Lurker > MrMallard

dude, even Domino's Australia has stuffed crust.

DeadBankerDream posted...

Needed character to have synchronized levels sound a teeny bit OCD.

Yeah, it's a me thing. I can at least accept it in Final Fantasy X because the sphere grid system makes it easy to get everyone the same amount of spheres.

I used to spend upwards of $200 a weekend drinking. Drink prices in Australia are through the roof, a cheap carton of beer or a cheap bottle of spirits are low/mid-$40 range. You can get a ten pack of cider or mixed drinks (flavored vodka, blended whisky with dry or cola, rum and bourbon with cola) from anywhere between $20 and $40.

Fairly recently, I was drinking whatever looked fun. I was drinking these alcoholic iced teas, premixed vodka cans, bottles of gin - there's this premix brand called Wild Boar where they sell 15% strength cans of bourbon or rum, they're 4x as alcoholic as a regular can of booze.

I used to drink this artificial cider called Little Fat Lamb because it was 1.25 litres of 8% alcohol for $8.50. I had to stop that years ago because I threw up stomach lining and spent half an hour dry-retching on my bathroom floor twice in a row after drinking it. Since then, it's been the more expensive brands for me.

At the moment though, I'm going sober. 22 days clean. I drank two entire bottles of gin - two "fifths" in American terms - at my grandparents' place over Christmas without even meaning to, and that was a real wake-up call. I might have some drinks in April when I take a vacation, though I think it'd be a bad idea for my health. One reason I'm considering it is because I have a hard time socialising without it, and I wanna have a great time and make friends on my vacation.

So yeah. I used to spend over $200 a weekend on booze. For the time being though, I spend $0.

Not really. Characters keep coming and going so it's impossible to synchronise their levels.

I prefer FFV because having all the different jobs you can max out gave me an incentive to grind. Having more to level up than just your main level was fun for me, and your characters start on a level playing field so you can synchronise levels.

For real. Some of the best licensed games I've ever played.

Say what you like about the South

Okay. The south has a history of lynching black men, and to this day there are "sundown" towns where racial minorities are targeted by local white supremacist organisations.

https://youtu.be/eAcGqGCcEQw

What did you guys do while GameFAQs was down?

Irony posted...

Sokka was also highly incompetent

Nah, he got better. He saved the day with that inventor guy when they stopped one of the air temples from being besieged by the Fire Nation, he killed Combustion Man, he got a meteorite sword and learned how to use it, he got a falcon, and eventually he was able to plan a full-scale assault on the Fire Nation.

Sokka starts off as a bitchy, mediocre misogynist, but over the course of the show he grows into a clever, competent warrior who truly comes into his own. Even his dad thinks so. I think some of the characters hint that he might even be White Lotus material.

I don't disagree with the thesis of the topic though.

I used to.

Fun fact, they cut out a subplot in Blades of Glory that made the rivalry of the two main characters even more personal.

Fucking dweebs never heard of mpreg before

Final Fantasy X. My experience with RPGs basically amounted to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on Game Boy Color, and the Dark Cloud demo on the disc that came with the PS2 (which is more of an action RPG with town-builder elements than a tried and true turn-based RPG). I tried to play Chrono Trigger a couple times, and I just didn't like it that much for how much it was hyped. Point is, I wasn't a big JRPG guy.

At school, I traded my copy of Tekken Advance for FFX over the span of a couple weeks, and after playing it for a couple hours I just couldn't get into the game because of how dated it was. I think I got up to Luca, and I just didn't give a fuck past that point - probably got to the Blitzball match and sucked ass.

Keep in mind, this is like 2006. I had played Tekken 5, Ratchet and Clank 3, all the Jak and Daxter games - I liked more kinetic, actiony games that made full use of the PS2's capabilities. The back of the FFX box touts real-time blinking animations, with the effect being incredibly basic and fake. Everything about that game is stiff and dated - it comes with the territory of being a launch game. Another thing that really dated it was the framerate; again, look at all those games I listed above. FFX with its blurry 30FPS and weird freeze-frame aftershadow transitions really didn't do it for me. I just outright didn't like it.

So I get my game back, dude set a bunch of high scores which was annoying but whatever. Then a couple years later, I begin to burn out on video games. Even games I adored previously left me feeling like this empty husk.

And then I remembered FFX. It was a slow-paced game that let you take it at your own pace. It was the perfect game to just sit back and brute-force your way through.

I fully stand by FFX being a stiff, dated mess. But it's also a really good game, and I really enjoyed it. I played FFX-2 and enjoyed that as well, took me years to get 100% story completion in that one. Played FF5 and I really liked that kne. I love Dragon Quest and Atelier, and I'm thinking about trying out Ultima. Nowadays I prefer a good, slow-paced JRPG that I can take at my own pace.

Final Fantasy X had to sit with me for years before I finally got it.

Axiom posted...

If there was a vote for most boomer show NCIS would be at the top of the list. They love that shit

I liked NCIS when I was a kid. Mostly because Pauley Perette was hot.

It's a shame she quit the show due to a stalker.

Edit: looked her up and it turns out she was assaulted multiple times on-set, which is why she quit the show. Apparently she's afraid of the guy who plays Gibbs.

Because they said that the virus was being spread via 5G waves?

Foppe posted...

...did Hitler really write "oh, and by the way, transwomen are clearly men"?

I feel like the quote is probably referring to progressive attitudes towards gender and changing societal norms regarding women being an insidious plot to bring Germany down run by the communists and other scapegoated groups.

Like I'm pretty sure one of the first trans-positive clinics was established in Vienna in the early 20th century. They did research into gender dysphoria and I think they may have carried out some of the first gender reassignment surgeries in the world, all pre-WWII. You also had the growing liberation of women worldwide, flappers from America being one example.

When Hitler began his ascent to power, the Vienna clinic was torn down and the Nazis prioritised family values - giving families monetary incentives and tax breaks if they fulfilled the role of the ideal German family - the man works, the woman stays home and makes babies. Families were rewarded every time women had more children.

The Nazi regime crushed a growing liberation regarding sexuality, gender and gender roles, scapegoating communists and Jews as bad-faith actors tearing down the fundamental pillars of German society by planting those progressive ideas. I can only imagine this TERF takes some line about the Other who's poisoning society by putting people in hierarchies where they "don't belong". It'd come all the way back to The Other and biological essentialism, I can almost guarantee it.

This reminds me of a poem by Gil Scott-Heron called Whitey on the Moon:

https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annotated

The point being, disenfranchisement and poverty are ever-present and unchanging even as we laud big historical events as steps forward for all mankind. Whitey's on the moon, but it didn't stop the landlord upping rent for a struggling black man and he still can't afford the doctor's bill for his sick sister. Someone spent $10 million on a statue of MLK Jr. in 2023, and a struggling black man is almost certainly in the same shoes as Gil Scott-Heron was in the 60's - rent's gone up, and he can't afford to pay his sister's hospital bills.

The similarity isn't 1/1, because the MLK statue is an affront to what MLK stood for and would have wanted. But it's similar in that we wrap ourselves in phony sentimentality about how far we've come, how we've made such a bold step forward, but we don't address the people who have historically been left behind and gain nothing from the hysterical celebration of that phony sentimentality. MLK has a $10 million statue, but black people are still disproportionately sent to jail over other races. Black men on death row have been proven innocent, and the law has upheld the decision to keep them in jail. There's no money to address racial bias in the justice system or make the appeals necessary to get innocent men out of jail, but there's enough for a big statue of a man whose ideals have been watered down to a bland, generic "unity" without addressing the "unity" MLK actually protested for.

Rent's going up, and hospital bills aren't going down - so what has really changed? Well, now Whitey's on the moon, and someone spent $10 million on a statue instead of honouring the ideals of the person depicted in said statue. Nothing has actually changed or gotten better.

That guy who appears in the screen whenever the screen goes black

Noumas posted...

Cuphead eh? Tell me more tell me more

Tell us about it, Janet!

LazLemon posted...

It was made for streaming. It only ran in one theatre for one day.

cope

pegusus123456 posted...

I watched someone livestream it a few weeks ago. It was a charity stream where they eventually decided to do the dragon slayer quest on fresh characters.

Even with chat instantly giving them the items needed to complete every quest, it looked only moderately entertaining.

The quests are dogshit, but the skilling is fantastic.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/0/5/AAbh80AAEFyx.jpg

parisdolphin posted...

FES is so much better

I did enjoy FES when I played it. I also didn't mind The Answer, though I get why it's controversial.

The Persona 5 party members are three boys and four girls, not counting the main character. afaik, Persona 4 also has a mix of guys and girls.

And while I can understand what you mean, building these new campaigns from scratch with new characters like a rule 63 campaign, I don't think those changes are as practical with Persona 4 or 5 as it was with Persona 3 Portable. You're right, they would be excellent additions that add to the game's value and longevity if they made those changes. But I doubt the team has the budget or the manpower to make the necessary changes for what you're talking about, and I doubt Atlus would sign off on such a monumental labor of love (and the associated costs) for the sheer sake of it.

I would like for each re-release to include a second playthrough, but I just don't think it's as feasible as it was with P3P. I'd love to see them add a female player character in Persona 6, because at least then they're building the game from the ground up with that in mind. But for the remasters, it is - unfortunately - asking for too much on top of what you're already getting.

Zikten posted...

they need to do another version of 4 and 5, adding girl mode. Or just make the whole game girl mode. If you want to be a boy, you play the older versions. If you want to be a girl you play these new ones

I hate that you could be a girl in 3, and then they downgraded the series by removing a key feature in the sequels

I think it's less that they downgraded the sequels, and more that they went above and beyond for the port.

Persona 3 Portable came out after Persona 4, so the gameplay was brought up to scratch with that game. afaik they re-recorded voice lines that referred to the protagonist with masculine pronouns to change them to feminine ones, and they re-wrote social links. I heard you can save Shinjiro, or at least extend his life if you complete that social link by a certain date.

And what made it manageable is that Persona 3 Portable doesn't have the anime cutscenes that the console version does. Because they would have had to re-animate all of those cutscenes with a new protagonist.

I don't think Persona 4 Golden got rid of the cutscenes, being on hardware that could not only run full PS2-scale games but exceed that benchmark. Like P3, I can only assume that there were lines referring to the protagonist as a guy - once again, requiring rewrites and new voiceovers if the characters called the main character a guy, on top of the anime cutscenes they'd have to re-animate. P4G also made plenty of positive changes to my knowledge, and set the standard for what a handheld port could be.

The same conundrum befell Persona 5, where the game has a bunch of anime cutscenes with the main character that would have to be re-animated, and where voice lines explicitly refer to the main character as "him". And that's on top of the additional Royal campaign you get after you beat the main game. And while I didn't play Royal, I hear they voiced previously unvoiced dialogue throughout the game, which is already a pretty big undertaking. Every port from Persona 3 Portable onwards has gone above and beyond in polishing those games even further, which is no small undertaking and has taken each of the base games to a whole new level.

The lines are one thing - re-recording individual lines, or replacing entire voice actors if they aren't free to reprise the role, is already a labor of love that most games wouldn't do. Re-animating cutscenes are a whole other story, and the lack of cutscenes is probably what made the FeMC route in Persona 3 Portable possible in the first place. They were able to turn a technical hurdle into an added bonus for players. It would be really good to have that whole second rejiggered playthrough in each subsequent Persona game, but is it practical? I don't think it is, unless they started development on a new game with the idea of creating two sets of assets from the start and referring to the main character in gender-neutral terms to alleviate the workload.

I played P3 FES in 2021 so I might just buy Persona 4. Solid move giving them budget pricing, and offering a full-priced bundle for both games that's cheaper than the individual sales was a good move too.

My one concern is with Persona 3 Portable. I feel like there's a lot of room for this port to get heat, with Portable cutting back features from the PS2 releases. I'm also not sure about that black box around the text in the text bubbles, like is it an accessibility feature or something?

Like at the end of the day, Persona 3 Portable is going to look a lot simpler next to Persona 4 Golden, and I'm concerned that it's going to attract backlash because of it. I think it's a great game, Portable was how I played P3 for the first time, but even at a budget price point I can already see the bitching.

On the upside, I can finally play P4G. I tried to run it on an old laptop and the cutscenes lagged like hell.

I've been listening to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers. The lyrics in my sig are from a song called Moon Song, it's a grower:

https://youtu.be/DXqZ66XK3z8

Other songs of hers I've been listening to lately are Killer:

https://youtu.be/psZuC10Oa4E

and Sidelines:

https://youtu.be/3c-wRm0_0bY

and Graceland Too:

https://youtu.be/cTG0dakpDko

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/4/2/AAbh80AAEFp-.jpg
Luigi got on that sigma grindset

DeadBankerDream posted...

Was Pell actually innocent?

I personally think he was guilty, but even if he was innocent of actually touching or raping children, he was 100% without a doubt complicit in allowing child sex abuse to proliferate under his watch.

Just scrolling his Wikipedia page brings up the results of a 2020 royal commission into child sex abuse in the Catholic church. As per the page:

On 7 May 2020, the royal commission revealed its findings regarding Pell, which had been made by 2017 but were withheld while Pell's own sexual abuse case was ongoing.[168][169][170] concluding that Pell knew of child sexual abuse by clergy by the 1970s, but did not take adequate action to address it. Pell responded that the commission's views "are not supported by evidence".[168]

For the case of Gerald Ridsdale, while Pell was a priest in Ballarat, the commission concluded that "in 1973 Father Pell turned his mind to the prudence of Ridsdale taking boys on overnight camps", with child sexual abuse "on his radar, in relation to" Ridsdale. The commission concluded that "by 1973, Cardinal Pell was not only conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy, but he also considered measures of avoiding situations which might provoke gossip about it".[168][171]

For the case of Father Peter Searson, while Pell was an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne, the commission concluded that given the information Pell had in 1989, he "should have advised the Archbishop to remove Father Searson and he did not do so". Pell had told the commission that, in 1989, he received a list of grievances about Searson. The list included statements that Searson had harassed children, parents and school staff, used children's toilets without cause, shown children a dead body and practised animal cruelty. The commission concluded that it "ought to have been obvious" to Pell that he needed to have Searson removed, while rejecting Pell's statement that he had been "deceived" regarding Searson's case by education officials.

To which I will say, if nothing else:

Pell removed Searson in 1997 when he had become the archbishop.[171][172][173]

Even if he had the power to raise these concerns eight years earlier, and didn't do so.

For the case of Father Wilfred James Baker, while Pell was the Archbishop of Melbourne, the commission concluded that Pell had the power to remove Baker in August 1996 when he learned that Baker was about to be charged. Pell did not remove Baker then, resulting in Baker continuing as a priest in a parish with a primary school until May 1997.[171] Baker was jailed in 1999 for child sexual abuse.[174]

The same page brings up allegations against Pell as early as 2002, Pell calling the prosecution of a former roommate a "witch trial" and fleeing the country happened in 2013, and he was extradited and sentenced in 2018. While he was acquitted in 2020 - proceeding to lash out at the ABC and other media outlets for bias against him - the findings of that royal commission were published in 2020 and arrived at the conclusion that he allowed child sex abuse to proliferate under his watch when he had the power to do something about it.

So whether he was a kiddy fiddler or an outright rapist - which again, I personally believe based on his absolutely bizarre and self-centred reaction to being called to testify against someone else - I think it's fairly clear that at best, he was complicit with child rape and he was light on child abusers when he had the ability to punish them.

Murder-suicide pact.

Also I have no idea why Pell would write a diatribe against the new Pope, considering that Benedict left the position voluntarily and as far as I can see, the Vatican covers for child rapists under Francis just as much as it did under Benedict. I don't know what George Pell, once-convicted child abuser, would have to speak out against regarding the Vatican under Francis.

It would be funny - if not extremely sad - if a convicted child abuser took issue with a pro-queer Vatican for being "too accepting" for God's doctrine. So what, you and your pedophile buddies can be ferried around the world to dodge pedophilia charges, but a Vatican that doesn't outright reject queerness is a step too far?

pegusus123456 posted...

I feel like some people ITT are forgetting pre-cancellation Family Guy where Brian is definitely a candidate for best character.

I recently went back to Family Guy due to a combination of YouTube clips and me getting really sick and needing to stay home. I had season 3 on DVD when I was a teenager so I started there.

When I started season four, I got reminded of this other YouTube short I saw from that two parter where South Park was ripping on Family Guy. It was that part of an FG episode that plays at the start, where the characters just make meaningless references and go to pointless cutaways. At one point Peter makes a delivery to Captain Kirk, who says "I'll be the Captain, you be Tennille!" - and the comments were like "wow South Park predicted exactly what the show would become, a soulless husk of stale reference humor".

It stood out for two reasons. First, it was genuinely a solid pastiche of a Family Guy plot, especially from season 4. The cutaways are often references for the sake of references. Even a lot of season 3 episodes were like that, filling in time with non-sequitur jokes that banked on references - but season four took the cake.

But secondly, it was laughable that people could see that clip and go "wooooah south park depicted the future of the show", because it was pastiching the then-current state of the show. The episode of South Park where that clip came from was from April 2006. Season four of Family Guy, which was where that style of humor began to come in even more heavily, aired between 2005 and 2006.

But I sincerely think that any self-proclaimed Family Guy fan would go "no it got even worse later on, it wasn't this bad at all until around season 11!" because season four is where a bunch of classic jokes made their debut.

I'm still watching the show, because for better or worse I'm nostalgic for it and its general stupidity is something easy to put on and laugh at. But season four, the first season after their second cancellation, is absolutely where forced reference humor and non-sequiturs began to fill in as much of the episode as the actual plots. The show was always bad for that, at least come season 3, but season 4 is where the show took a turn. Shit, even if she wasn't treated the best in prior seasons, season 4 is (I think) the first season where Meg began to get regularly bashed, and the first season where someone said "shut up, Meg".

All of that to say - personally, I prefer Stewie. Brian is a good character, he's a devoted friend to Peter and he seems like a good person caught up in his ego and in an environment where he isn't thriving as much as he would like to. But come season four, he's lusting after Lois about as much as Quagmire is, and the show is outright saying "if Peter wasn't in the picture, Brian would 100% be making a move on Lois". There's an early episode where Peter gets lost at sea and Lois marries Brian because he became a provider, and a later episode outright has Peter and Lois commenting on how badly Brian wants to fuck her.

Stewie isn't consistent with his supervillain thing, but I would say that his character stays the most entertaining. He switches between upper crust supervillain and emotionally immature baby, and maybe I'm a dope for liking that contrast but it's always funny when the show plays with that. He's always selfish and murderous, and that only changes as much as his more metrosexual personality style comes into focus.

Peter becomes a cruel, child-abusing idiot, Lois becomes a physically abusive rapist, Chris is always an idiot, Meg is the show's designated butt-monkey, Brian goes from loyal friend to wanting to stab his best friend in the back to fuck his wife. I think Stewie ends up being the most well-rounded and entertaining character.

Quick note about #498 in the previous meme general, the guy who makes those comics goes by Jake Likes Onions. Here are some of my favorite ones of his:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/4/AAbh80AAEFo6.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/5/AAbh80AAEFo7.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/6/AAbh80AAEFo8.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/7/AAbh80AAEFo9.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/8/AAbh80AAEFo-.jpg

I remember hearing that Fusion was great, but I had a lot of trouble getting into it after Zero Mission.

Eventually I played through most of the game and liked it well enough, but there are things that bug me compared to ZM. The main issue I have is that the palette and artstyle of fusion are bordering on cartoony compared to the sleek, understated palette and artstyle of Super and Zero Mission. But even then, it's not a deal breaker.

I also thought that the thing with the AI unlocking parts of the map as you cleared each section was a bit off-putting, whereas I thought ZM felt extremely open-ended and free. I think that's what turned me off in the first place.

Fusion is fine, but I found it when it had found its audience and it was heresy to say you didn't like it.

I'd say the chances are bordering on 0%. It's almost a ten year old game, and if it's true that the code is spaghetti code, I doubt Fromsoft or Sony would go out of their way to untangle it for a wider release.

The more likely scenario - which is still a major longshot - is that a company like Bluepoint will remaster it in a few years. I doubt Bluepoint themselves would move on from a Souls game to remaster/remake a whole other Souls game - who wants to be pigeonholed like that - but I would wager that the game gets a remake/remaster before it gets a port.

"yeah uhh, the way he uhh... killed those kids was awesome lol"

Full disclosure, I'm a Nu-Who guy with zero experience with the classic series. This is based on my own values and thoughts regarding what I think the platonic ideal of the Doctor would be. I'm also extremely critical of Moffat, so you're gonna see a critical drubbing of his Doctors in my ranking.

There are three things that rank a good Doctor in my opinion: wit, craftiness and compassion.

Ranking from worst to best:

* The 12th Doctor. He loses on wit, especially later on in his run. He lacks compassion initially, and while he takes a level in kindness later on, that falls by the wayside with the Time Lord Victorious stunt and his growing neediness over Clara. And as far as craftiness goes, nothing stands out in my memory. 12's run was marred by episodes like the Mind Virus one that cribbed from creepypastas and kept none of the charm, and the character was inconsistent and only found his footing literally on his deathbed. I thought he had a lot of promise, that first episode was dynamite, but in wit, craftiness and compassion I think 12 is the worst.

* The 11th Doctor. Eleven's whole schtick is his "I am the Doctor" speeches, which I personally don't think are particularly inspired - especially after 6+ examples of the same speech, meant to give off this vibe of the Doctor making a badass boast and leaving his enemies quaking in their boots, but which come off as lame and forced character shilling coming from the character's own mouth. It also compromises his craftiness score, because when the solution to a threat of the week or an often enough outcome in his episodes is to make the same grandiose, self-serving speech, it becomes predictable and tired.

He wins out on compassion with his relationship with Amy and Clara, and even mid episodes like the Rings of Akhaken have small kindnesses in them. Moffat's best Christmas special, the Christmas Carol pastiche, is probably the craftiest and most indirectly kind that Moffat's Doctors got.

* The 13th Doctor. I like Jodie Whitaker's Doctor a fucking lot, but Chibnall's run was wasted on her. I had to dock kindness points for how secretive she ends up becoming from her companions and her occasional lashing out at Yaz. I think she was one of the craftiest Doctors, being an engineer and a tinkerer, and my favorite aspect of hers was bringing back Ten's approach of giving companions 2 and 2 and letting them make 4 - demonstrating their own intelligence and giving that same joy of discovery to their companions. And while again, I adore her Doctor, I wouldn't say she had the most wit. I did think her ramblings were really good though.

* The 9th Doctor. Nine's entire arc was kindness - he was still traumatised from the Time War, he was wary about taking on new companions. He was a man lost in himself. Meeting Rose let him open up again, and finding meaning in showing her the universe allowed him to give his life to save her. It was his own strong example that led to Rose saving him, and while Ten would become a lot more selfish, it's that mutual bond of kindness and affection that defines Nine. Adam is an outlier - his acceptance and appreciation of Jack Harkness, despite his own shame at turning him into an undying abomination, is mutually kind. His finding meaning in Rose allows him to be kind to himself again. He bothers Mickey and Jackie, but it's the character journey of Nine through that first season that seals him as one of the most well-rounded Doctors ever.

He's pretty witty too, talking about dying in a basement from ghosts - in Cardiff - and getting the best character writing of both Steven Moffat at his prime and Russell T. Davies. And while he didn't get a lot of time to shine in this area, he's crafty enough but not super crafty. The Psychic Paper is extremely nifty though.

* The 10th Doctor. Look, normie pick, but Ten sets the standard of what The Doctor is. He's kind, but arrogant and traumatised. He's exceedingly clever, to the point that it leads him into darkness. He's undoubtedly the most charismatic Doctor - when he's not running his mouth and making some of the best broadcast television ever, his face and HAIR do the acting for him.

Nine is loaded up on kindness. Ten is loaded up on charisma. Having such a long reign, he also gets so much time in the spotlight to be crafty - both in the tinkery inventor sense and in regards to being cunning. While his greatest triumphs and emotional peaks are balanced by losses and dark periods, that only serves to feed into Ten's charisma, which is like a megaphone amplifying his wit and charm.

Again, normie pick - I know. But Ten is the definitive Doctor, at least of the revival series. His emotional high peaks are barely touchable, he's crazy like a fox and he's so, so fucking entertaining.

Congrats. I think the most rare drop I ever got was a Curved Bone in Old-school Runescape. It's got a drop rate of like 1/5013.

wanderingshade posted...

RIP Rick and Morty I guess.

RIP and Morty

Oh, so he stopped her from leaving too. What the flying fuck.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/2/4/AAbh80AAED5M.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/4/AAbh80AAEFVi.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/5/AAbh80AAEFVj.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/0/AAbh80AAEFVe.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/1/AAbh80AAEFVf.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/2/AAbh80AAEFVg.jpg

I don't want to jeer at this because I respected Roiland's creativity even after I fell out of my Rick and Morty phase. Dude had it made with video games and Solar Opposites and stuff, he had it all going on and even if I didn't vibe with that kind of humor any more I respected his success.

This is really demoralising to hear. And it makes it worse because of the unruly fanbase Rick and Morty has attracted in the past, where before you could at least say it was a bunch of toxic people glomming onto a show that by itself is relatively benign. Hearing that one of the creators is a domestic abuser makes that whole thing rotten to the core, a bunch of edgy memelords following a guy who beats women. Makes that while thing a bit worse retroactively.

Yeah, older episodes had a rough baseline of 500k views. Nowadays it's anywhere between like 250k and 800k depending on the episode.

I'm like 98% sure this was never actually a thing, and a handful of trolls in the Pokemon community tried to get a bunch of kids to fuck up their game cartridges by rubbing washing powder into them.

Here's the context:

Back when I was a kid, I got super into glitching Pokemon. Gen 2 was the best for this, it had the easiest cloning glitch in the series and it was easy to fuck everything up and corrupt your game.

I ate that shit up. It was like watching this game world I had adored for years unravel at the seams, and I wanted to go deeper. So I would go online and look up Pokemon Crystal glitches, like things that people had done and how they did it.

For example, there's an item called Teru-sama. You can only get it by glitching the game, you could sell it for a stupidly specific amount like 64,382 dollars, and - if you got the right one - it had the same item ID as the apricot that Kurt turns into the GS Ball, meaning that you could legitimately catch Celebi in an English version of the game. Here's a Bulbapedia article about it: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Teru-sama

Strategies were mostly the same: clone your Pokemon until something goes horribly wrong, which was literally just a matter of time because something would go horribly wrong if you cloned the same Pokemon over and over. Other strategies involved cart-tilting, which never worked for me because knocking the game out of the pins would freeze everything.

But I came across a couple of different threads where people were saying they glitched their games and got some really unpredictable results after rubbing washing powder into the connector pins on the bottom of the cartridge. The idea was that because washing powder was slightly corrosive, and because the gritty texture would let you scratch the connector pins, it would fuck with the pins in a way that made the game playable but extremely fucked up. It was physically damaging the game in the hopes of getting corruptions that went above and beyond. High risk, high reward.

I don't know if this was ever some sort of common practice that anyone else has ever heard of, and I've been thinking about it lately so I thought I'd make a thread. Again, I seriously doubt this was a thing.

Glob posted...

Where Im from, Dove is soap, not chocolate.

Actually Dove is both soap and chocolate all over the place, including Australia. It's two different companies too, they just decided to leave each other alone because the brand similarity was a genuine coincidence and it wasn't worth the trouble of suing.

...I mean HOW DARE YOU DEFLECT FROM MY RIGHTEOUS RAGE :P

First of all, let's be up-front about this - if you're legitimately upset about that whole "helping women break the glass ceiling" M&M thing, you're being an ass and the forced and lazy outcry you're contributing to is made more and more legitimate through your actions. Genuinely, a better way to "protest" something like that - a bit cringe and pandering, but ultimately fairly innocuous and unlikely to have anyone buying M&Ms based on the branding alone - would have been to shut the fuck up and let it die the eventual obscure death that most advertising does. It is a non-issue. It has always been a non-issue. This whole stupid thing was a "controversy" in name only.

Secondly, and specifically relating to why I put "controversy" in quotation marks - the packaging was designed to whip morons and droolers up into a frenzy, what with the M&M branding being savaged by dumb shits like Tucker Carlson over "desexualised" M&Ms leading to more scrutiny from the particularly stupid section of the right-wing who watch that trash. This was planned.

So what would a negative PR event like this be covering up? What basis do I have to say that this was a deliberate PR strategy to distract from something else?

Mars Inc. are facing a lawsuit over toxic levels of cadmium and lead being found in their Dove brand of dark chocolate.

Here's the lawsuit: https://www.law360.com/cases/63b7967154caf665e685628b

It was filed on the fifth of January.

As per a linked article, those heavy metals carry a risk of cancer, organ failure and other irreversible health risks. Toxic levels of those metals - not just unsafe levels, toxic levels - were found in Mars Inc. branded chocolate. Lead poisoning affects the function of the brain and can affect you for life, and I'm sure that cadmium is just as dangerous if not moreso. You or your kids could have been eating chocolate tainted with lead.

But you don't know that, because every dumb-fuck mouth-breathing hick who's upset at this chocolate company are mad because Cringe Feminism Fail Chocolate or whatever the fuck. Again, this supposed controversy is - at best - being fueled by Tucker Carlson watchers who are mad that a green chocolate candy doesn't wear high heels any more. That flow of absolute morons dogpiling M&Ms because women or something is taking away from the real story, which is that Mars Inc. have been fucking POISONING people.

As it should be.

So they're pulling the rug out from under everyone who's used DnD 3rd Edition and monetizing their content without their permission.

Can't believe my initial guess was less shitty than what's actually going on.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/6/AAbh80AAEFLa.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/7/AAbh80AAEFLb.jpg