Kal-El814
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Posts posted by Kal-El814
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1 minute ago, mclumber1 said:
Swift is to the right what Musk is to the left: A person that used to be (and ought to still be!) squarely in their camp, but they've become sellouts. At the same time, I don't think Swift would be so anti-conservative if they weren't so anti-Swift to begin with. It's a bit of a vicious cycle.
The notion Swift has sold out is strange to me. Country music is wildly lucrative for top performers so I don't think there's any logic behind that position beyond circular.
Besides, I don't think "conservatives" are anti-Swift broadly, it's just a vocal group of chucklefucks. You just can't get to her level of popularity while alienating people who vote Republican, people who touch grass simply do not give a shit about most of the Fox Cinematic Universe alleged culture war.
Lamentably, this is likely true for Elon as well; Teslas are generally popular, people think Space X is cool, etc. However and fortunately for those of us with discriminating taste, Elon has perhaps never touched grass in his miserable fucking life and he very obviously cares deeply about what the chronically online feel about him.
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1 hour ago, best3444 said:
What do Republicans have against Swift? I'm not following that at all.
Some of them assume she's a gold digger for going after an NFL player which is hilarious. She endorsed Biden in 2020, she "sold out" by not staying exclusively country, she's spoken out against laws that target the LGBT+ community, etc. It's people who claim to hate identity politics shitting on her for not matching up with what they believe her political identity should be.
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Even if someone isn't ever going to vote for a Democrat, Trump has literally nothing going for him beyond vibes. That's it. His big campaign promises were building a wall along the entire southern border that Mexico would pay for (OLO), repealing Obamacare with something better (OLO), resolving the Israel / Palestine conflict (OLO), and a tax cut for the wealthy. That's a bad batting average, and the tax shit is you know... also bad.
Unless you've got a hard on for policies that specifically favor the wealthy, what does Trump bring to the table beyond the mere vibes of owning the libs? And if that's what gets you to the polls, just fucking own it, who cares. But get the fuck out of here with this concern about Biden's cognitive decline as if Trump's brain worms haven't been running the show since he was on The Apprentice, please.
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The entire game of pro football at this point is designed around maximizing the potential for advertising and letting fans eat nachos, the notion that < 2 minutes of gazing at the majesty that is Taylor Swift is somehow ruining football is incredible. God willing there will be a SwiftZone channel.
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12 hours ago, Jason said:
Curious what you mean specifically.
I think it would have been really easy to have Kamala and Carol be frenemies or rivals or set up some "never meet your heroes" kind of scenario. Not that there's anything wrong with those per se, but it's surprisingly uncommon to just let female characters be friends.
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4 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:
Imma swiftie now just because she pisses off the chud losers sooooooo much.
chud ire > white/10?
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Jewish space lasers causing cognitive decline.
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Didn’t manifest hard enough, shame.
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I dunno that this franchise needed an origin story, but that looks good enough.
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On 2/6/2024 at 8:39 PM, silentbob said:
Gina Carano Sues Disney Over The Mandalorian Firing, Elon Musk Funding Lawsuit
WWW.COMINGSOON.NET
Gina Carano is suing Disney and Lucasfilm for discrimination after she was fired from her role in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian.
As I said on the entertainment board, I highly encourage people to read the full filing. It’s hilarious, and a full 50% of it is screenshots of people being mean to her on twitter.
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On 2/6/2024 at 3:09 PM, CitizenVectron said:
Gina Carano Sues Disney Over ‘Mandalorian’ Firing In Lawsuit Funded by Elon Musk
WWW.HOLLYWOODREPORTER.COM
The actress claims the entertainment giant discriminated against her for voicing right-wing opinions on hot-button issues.Truly a perfect union of assholes.
I fully encourage everyone to read the entire court filing.
You may think to yourself, WHOA TEHRE KAL, I’M NOT PART OF THE D1P LEGAL TEAM, CALM DOWN, I’M NOT READING 60 PAGES.
To that I say… the first two are mainly Star Wars references and at least 50% of it is screenshots of people being mean to Carano on twitter. It’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
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3 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:
Ewwwww.
You have a phone, don't you?
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Step 1: SCOTUS determines POTUS has absolute immunity
Step 2: Biden orders drone strike on SCOTUS, Mar a Lago
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
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The extent to which Microsoft’s communication and marketing around the Xbox platform has been absolutely dogshit since they started hawking the One is remarkable. It’s close to half the amount of time the Xbox brand has existed. It’s unbelievable.
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Reading about what this game is and its story... it's very much not my speed from a gameplay or narrative POV. But it's cool to see DC lean into this stuff in their Rocksteadyverse, or whatever the hell it's called, for people who are into it.
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31 minutes ago, MarSolo said:
But have they told us what’s going on with his sausage fingers?
I’m no doctor but they give me arthritis + smoker vibes. -
I really don't even know what could be done about this short of some kind of diet Dune scenario where email is banned. Having thousands of staff members be one errant click away from completely fucking over the entity they work for is just not sustainable. I "fell" for one of the phishing scam tests at my job when my mouse battery was dead; when I went to mouse over a URL in the email to see where it was going to take me, my trackpad registered moving my mouse as a click. Harmless in my case but if it'd been a real phish? Cooked. And if Jim Browning can be scammed into temporarily losing his YouTube channel, nobody's safe.
This says nothing of situations where things like Strava revealing the location of military bases and routes.
Something's going to have to give and I don't know what it'll be or what it's going to take.
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1 hour ago, Biggie said:
Anybody play this? I just started it. Really should be on Switch. Feels like a handheld game.
YOU feel like a handheld game, what now?
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13 minutes ago, legend said:
Yeah, it was a really tough decision to flay myself, because the argument for Karlach doing it *is* good and she was consistent with it throughout. But I was hoping for more for her.
At that end, she's basically ready to explode (and you can let her apparently), but you and Wyll plead with her to live on with you and make her come around in the last moments. And I guess there is hope for something more, perhaps for both of us, but sadly, not yet. For now, ugly I shall remain!
Shadowheart was my squeeze, so it also felt bad to leave her behind, but I figured she'd understand leaving to fight for Karlach and again, maybe we can resolve it all later.
Come on Larian, give me my expansion! I have unfinished business!
Yeah that's a solid conclusion as well.
SpoilerAgain everything feeling earned, for the most part, is a real accomplishment. I think it'd have been easier to write the Lae'zel romance in such a way that by the end she's not really Gith anymore. And maybe that's an option, I dunno. But by the end of my playthrough, for her to not bail with Orpheus felt like something she'd do, the notion that we're raising the kid together seemed right, that she'd be okay with him not being a warrior felt natural... but we talked about how we found the last bastion of Vlaakith's followers on the Sword Coast and we were gonna go fuck them up after the party. Her accepting there's more to life than Gith domination but still kicking the shit out of the group that deceived the Gith seems right.
I could go on and on, the stuff they did right in this game is too long to list. I really can't remember the last time I played an RPG that was this long, that kept iterating on its core premise and loop for as long while remaining so interesting, etc., as BG3.
And my god that Raphael fight. The setup, the song... so good. I don't even mind that I won because Raphael's final form was still susceptible to Tasha's Hideous Laughter which kept him in check long enough for Lae'zel to stab him over and over and over and over. That's Raphael's fault, honestly, spec your character better you 666 hit point asshole.
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Just now, legend said:
Re: Karlach
In mine, I chose to become the Mindflayer because I didn't want anyone else to suffer. At the end, I then convinced Karlach to go back to Avernus with the Wyll and myself. When you get to the epilogue, the discussion is the party of 3 has nearly figured out how to get her out for good. I believe the same thing happens if just Wyll goes with her and you choose to stay behind.
This + Withers saying there may be another need for you soon, suggests there will be an expansion. I hope so, and in it, I hope we save Karlach for good, and ideally find a way to de-squid me
As part of that epilogue (and others you can find), Withers indicates that you are the first of your kind, a Mindflayer who still has a soul. So that also suggests a way to reverse it in your case.
Aaah interesting.
SpoilerLike in my other post, I feel like Wyll is the most weirdly written of the Act 1 party characters. He's down in hell fucking with demons... with no powers... but he still has horns... like okay? Him buddying up with Karlach makes sense. Maybe if I had Wyll in my party during the Astral Plane segment he'd have chimed up about that option, but since I didnt... Karlach was pretty clear that her opinion was either die / explode (she'd been consistent about not wanting to be in Avernus) or squid. And the language she used made it seem like the best possible outcome for her. Pretty interesting.
I'd probably have gone for being a squid myself but I couldn't believe that my precious Bae'zel would look at me the same way so... I get to keep having sex and Karlach didn't die. Win / win.
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RIP, hopefully he's got a stew going in the sky.
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All finished up! What a satisfying game. I dunno what the OG ending was before patches, but I think the ending I got was reasonably well fleshed out as well as a pretty true to the character relationships I built up throughout the game. There are a couple of pretty funny choices, like being able to end your romance at literally the last second for... god only knows what fucking reason... but I guess you could role play that away or just lean into psychosis or something.
Spoiler free thoughts...
Some of the "big" fights are really a testament to how well you know and can work the game mechanics. For the last bit of combat I was pretty well stocked up on certain scrolls and items and at first glance it seemed really daunting... but it ended up being fairly trivial. Normally that kind of thing would be disappointing, but here I think it works. In something like a BGS game you can end up "abusing" mechanics by taking advantage of the fact that everyone has the short term memory of someone who just got hit in the head with a frying pan or other behavioral oddities. Here's it's not abuse but being able to use the game mechanics to your advantage. It makes you feel like you solved a puzzle as opposed to taking advantage of exploits. There are a couple battles where I think the terrain itself could be better considered; a couple encounters specifically come to mind where if you position yourself in a certain way or stumble into a fight from a specific angle, the AI just isn't in a position to recover and the enemies act super dumb. But this happened maybe 3 times in 90 hours, so whatever. It's notable when something hyped up ends up kinda petering out.
The characters really shine. All of the people who can join your party are pretty well fleshed out and interesting, and most of their quests have interesting resolutions or solutions. Again i think there's a pretty good balance between letting you earn things and then giving the NPCs themselves a chance to make their own choices, while also giving you the chance to tip the scales if things seem like they're not going the way you'd like. It's really well done. I'd say the only very tiny downside is that there's so much content in this game that if you decide to do most of it in one run (like I did by the end) you'll probably run out of juice for your favorite characters long before the plot ends... but this is a real high class issue. And again, for me it ended on a really high note. Lots of closure, lots of resolutions, all in all... pretty great.
Some spoilery thoughts from someone who played and liked BG1 and 2.
SpoilerMinsc is weird. I appreciate that he needs to have class appropriate stats and the changes between AD&D 2nd ed and 5E are significant... but it's weird that he's not just yoked. I appreciate this is a very stupid nitpick.
Jaheira I thought was pretty well done, and it's great to have her back.
Viconia and Sarevok... woof I don't even know what to say. Even if you assume that the PC from BG1 and 2 wasn't good and didn't redeem either or both characters... I don't think they have much in common with their previous versions. Since BG1 and 2 Viconia has kidnapped kids and abused their relatives. Shit like that happened to her brother and it used to give her nightmares. Sarevok... he's making sacrifices to Bhaal and seems loyal to him... which I don't think he ever was in the old games? How is he alive? Why does he suck so much ass and die like a clown?
I dunno that Sarevok was anyone's favorite character or anything, but Vic has her stans and how she comes off here is just... wild. I don't know why they'd bother with her cameo if that's all they were gonna do with it.
Spoilery thoughts about how I approached the endgame.
SpoilerI guess the only disappointment I had was that the best thing I could seem to pull off for Karlach is letting her squid herself? She really seemed like she didn't want to go back to hell and it was a bit surprising to have her want to become a mind flayer... but I suppose that's better than Avernus or dead. Although... in the ending it seems like Withers can yank people out of Avernus whenever he wants for a party, so... that's weird? She seemed happy but it's clear that she's not going to be "herself" anymore after eating enough brains. Everyone else got a objectively good ending, hers being bittersweet would be fine other than that she's the only one like that.
I don't think I could ever do an evil playthrough here. I have a tough time with that in games like this where I'd like the characters to be happy, but seeing everyone content at the end would make it pretty hard for me to go against that. The only one I could maybe see is letting Astarion ascend, but... maybe he'd just be a huge dick? I dunno. Letting him be the head vamp seems bad even though we let 7,000 vamps loose in the sewers.
Anyway, Karlach became a Mind Flayer, we freed Orpheus, and everyone was more or less happy. Raising a lil Gith baby with Bae'zel, everyone's more or less their best self. The only other real ending weirdness was Orpheus being REAL bent out of shape about me "stealing" a Gith egg that I was given, and then turning from being pissed at me for not letting his honor guard kill me to calling me his savior after we killed the brain. Again, a very small beef compared to the overall awesomeness of the ending.
I really liked The Emperor even though I ended up "betraying" him (and then ignoring him completely in the final fight, lul). I think he's an interesting character and written well for what he is, a kind of pragmatic survivor who's ultimate main interest is self preservation when the chips are down. I wonder if some people find him consuming or contradictory, when I find that he's ultimately just wildly selfish in a way we don't often see in videogames.
Anyway, what a ride. Here's hoping there's DLC or a full sequel sometime.
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59 minutes ago, best3444 said:
They definitely made her more manly looking in Forbidden West. I thought she was pretty is Zero Dawn. Not so much in West.
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As part of that epilogue (and others you can find), Withers indicates that you are the first of your kind, a Mindflayer who still has a soul. So that also suggests a way to reverse it in your case.
The 2023-34 Mock Gambling Thread - SUPER BOWL - silentbob takes the lead!
in The Locker Room
Posted
BALLS thank you.
NINERS ALL IN BABY, LET'S END BROKE AS HELL
Niners safety, we're going balls deep with this!
Eleven
KC
Niners
10 / 20 / 27 / 34