Kal-El814

1 hour ago, Mercury33 said:

This show just really emphasizes how cookie cutter and empty of any real stakes or emotion the MCU films are. 

I mean anyone that died is very obviously going to come back so… whatever.

9 hours ago, stepee said:

Actually hairless cats still cause allergies because the real culprit is the dander 

dander these nuts in your mouth

2 minutes ago, legend said:

Nice. I can reliably get to Chronos but so far he keeps kicking my ass. Got to second phase at least but he's rough.

One of the keepsakes lets you do 20% extra damage to the last enemy that killed you, which turned out to be really helpful! That's at level 1 as well, I assume you can buff it to 25% or something.

Had one of those runs that started off kinda lousy; was looking to try some ranged nonsense but the boons I got kept blessing close combat. Figured I'd turn it into a farming run, then popped a duo boon that gave me my close combat benefits regardless of range. Proceeded to kick the everliving shit out of everything including Chronos. What a game.

Game is already 17% off on GMG lel.

3 hours ago, stepee said:

Imagine having the ability to just shut up and coast into the sunset with a lifetime of free money and adulation as America’s mayor tm and being such a horrible person you can’t help but sabotage yourself and ending up like this

HMMMM

On 9/26/2019 at 7:31 PM, Kal-El814 said:

Imagine being America's mayor after 9/11. I bet it's like sitting at a blackjack table with a 20 while the dealer is showing an 8. Imagine deciding to hit to get that ace. Giuliani has been doing that for eighteen fucking years.

I was watching some clip of two young dudes (who I believe are prominent podcasters or some shit) talking to Hasan Piker about taxes. They said they moved to Nevada for tax reasons and they'd feel disincentivized to work if the highest marginal tax rate was... something. 40% - 60%, I can't remember the number they used. I was irritated at first but then the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got.

One, to hit the highest income tax bracket, you're rich. Complaining that the government is taking 37% of your income over $609K (assuming they're single) is fucking bananas. Crank that shit up to like 75% at the highest level, eat my ass. Listening to a couple young men whine about how they can't run up the score after the game has been technically but not finally won made my soul leave my body.

Two, I think that says more about them than it does about "people." The highest marginal tax rate in the USA used to be much higher in the past when it was easier to break into the middle class, so the notion that higher taxes would disincentivize people from working in a broad sense seems to be counter to history.

Lastly, even if we assume that is true, that people would be financially disincentivized to work... I don't know that's a bad thing? I don't know that anyone's working a job where they're making that much money that them, "doing more work," is what's going to improve their output? I think Americans in general have an unhealthy relationship with working a lot or working hard. I've seen so many younger people that I've tried to coach into "working less." Not that they should work more poorly of course, but I'd see people log into work super early so they could check on defects that they had no ability to triage, no training to resolve, at times where nobody else would be online to assist even if something came up. When I asked "why" for things like that, the inevitable answer 100% of the time was that they wanted to show that they were working hard. It drove me nuts that the appearance of working hard has been so drilled into people that performative work is seen as the thing to do or the way to get ahead. And it drove me nuts that so often it would work.

Anyway I have no idea why I typed all that. I'd say if you're comfortable and your "coasting" isn't harming anyone, go for it.

Yeah I think Mirage reviewed favorably and sold well. Its origins (homina homina homina) as a Valhalla expansion and a reduced scope from the last 3 titles meant that it wasn’t aiming as high as those previous games but I have to imagine it hit whatever target Ubisoft was trying to hit with it.

I can appreciate it not being someone’s cup of tea but it being a “miss” is less charitable than it deserves.

I thought the ending was a little clunky and suffered from them trying to cram so much into the previous episodes. There just wasn’t enough time to have the landing really stick and it showed. Not bad really, just the least good episode of what was otherwise a great season. 

There is no force in the universe powerful enough to compel me to watch this. Norrin Radd would have a stroke attempting to make me. 

39 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Especially when the pre-rendered trailers don't look that much better than games we've seen in real time.

 

Just show us the game you cowards.

It's especially weird because... it's fucking Assassin's Creed, what are we even doing here. If it was a brand new series they wanted to hype I could kinda get wanting to build hype / mystique for a gameplay reveal.

Back when the original Ass Creed launched in 2007, if you told me that in 2024 we'd still be getting prerendered hype trailers, I wouldn't have believed you.

36 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

By impactful do you mean cultural impact? I agree its cultural impact might be greater but not in a good way I think.

To be clear by prequels I mean TPM specifically, I think Clones is awful and Sith is very bad

8 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

Even if the Darth Maul duel outdoes anything in the Hobbit movies, few things in the Hobbit movies are as bad as most of the rest of the prequel scenes are, so I think Hobbit comes out ahead in the end, one scene or not when all added up. I should say this applies to the extended editions for me, which are far less choppy and sit with scenes longer than the theatrical editions.

 

As for Bilbo, that was casting I think many felt was spot on, but perhaps his performance is too modern? Sometimes I get that vibe but I thought he was a great Bilbo myself.

Yeah I dunno that I've seen The Hobbit movies since they came out for purchase on streaming; I should probably give them another go.

And I appreciate my take on Bilbo is an outlier. Maybe it's the modern thing? Maybe it's cross contamination from me just not loving the movies? Maybe I think he's a bit "higher energy" than I always expected Bilbo to be? I can't put my finger on why.

Again and for the umpteenth time, selling raw milk should be straight up federally banned. No health benefits compared to pasteurized milk, significantly higher risk compared to pasteurized milk, there is no fucking upside to this being a product that humans can buy and consume.

11 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

 

Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed season 1 a lot. Thought it would be terrible but they were able to write a real story out of a bunch of world building. Not a perfect season but some people's vitriol online towards it is unwarranted.

 

But The Hobbit movie trilogy being Star Wars prequels level bad will always be a crazy take to me. The Star Wars prequels have terrible camera work (walking and talking, sitting and talking, a two shot back and forth of faces for most of all three movies), terrible acting, dialogue, etc. The Hobbit movie trilogy has flaws but they are genuinely wonderfully acted, the filmmaking is a million times better than most of the Star Wars prequel scenes (save for two lightsaber fights), there's at least heart and soul in parts (love when the dwarves sing in the first movie), etc. There's just no comparison.

 

I think people should look at it less like an adaptation of The Hobbit alone and look at it more like: "The Hobbit, and also a bunch of fun connective tissue fan service scenes we'll probably never have gotten to see otherwise in live-action".

I'd need to think if I like any of The Hobbit movies are as "good" as I've come to think The Phantom Menace is.  They're all very flawed with some really over the top stupidity, but they have their moments. I don't think anything in any of The Hobbit movies is as good as the saber duel in Phantom Menace, but It's been a while since I've watched them.

Aside from quality, I can just never buy Martin Freeman as Bilbo. I don't know why. He's a good actor, he does very well in these movies. And I generally don't have an issue when a film portrayal is different than how I imagined the literary character; I get why Gimli is the way he is in the LotR trilogy and I can get into it even if it's a not especially faithful take on the character. But for whatever reason I always see Martin Freeman doing a Bilbo LARP and not just... Bilbo. 

21 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Guy on the far right needs to up his collar game! 

Guy on the left is making the classic “I’m in shape so I must wear a suit coat I’m bursting out of or less I’ll look fat or something” mistake. 

47 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

I started the server prior to Ashlands… so I guess I am wondering if the Ashlands will be in the server? Does that make sense?

IIRC the placeholder for the Ashlands has been there for a long time. But if you went to and explored the part of the world that the Ashlands would be in before this update, the update won't unexplore or overwrite what you've already seen.

On a generally unused world of mine that existed before this update I enabled dev commands and flew there just to see if the Ashlands would exist in my world, and it did.

I dunno how spoiler sensitive you are, but the Ashlands will be located...

So if you haven't gone there, you should generally be okay. If you already explored all of that area, the game's not going to undo what you've already seen.

Got a buddy who's sitting on a bunch of Best Buy credit and he's looking for a prebuilt PC and monitor. Budget is around $1500 for the lot. No interest in trying to build his own and since he's got the credit at BB that's where he's gotta go even if the value isn't awesome going that route.

I was thinking something like this:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/cyberpowerpc-gamer-master-gaming-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-5700-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-8gb-2tb-ssd-black/6575121.p?skuId=6575121

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-rog-strix-27-curved-1440p-180hz-freesync-gaming-monitor-with-hdr-displayporthdmiusb-black-black/6572369.p?skuId=6572369

Been a while since I've even looked at this market specifically so I may be way off.

1 hour ago, Paperclyp said:

Does anyone know... I had a started a dedicated server game with a few buddies. Will the update just automatically incorporate into that? Or no? We didn't do anything fancy to it just got a vanilla server up. 

It kinda depends.

If you explored a an Ashlands biome before this update, it won't turn into "new" Ashlands areas. They'll stay the same more or less. If there are Ashlands you haven't found or explored yet, those will populate like "new" Ashlands biomes when you discover / explore them. If you beat the Mistlands boss, you may have to drop / pick back up the placeholder drops to turn them into the actual resource you'd get from that boss.

They always recommend starting fresh whenever a biome releases to avoid this kind of derp. You don't have to, unless you explored the whole map or something (in that case all of the Ashlands would stay boring and empty), but stuff can get wonky.

If you wanna "cheat" on your server, you have always been able to start a local world, bring a character into it, enable cheats, spawn a shitload of materials, put them in your inventory, bring that character into your server world, drop the materials on the floor or into a chest or something, and rinse / repeat until you have enough shit to build whatever you want. I don't THINK you can easily enable cheats on a server world, but it's been a while since I looked into that.

I'm interested to see what happens this season as it felt like they were running out of steam at the end of season 3. I haven't watched Gen V yet, maybe that changes things up.

2 hours ago, SuperSpreader said:

Now hear me out, what if the doors had guns

Why would you want a cop to shoot your door?

Florida deputies who fatally shot US airman burst into wrong apartment, attorney says

APNEWS.COM

---

A civil rights attorney says deputies responding to a disturbance call at a Florida apartment complex burst into the wrong unit and fatally shot a Black U.S.

The great 2A paradox... you're allowed to own a gun for personal safety, cops are allowed to blast if they fear for their safety. It's almost like the problem is too many Americans are armed and too many cops are too happy to shoot them.

1 hour ago, Jason said:

As I've said before, Trump cost the GOP the 2022 midterms by making it a referendum on himself when he wasn't even on the ballot. I don't see any reason to think people will react better to him this time around.

The broader issue is the constant risk to American institutions writ large as it's become clear that Trump and Trumpism aside, there's a non-trivial contingent of the US voting public that is fine with authoritarianism as long as its in their short term benefit (or even perceived benefit, as we saw with COVID restrictions) and there are plenty of institutions at risk even if Trump isn't elected. Two people straight up lied under oath, got lifetime SCOTUS appointments, and the consequences of that are some potentially short term local election losses for Republicans. The scales just aren't balanced here especially when the safeguards are norms that a significant number of elected and appointed officials are happy to ignore.