brucoe

Lately, I've been playing Paleon, which is in early access (I usually don't play early access games). It's kind of a watered down version of Rimworld, which I liked but just could never get into because it always seemed to be missing something that I could never put my finger on). It's basically a resource gathering type of game that focuses on using experience to increase technology. It's kind of lacking in the later stages of the game (meaning, I suspect that it's not completely finished yet, or it hasn't given any thought to what happens after you develop gunfire). It's an interesting time-waster though.

The problem with handling anything nefarious that Facebook is doing is that it is extremely technical to the people who decide whether or not to regulate such things. We're basically relying on people whose experience is in very easy to understand entities like gasoline and media companies to determine what controls need to happen on an industry that is basically creating the industry they're supposed to monitor. We saw this during hearings where senators asked Zuckerberg basic questions about the Internet that their ten year old kids already could answer, yet they felt no shame in asking extremely stupid questions. This is why I don't think we're going to end up in a better situation when we're done with all this. Either they're going to do nothing (because they don't know what to do or even understand the industry they're trying to maintain) or they're going to do drastic things that will hurt all types of innovation because they see 2030 solutions in the eyes of a 1950 mentality.

Elder Scrolls 6 will release to coincide with Greta Thunberg's announcement as the next Victoria's Secret induction as the next angel.

I love the Foundation stories and really hope they do something good with it. And I can see a successful same cast series working, especially if they did it like the season process of American Horror Story, where you keep switching the main cast with the new characters of each season. But I kind of doubt that's what they're going to do. I do regret they're not sounding like they're going to be using a lot of the Mule. He was my favorite character within that universe.

I'm still amazed at how difficult it it to obtain a new console this generation. I know scalpers are out of control, but I can't believe they're controlling the entire market, because I know a lot of people are still getting these things, but the difficulty is absurd for a type of good.

That was the hardest thing for me. But since being back to physical work (actually being there) for over 3 weeks now, it's not really as bad as I thought it would be. It was sure nice walking around all day in sweats, but honestly, I was going stir crazy being at home.

A dumb joke figuring that with so many members Sammy should have been in there somewhere.

The only reason I have a Facebook account is because my writer's page is linked through it, and my fan page is grandfathered through them with the sign-up that was started years ago. I basically don't go on the site more than once every few weeks, just to clear out the cobwebs of the endless notifications.

I didn't see where Sammy Hagar showed up on that list....

I think we would have been a lot safer of a country if we didn't have so many cops with guns in the past. I know that sounds blasphemous now because cops are constantly needing those guns, but a huge part of me believes it's a lot like the superhero paradigm where more superheroes on the scene seem to ignite a need for more supervillains I think the gun problem is very similar in the real world. You look at places that don't have a lot of guns available to cops (but only available when they are responding to something that indicates guns will be necessary) and you don't end up in situations where the solution to a simple altercation is to kill the other person with a gun. Add to that the fact that we integrated policing with indirect racism, and we're where we are today. And I don't honestly believe there's an easy way back. The problem we have is that we hit a point where we don't have an alternative path back. There are massive numbers of guns in the US today, and that's never going to change. We can point at some place like England and say we want to be more like them (or whatever place) but we're never going to be that way again. We built this country on guns, racism and a bunch of stand your ground mentalities where we actually believe that standing up to bullies with superior firepower is always the appropriate response. Of course, we're not going to ever reach a peaceful compromise in that environment. It's also why our country is never going to be one where the two opposing sides start to work together. We built an entire infrastructure on believing that we're always in struggle with some evil other side. Compromise is seen as weakness, so we've let that boat sail a long time ago. The few people who still believe in working together are old, retiring and dying off. The future is bleak and pretty much on autopilot now. The problem with Chauvin is that he's very much a symptom of the problem, but we're treating him as an anomaly rather than a problem we need to solve. So they'll put him in jail and throw away the key, but we're not going to fix racism, anger and hatred in this country any time soon because it's a product of our society, not some strange phenomenon. I used to present ideas on how to fix our circumstances, but over the years I've come to the conclusion that no one really wants to fix anything. They want to condemn and point fingers at things they see are wrong. And then punish instead of trying to fix it, so instead of actually fixing things (like going after the root causes of violence or hatred), our solutions are to cancel or complain about being canceled (depending upon which side you end up on). I could go into much more detail but I'm afraid no one would listen anyway if I couldn't limit it to two minutes worth of innovative dance routines in a Tik Tok video.

I've honestly had students in college tell me something batshit crazy and then highlight it with "well, that's just my opinion, so perhaps we should agree to disagree". This has been on factual information that I can then give them numerous academic and national data that points to the complete opposite, and they just stare at me like I spoke in Korean before going back to batshit craziness. I completely understand why a lot of professors go into autopilot for the last twenty years of their careers and avoid any communication that isn't directly from the textbook because so many nutcases have filtered into their classes over the years.

Paragon City from City of Heroes.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that there are a large number of people who worked in intelligence (and other agencies) who actually investigated these type of phenomenon while doing their regular duties (I can't tell you how many times I served as the counterintelligence officer on duty in a foreign country when I got called on an "unexplained" call, and I'm sure there are hundreds to thousands of similar stories of others who served in some capacity. The problem is that due to classification processes, specifics can never be discussed, so the only evidence is buried under mounds of red tape, and all that's ever going to be released to the public is mundane, out of context types of cases that even the people involved are still not allowed to comment on. That's a problem that's always existed because of our tendency to overclassify anything. What would satisfy me, and probably everyone else that's seeking information, is for a blanket declassification of any type of UFO data so that those who actually investigated (or viewed) anything involving such phenomena, are free to discuss it so that the information actually gets into public discourse. But that's never going to happen because our counterintelligence process is to be paranoid about anything, even if it involves classifying an encyclopedia that's sold at Barnes & Noble (spoiler alert: It's been done a bunch of times, including charges brought against people who "revealed" the information available in said encyclopedia).

She's basically the epitome of lowest common denominator of ASMR on Twitch, Youtube who basically uses all of these services to promote her OnlyFans page. She's a horrible, horrible person who uses people because she was one of the early adopters of figuring out how to turn simps into endless cash streams.

I love how the people who panic over critical race theory the most are the same people who couldn't sit down with you and actually tell you what it is they're talking about without just repeating what some pundit has said, even though he or she didn't know what it was either.

For those that don't know, often ASMR is used for people who have trouble sleeping. It can create a sense of tranquility, enough to where someone who has trouble focusing or has a brain that's on warp speed over other issues, is able to relax enough to finally fall asleep. For some people, it works really well, and they use it all the time just to get to sleep or relax. For others, it has zero effect whatsoever, so they usually move on to find other ways to get what they need. The problem with ASMR is the fact that young women found it was an easy way to make money (much as young women discovered OnlyFans and figured that all of their financial problems were finally solved, without realizing the horrible implications that would end up following them for the rest of their lives, making it impossible for them to ever achieve a stable job without being fired for having done porn in the past). So, a lot of these young women who started gaining a following doing ASMR started doing what happens whenever a woman pursues an Instagram mentality (living their lives to gain attention and likes): They start creating more and more edgy types of content until they end up basically creating softcore porn instead of videos that help people relax. It basically becomes a pursuit for a bottom that never ends as they make more and more Youtube and Twitch money chasing validation, clicks and higher revenue shares. I've actually been following this demographic for some time now in an academic study, and there's a certain threshold where a young woman literally travels a path that begins with innocent ASMR content, moves to edgy ASMR content, begins doing roleplay ASMR content, and then either just goes off the deep end or ends up launching a related OnlyFans/Patreon page where her content won't get deleted from Youtube or Twitch. And each one of them seems to have this bunker mentality that she's the first one to discover this cash cow until she's completely destroyed her chances at ever becoming a productive member of society. Others manage to maintain innocent ASMR streams for their entire careers, and strangely enough, end up doing better than those that went down the rabbit hole of future porn careers. It's really a phenomenal process to watch, and I've tracked about twenty "artists" in the last five years just to watch their trajectories, and it's almost scientific in how I can predict exactly where one of these artists is going to be five years from now, based on how this industry causes them to do exactly what every one of them has done before them.

Part of me is suspecting that she's not really a Loki at all or more of a version of the Enchantress (moving closer to Hela or even Loki's mom). She takes a lot of effort to point out that she doesn't like being called Loki by Loki himself. Either way, I think they're setting up something a lot deeper than it just being a female version of Loki. But they're also really good at throwing out curveballs that still manage to cross the plate as they should have been expected. Did that a few times with Wandavision.

I heard this story on the radio this morning, and my first thought was that this was something you usually heard of happening in some South American or Central American country, not the US. And then the reporters started talking about how the review of this building was just under review this year, which suggested there's probably a lot more to this story than just what we caught on the surface. It's sad that anyone died and that anyone was injured, and hopefully the aftermath doesn't get any worse for those affected.

Oh, pleez. You know Hunter Biden was involved somehow.

I tend to keep my temperature in my apartment at about 80 every day, just because I hate anything cold. My girlfriend (you know, the imaginary one from Canada) literally turns my house temperature down to about 65 whenever she comes over, and I sometimes think she stays an extra night or two just because she knows how much it drives me nuts. I live in South Texas, so it gets really hot here, but what's bizarre is that I'll step outside, and it's so much hotter out there, so that keeping my place at 80 still feels like it's way cooler than the natural outdoors.

I fall into a really weird rut whenever it comes to gaming. I'm very specific in the kinds of games I like, but those change drastically on me over periods of months. I tend to like huge world building types of games, and will play them for thousands of hours, and then just grow bored with them and look for something else JUST LIKE IT. Yeah, the logic there throws me off every time as well. Recently, I started in on an older game, Rimworld, and after getting past the initial problems (like I was constantly being completely murdered by wild animals in EVERY play through after doing just fine, and nothing would stop this from happening). Then I moved onto mods that managed to make it so that I could become overpowered so that those problems didn't occur, but then something else would diminish the experience, because no mod or series of mods could compensate for the fact that every mod seemed to build some kind of crappy experience to compensate for the good parts of the mod. Basically, after hours and hours of trying to get that game going, I just stopped playing and am now looking for something similar, but not the exact same thing. That stupid problem again. So, I'm constantly looking for something super great, but then constantly stuck because no matter what you do, it appears that every game out there comes installed with some fatal flaw that you often don't discover until many hours into the experience. It's almost like my gaming experiences have become one huge pursuit for what is wrong with a game, as if that's the goal of the game in each new game I get into. I'm torn between whether this is a fatal flaw in me, or a fatal flaw in the fact that I'm starting to believe that laziness is allowing developers to create games that should have been developed better. It kind of leaves one in a sense that the next best game is always around the next corner, but it's just not done yet.

Well, that's good to know.

I'm a little further into the story, but I keep waiting for the open world part of it to open up. Seems very much on rails right now.

Okay, I completely reinstalled and now it is playing through. Looks like I might be able to keep playing this.

I'm playing on PC. And I totally agree on the visuals, and I can't tell you how much I wanted to play this when I finally bit the bullet and purchased it. I've checked through forums, but so far I've never seen anyone else with the same problem. It was so bizarre because the first guy went down quickly and then everyone after that took no damage. No matter what I did, it would end up cutting to the "you're dead" screen after a certain amount of time of them constantly shooting back.