Lurker > YoBlazer

Mbappe is amazing, but it feels like some of that "personal narrative" or drama isn't there for him when he already helped lead his team to a WC at age 19. Seems crazy to say but it's like he accomplished too much too early.

What's next for Messi? I heard his contract with PSG ends somewhat soon. Has he given any indication whether he's retiring soon?

Oh I've watched all the big matches on Telemundo. I speak like five words of Spanish - doesn't matter when the passion radiates through the commentary like that.

I can't wait to watch the final 30 and PKs, my god

All the airs been taken from Argentina. I think this one's close to over

4-2 France incoming

France's first shot was 70 mins in. Unreal.

That second goal is one of the prettiest I've seen in the cup

The football gods want this for Messi

I wonder if winning this cup will bring on a resurgence of sort for Messi. All that pressure gone and he can just have fun for the last bit of his career.

Guess the Tuesday mid-workday timing of this match is killing some of the conversation. Even my family group chat that's been following the cup and goes crazy for Messi is silent.

Yeah he's obnoxious, but I've seen the wind slam these carts into parked cars with a lot of force. Whenever I remember that I tend to feel that the "I'm done shopping and it's not my problem" people are worse.

All three of the countries I rooted for are in the semis, feeling spoiled af

Rooting for England but I have no right to ask for any more.

Morocco makes all their limited touches count. As a casual fan, I find them so exciting to watch.

Based on their average height I assume the Dutch keeper is about 12 feet tall?

Not watching this

Croatia won?! I haven't looked up any stats but it's gotta be rare to win two PKs in a row.

Italy's run in 1994 and Baggio's magnificent play (inexorably capped with his infamous PK miss) is one of my earliest and strongest sports memories.

Pretty sure I'll always root against Brazil after that.

12/19

Missing all the handhelds aside from Link's Awakening and A Link Between Worlds. Beaten all the console entries.

About 19-20 weeks, assuming I'm lucky enough to stay fulltime

(University lecturer ftw)

Mbappe man

It's one of my favorite Kubrick films, perhaps second behind 2001. It's not particularly gripping, but as someone who's struggled with monogamy and has felt the compulsion to seek out "taboo" sex, I found it surprisingly relatable.

Is Neymar out for the whole cup?

Idc if it sounds creepy but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that's a fringe benefit of working in a university

shane15 posted...

Have Brazil ever lost to a lesser nation at a World Cup? The only time they've ever been humiliated was that 7-1 to Germany.

I'm going back a few decades, and the only "lesser" nation end their run (so to speak) was Poland in 1974, but that was for a third-place consolation game anyway. All of their other losses since then have been to other elites.

I was big into Nintendo Power and EGM in the late 90s/early 00s. Ninty bias kept me generally preferring NP, but I recognized EGM as the more rebellious mag because of its looser standards on sex and language. Some specific recollections:

- Super Mario 64 bring crowned "greatest game ever" in NP's issue 100
- Tetris being given the same honor in EGM's issue 100
- A 97 or 98 EGM article where one of their editors spent 24 straight hours online. The internet seemed like the wildest fucken place.
- EGM having the guts to declare a "winner" when the GameCube and Xbox launched at the same time. They picked Xbox and I was offended lol

It probably would have been better received had it not quickly followed GotY RE2. It was so disappointing as a direct comparison.

M/F ratio in the stands will be like 100/1 in Qatar.

I'm name-dropped in the Table of Contents...

*checks a big one off the Life Bucket List*

Hope Biden reacts to this by extending the loan repayment pause.

My brother is a public employee and is thus eligible for complete (and tax-free) student loan forgiveness after ten years of employment. All of this paused loan time still counts toward those ten years for public employees. A pause extension is literally better than partial debt relief for most people in that camp. >_>

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Found an upload of his story from this year's DC Pride.

https://why-i-love-comics.tumblr.com/post/686429424926736384/dc-pride-1-finding-batman-2022-written-by

...wow

Trump's on the warpath and DeSantis has only usurped him as "the guy" for like two days. He's going to keep this up for two years lol.

Undertale won because fans from outside communities (primarily Tumblr) rallied for it, and those rallies caught traction and grew. In its first round match, it was losing handily to Mass Effect 3 - by a margin that would have simply been impossible to overcome without external rallies. It overcame ME3 in the waning hours of that match and grew in strength in every subsequent one... until it was strong enough to easily beat Ocarina and win the contest.

Undertale's fans didn't cheat. They didn't go anything shady or suspicious (not by my recollection, anyway) - rallying is allowed under our contest rules, and has been encouraged outright by SBAllen in the past. The diehard Undertale supporters won for their game fairly. Still, many contest enthusiasts on this site felt Undertale's win "cheapened" the contest, as we generally weren't big fans of external rallies artificially super-boosting the strength of normally weaker games/characters.

Little more contest history (I can't help it - I created my first account in 2002 for the first ever Character Battle, and I've been one of their most ardent fans ever since):

There have been only three "rallied" or "joke" winners in contest history - winners that never would have materialized if only the everyday GameFAQs community had been voting: L-Block in 2007, Draven in 2013, and Undertale in 2015. Unlike the latter two, L-Block's win was largely celebrated by the hardcore contest fans, as it was gaining power every round (the joke was growing before our eyes), not a part of any invading community like League of Legends, and pretty much impossible to hate (how can you hate a fuckin Tetris block).

Of all the different types of contests, Character Battles are/were the most popular by far. There have been ten Character Battles. Link has won seven, and L-Block, Drave, and Cloud each won one apiece. In fact, Cloud is the only non-joke character to ever beat Link in a contest match, managing to do it in 2003 during his lone contest win.

There has been a long-running misconception/joke that "FFVII wins everything." In fact, Link and the LoZ series have dominated contests far more than anything else.

DarkFists posted...

Also...did we have a character battle this year? I honestly forget...

We haven't had a contest period since 2020 (Game of the Decade 2, which BotW won against Witcher 3 in the final). The last Character Battle the site had was in 2018, in which... wait for it... Link beat Cloud in the final.

GameFAQs Contests have gotten WAY less frequent over the past several years, and the "Draven contest" back in 2013 was the clear catalyst. It was a shitshow, and SBAllen lost his passion for running these things after dealing with the LoL community invasion of the site and GameFAQs user's backlash.

They may have taken place several years ago, but Draven's win in 2013 and Undertale's in 2015 began the slow death of contests here (since they were both the products of rallies/invasions from outside communities, and this naturally resulted in arguments on GameFAQs that SBAllen had to deal with). We've barely had any contests since then, and the most recent one in 2020 may have been the last one of all (no new contests have been even hinted at since then).

Trump going all-in against DeSantis - this is the best thing I've read all week.

https://twitter.com/CurtisHouck/status/1590842213004869632

Duke it out, shitheads.

We've got a couple friends coming over, and it was collectively decided to get the cheapest fast food still available here. I made the order (two standard pepperonis) on the app and drove over.

Only two employees were there, and they were clearly backed up. I got my order about 15 minutes late, and I actually did check open the boxes up in my car. I laughed and decided I'd do the job myself with kitchen shears (I didn't wanna go back in there and demand they slice up my pies, not when they were that busy). Not even annoyed, since those two employees were holding down the fort and doing their best at a type of job I can say I'm lucky I've never had to work.

Props to the people who've found the opportunity/leverage to quit shitty jobs like this, but also props to the ones who've stuck around to serve lazy fucks like me.

I think I've had a fast food burger once or twice since the pandemic began - it's just too difficult for me to justify the new costs.

If anything, I'm thankful Little Caesars has only jacked up the price of their $5 pepperoni to $6.

That was last year, right? It's the only time I heard plagiarism brought up with AVGN/Cinemassacre, but a few of the posts in this topic made it seem as if it was an everyday accusation with AVGN's work.

He's obviously way past his prime, but I don't blame him for keeping up with what is probably the least soul-crushing way for him to make a living.

Xenoblade
KotOR
Chrono Trigger
Bloodborne

Guy was probably a well behaved suck-up on the set of Space Jam because MJ and Bird would have torn him a new asshole after his first "joke"

Nanis23 posted...

But I just want to say Hideki Kamiya sounds like a ass in his Twitter

That's been his shtick for years. I'll admit I found it funny at first because I wanted to cheer the "passionate game auteur with the nfg attitude." But after 10-15 years of acting like a petulant asshole... he just comes across like a petulant asshole.

As for this specific story, I'm not excusing Platinum or Nintendo at all, but I read another take that commented on the rarity of actual firing/dismissal in Japanese culture, and that a company is more likely to lowball a contractor/employee if they want to be rid of them. Maybe this was their tactic to severe ties with the original VA, because Jennifer Hale is almost certainly one of the biggest names in the business and wouldn't have accepted a lowball offer herself.

It still looks like an exceptionally douchey and unprofessional movie, but I doubt the companies' underlying intent was about money.

Zelda

Doc Brown

How are you liking it? IMO it had some of the highest highs but lowest lows of the franchise.

Distinguishing between mental and physical health but sticking to y/n answers apart from that