It’s a shame that I’m a quivering pussy, because I think the combat against the replicants in FEAR fucking rules. The shooting feels awesome, slow-mo karate is awesome, the game feels awesome to play.

…and then the game goes quiet after the shooting stops, and it delivers some of the spookiest atmosphere I’ve experienced even after two decades of age. A single light fixture moves suddenly, showing the shadow of something just behind me, and I jump out of my skin and have to take a break from playing.

I think the record still goes to Amazon’s Crucible, which was cancelled before release after a closed-beta that nobody played.

I have two(?) that I did back to back.

The first was finishing One Piece. After nearly a full calendar year, I’ve finally caught up and have been actively watching Egghead.

The second was finishing the One Piece 4kids dub, which managed to just barely last a hundred episodes. If you’re a huge fan of One Piece and B-movies, I’d highly recommend it. The scripts are awful, the censorship is nonsensical, and the obsession with accents is just bizarre, but the voice actors seriously nail the delivery. 4kids basically produced a One Piece parody for children, and it’s so much fun to laugh at.

Even the pro-Putin Russians are being treated well and “deprogrammed.” I heard that a major struggle Ukraine is currently having is a lack of therapists, as captured Russians are struggling to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance between what they’ve been told about Ukrainians, and how well Ukrainians have treated them.

Unironically would love to have it as a full collection. Not that accessing One Piece is too hard currently, but access can always change, and I wouldn’t want to end up like Pokemon fans with the entire series split across the internet.

It’s a real shame that lawmakers seem squarely focused on sinophobia, because X should absolutely be skewered just as hard as TikTok if a hostile beast like Musk is at the helm.

The problem is that to argue this point, you have to start going through all of the facts like case conversion rates, the domestic abuse rates, the rates of racist attacks by law enforcement, and the membership overlap between law enforcement and white supremacist groups. Once you start bringing up that many numbers, the idiots get confused and their eyes roll out of their skull, whereas the centrists get too scared realizing that basically no cop is actually trying to keep the U.S. safe and try to shutdown the conversation.

The threat of Trump hasn’t been big enough for the DNC to take seriously, why would a currently undecided independent take it any more seriously?

It’s an annual march. They’ve never been looking to de-escalate, the point has always been to terrorize.

The Sims 2 Castaway is basically the proto survival crafting game. It’s kinda cool to see the classic Sim stats get used in such a different way. I sometimes wish EA would return to those days of selling spinoff Sim games like Castaway and the Urbz, rather than just dumping every single new idea they get into one game as DLC.

I’m sorry, your take is that we need to shame people for …standing against a genocide? for deciding that supporting the deaths of an entire culture of people is the line too far for their conscience to support? You think that deserves to be attacked and shamed?

The U.S. has no obligation to participate in genocide, and can start withholding aid at any time. If Democrat leadership has decided it’s more important to exterminate Palestine than prevent a Trump election, that’s going to remain on the Democrats.

Why do they make waffles in the shape of Texas in Wyoming?

Then why the fuck did they send so many troops to Libya?!

I guess I shouldn’t complain too hard, you never want to correct an enemy when they’re making a mistake.

“Hundreds of targets have already been attacked,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said after meeting with commanders in the Rafah area. “This operation will continue.”

“Yeah, hundreds have already been attacked. What’s a few hundred more,” the justifications of a fucking psychopath.

Oh no, now the U.S. is Hamas too!

They’re refusing the proposal, and they believe that the only reason the proposal was offered was to make Israel look bad by …forcing them to refuse the proposal? As if a good faith effort to collaborate with two other powers in the region for a mutually beneficial ceasefire is an insult to them? As if Israel needs any help looking like the bad guys in this conflict?

There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.

These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.

Gd, when even fucking Erdogan thinks you’re going too far. I know they’re a usually antagonistic force to the West, but they are a real player in the region, so this is still good pressure on Israel. Even if it happens to be opportunistic.

but right now, Hamas is actually getting what it wants for the first time ever. People are now actually demanding an end to the Israeli apartheid, even though the genocide was happening long before October 7th. They’re no longer suffering in silence, there are members of the West that support Palestine now. That is a massive, massive difference compared to conflicts like the 2014 Gazan War or the many Intifadas, where Israel committed many of the same war crimes today but faced zero consequences internationally for them.

At the same time, the West has the memory of a goldfish. If Hamas cedes now, and we do the dance of both sides planning up for a future conflict again, how can Hamas trust that they’ll receive Western support again? How can they know they won’t be villified, and Israel won’t get away with just committing more warcrimes on them? How do they even know there will be a next time, that Israel won’t strike first next time and exterminate all that remains of Palestine, after another few years of illegal settlements concentrates the population even further?

Their best bet is to maintain the current conflict for as long as possible, and hope that international support doesn’t just require Israel to agree to a mutually beneficial ceasefire, but also that international support adds some guard rails to prevent such force from being used against Palestine again. You’re correct that it’s unreasonable to think that this conflict will end with a two-state solution, or really any solution at all. That doesn’t mean Hamas should accept a spit in the face, which is exactly what the current ceasefire terms are.

If you read my comment and seriously came away with the idea that I support what Israel is doing, I don’t really know what the fuck to tell you.