My mom got me an OG Xbox around the time that the 360 came out, and a couple of games. The copy of Splinter Cell was undoubtedly my dad’s contribution to the conversation, but I remember my mom telling me later that she had never really heard of this “Morrowind” game but she asked the Gamestop employee for a game that was like Zelda, since we both previously loved playing Zelda on our SNES and N64. The guy recommended Morrowind and I figure it was probably a 50/50 shot that he did either that, or Fable.

I played Fable later on as an adult and it’s a fine game, but I owe a great debt of gratitude to a man I will never meet who allowed me to experience Morrowind in its entirety in my early teens. I went into that game completely blind and knowing nothing about anything other than what was in the game manual. I then went on to play it almost obsessively for the next eight years and continue to play it to this day about once a year or two. It is one of my very favorite games to exist and one of my favorite expressions of video games as art. Michael Kirkbride is a mad genius and I hang on his every word. Vivec is one of my favorite characters in fiction. I remember the layout of Balmora better than I remember the layout of some of my childhood homes. I love this game.

They have never been affected by conditions that lead to poverty and it shows.

But if you go somewhere like Idaho or Mississippi… They’re all fucking poor!! Everyone is poor! Everyone lives hand to mouth and depends on social safety nets like this. But if you’re proper homeless then fuck you, no you don’t deserve any help?

Blows my mind how entire self contained societies can all equally experience this kind of hardship and then instead of “I don’t want anyone else to suffer like we had to”, they instead conclude “I had to suffer like this, therefore everyone must suffer like this”.

There’s some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)

But in practice you’re going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you’re going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.

John McAfee is the only person I genuinely believe may have successfully faked his own death.

They’ve been putting AI slop all over official white house correspondence all year, I promise they didn’t need me to give them this idea.

I for one am extremely surprised that we didn’t recieve some obviously bullshit, AI-written “files” that conveniently implicate all of Trump’s opponents while leaving him and his posse out.

Pleasantly surprised, don’t get me wrong, but I fully expected that out of this administration. They’ve already proven time and again that they have zero shame or accountability, this would be right up their alley.

A lot of it deals with the fact that Roblox doesn’t pay you out until you accrue some critical mass of value. If a kid makes an app and puts it on Steam and it sells 2 copies, they’re getting paid for those 2 copies. Not so for Roblox. You require 30,000 Robux to cash out - which seems to be quite a lot, actually, considering the documentation I’m reading on their own webpage advertises this with photos that show 97,493 total Robux earnings from this presumably rock-star developer that you want to be like, and buyable items costing between 80-600 Robux.

It should also be noted that I cannot locate any mention of a dollars-to-Robux ratio without an account, which I do not have and am not making, so God only knows what rate they actually pay you out at once you do manage to acquire your 30,000 Robux. The primary use case of earned Robux is to then invest them back into the in-game shop to purchase content that other users have made. Robux actively doesn’t want you cashing out and makes it as difficult as possible to do so.

I’m personally not too upset about a game primarily made from user created content, I think it’s kind of cool, but the way they’ve tied real money into the process feels very icky and scumbaggish to me. My particular issue with Roblox is the rampant pedophilia and sexual grooming that the devs are either unwilling to alienate (since, presumably, this population makes up a not-insignificant percentage of their user base) or else actively in cahoots with, because this has been a known problem for many years but approximately zero steps have been taken to address it.

The Shadow Wizard Money Gang

While simultaneously insisting that saying “oh my god” is blasphemy of the highest order

You run into a subtext problem here though.

Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits

Making this argument to shareholders means you’re telling them “I wish to shrink your profits”, no matter what else comes after that comma that’s a non-starter for an American CEO. 99% of shareholders don’t give one Kentucky fried fuck about the company, they just want free money. You get between them and their free money and you’re gone, replaced by the next failing-upward ghoul in line on LinkedIn.

The idea of having a well established, respected and non-abusive company is no longer a reality in America. The stock market is a vehicle for gambling on shareholder feelings. It’s no longer about the company at all, just about how much you can hype up the company to then pass the bag along to someone else.

Wal-Mart shareholders don’t care if Wal-Mart craters into Hell tomorrow, so long as they get paid dividends and are able to offload their shares at a profit before it dies.

Not just a right wing billionaire, JD Vance specifically although surely some others as well.

Shitty reward??

Excuse me, Dawnbreaker is the coolest looking useless sword in the game. That’s not shitty, that’s home decor.

Double checked to make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself, and yeah, you’re actually completely correct.

Chief Justice presides over the hearing and the Senate votes on it. The House of Representatives is who presents articles of impeachment and if they reach a simple majority, then bam, you’re impeached right then and there. But a successful impeachment then goes to Senate to vote whether the official in question is guilty and should be removed from office.

Interestingly, according to this gov page I’m pulling the info from (which may or may not be accurate anymore these days, who knows) a total of 21 successful impeachments have been run in American history. Of those impeached, only 8 officials have been found guilty by the Senate and removed from office. All 8 of them were federal judges. 3 presidents have been impeached, but none were removed from office - Nixon isn’t on this list because he resigned and ran away once the impeachment process began but before it could finish. DJT is the only president in American history to manage to be impeached twice.

Anyway, point being, if the president has either the Senate or the Supreme Court Chief Justice in his pockets, he’s effectively immune to impeachment. With both in his pockets he’s so immune to it that it becomes a joke to him. You can impeach him as many times as you want all day long until the cows come home, but if no one in the Senate ever votes to convict then it means nothing more than a nasty footnote on his page in the history books. Or more likely these days it means you’ll be picked up off the streets by the Gestapo and the impeachment will be conveniently left out of historical records.

My Steam Deck doesn’t serve me ads. Not even the on-boot sale pop up that desktop Steam gives.

Trump has been successfully impeached twice. Impeachment just doesn’t mean “removed from office” like everyone thought it did. Unfortunately the Supreme Court is who makes the decision about whether an impeached president is removed from office or not.

Bad optics, at that. Hegseth just created the single largest opsec failure that the US has seen in over a century and used it to complain to career military generals that they look too woke.

If literally any other man tried this at any other time in American history he’d be in front of a court martial so fast your head would spin.

Oh they write highly comedic content. Just not on purpose.

They are actively under fire from fascists, and the rest of the world is failing to step up and help. They need what they can get.

This is extremely cursed and it will definitely have strings attached that no one wants, but in a question of survival vs not, I don’t blame them one bit. This is a decision centered around “we have to survive today to solve this problem tomorrow”.

She in awe of my 'tism

This isn’t quite that, but it is one of my favorite things to exist on the internet and it’s close enough that I want to link it here.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLINl9l0igYjzIipxsD4Y59_Jjxe4N3pZo

Get comfy, this is several hours worth of very top-shelf Star Wars parody. Auralnauts gives Spaceballs a run for its money as the premiere SW parody in my opinion.