Lurker > MrMallard

In Australia, at least for our rugby league, we pretty much only get commercials between tries. The video ref and all that is sponsored by KFC and shit, but you'll be watching the game and the only time you'll see a commercial is after someone scores or if it's halftime. And if it's after someone scores, it'll be like a 15 second commercial cutting right back as the scoring player kicks for a conversion.

I was gonna call bullshit on TC, because Aussie sports have a lot of commercials, but I do remember hearing that the frequency of commercials in American sports is fucked. It's not so much that we don't have commercials, it's that the frequency is significantly less fucked than American sports.

Like you call in sick and your boss is like "fuckin nope, your dumb ass is lying" and you end up going into work? Or you do something like go to get lunch in your sick day and someone sees you, so your boss goes "well I guess you weren't that sick after all"?

Like if it happens when you actually are sick it's like what the fuck, but this topic is about when you're specifically lying to chuck a sickie and your boss gets the better of you.

Personally, gaslight gatekeep girlboss. Medea got it done.

I'll bump this

Evangelion for me.

Craig Ferguson, hands down. Conan might be one of the best people to uphold late-night TV as an institution, but Ferguson was great because of how he didn't care for late night television as an institution. He swore, he made a habit of tearing up his notes, he spoofed the concept of the late night talk show sidekick by getting a robot skeleton puppet. But on top of that, he was unflinchingly real in how he talked to his guests, and he was arguably a more serious host with the most to say when the chips were down.

I've brought this up a couple times today, but this is a twelve and a half minute monologue he did in the wake of Britney Spears' breakdown where he discussed his own substance abuse, and there's a story there about on one Christmas morning he was going to go and kill himself. The barman of the pub he'd stayed at saved his life, ironically, by getting him so drunk he forgot to do it. This might be one of the greatest late night show monologues ever:

https://youtu.be/K46P7loICXY?si=UoV8Jn6ML-LMZeEz

And I know that people have an issue with Jimmy Fallon and how he breaks easily and seems to want to be very cute and precious about it, but when Ferguson breaks, the laughter is that sort of loud belly-laugh that booms up through the ribcage and gets you laughing along. His bits, and the parts where be screws up, are genuinely hilarious:

https://youtu.be/AQhxVINuJrI?si=vkBxHNWVcdmvJqem

Conan is great, but Ferguson feels somewhat antithetical to what Conan stands for and it's some of the best late night television that there's ever been. Craig Ferguson all the way.

The Mass Effect games has like four or five DLCs on average, and they were great little injectable campaigns as a part of a bigger whole. I get that FF15 shit the bed, but imo that was a game made whole by DLC while most good DLC adds greater value to the standalone end product y'know.

Xenogears15 posted...

I was looking for fanfiction, not yaoi lemons that make me want to forget how to read

And get that's roughly as close as we could get to MAGA Naruto fanfiction. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Xenogears15 posted...

...what details were offered?

We found one where Donald Trump tries to have a booty call with Sasuke on AO3.

Bummer. I recently did Walking on the Sun at karaoke and it fucking ripped. Say what you will about their meme cred for All Star - and I truly hope his legacy isn't painted solely as "the All Star guy" - but songs like Walking on the Sun are fantastic.

I was just talking about substance abuse last night, and I recalled a Craig Ferguson monologue he made in the wake of Britney Spears' breakdown in 2007. He recounted his own struggle with alcoholism, and one of the two biggest things he said was that substance abuse isn't an issue you can beat with money. Because if it was, rich people wouldn't die from it. Steve Harwell probably wasn't "rich" rich, but I'd imagine that Smash Mouth made a boatload of cash in the early 2000's and got some hefty residuals checks with All Star, I'm A Believer and Walking on the Sun. Steve Harwell had a better chance than most, and he's still lost the battle because the addiction won out in the end. Because you can't beat this sort of thing with money.

Like apologies for eulogizing the man before he died, but it's looking grim you know. I can't help but be surprised, but with that Kirby Morrow guy dying from substance abuse a year or two ago I feel like we're seeing an uptick in deaths via consumption and it's very disheartening.

So yeah, I'm really bummed out. It might be time to have a frank discussion about narcotic abuse.

It got to 500 in four hours because when DP posted, like six or seven other instigators logged in and hopped into that thread.

Like yesterday I was in a bunch of stupid trollbait threads like the Florida Nazis one (which had moreso devolved into a bait topic than being one from the outset). I didn't see Michael_Booth, Kimbos_Egg or Crow0000 there, nor did I see them in other threads I was kicking around in at the time. But DP makes a topic in bad faith to shitpost about something - surprisingly not Boogie2988's weight, as he's fond of pointing out - and here's a bunch of previously dormant users taken aback, cut to the quick and truly, totally concerned about the issue at hand of a guy who rebuffed a trans woman because she was trans.

It was just like everyone knew the topic was gonna launch, and when DP posted it they all hopped in at the same time to concern troll.

I'm just gonna say, half of the most vocal CEmen in this thread haven't been online in even the other trollbait threads for like the past 12 hours. Then DP posts a thread that clearly isn't in good faith, and all of you start posting at once? Shit is silly.

It's his right if he has a preference, but I do think he could have handled it with more tact and the last line there where he "told her what he really thought about her" seems kind of trashy and hurtful for the sake of being trashy and hurtful. And the one place I see "trans people in sports" as a persistent talking point in CE, and it's rarely productive. Dude is giving off red flags.

If he prefers cisgender women, he prefers cisgender women. I still think he showed his true colours at the end there and comes off looking like a wankstain. Not that I expect a fed topic to go well, but that's how I feel.

saspa posted...

But holy crap I had no idea it was by the Ocean's 11 guy. Also more holy crap that director has huge range, from comedy like oceans to more serious like Erin brockovitch to Contagion.

Should have suspected after he had the characters in the movie call the heist "Ocean's 7-11" in-universe.

So the Ocean's movies exist in the universe of the movie... that is directed by the guy who's directing this?

They could have been referring to the original movie? Probably not but I mean

Yeah I didn't like it. Watched it with someone who I used to know.

That being said, I don't mind the idea of like a trailer trash heist movie. I actually wanted to see that one with Zack Galifianakis but I never got around to it.

And I didn't really get why they'd get one of the most prominent British actors of his day doing a drawn out, exaggerated southern drawl, it's distracting and silly. Haven't seen Knives Out or Glass Onion, but I'm glad it seems to be a better fit than in Logan Lucky. Mid movie at best, really didn't like it very much.

I'm just gonna say it again, the paradox of tolerance is that in order to be tolerant and for tolerance to work, you have to be intolerant of intolerance.

You don't dismantle fascism, and you don't bring down neo-nazism, through the power of love and harmony. You dismantle fascism by making it clear as day that those neo-nazi fucks need to hide at all costs, and the loudest way to signal to a person or a group that they aren't welcome is through broken bones and spilled blood. And you can see that through the political violence that the far right is already committing.

It's incredibly unsavoury to say that, but when you have fundamentalist Christian nationalists shooting up gay bars and libraries over drag queens, and racist fuckwits shooting up predominantly black churches and unarmed teenagers on the street, and armed insurrectionists trying to murder the democratically elected leader of the country, all coming to a fever pitch over the course of the past seven years - you're already seeing the beginning of what those neo-nazi fucks want for the people who don't fit in their perfect authoritarian worldview. We also now live in a world where an unqualified third party is legally required to inspect the genitals of sports-playing children upon request, and the reaction from the right towards a doctor who aborted a twelve year old's rape baby was to advocate for the jailing of the doctor.

That's not what America stands to lose. Those are concessions that America already lost to these bastards. The political violence has begun. And now those fuckfaces want more genuine, unabashed neo-nazi enforcers in the street with rifles, calling for an American where the blacks, mexicans and queers are dead, dying or in jail.

So no, kid gloves are coming off. They want people like you and me to die. If they're advocating for a race war, they need to contend with the possibility of being a casualty. Love and compromise has failed, and people need to start bleeding.

teep_ posted...

Golden tried to fix that with his SLink, but failed on account of the SLink being pretty obscure/"difficult" to access

Though if you want something cool, look up the accomplice ending

P5 spoilers wasn't that the motivation of ol' Yaldy too though?

Oh yeah I heard about the accomplice ending. It's pretty cool tbh

it's been years since I played P5, but with Yaldabaoth impersonating Igor, erasing the Phantom Thieves from existence and feeding on like human apathy in a way that initially makes it invincible, I just felt like there was a lot more pizazz and drama to it. That being said, though, P4 is a lower stakes game that they made on the verge of bankruptcy, so ehh.

Also as far as I'm concerned, Naoto is a trans man. That one's a total headcanon though, and I know the game steers headlong into "don't devalue your femininity, you don't have to crossdress to be taken seriously!". Like damn, in her social link after her dungeon, she outright goes "why couldn't I have been born a man...?", and Yukiko is the one who says "you dressed like a boy because you thought you wouldn't be taken seriously as a woman" in her dungeon. Using female pronouns in this post because canonically she is portrayed as a cisgender woman going forward, but Naoto has some fucking egg vibes.

I also think it'd be funny for Naoto to be Kanji's closet key multiple times. Like "oh fuck I think this boy is attractive I'm gay as fuck" to "oh fuck Naoto is actually a girl I guess I'm attracted to women" to "oh fuck Naoto is actually a guy after all and I'm super fucking attracted to him, I guess I am gay after all".

I will say though, Naoto was a better queer rugpull than Chihiro from Danganronpa.

Rise.

For some reason, I was under the impression that Rise was a controversial character with people arguing her merits and shortcomings. That's usually a sign that female character have done something fucked up in the native work, because people tend to paint complex women as irredeemable bitches, but I think I was just mistaken about her reputation. The way she presents herself - at least with the prior misconception I had - is kinda suspicious too, she moves back to Inaba and begins lovebombing the PC and gets involved in the whole thing fairly quickly.

The way I thought things were gonna work out is that Rise was behind the killings, and Adachi was like her enforcer. The killings are related to the media, and she's a media superstar - she killed the newscaster because she had some connection to the politician, she killed the schoolgirl because she was a witness and then she began getting Adachi to meddle with the heroes as they began to thwart her plans. She calls the shots, and Adachi follows her orders - then when shit starts to go south, she moves to Inaba to do it herself.

Though in hindsight, that's basically just one of the Persona 5 antagonists. Maybe I'm just biased.

I thought she was gonna drop the lovey-dovey act and go full yandere, and then her story would take a dark turn as she fell victim to serial abuse in the idol industry and vowed to get to the top and crush everyone who'd ever wronged her - internalizing the abuse she suffered and craving it as a source of power. To that end, she created her own dungeon, "kidnapped" herself and manipulated the narrative to make them think she had a change of heart. The Midnight Channel was born from a moment of sheer shock and despair, leading to a supernatural being latching onto her and manifesting her dark desires as the Midnight Channel to reflect her nature as a media personality, and then the rest of the narrative is more or less the same.

In that equation, I think Adachi would be a creep who was preying on her, only to get murdered by her as a pawn. Like when the abuse happened, Rise went to the police and Adachi was a fucking slimeball to her, and him mistreating her is what caused her to snap and manifest the Midnight Channel as a way of twisting everyone's darker impulses against them and killing them. But in that, she was able to string Adachi along and get him to do her dirty work. The damage he did was very real, but Rise manipulated his nature to get what she wanted and then killed him as a final act of revenge - his name was like #2 on her hitlist. It doesn't conflict with his characterisation too much either, he's already a misogynistic misanthrope.

I dunno, Adachi being the perpetrator just felt kind of flimsy and hollow. He's the goofy funny guy, then he's a serial killer who was Evil All Along. He's not familiar enough for the reveal to be a massive backstab, as likeable as he is, and the twist felt more repellant than engaging to me. It was kind of a wet fart of a reveal. I feel like Rise having a hidden serious side and calling the shots would be one more layer to the twist that could have heightened the conflict.

I also wasn't a big fan of the reveal that the god character did it for shits and giggles. idk, you have the grand scale and edginess of Persona 3 and the stylishness and insurmountable scale of Persona 5, and then the final boss of 4 is some hoity-toity dickhead who's all like "it was all a game to amuse me, *ojou laugh*". I dunno. The pacing and stakes just kinda began to fall apart after that incredible scene at the hospital with the TV.

I guess what I'm trying to communicate is that there was a desire there for a much more dark, substantial twist. I'd never played Persona 4 before this year, and I'd enjoyed the third and fifth games already. There was potential for things to get really fucked up and weird, and it never quite crossed that threshold - again, that hospital scene was probably the closest that the game came to crossing that threshold, it was really fucking good.

I think what I like the most about the game is that it doesn't undercut itself.

Like there's a lot of dopey jokes and shit, but instead of the characters being like "well, THAT happened I guess!" they follow through and bounce off each other. Like yeah, Lann will say something stupid and Reynn might brush him off, but the longer you play the more you realise that she's just as crazy as Lann is, and the way their conversations tend to go is more of a "yes, and" flow rather than trying to lampshade the silliness.

The game is confident in itself, and the vibes are impeccable. It's such a swell little game.

For people who don't know, World of Final Fantasy is my favorite RPG on the Switch.

It has the perfect length, it's a solid 40 hours including postgame content. It looks and plays fantastic - I imagine the other versions look better, but the fidelity that the Switch port maintains is truly phenomenal. I love how goofy it is, and I love the Lilliputian Final Fantasy cast - but given that the game was headed by the same guy who did Type 0, the game takes some surprisingly dark turns.

I played it to completion once, and I really fucking enjoyed it. I haven't touched it since because I even beat the endgame dungeons, with a Xenogears boss fight at the end of the last one.

I've been thinking about it lately, so I'm going back to it. Started a New Game+ and I'm going to try the Nightmare difficulty.

Nomura-ass character designs lmao. I'm looking forward to Princess Goblin the most.

Richard Spencer was getting interviewed in nationally syndicated magazines and on the news, an avowed neo-nazi who coined "the alt-right" as a term and led to its prominence. Dude just straight-up rebranded fascism and got away with it.

One dude punched him in the face.

It was traumatic and humiliating, and he shut the fuck up.

Political violence like that is a slippery slope, and you could argue all day that it's the same thing as - say - an authoritarian beating up a peaceful protestor to intimidate them and squash their cause. But when you have someone whose goal is to strip human rights, promote violence and racial warfare and undercut the democratic process of their home country out of what can only be seen as blind, pointless hate for the sake of hate and/or abject greed, that's a line that might have to get crossed.

There's a concept called "the paradox of tolerance", in which you can't tolerate intolerance because it inevitably grows and undercuts tolerance. In order for tolerance to work, you have to be intolerant towards intolerance itself - hence the paradox. That's how I feel about fascism and the rise of neo-nazism in western politics - there is decorum and due process and all that shit, but when that is undermined by radical hate groups, you fucking fight back tooth and claw. You leave those fucks as a bloody smear in the asphalt. You don't let them "go low" while you have all the moral satisfaction of taking the high road, you stoop and you wipe the fuckers out. Because that's exactly what they're trying to do to you.

Neo-nazis and fascists want to go out and promote cronyism, violence and war. When you're advocating for a race war, don't be surprised when you become a casualty. Pray it never comes to violence, but if it does - and with dickheads like the alt-right, it does - fight them to the last fucking man.

StealThisSheen posted...

...X and 11 weren't reboots of any kind. They were sequels. What?

X was a soft reboot where they do a big time skip and focus on a new cast in the same setting, like how the Star Wars sequel trilogy was a soft reboot.

I'll admit that my reasoning for 11 is nebulous, but the entire plot builds up to Liu Kang rebooting the universe. I guess it's more accurate to say that MK11 ends up rebooting everything, rather than the game itself being a reboot. I still think recalling old characters like Liu Kang and Kitana to continue those storylines, instead of working with their current revenant forms, is kind of like rebooting those characters - but ehh.

Though there is the assertion that Kronika reset the timeline multiple times offscreen, which would mean there's like eight different timelines between MKX and 11. But that's pedantic and stupid so I'm not going to talk about it.

Mortal Kombat 9: Shao Kahn has Raiden dead to rights during Armageddon, and Raiden realises how they should have defeated him back in the day. He sends a psychic projection back to the Raiden of the first Mortal Kombat game, influencing history and rewriting the timeline. MK9 was a hard reboot that explicitly covered prior games in the series as a way of giving the franchise a fresh start.

Mortal Kombat X: with the rise of Shinnok, the realms devolve into all-out war. A new generation emerges during a 25 year timeskip. This one was a soft reboot, focusing on the kids of several longtime characters and adding a lot of new elements like Kotal Kahn's rule of Outworld, Mileena's deposal and subsequent rebellion and everything about D'Vorah which is probably the most emblematic aspect of the Netherrealm Games era of the franchise.

Mortal Kombat 11: Kronika, the keeper of time, is working to create a timeline without Raiden. To do this, she uses her position to bring past characters to the present day - 28 years after the original tournaments - to do battle and establish her new timeline. The plot is literally just dragging past versions of the characters into the future, partially to retread old ground like Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade.

It's still an installment in the broader franchise, but the game exists as a reboot jumping off point - and as the advertising for the next MK game shows, this game succeeds. It's already kind of rebooty with the time travel, but the end of the game literally reboots the entire timeline. And now Mortal Kombat 1 is set in that new timeline, making it the fourth Mortal Kombat reboot in twelve years.

Basically, MK9 and X reboot the franchise at the start and 11 has a plot that relies heavily on playing with past versions of the characters, retconning them and changing them, before rebooting the entire franchise at the end. All three games are reboots, and MK1 is a fourth reboot.

Back in 2017 I was on a train getting a sandwich, and I made conversation with a man in double denim. I offered him half of my overpriced sandwich just to be nice. He was interesting.

If anyone was close to being a serial killer, it was that guy. Double denim in the middle of the night on a train? idk it was just a weird liminal space sort of thing y'know.

Euripides nuts lmao gottem

Karaoke isn't on. I'm still at the bar chilling.

He made music that he wanted people to relax to. Rest in peace, you lazy beach bum

It depends. I would report a coworker if they were doing a bad job and like overriding other people's authority in order to do a bad job, which I did do once because a dude was just straight-up delusional and would come to a conclusion by himself and just decide that whatever he thought was the truth. Dude almost flipped the breakers because he didn't think we needed to do the washers a certain wa--

if you spotted them in public when they are on a sick leave

What the fuck, no. I'm not a NARC

Quicksilver posted...

Gonna knock a few Pina Coladas back in his honor.

I was in bed after drinking all morning, as Jimmy Buffett fans are wont to do. I'm gonna get up, finish this half bottle of bourbon and hammer out Margaritaville at karaoke next door.

Aww fuck. Margaritaville was a karaoke staple. Dude just liked making stupid-ass songs about being white and trashy on the beach, it was goofy and I liked it.

He managed to leverage his stupid novelty vacation songs into a minor restaurant empire, there's a fucking Margaritaville casino and a couple of hotels. Dude did extremely well for himself, and I imagine he lived the last years of his life in comfort and peace.

This isn't a David Bowie event for me. That was the first celebrity death to really have personal stakes. But I'm certainly upset that the OG beach bum has keeled over after so long. Dude is the patron saint of Bermuda shirts and sandals, either in the heavy heat of a hot summer day or the frostiest peaks of winter. I'm sad that Jimmy Buffett is dead, and I hope if nothing else that his suffering was minimised.

Dude made a video a couple months ago about eating at every Margaritaville ind the country. It's pretty funny, check it out:

https://youtu.be/Bsb9T1g5nlE?si=g31FnGpdHz7B1CR_

I went up to where this MILF works, they don't cool their beer right so it's disgusting. She was having out but she doesn't work there any more. The slot machine I wanted to use was out of order and the beer I got was fucking foul - I legit had to spit like three or four times as I walked up the street so I wouldn't puke. I don't like spitting but I fucking had to. Shit was fucked. About to get some McDonalds to clear the palate, if that tells you how bad that beer was.

I don't know what the movie is called, but it's a woman in a Geisha mask who cuts everyone she meets with broken glass. There's a scene where she puts a gas fire out, a guy goes to relight the furnace and when he turns around she cuts him up. I saw it as a kid and I never learned want it was called

Questionmarktarius posted...

How did an Australian become me, fifty pounds and a haircut ago?

Get into the drinking topics.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/400-current-events/80487963

no U

im in the discord

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/6/2/AAbh80AAEzdi.jpg

Questionmarktarius posted...

You get drunk twice, so if you've stopped drinking, pound water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde

Also, every goddamn time I've got a tooth drilled, pulled, or root-canalled, it's always this same fucking song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaqoQr-aCtQ

Woof, at least it's not Superstar. I'm sick of that song.

If I had a dentist song, I'd want it to be Goodbye to Love. It's very bittersweet and the harmonies fucking rip. So I've made my mind up, I must live my life alone

And now that I've brushed my teeth, I'm ready to hit the town. Wish me luck, I feel less wonky but I probably need it.

I feel like the girl from this music video when she first gets the power, and she's running around to suck stuff up:

https://youtu.be/ntbNRUycbD4?si=wYKb41f7Hq-2C5Wb

I'm glad I laid down for ten minutes. I feel a lot better already.

I'm gonna see a friend at the back, maybe have one or two beers, and then I'll come home and drink this other half of a bottle of bourbon.

I would kill myself before I paid a monthly subscription for water.

Not counting utility costs ofc.

when I was gay, I thought I was in the third grade

"hey what are you doing in my cell" - Donald Trump

Because you touch yourself at night

I was saying relative to my ability to hover over I'm saying a d try to correct it. As vigilant as I am, I still get very stupid.

But yeah, the point of getting this drunk is to fuck around and try to have the most fun.

Questionmarktarius posted...

If you can still type without (or correcting) terrible misspelling, you're still good to go.

I'll take that as a challenge!

for real though, I'm just gonna lay in bed for a bit and try to sober up a little. I'm kind of a grammar nazi at the best of times, as outdated as the nomenclature is, so I'm always alert to my spelling.

I still say incredibly stupid, nonsensical things when I'm drunk, I just try to hold onto my grammar for the longest. Basically I'm like that part in the Rocky Horror Picture Show where Dr. Scott is like "I have to be strong, and try to hold on... otherwise, my mind may well snap, and my life will be lived... for the THRIIIIILLLLLLSSS"

though the fact that I could recall and type all that does make me feel more capable than before.

I hit that point of Too Drunk. It took every ounce of strength to stop myself from falling asleep on my bathroom floor. Gonna have a shower and get some food..

Probably not gonna remember this tomorrow.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/3/1/AAbh80AAEzdD.jpg

There's a perfect transition between I Won't Last A Day Without You into (They Long To Be) Close to You. Second last track of the album, great choice