Lurker > MrMallard

It turns out that gay men can donate blood, but they have to abstain from sexual contact for three months before they're allowed to donate. Up until 2021, they had to abstain from sexual contact for 12 months.

If there was a blanket ban on anal sex for all blood donors, that'd be one thing. The root of that ban would still come from the remnants of a 30 year old pandemic that saw the scapegoating of the queer community, but it would at least be a sweeping ban that affected everyone equally. To single out gay people when the majority of the disease's infection figures are coming about in straight people shows how discriminatory and unfair this law really is.

Because after all, straight people can and do have anal sex as well. Not to mention that HIV isn't solely transmitted through anal sex, with it being transmissible through vaginal and oral sex. It may spread easier via anal sex, but again, straight people have anal sex too. But do all blood donors face an abstinence period before giving blood, even when the majority of new HIV transmissions are between straight people? No. It's discriminatory.

A couple weeks ago I had a pretty messy bender. I drank non-stop from Thursday afternoon to 6am on Saturday, and it fucked with my mind extremely bad. I binge-drank my last 8 cans of cola and whiskey after waking up at 3am so I wouldn't be tempted to drink on Saturday, put on some Phoebe Bridgers songs and chose select moments to chug what I had.

I blacked out super hard that entire weekend, and for the next four days I was kinda in shambles. Kept thinking I was gonna get fired from my job and I thought about messaging an old friend to be as hurtful as I possibly could to them. I realised I had to stop drinking - it was around this time that I was doing the math on how long it would take me to leave my shithole town, so that added incentive to stop drinking since I'm gonna need a lot of money.

I made it two weeks, because some of the only people I still spend time with irl messaged me to have beers with them. I woke up this morning with a massive hankering to keep drinking, but that's subsided somewhat. The urge is still there, and it's strong, but I've got it under control.

It just sucks that without alcohol, I don't really have a life here. I'm just biding time until I can move to where I want to be. My mind gets fucked up when I'm drunk, I black out and get lost and I spend money hand over fist. But there's a mental toll to sobriety too, where I begin to feel my emotions at full strength after three weeks of not drinking and I take a significant emotional dip after three months. Like I'll just be playing a video game and then I'll think "I'm going to die", and that's my whole afternoon gone.

I don't have friends when I'm sober, but I lose my mind when I get drunk. I spend so much money trying to stay drunk, and the person who comes out the other side three days later is a nervous wreck who can't maintain a sober lifestyle. If I spend too much time sober, I begin thinking I'm going to die. I spend too much time getting drunk, I'm probably gonna die.

I'm seeing a counsellor, and it's only with her help that I'm going to be able to transition to sobriety. It's going to be a long, fucked up process. I missed an appointment with her this past week because I was working a late shift and thought it was the day after, so I don't really know when I'm gonna be seeing her next and putting any of this into practice. Just kind of in limbo on that front at the moment.

There's no use complaining about how bad life is, but it really hits home how no matter what I do, I'm going to feel like dying. Things are a cycle of bad things broken up with a tedious industrial laundry job I'm desperate to keep so I have the remote chance of having a better life in the future. There's never any reprieve, and I'm always on guard around everybody. I don't know what I'm gonna do if I stay sober, but I don't have a future if I keep drinking.

Alcohol really fucks with my brain. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to be alright in the end - note to mods, this isn't like a suicide ramble and I have the sense to seek help in the face of a crisis so plz no mod. I'm going to be okay because I have no choice but to be okay. But I'm not gonna lie, I feel incredibly fucking weird right now.

Pretty much any Kurosawa film. The one about the Golden Pavilion burning sounds good, too.

People believe anti-vax bullshit on Facebook because it's the voice of Todd.

MOTHER 1 and 2 just came out on Nintendo Switch Online, if you have that. The SNES one also has the first two Breath of Fire games, so those are a possibility as well.

You could also check out World of Final Fantasy on any current platform, which is fan-fucking-tastic.

Robot2600 posted...

He's being a dick about it. If he's getting the same as West and Segal he should trust their judgment and go with it.

TBH, both of them are much more accomplished than he is. West has done countless things, including Ren & Stimpy, Segal was on 2 of the biggest TV shows of all time (Married with Children, Sons of Anarchy). Meanwhile DiMaggio did like 1 guest episode character on a bunch of cartoons, but basically has never done anything else big.

He voiced one of the main characters in Adventure Time, too.

spikethedevil posted...

Er Harry Shearer voices Ned @MrMallard

Shit, mb.

I felt like this when I didn't have a job. I didn't have any opportunities, I had no potential. Even when I started my most recent job, my goal was basically to work and get money and play everything else by ear - move somewhere that works better for me, try to date, that sort of thing.

What I did was set a specific goal to get the life that I want. I don't want to live in my backwater shithole town for the rest of my life, I want to move to Canberra even if I have to struggle to make that happen.

So what do I need to start a new life in a city? When there is no safety net, what is the most important thing to have? In my opinion, the most important thing is money.

How much money do I need to start a new life - how much do I need to have a fighting chance at making this a reality? In my opinion, I need at least $20,000 in savings.

I make roughly $1000 - $1500 a fortnight, depending on my hours. If I save as close to a thousand bucks a fortnight as I can, I'll have the money to make my dream move by October - the reality is that it'll almost certainly take longer than that, but it's possible to get to this point by October.

What can I do to improve my chances of getting a new job and surviving in Canberra for the long term? I could take another business admin course, because the curriculum got overhauled a couple years after I did my course and Canberra is a town where business admin is always required.

So I have an end goal of moving to Canberra. I have an obtainable end point at which this becomes possible - when I save $20,000. I have an optional goal which will make the move a lot more secure, with refreshing my business administration qualifications. Through that, I have something to work towards. I have a goal that makes me happy.

It sounds like you don't know what you actually want after spending your life trying to please others. That's a relatable feeling, and I wouldn't know where to start helping in that case. But when you have an idea, as far out and seemingly unreachable as it might initially seem, make a plan. Hypothetically, how do you get there? It tends to come down to money and logistics, which someone in a well-paying job can often meet if given enough time.

Whatever your eventual goal is, I have no doubt that you can achieve it in the end. Don't give up hope, because you don't have to be an engineer for the rest of your life - you need to be an engineer for long enough that you have the means to start living a life that you actually want to live. That possibility exists, and it's waiting for you. Don't lose hope.

BB mofo posted...

Sounds like Dan Castenella pulled him aside and gave him the talk.

This is a very Dan Castenella move. Announce you're not returning and then negotiate for more money in the background.

Do you mean Hank Azaria? Because we saw his negotiation tactics come to light when Fox announced his departure over pay, to the point of discussing the replacement for Ned Flanders' voice, only for them to reach an agreement later on. News stories were saying that Azaria tends to be the holdout when it comes to contract negotiations.

My current perspective is this:

The past five years of the Republican party have been defined by the term "witch hunt". You can't fault Trump for saying he grabs women by the pussy and they love it because he's powerful, it was locker room talk and this criticism is a total witch hunt. Mark Gaetz and Brett Kavanaugh aren't weird sexual predators, despite all the weird sex shit they get embroiled in - this focus on weird rapey Republicans is a total witch hunt. Ted Cruz deserves to go on vacation, this controversy about him going to Cancun while Texas's infrastructure fails due to unprecedented winter weather is a total witch hunt.

But look at what Republicans are doing right now with schools. Books written by black people from a black perspective are being removed for "promoting critical race theory". Books about the holocaust from Jewish writers talking about Jewish trauma are being removed for being too grisly, and for supposedly being sexual in such a way that it poses a risk of harming children - despite the one instance of female nudity in a book about the Holocaust depicting the author's mother in a bathtub with slashed wrists, and other nudity in these historical texts often amounting to naked female corpses residing in a mass grave.

The term "witch hunt" has been overused to the point of losing any and all weight behind it, because dumb fucks keep using it to describe when some fuckface does something wrong and is criticized for it, when it's a term that applies to an unjustified or reactionary punishment of an innocuous action. It's been used to lowball actual fucking crimes and examples of wrongdoing, and that's served to desensitize people to the term.

We're seeing a witch hunt right now with the policing of books in school libraries. We're seeing moral guardians obstruct important educational information on grounds of decency. But no-one is calling it a witch hunt because the last twenty times "witch hunt" became a news headline, it was dumb fucks like Marjorie Greene-Taylor saying that January 6 Capitol rioters shouldn't be sent to jail, or other morons downplaying fucked up things happening in the far right.

Fascism is exactly the same. The right keep taking steps towards authoritarianism, and when they're met with accusations of furthering an agenda that removes power from the common American and grants the government unprecedented power to prosecute non-violent crime, they balk and they downplay and they blame the left. I've posted the steps of fascism screenshot before:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/8/AAbh80AAC6j-.jpg

And the Trump administration hit every one of those items like a checklist. Yet whenever anyone brought it up, it was just fearmongering or weak beta male leftists overexaggerating what was really going on.

We had an unqualified third party checking ballot papers in Arizona for fucking bamboo fibers because the Republican party insisted that the election was fraudulent and that legitimate Republican votes weren't counted and were supplanted with external voting slips from China. We saw immigrants being put in cages, we saw Mexicans being persecuted for being murderers and rapists, we saw Donald Trump rallying for a military parade in DC despite public infrastructure not being built to roll tanks down the street, we saw the right mischaracterize women as hysterical and needy which has continued to persist with criticism of AOC and other female Democrats, we saw Trump's takedowns of CNN to the point of removing their ability to ask questions at press hearings, Trump ran his entire campaign on a moronic fucking border wall that would have cost billions to build and countless billions to maintain for little actual benefit, we saw the seperation of church and state end, we saw regulations get slashed and labor forces lose what little power they had, we saw right-wing dickheads praise a president for saying he only watches TV and rally against the concept of an academic expert having input on important decisions - because academics are "elites" who ruin the world for their own nefarious means - we saw how empowered ICE became to attack American citizens in the name of national security and the rise of no-knock warrants, we saw corporate heads getting admitted to the highest cabinet of political influence in America like Rex Tillerson, and we finally saw the attempt to overturn the certification of an election in 2021. Every entry on that list, a list modelled on the rise of Nazi Germany that's displayed in holocaust museums, checked off by the Trump administration and being furthered by the fanatical right wing of America.

You can see what's happening by the terms that people are trying to downplay or strip of power and meaning. The two terms I've noticed that happening to are "witch hunt" and "fascism". The right wing are currently engaging in both, because they put in the time and effort to delegitimize both terms and waste them on incomparable acts, so that when they began targeting books under moral guidelines and undermining law, decency and universal human rights, no-one would make a genuine effort to use a term associated with a total overreaction.

So yeah, I would say that fascism is a rising threat in America. The fact that the right wing have been besieging government offices for years, culminating in an attempt to subvert the highest office in the nation, only for reactionary Republican dumb fucks to say "if you re-elect us, Jan 6 rioters will be released from jail and the committee who prosecuted them will be put in jail" should fucking terrify you.

Sources:

"Maus" nudity amounting to the author's mother with slashed wrists in a bathtub: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/tennessee-school-board-removes-maus/index.html

Newt Gingrich threatens the government committee into the January 6 attack with jail time: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/24/newt-gingrich-threatens-jail-time-for-jan-6-commit/

...and gay people still aren't allowed to donate blood due to the HIV pandemic in the 90's and HIV/AIDS being considered a "gay disease".

https://metro.co.uk/2022/02/07/more-straight-than-gay-people-catching-hiv-for-first-time-in-decade-16050148/

I don't trust the media spin on this. Whenever Disney's involved, someone's getting fucked over - look at Scarlett Johansson's pay for Black Widow being tied to the theatrical profits in her contract, only for Disney to fast-track the movie to Disney+ where they'd own all the profits from people buying the movie, leading to Johannson suing Disney and being criticized for being greedy.

I feel like Disney offered the cast an okay deal, but not adequate as far as SAG-AFTRA guidelines go. DiMaggio held out as a member of SAG-AFTRA in the hopes that not only his pay would rise, but Billy West and Katey Segal's pay would rise with it - but the two decided to accept the contracts as written up without telling DiMaggio, and that cut him out of the deal.

I could easily be wrong in this, everything I just said is baseless speculation. John DiMaggio could be a huge primadonna dick. But as far as the framing of this goes, we're talking about a larger business who's been known to lowball talent and subsequently smear them when they seek fair compensation. Until more details come out about this, I don't think things panned out the way they're being portrayed.

Oh god, the aliens invaded while I was in heaven! Shit's fucked!!

The hell? The Merrysville doctor charges you for half of your money. He was gonna charge me $250, then I withdrew a bunch of money, then he was charging me $1500. The audacity of this asshole, lmao. Gonna go back there with 2 bucks.

Somebody gave me a cold, and my inventory is full so I'm fucked.

Anyway, if I'm gonna get all the armor and stuff here in Magicant, is there a way for me to use my Cash Card and get all my money?

I decided to do some googling, and the Boomerang is the best item to get, hands down. Second strongest weapon for Ninten/Mallard? Fuck yes.

Blue_Target posted...

Sadly EBB is way harder to play and get into. You should really get a guide for the game.

I'm actually enjoying it a fair bit. It's got a lot of character, but it's also an okay game to grind and watch YouTube videos/listen to podcasts as you play.

Like I've played Dragon Quest 1 and 2 and I like them both a fair amount. Earthbound Beginnings is fine - I saved the kid from the cemetary, that gave me the zoo key, and now I'm in heaven because I communicated telepathically with a conch shell. Perfectly cromulent game experience so far.

I was about to ask for help in solving the Magicant palace riddle, but then I used telepathy and it worked. I thought the Red Weeds would factor into it, but apparently not.

Also the inside of the palace looks pretty great for NES.

I will ask, what's the best item to take in the treasure room with six presents? I'm thinking either the Ruler, Boomerang or PSI Stone.

Hey, so uhh. I listened to a singing monkey, then I crossed a previously guarded border to find a cave. Then I used telepathy on a conch shell and got transported to Heaven.

Oh fucking boy. The Earthbound weirdness has begun.

Garioshi posted...

It's Dragon Quest but worse

I'll be the judge of that, if nothing else it already has more variety in its graphics and music. It also has multiple enemies on screen at once, and a party system.

Never played the Earthbound games, been spoiled for all of them. Gonna play them all anyway because I've been on an RPG kick lately and the addition of the NES and SNES Earthbound games to NSO makes them the most accessible they've ever been to me.

So far the music is good, the battle themes have more variety than most RPGs to this day. There's the classic Hippie battle theme, but there's also two different battle themes between like stray dogs and snakes and stuff. I imagine there's more where that came from too.

I grinded until I got the Wooden Bat, on my way to the graveyard to save that kid.

If you're coming in to say "play Earthbound instead, it's better and you'll hate Beginnings and never want to play Earthbound" - first of all, I've tried to play Earthbound multiple times over the years and it never stuck; I'm hoping this time will be the charm. Secondly, I've read about how this game is very open ended and lacking the structure of future games - I'm approaching this with the same mindset as Dragon Quest 1, which is a game I finished and liked quite a lot, and which I understand was the inspiration behind Earthbound Beginnings. So if you're just going to recommend playing Earthbound proper, don't even post. I don't want to hear it.

Turtlebread posted...

You use the word atonal a lot but I don't think you know what it means

also this is now a copy pasta

Probably. I don't know how else to describe it - I guess what I would say is that a lot of her singles revolve around that big note, but it's this one loud, monolithic wall of sound in a song that's already stuck in a sort of rut, and by committing to the big yell her choruses tend to stay stuck in a limited sort of range.

I dunno if any of what I said makes sense, I just think after years of songs that make me want to bash my own face in with a brick she made a song that I actually like a lot, even after months of radio play. That's never happened with her music before.

I have a similar disposition towards Tik Tok by Kesha - it's the same bland, repetitive structure the whole way through, and it sounds flat and annoying. We R Who We R, Your Love is my Drug and Timber? I like them all. Can't stomach Tik Tok in the same way I can't stomach most of Adele's music. I'm not enough of a music guy to describe it, which is why I used "atonal" incorrectly so many times, but there's something repetitive and annoying about her music that makes listening to it like pulling teeth for me. But Take it Easy On Me is a fantastic song.

Bump

C

All of her singles before this sound like atonal belting to me. That's not to say she doesn't have talent or that her music is unworthy of critical acclaim, just that all of her music has struck me with how simple, stripped back and ultimately repetitive it is. And this is only exacerbated by how many times I've had to listen to her music in the wild.

Somebody Like You has the same plonking piano chords running through the entire song, more skilled than Love Song by Sara Bareilles for example but noticeable and repetitive enough to really get on my nerves and stay there. And the chorus wears out its welcome super fast, too - It's like Somebody You Loved by Lewis Capaldi, where by the last time he goes "I was getting kind of used to being someone you loved" it's just like - okay, I get it, but this just isn't as raw and emotional the third time it just kinda gets on my nerves.

I kind of love when songs fuck with the final chorus to make it stand out, especially when the song is meant to be this emotional thing and they're going for a big finish, an emotional climax - Piece by Piece is one example, as hit and miss as the song itself can be I at least appreciate what the last chorus does.

Set Fire to the Rain has a very melodramatic backing track, but the tone of the chorus is so one-note and boring to listen to - at least for me. Rolling in the Deep is a stomp-clap song, so is Rumor Has It. The former has a chorus comprised of atonal belting - it's controlled and intentional, I'm sure it's skillful, but I genuinely never liked it because it's just a controlled wail that doesn't age well listen after listen after listen - i.e. the way her music is overplayed on the radio. The latter relies on a sense of swagger, but again, I don't get much of a tune. It's regimented, it has structure, but the lack of a tune bores me to tears.

Skyfall is fine, I get that Adele is going for that classy James Bond vibe, but the chorus is boring. A lot of my hangups about Adele are in the chorus, it's often very one-note and shows off an impressive facet of her singing that isn't very pleasant to listen to repeatedly. Skyfall is better in that regard, going for more of a low melodic sort of thing, though again I don't like having to sit through a very piecemeal sort of chorus.

Hello, once again, doesn't have the sort of tune or melody I like in my music. It's very low and dreary, which I can appreciate in the verses, but the chorus is another loud, controlled belting that I got so fucking sick of listening to so fucking quickly.

Her other single off this new album reminds me of her older stuff. I'm not too hot on it. But Take it Easy On Me is easily her most lavishly arranged, melodic and tuneful song - and even though I've been hearing it almost daily since December, I still fucking love it.

First of all, the piano melody that starts the song and sets the structure of the song is great. It's interesting, it's got a lot of character and I can feel the tone it's going for. The verses are pretty standard Adele fare, though I'm sure there's a lot of context there that I'm missing through the tinny radio speakers I hear it through at work.

But it's the chorus that impresses me. Because yeah, she winds backs and belts, but she hits a falsetto and winds it back down into this soulful, pleading statement. It's genuinely emotional - I didn't get emotion from Rolling in the Deep or Skyfall, and whatever emotion I gleaned from Someone like You and Hello is hampered by the fact that it feels more like a platitude than a statement. Like "I thought you were bae, turns out you were just fam". Hello from the other side, never mind I'll find somebody like you. And it always amounts to a single, atonal yell that gets lauded as this skillful, masterful expression of raw emotion, but feels like someone hammering a star picket into my skull 500 listens later.

Maybe there's a point there, but it doesn't help that a lot of her singles are these one-sided conversations - maybe that's what I'm picking up on that makes her music so frustrating to listen to over and over again. It's always saying the same thing.

But Take it Easy On Me doesn't just sound like a two-sided conversation - the part that I would typically describe as "belting" has a peaked pitch, but the entire time she's singing through that part of the song, her voice fits a more complex melody and she continues with this very well-crafted and emotional melody as she winds down out of it. There's more to chew on in her singing "But please" in Take it Easy On Me than there is in "We could have had it all, rolling in the deep" in the eponymous song - and Take it Easy On Me doesn't peak at those two words, it continues along a very emotional, pretty and well-produced melody and piano accompaniment. It's a skillful and emotional song built on a rock-solid base and noticeably fantastic production, and its quality shines through.

Take it Easy On Me is her most skillful single, hands down. The song sounds fucking fantastic. I've always been burned by Adele and the constant overplay that her songs go through, but again - after a lifetime of hitting Adele burnout after like a month of overplay, I still adore this song months after I first heard it. The other new single? Don't really like it. Take it Easy On Me is her best song, hands fucking down.

I mean, Castlevania Advance Collection was announced in a Nintendo Direct. And was this the first anouncement of the Front Mission remakes?

I know this won't ever pan out, but I Ike to believe this will lead into not only a Mother 3 localisation, but with the GBA virtual console launching with the official Mother 3 localisation.

Alucard188 posted...

I refuse to believe this is real. Looks like some concern trolling bullshit to me.

Dude it's AngelsandAirwav3s. Of course he's trolling.

Poor trolling attempt with a dogshit source.

I mean

• Klonoa
• Portal
• Front Mission 1 remake + a remake of 2 in the future
• Earthbound on Nintendo Switch online
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses musou sequel
• No Man's Sky port
• Xenoblade 3
• Mario Strikers
• Splatoon 3 Salmon Run trailer
• More info on the new Kirby
• Wii Sports sequel (kinda ehh on it, but they're adding like a pseudo bowling Battle Royale where you can knock out other players by playing better than them)

I don't look at these things in the sense of what isn't there, I look at them in the sense of what is. I wanted a Battle Network collection, I wanted BotW2 news, and I'm sure people wanna see more of Bayonetta. But I saw plenty of stuff I want to play, like No Man's Sky on Switch is gonna be fucking awesome if they don't fuck up the port. I never played the first two Portal games, and I want to play Klonoa 2 so bad after only having the PS2 demo as a kid - the only way they could have gone after my heart any stronger is by announcing a Dark Cloud remaster.

I had a great time watching the Direct, and there's plenty of stuff they announced that I want to play. In my books, that constitutes a good Direct.

There were only two misses for me in that whole Direct: the f2p Disney kart racer, and the Mario Kart 8 DLC pass. Everything else was fucking fantastic.

LeperMessiahXX posted...

How stupid do you need to be to do this and also put it on the internet?

Unveiled bigotry and hate crimes are on the rise after the global shift towards the right in the second half of the 2010's. People who fell into the radical political divide during the 2016 American election think they can do whatever they want to whoever they want, as seen not only by this scumbag committing an antisemitic hate crime but by the gutter trash who pulled up on a black jogger and killed him in the street for no reason.

I'm all in, my dude! The Zero/ZX collection was a year or two ago, time for Capcom to shovel more content into the maws of its expectant fans!

Fuck, I'm gonna be at work.

Someone says "People who claim to be victims of hate crimes are duplicitous, greedy villains who make life harder for you and me. We should do everything we can to expel these vermin because they're a plague on our species, and by doing that it would be for the betterment of our world".

What happens when we leave that up: people who agree with harassing the target of that statement direct other people to that statement and influence them to join their ranks, whose goal is to scapegoat the target of that rhetoric, harass them, post slander about them to ruin their reputation and hopefully become loud enough to begin affecting public policy that affects them and people like them.

What happens when we make a concerted effort to shut that down: the people making those statements have less influence due to being moderated, the message gets less exposure because it keeps getting removed, and potential new recruits can't be radicalized as easily because the statements are harder to access when they're forced underground.

Less people are exposed to extremist rhetoric, which means less people are at risk of being radicalized by said rhetoric, which means there's less of a network to spread the word, which means the influence of the rhetoric and the people pushing it are neutered. Whereas when you leave it up, the roots grow further and more people are at risk of falling down the rabbit hole into bigotry and political extremism.

Flauros posted...

Natawen

Gwenatalie

Smackems posted...

Star wars

I mean, people shat out serials and pulp fiction all the time. Stuff like Flash Gordon is pop art that got vindicated by its audience of idyllistic dreamers who filled in the gaps and got invested in this grand space opera sort of thing. It honestly tracks to me that all three original movies do what they do, introducing so much ludicrous alien bullshit from movie to movie - Jabba the Hutt might feel incongruous with what film nerds consider as the "cinema" of the Empire Strikes Back, but it totally scans that the movies kept throwing random alien bullshit in there like "look, there's a malevolent slug lord who keeps a slave woman on a chain!". All Star Wars is, is a franchise-long homage to pulp fiction.

Even the prequels are justified - since the setting of Star Wars is a galaxy in decline after a rise in intergalactic fascism, and one of the main villains of the original series is eventually painted in a sympathetic light and redeemed for his atrocities, why not show that golden age of the Force and the start of darkness for such an iconic sci-fi villain? There's a story there, and the fall of great civilizations is an interesting topic. The movies might not have been done the best, but it's not wholly misguided to pull on that story thread and see what happens. And I don't begrudge the premise of the sequel trilogy either - there's room for it to exist as a look into the franchise after a generation of peace.

Star Wars came from schlock that sold itself as narrative gold, and so to that mold shall it return. The most misguided part of Star Wars as a franchise is when people began making movies who consider Star Wars itself to be a lifestyle and a personality trait, because that basically fed the poop chute back into the mouth of the beast and led to creative stagnation and cynical pandering. But what are callbacks and further world-building and mythologization of a popular property in the first place, if not shameless pandering and getting high on your own supply? Star Wars comes from schlock at its core, enhanced by the imagination of those who bought into that schlock. I don't see its continued serialisation as something that's at odds with its origins.

Bishop9800 posted...

Fast and Furious

The first movie had a criminal gang shooting magnetised grappling claws into the sides of trucks to steal DVD players. The movies started off as car porn and dumb action schlock, and while it's gotten well beyond a joke how stupid these movies have gotten, the path its taken is congruous with the vision of that original movie.

The movie + the book it was based on: the trauma endured by Vietnam veterans, combined with their demonization in public life and their abandonment by the government who drafted them, causes such a lofty toll on them that if they're treated like animals for long enough, they will act like animals. John Rambo's acts of violence aren't glamorous and they aren't heroic - but they are sympathetic when all he is to anyone else is a disgrace and a burden on society, despite simply wanting to leave his trauma behind and to live a normal life. He is a haunted veteran, driven to madness by the dehumanization he's subjected to by those around him.

Rambo 2 and beyond: John Rambo is the ultimate killing machine, and when all conventional infantry - nay, decency - fails to combat the enemy combatant, it falls to John Rambo (the one man army) to take matters into his own hands and save the day, no matter how much it takes.

They turned a harrowing horror story about the traumas of war and the mistreatment of veterans into a jingoistic pro-America army recruitment aid, where the solution to a veteran's incapability to survive in civilian society is to throw them back into war.

The thing that annoys me is that yeah, media censorship is shitty and there are avenues of censorship that I'm very much against. But the most vocal people who take on a cause of anti-censorship are protesting shit like 15 year old anime girls getting their cleavage/crotches covered up, stuff like Fire Emblem removing a minigame where you can rub teenagers through a touchscreen minigame, and going nuclear when a lurid piece of shit like Hatred isn't allowed to be sold on Steam.

God forbid localisers put a pair of shorts on a 15 year old anime girl so you don't get panty shots, y'know. Either play the Japanese release, mod the game so you can look at your creep shit, or fuck off.

Quick note, I just realised how much I wrote. I post long walls of text over plenty of stupid bullshit, sure, but this is a post that got way out of hand - like I didn't set out to write this thing. Feel free to skip, I had kind of an episode the longer I wrote and it's not worth reading.

A friend of mine did something that I wouldn't have done to him, and that set off a chain reaction where I realised how little he actually respected me and how much his presence in my life had been driving my self-destructive urges and general shitty emotional wellbeing. And it sucked, because he was a real port in a storm - my home life has been pretty shitty the entire time I've known him, and I came to rely on him a lot during the real low points. Even now, a friendship without the baggage that tanked everything would be preferable to where I'm at now in my life.

But it's like, sometimes one thing happens that's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. Cutting someone out for just that one thing can be extremely selfish and self-centred, and I've chosen not to shy away from that - if I'm selfish for doing what I did for the reasons I did, I'll gladly be as selfish as I need to be to get out of this situation and protect myself from further harm. I'll be the bad guy in all of this. But on top of the inciting incident, I remembered times when I'd do something kinda silly but totally innocuous, and it'd get used against me to like belittle me and make it into a joke. There was a point where he yelled my name at strangers out of moving cars, telling them to add me on Facebook. He kept starting this persistent rumor with any new people we met that I had a kid with my first girlfriend, and despite it always upsetting me and fervently denying it he'd go so far into this bit that whoever we'd just met wouldn't know if he was actually joking or not. When I'd go to add to an open discussion in our friend group, he'd just talk over me and say what he wanted to say, even after I gave everyone a grace period of a few seconds to make sure I wasn't butting in - I genuinely don't think it was intentional, because he'd just do it intrinsically without thinking. Without realising I was even talking. Getting surprised when other people told him to let me speak after he interrupted me five times in a row.

And it's like I'm thankful for our friendship, I would be less of a person than I am today without that relationship. I simply wouldn't be where I am today without him - not even looking at this through rose-coloured glasses, this friendship was critical to my personal development at the beginning. But saying that, for about half of our friendship I began to feel like less of a person around him, and one reason I fell into binge-drinking the way I did was to numb myself to anything that made me feel bad about myself, like people making me the butt of the joke. In hindsight, he was the better option in my life to be around, but I had to be drunk for that relationship to be bearable and that wasn't tenable at all.

Our friendship came with good parts, but eventually it got to the point where we'd be standing in line at the store and he'd go and make small talk with the cashier offhandedly, and I'd go up and just blank out and feel like a human potato - and I would feel like less of a person than my friend was. That wasn't something my friend intentionally cultivated in me or whatever, it's not his fault that I felt that way, but it's telling that that's how I felt about our friendship in the end. It's telling that when I drank myself into a health problem and had to go sober, I wanted to spend less time with him the longer I spent sober. Something about him just made me feel incredibly unhappy about myself in a way that other friends didn't, like I was a broken vase who had to suck all the pieces up and hold them in place whenever my friend was around. And in hindsight, I feel like it's because I was his friend out of obligation, out of a sense of owing him financially and emotionally for all I had taken up during our friendship, not because I liked being around him or how he made me feel. And that culminated in a scenario where he did something where he didn't want me to be hurt, but the fact that he did it at all was such a slap in the face that it ruined our friendship. He didn't want to rock the boat after doing a running leap from the bow to the stern.

I didn't trust him for a lot of our friendship because I noticed the way he treated me, how small and overshadowed I felt even when I began finding my voice and stepping further into the light. I especially didn't trust him after he confided other people's secrets in me and gossiped about them. And after months of badgering me to be more open and vulnerable with him, he used the one thing I felt comfortable talking to him about to stab me in the back. He might not have meant to, but he did.

The worst part is that most of my friends were through him, meaning that I lost most of my wider friend group, and the mutual inner friend group we did have are so entangled in what went on that when I left, I had to leave everyone behind. I went from having a solid 4-5 real life friends and like 15 acquaintances total to having zero friends and zero acquaintances, because I chose to disassociate from this guy after what happened - not that I begrudge those people, because I chose to leave knowing the consequences for doing so and the reason I left is so petty and selfish on the surface.

We were so inseperable that for the first month after I stopped being friends with him, people who weren't aware there had been a divide would say hello to me and ask how my friend was doing before they'd ask me how I was doing. It really sums up how much of a cog, an accessory, I was in this friend's life - not just to him, but to everyone else.

I didn't want to write this much, but when it comes to this situation I tend to spiral into these episodes where I have to process everything all over again. Like a couple of times, I put my phone down and had to like process how I was feeling, less like a flashback and moreso just thinking about how unhappy he makes me in my daily life whenever he comes up. This is one wall of text I wanted to avoid, sorry.

tl;dr I realised how much less of a person I felt compared to my best friend, and in the aftermath of a traumatic event I began to realise how little he actually respected me as a person. He basically did the worst thing he could have done given the circumstances and expected everything to go back to normal, and I realised the severe effect that this friend had on my personal development in the aftermath, so I chose to leave all of my friends behind and start again from square one because I would rather drag my balls through a mile of broken glass than spend the rest of my life being a subservient accessory to a person who fucking hurt me as badly as he did.

SydneySweenHero posted...

Julia
Anri Okita
Sakura Miura
China Matsuoka
Yuma Asami
Ai Uehara
Rio Hamasaki
Aimi Yoshikawa

Solid proof that the answer is "yes".

On one hand, if you know one porn star that you're interested in and you keep your simping to yourself, that's one thing. We all have types, we all find horny things that appeal to us specifically.

But the further out you branch with it - liking/replying to their tweets, making threads about individual actresses and how attractive they are to you, listing off like twelve like it's a badge of honour - the weirder it gets. Like if your idea of sane public discourse is to go "there's a JAV actress named Yuma Asami who graduated from being a gravure idol in 2020, she did a 15 man gangbang where they all had phimosis", that definitely singles you out as a weird person.

Like by all means be into that shit and make friends who share your tastes. I'm in like 5 Discord chatrooms with dedicated NSFW channels, people talk porn and bond over their mutual weird interests all the time. And I'm certainly not above any of this. The crux of what makes it a red flag is both how open you are about it in public situations, and how proud/defensive you are when you're called on it. Let's face it, talking about sex stuff unrestrained in public spaces makes you look like a weirdo. The difference between it being a red flag and not being an issue at all is who and where you bring it up.

Knowing the names and keeping track of them is one thing that some may deem to be weird, but it's literally a non-issue if you keep it to yourself. The more you advertise your extensive knowledge of pornography that caters specifically to your niche to a wider audience, the weirder it is.

ultimate reaver posted...

matt doesnt have a good voice for informative videos, he sounds like a caveman with a head cold

That's kinda what works about it though. Matt sounds like a goon, which makes his jokes roll a little better, and his enunciation is unique. Austin Eruption has a crisper and speedier enunciation, Super Bunnyhop has more of a dry, occasionally sardonic bent to his delivery, YongYea just kinda powers through Reddit articles and Twitter threads in a very utilitarian way - Matt stands out by sounding like a meathead.

Apologies for being a hardass, but I appreciate it.

The thing about Darth Vader is that the more they show him in later Star Wars media, the less believable it is that his immortal soul got saved and got to become a force ghost.

Like in video games alone, you can see Darth Vader slaughtering dozens of people at a time. Any time they bring him back in a movie set between episodes 3 and 4, you see how brutal he is in murdering people and the carnage he leaves in his wake. When all you have is the original trilogy - hell, even the first six movies - the majority of what he actually does is off screen and all you know is that he's an intergalactic tyrant. That makes his redemption, him saving his son and saving the galaxy after spending so long terrorizing it, impactful as an emotional story beat.

When you have an image of Darth Vader stabbing a man through the back, whose only crime was to hamper his quest to commit planetary genocide, it makes that redemption much harder to swallow. And the more you encounter Darth Vader as an unstoppable force of malice and destruction, watching him cut through characters you've grown to love and appreciate in video games and movies - good, heroic characters whose deaths can only be described as cold-blooded murder - chucking an evil guy down a pit (who doesn't even die) and saving his own son's life hardly seems to justify him being admitted to Jedi Heaven.

More than anything, especially after episode IX, it seems to me that the Force favors blood relations and familial dynasties over actual balance.

lmao. Honestly really liked their pop singles when they were new, and the song that the lead singer did with Pink is pretty good. But it's one of those things where something about the band or someone in the band is going to end up being terrible - they always felt like they were a flash in the pan who were gonna get ousted for being cringy or mediocre.

Like James Blunt had a fantastic debut record, but every release since then has been worse imo. Second album was okay, talks about how the media hung him out to dry. Third one was mediocre. Fourth one tried to chase a very holistic indie sound on the singles. Fifth one had him trying to do club bangers. James Blunt was the epitome of diminishing returns, which I say despite having a fairly neutral opinion of him personally - and I think FUN. would have either been a similar case where they can never really accomplish the breakthrough sound of their debut record, or something like Maroon 5 where they parlay all the goodwill from their most popular music into making bland, shitty pop music for the rest of their careers.

It doesn't surprise me to hear that the lead singer got a fat head and tanked everyone's careers. As much as I like their singles, something about them felt plastic and temporary. Whether they sold out or the lead singer went off the rails, it doesn't surprise me to hear that FUN. ended up failing in the end.

I got Heart Attack Diner with a work friend. It was pretty fun, feel like I'm settling into my job and making friends. feelsgoodman

Also fuck yeah, never really dived into Propagandhi but I love the Weakerthans. Not big on his solo stuff but I appreciate John K Samson as a musician.

Oh fuck, is this third wave ska?

I'm not gonna comment on the guy because I don't know or care about him, but the centralisation and monopolization of game development is a genuine concern - especially when you look at what was happening under Activision and EA before the Microsoft buyout.

Think of all the development studios and intellectual property Activision owned, only to scatter the development teams to the winds to work on resources for "tentpole" releases like Call of Duty and refuse to develop new games for classic franchises outside of mobile games, DLC or other avenues aimed at monetizing nostalgia.

Look at how games have gone from microtransactions to always-online singleplayer games to live-service games to NFTs/blockchain games - games are taking a path where monetization is more important than fun games with innovative features and player agency, and we've seen that progression over the past 15 years with the way Activision and EA acquired so many resources, introduced so many new ways to monetize full-priced retail releases and overtaking the movie industry in profits generated.

I used this example yesterday - the story of Microsoft acquiring Activision-Blizzard is a decades long story of a small fish getting eaten by a bigger fish, which gets eaten by the biggest fish - only for that fish to be devoured whole by a megalodon. The monopolization of gaming under one mega-corporation - and I use that term because Activision-Blizzard was already a significant conglomerate of hundreds of companies, as is Microsoft, turning their union into arguably one of the most far-reaching tech companies in the world - risks the acceleration and reinforcing of even worse anti-consumer practices, because without competition, Microsoft could use their unparalleled presence in the gaming industry to push through whatever standards they want, regardless of public outcry.

Think about the release of the Xbox One, where not only was the console going to require an online connection at all times, but the Kinect was going to be a requirement to using your system. They were going to kill secondhand games by making game discs single-use licenses, meaning that when you bought the game and inserted the disc, it would download the game and render the product code on the disc as fulfilled. Even now, with game discs being keys to access digital games, you can still resell them and share them with friends - and one reason Microsoft backed down on this was because Sony took the opportunity to kick them while they were down and state that their physical games would be free to work on any and all PS4 consoles.

When you don't have a competitor who can honestly compete with your business, you essentially have license to do whatever the fuck you want. Imagine EA's live-service push, where they arbitrarily decided that offline singleplayer games were dead and live service games like Anthem were the future - but instead of fucking up their own internal studios for a few years before backpedaling, it's an industry-leading company that's big enough to force through whatever standards they want as an industry norm. It's like companies like Facebook pushing the metaverse as Web 3.0, forcing the redundancy of the old internet in favor of an endlessly sanitized, corporate space where everybody lives and shops under intense surveillance - imagine that, but it's NFTs or it's bans across multiple online games because you were caught using an exploit in one game.

That's not a guarantee of course, I'm not saying the sky is falling. But when you look at how the gaming industry transformed under a publisher-driven wave of acquisitions and internal monetization schemes in the past, leading to full-priced games offering $100+ in-game transactions as accepted and highlighted features, you can see how the further centralisation of game development under an even bigger company than those former publishing giants can pave the way for something even worse if that company were to shed any sign of consideration or restraint - which, in an environment where money has shown to be king time and time again, is much more likely than perhaps we'd like to think.

So basically what I'm saying is that independent of what this guy is saying, the monopolization of the gaming industry under a single company - whether it be Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook or Sony, or any other company on Earth - is a significant issue that people are going to have to pay attention to. We've already seen the ethical standards of game publishers hit record-breaking lows in the past 10 years alone, let alone other tech companies that are making significant pushes into the gaming industry to capitalise on a multi-billion dollar boom that's happening right now.

When you put a majority of the gaming industry into the hands of one business, enough so that they can push through whatever standards or trends they want, the potential for abuse becomes exponentially higher along with the amount of influence and control they have in that industry. The centralisation of game development under Microsoft is not good news, nor would the news be any better under any other company, and we need to keep an eye on this to ensure that the next ten years won't see a further level of price-gouging, surveillance and anti-consumer practices that already plague the gaming industry today. Because when you have a juggernaut corporation who can define industry standards with the amount of influence their presence has in the industry, their word has the very real potential to become law.

CommunismFTW posted...

She was 19 for misery business?

Jesus.

At one point, Paramore couldn't go on tour because Hayley Williams was grounded.

The in-game economy went through a deflation crisis, money became so scarce due to a lack of post-game revenue streams that it was cheaper to buy new weapons on the market place than it was to pay the static repair cost.

The automatically generated captions on that video are amazing because whenever Shobu's name is said, the captions wig out.

Also, the original manga was about Magic the Gathering - it was licensed by Wizards of the Coast. It didn't do well, and they changed it for the TV show which took off. Wizards of the Coast apparently produce the official Duel Masters card game or something though.

That also means that this is the second card game started in tribute to Magic the Gathering, only to take up a life of its own and become a competitor. Duel Monsters from Yu-Gi-Oh was originally a tribute to Magic which only took off the way it did because people were interested in Duel Monsters.

You know that Yu-Gi-Oh knockoff-looking anime from the mid-2000's? It got two dubbed seasons, and tbh they were pretty garbo. I caught a couple of episodes as a kid, but it was never as good as Yu-Gi-Oh.

Well, in Japan, they're still making the show and the Duel Masters card game. It's been running since 1999. They've swapped the protagonist twice, with the first guy's kid brother and then his nephew.