fight and catch, side-missions that involve collecting resources and specific creatures, and special limited-time events to help you further round out your Pokdex.

Polygon: unscored
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22901385/pokemon-legends-arceus-review-diamond-pearl

Instead of a back-and-forth battle, Legends: Arceus is focused entirely on speed. If one Pokmon is faster than the other, it can potentially attack multiple times in a row. This couples with the new mastery system, wherein Pokmon can increase an attacks power at the cost of delaying their next move, or act twice in a row by speeding up an attack, causing it to deal less damage. Its a mechanic weve seen in several other recent turn-based RPGs like Octopath Traveler, Bravely Default 2, and Ruined King: A League of Legends Story.

These seemingly small changes add a new layer of strategy to the Pokmon series, and for the first time in years, I had to make meaningful decisions during non-Elite Four battles. But there were also battles that left me wanting to chuck my pro controller at one of my TVs. In a story-crucial battle toward the end of the game, an enemy trainers Pokmon attacked me three times before my fully evolved, over-leveled starter could move once. It knocked my Pokmon out before it even had a chance, and made me feel like Id wasted all the time Id spent leveling up before the battle.

Still, Pokmon Legends: Arceus made me care about battling, and I actually wish there were more trainer battles scattered throughout the world. But I missed some of the predictability found in the mainline series. Whenever Id go to swap out one Pokmon for another mid-battle, I held my breath, never knowing if Id have to take a hit from the enemy before I could attack. Hours in, I felt like the game didnt give me enough information to make some of the strategic decisions I wanted to. I love the direction in which the battles are going with Legends: Arceus, but a handful of what the hell moments killed some of my enthusiasm.

Thats just the Pokmon Legends: Arceus experience. Its filled with excellent ideas aimed at changing a series that has largely grown stale. But some of the execution breeds frustration. Exploring the open world is freeing, but also awkward, until I unlock more travel options later in the game. Legends: Arceus is graphically dreadful, with flat textures and pop-in rampant in every area, but the Pokmon animate wonderfully. Still, Ill gladly take an imperfect Pokmon game that takes a chance on something different, even if its not always successful.

Tales of Arise

Good news for workers

Anyways I'm not like, super into achievements, but their absence on Switch feels weird. Not getting any sort of acknowledgment when you accomplish something big...

MabusIncarnate posted...

Also worth noting, on Xbox, you get a rebate the higher your gamerscore is. If you are over 60k you get a permanent 5% rebate on anything digital you purchase.

Also you can get 50 points on Microsoft rewards (~5 cents) for each day you get at least one achievement.

I'm not into FF but that class stuff has me curious...

The rural communities that are built around prison jobs collapse.

The evening news

I played XV on Gamefly for 45 minutes

I think he's being brain-poisonedly satirical in some dumb attempt to make the libs' complaints about Trump's behavior seem silly.

But his brain is deeply poisoned.

They cease to exist.

The economy isn't real. It's made up

It's mentioned in this article talking about how there's an invasion mode in campaign that sounds like Deathloop.
https://www.polygon.com/22900767/sniper-elite-5-trailer-invasion-mode-release-date

Hell yeah to all of that.

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1486012992647057408

Why do I feel like it's gonna be Call of Duty?

lww99 posted...

forced board games

What do you mean by this? I only skimmed the video

ROBANN_88 posted...

why are they talking about a picture of a monkey?

Because someone, somewhere, hopes to make money off of that picture.

https://www.nj.com/data/2022/01/the-true-cost-of-policing.html

State Police Superintendent Patrick Callahan oversees New Jerseys largest law enforcement agency, with 4,000 employees and a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
For responsibilities that span the breadth of the state, he earned $190,000 in 2019, pay that places him in the upper echelon of public officials in New Jersey.

Yet nearly 1,500 local cops and 115 state troopers actually made more money that year than Callahan. They did so largely under the radar of public scrutiny, in departments with as few as 11 officers.

Among them was a lieutenant in Clifton who pulled in nearly $200,000 in overtime, doubling his salary; a police chief in Bernards Township who added $105,000 to his pay by manning traffic details paid by utility companies; and a Teaneck officer who made $8,300 for hours he didnt even work.

With little notice, police regularly add tens of thousands of dollars to their paychecks through overtime, off-duty jobs monitoring traffic and a raft of contractual perks, NJ Advance Media found during a two-year investigation into the true cost of policing in New Jersey.

Those extra earnings are in addition to the six-figure salary the average officer makes, which is among the highest in the nation and which already accounts for a significant portion of many towns annual budgets. But the full scale of police income has long been all but impossible to track, buried in payroll records that 463 local police departments keep separately.

Today, NJ Advance Media is publishing a first-of-its-kind database that captures every dollar earned by each of the states 21,000 local police officers and 2,900 state troopers, an effort that involved more than 700 public records requests and a team of reporters.

Across New Jersey, the average officer made $123,239 in 2019, the most recent year before the disruption of the pandemic. Thats far higher than has previously been disclosed because the state only publishes data on officers base salaries the earnings on which their pensions are based understating law enforcements real price tag.

The review revealed an opaque system of pay that, in departments with lax oversight, permits the most enterprising officers to work exceedingly long hours with little upside to public safety. The investigation also showed potential abuses officers who put in more hours than their departments anti-fatigue policies allowed, and officers who were double paid for working extra shifts while already on the clock.

Statewide, 104 cops earned more than $250,000, 13 of whom exceeded $300,000.

Income was the greatest in high-cost North and Central Jersey particularly in Bergen County, where a typical officers compensation reached $151,000. In the highest paid departments, average earnings topped $180,000, on par with a school superintendent.

Of those dollars, 20% came outside of an officers regular pay, usually through taxpayer-funded overtime and through off-duty details, in which third parties hire uniformed cops to provide services such as traffic control or security.

But in some departments, the gap was even more striking: In Emerson, officers on average added more than $74,000 to their salaries in 2019. In Plumsted, officers doubled their pay.

And for the highest earners, their sheer number of hours was often staggering: By loading up on extra shifts, there were cops who recorded workweeks of 100 hours or more, or who worked for weeks at a time without a day off. One officer was credited with working 24 hours straight on five occasions.

For this project, NJ Advance Media conducted 59 interviews, including with law enforcement officials, municipal managers, finance directors and experts on policing. It sought comment from dozens of others, including every police officer named in this article, as well as their police departments. If they responded, their comments were included.

The accounting which captures $2.94 billion in spending comes as New Jersey continues to try to rein in public-sector benefits that drain government coffers and spur the highest property taxes in the nation. Police now account for as much as 40% of some municipal budgets, which critics charge peels resources from other public needs.

Somewhere down the line, these towns have to have the will to understand and see that you have to have a greater imagination about what public safety is, said Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. Because otherwise theyre really just wasting the money.

https://twitter.com/etienneshrdlu/status/1485956332989693953

https://www.ea.com/news/electronic-arts-and-lucasfilm-games-announce-new-star-wars-titles-from-respawn-entertainment?
tl;dr: Jedi Fallen Order 2
FPS
Strategy game from ex-Firaxis devs

Oh you mean from when he was a senator

https://twitter.com/keano81/status/1485582987949449220

Who is this for?

Update
https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1485796041928716292

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1485741910560022532

God bless

Will_VIIII posted...

Is it a new one?

Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqLa5qOVsQg

Man,

Gotta give it up to the flu, still showing up to work every day while covid steals the spotlight

When I was washing dishes at a nursing home, a well-timed power outage meant the meal would be served on paper plates instead (because the machine was inoperable). So, yeah.

A Florida school district canceled a professors civil rights history seminar for teachers, citing in part concerns over critical race theory even though his lecture had nothing to do with the topic.

J. Michael Butler, a history professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, was scheduled to give a presentation Saturday to Osceola County School District teachers called The Long Civil Rights Movement, which postulates that the civil rights movement preceded and post-dated Martin Luther King Jr. by decades.

He said that he was shocked to learn why the seminar had been canceled through an email Wednesday but that he wasnt surprised because educators feel increasingly intimidated over teaching about race.

Less than 24 hours before Butler was informed of the cancellation, a state Senate committee advanced legislation Tuesday at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to block public schools and private businesses from making people feel discomfort when theyre taught about race. DeSantis also wants to empower parents to sue schools that teach critical race theory.

Theres a climate of fear, an atmosphere created by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that has blurred the lines between scared and opportunistic, Butler said in a phone interview.

The victims of this censorship are history and the truth, Butler said. The end game is theyre going to make teaching civil rights into critical race theory, and its not.

A spokeswoman for DeSantis, Christina Pushaw, denied the allegation and pointed out that DeSantis had nothing to do with the local Osceola County controversy one of the most tangible examples of how the debate over critical race theory has reached public schools in Florida.

Critical Race Theory and factual history are two different things. The endless attempts to gaslight Americans by conflating the two are as ineffective as they are tiresome, she said in an email. So just to be clear, mixing up teaching history with teaching CRT is dishonest.

Between local classrooms and the halls of the state Capitol, public school administrators have been left to navigate tricky education politics intensified by state and national forces.

DeSantis an early opponent of what he called critical race theory, or CRT, who also fined school districts over Covid mask mandates is running for re-election and is widely seen as a 2024 GOP presidential contender. Although theres scant evidence that CRT is taught in Florida public schools, DeSantis pushed the state school board to bar it anyway and then called on legislators to enshrine it in state statute during the lawmaking session that began two weeks ago.

Other potential Republican White House hopefuls, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have also crusaded against CRT and school mask mandates, issues that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governors mansion in Virginia last year.

CRT was developed in the 1980s as a graduate-level academic framework to highlight and quantify the impacts of structural racism, including disparities among Black people and white people in policing and prosecution. It was rarely something likely to be discussed in a high school classroom.

But the term has often been misapplied as a shorthand for the notion that white guilt was being taught in K-12 schools in lessons about slavery, civil rights and discrimination, all core elements of the nations story long before the advent of critical race theory in law and graduate schools.

The debate over the teaching of racial history in education began to boil over in 2020 amid parental unrest over Covid lockdowns, distance learning for children and anti-racism trainings. And last year, organizations like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which produces model bills for Republican causes, held webinars that warned that teaching what they called critical race theory in schools is un-American.

At the local level, school board members like Terry Castillo in Osceola County said she has gotten unprecedented attention from parents over the debate.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/florida-school-district-cancels-professors-civil-rights-lecture-critic-rcna13183

cooking is canceled

"miss" is sort of weird phrasing. At least at my age, it's not like I was watching at the time it was airing

https://pagesix.com/2003/12/28/singling-out-apples-top-studs/
Starts out reasonable enough...

DEREK JETER, 29. The Yankee shortstops sex-symbol status has only grown since he was stalked by Mariah Carey, and mocked in American Express ads for his propensity to party. Pro: Great seats for the World Series. Con: Demands near-perfection at least visually in his dates.

But some of these other selections sure are funny in hindsight

SHEPHERD SMITH, 39. Next to the blustery Bill OReilly, this Southern-fried anchorman is probably the most recognizable face on the top-rated Fox News Channel. Pro: His sprawling Lower East Side pad has a pool table. Con: A road rager who was arrested in 2000 for hitting a reporter with his car in a dispute over a parking space in Tallahassee, Fla.
...
DONALD TRUMP JR., 25. The first-born son of The Donald and his first wife Ivana is following in his fathers footsteps, not only developing buildings, but taking center stage to sell the apartments. Pro: Weekend flights down to Mar-a-lago on the family jet. Con: his dad, who owns Miss Universe, has extremely high standards when it comes to the female form.

And then, well,

REP. ANTHONY WEINER, 38. The Brooklyn Democrat is ambitious and hard-working, and had the good sense to hire the extremely capable Serena Torrey as one of his aides. Pro: Being touted as a possible candidate for mayor. Con: Could be cruelly described as a pencil-necked geek.
...
ANDREW CUOMO, 46. After a nasty split with his wife Kerry Kennedy, the failed gubernatorial candidate has been quietly dating again. Pro: Hes capable and articulate and has nowhere to go but up from here. Con: Sometimes comes off as arrogant and self-absorbed.
...
JEFFREY EPSTEIN, 50. Mystery billionaire was a math teacher at Dalton just a few years ago. Then he started handling Leslie Wexners money. Now he lives in Manhattans biggest mansion. Pro: Has a private plane which he used to take Bill Clinton to Africa. Con: Was one of Mort Zuckermans partners in failed attempt to buy New York magazine.

Is that what the bill actually does, or is that just the verbatim description of a Republican lawmaker who opposes it?
https://newjerseymonitor.com/2022/01/13/murphy-signs-law-solidifying-abortion-rights-in-new-jersey/

This bill and the rhetoric weve heard from the other side is: any abortion, at any time, for any reason, on any one, paid for by the taxpayer, Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris) said before the Assembly voted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/us/jan-6-attendees.html

There were moments when Paul Davis questioned his decision to join the crowd that marched on the United States Capitol last January. When he was publicly identified and fired from his job as a lawyer. When his fiance walked out.

But then something shifted. Instead of lingering as an indelible stain, Jan. 6 became a galvanizing new beginning for Mr. Davis. He started his own law practice as a lawyer for patriots representing anti-vaccine workers. He began attending local conservative meetings around his hometown, Frisco, Texas. As the national horror over the Capitol attack calcified into another fault line of bitter division, Mr. Davis said his status as a Jan. 6 attendee had become a badge of honor with fellow conservatives.

It definitely activated me more, said Mr. Davis, who posted a video of himself in front of a line of police officers outside the Capitol but said he did not enter the building and was expressing his constitutional rights to protest. He has not been charged with any crime from that day. It gave me street cred.

The post-mortems and prosecutions that followed that infamous day have focused largely on the violent core of the mob. But a larger group has received far less attention: the thousands who traveled to Washington at the behest of Mr. Trump to protest the results of a democratic election, the vast majority of whom did not set foot in the Capitol and have not been charged with any crime who simply went home.

For these Donald Trump supporters, the next chapter of Jan. 6 is not the ashes of a disgraced insurrection, but an amorphous new movement fueled by grievances against vaccines and President Biden, and a deepened devotion to his predecessors lies about a stolen election.

In the year since the attack, many have plunged into new fights and new conspiracy theories sown in the bloody chaos of that day. They have organized efforts to raise money for the people charged in the Capitol attack, casting them as political prisoners. Some are speaking at conservative rallies. Others are running for office.

Interviews with a dozen people who were in the large mass of marchers show that the worst attack on American democracy in generations has mutated into an emblem of resistance. Those interviewed are just a fraction of the thousands who attended the rally, but their reflections present a troubling omen should the country face another close presidential election.

Many Jan. 6 attendees have shifted their focus to what they see as a new, urgent threat: Covid-19 vaccine mandates and what they call efforts by Democratic politicians to control their bodies. They cite Mr. Bidens vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts to block his presidency.

Some bridled at Trumps recent, full-throated endorsements of the vaccine and wondered whether he was still on their side.

A lot of people in the MAGA Patriot community are like, What is up with Trump? Mr. Davis, the Texas lawyer, said. With most of us, the vaccines are anathema.

In interviews, some who attended the Capitol protests gave credence to a new set of falsehoods promoted by Mr. Trump and conservative media figures and politicians that minimize the attack, or blame the violence falsely on left-wing infiltrators. And a few believe the insurrection did not go far enough.

Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself, said Oren Orr, 32, a landscaper from Robbinsville, N.C., who had rented a car with his wife to get to the Capitol last year. I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.
Mr. Orr added that he was not planning to do anything, only pray. Last year, he said he brought a baton and Taser to Washington but did not get them out.

More than a year later, the day may not define their lives, but the sentiment that drove them there has given them new purpose. Despite multiple reviews showing the 2020 elections were run fairly, they are adamant that the voting process is rigged. They feel the news media and Democrats are trying to divide the country.

The ralliers were largely white, conservative men and women who have formed the bedrock of the Trump movement since 2016. Some describe themselves as self-styled patriots, some openly carrying rifles and handguns. Many invoke the name of Jesus and say they believe they are fighting a holy war to preserve a Christian nation.

The people who went to Washington for Jan. 6 are in some ways an isolated cohort. But they are also part of a larger segment of the public that may distance itself from the days violence but share some of its beliefs. A question now is the extent to which they represent a greater movement.

...Continued

General-Secura posted...

Sure, but why the fuck would they need NFT's when a simple membership card would suffice?

NFTs allow them to specifically target suckers.

Been hard at work trying to get through Tales of Arise. On the side I've been keeping up with Forza Horizon 5 and playing timekillers on Switch: Mario 3D World again, 51 Clubhouse Games, Monkey Ball...

Why is the topic title in plural?

whitelytning posted...

But I mean, why is that in the description or something people here care about? Lots of videos of Karens and racist people but you dont often see where they work as relevant. Did this happen at work?

I think it's a useful antidote to the idea that racism is the exclusive property of backwater yokels

My throat's been scratchy today

I found the rest of his quote; it's not much smarter
https://twitter.com/SInow/status/1484750395817664514/photo/3

That quote about comorbidities was specifically referring to people who have died despite being vaccinated.

The risks of losing legitimacy far outweigh the rewards of getting modestly better ratings for what is already the most-watched program on TV.

Folks should play Dungeon Encounters, by the way

Thinking about the arguments made by opponents of universal healthcare, including a US Senator, that Medicare for All would be tantamount to enslaving doctors.

He was in the middle of making a point and got sidetracked by being mad over Biden's win.