Worst thing since sliced bread?
This has got me in a sort of nostalgic mood with all the different animation styles.
Friday Afternoon Links
About The Author
Riven
[riv-uhn]
noun
1. a gaming, lifting, shooting, intoxicated, ravenous, and happily-taken nerd.
2. often aims to misbehave.
3. and though she be but little, she is fierce.*
And rumor has it that she (and her husband) are also delightful dinner companions. You didn't hear it from me, though.
As it currently stands, I’m more excited for BG3 than Starfield. Bethesda already fucked over Fallout, and burned a lot of good will there. Then there’s the fact it’s going to be a buggy mess at release, and probably until a GOTY version is released.
But I’m going to try to be strong and wait for BG3 to get a discounted price.
/eyes the backlog of shame
I’m exactly the opposite. I couldn’t really care about Baldur’s Gate, and having recognized the warning signs in 76, I have no ill-will accumulated towards Microsoft’s Zenimax Bethesda division. What I’ve been seeing for Starfield has been looking much better and I’m eager to see what they’ve done. It helps that it seems tuned to my exploratory playstyle where I’d just go see what’s over the next hill.
As for Bethesda bugs – for some reason I’ve not been afflicted with too many. But then again, I also didn’t have bugs from CyberPunk, so *shrugs*
Oddly, I’ve also had one bug in AC: Unity too (I got stuck in a pillar once).
Maybe I’m lucky.
*knocks on wood*
FO76 was after I’d written off Bethesda for Fallout, they burned the good will with FO3 and FO4. I’ve been playing the Elder Scroll games since all the way back in the Arena days. The most common cause of death in Daggerfall was falling through the world. Larian studios has done some really deep turn based combat in Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 (although I didn’t care much for the world).
Fallout 3 is where I started with the franchise. Since that set my baseline, I’ve had no issue with the entries that followed (except those gripes previously mentioned in New Vegas and 76, which I’d succussefully avoided from the red flags)
I still have trouble getting into the isometric entries. I’ll admit it, it’s the interface and the steep early difficulty. Each time I die having forgotten to save for a while, I’m discouraged, and I look at my backlog of other games.
I could claim to have an ongoing booycott of Wizards of the Coast and their licensed products, but it’s melted into apathy towards them. In the electronic gaming sphere, they generate about as much interest as multiplayer shovelware.
FO4 killing skills entirely, and bastardizing perks turned me off. That was one of the core features of the games.
I can see that.
I still had fun, so I let the change in mechanics slide.
I honestly find I’m in “Don’t give a shit… guess I’ll wait and see about both.” Yes, Bethesda with 76 made me very wary. But the BG add-ons don’t impress me all that much… and frankly, most of the D&D rule expansions have just gotten into the overly complicated / confusing zone as far as I’m concern… and BG3 is up in those rules to my understanding. I don’t think they can recreate the magic that was 1 and 2, so I’m not really expecting much.
“Substantial economic effect”
Jobs saved or created!
Ugh… Wickard v. Filburn — only went through because of the thread of court packing, should have been reversed on general principle accompanied by the entire Supreme Court taking a field trip to defecate on FDR’s grave.
Existing “can” have a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce after all…. (you either do or do not purchase items which may or may not cross state lines… hence you have an effect).
Choir. Preaching… but you brought it up!
The thread of court packing? Well, a stich in time, saves nine!
“the savings are not as much as we expected.”
One dumbass bureaucrat once admitted he was wrong………and undid a mistake. I might consider a statue, but I don’t want bureaucrats in general to get the wrong idea.
Nope. Studyin’. I’m on the last leg of this fucking medical coding course and I need to get it done. My deadline is 9/13.
my parents’ 60th is getting in the way of golf
I’m schlepping around ice, flowers, and white wines and burning a vacation for the privilege: total bullshit
I promise to just die and get out of the way before anyone is obligated to put on such for me
Condolences.
My aunt threw a big bash for her 50th wedding anniversary. My uncle was on his last leg, and she told him he better not die before the party, and he didn’t, but it wasn’t long after that.
It’s very generational.
Just spent some time with my parents this weekend and I’m reminded how much appearance crap my mother cares about that I despise.
Just took my mom shopping at her favorite mall this week. She bought some clothes and some shoes, but I didn’t consider buying anything after I looked at the price tags. $98 shirts, $66 shorts. Yikes.
Nordstroms? Try some outlet stores to easily beat those prices.
Needless Markups?
Hi Riven!
Important news from the SC:
Supreme Court Rules 5-4 That Ross And Rachel Were On A Break
Heh… very nice, Bee.
“This is a dark day for every American woman…whatever that is.”
if only Grandpa Jones has lived to see this
I’m not any more likely to do a remote vet visit than an actual vet visit — and since a lot of vet visits (imho) involve the hands on inspection of the animal because they can’t communicate symptoms… well, I’m more than a little suspicious that the remote visits won’t be all that useful.
But I guess they just have to push for outsourcing / AI everywhere. I look forward to someone hacking ChatGPT to start talking about your pet unicorn instead of a cat.
It could be for guys like me. “My dogs ears are infected. I need another prescription for the medicine you always give him”.
My vet was fairly peeved when I started buying my medicine online. All I needed from him was a prescription. How dare I only let him get half the profits!?
For those of you following the Tucker interviews today, I caught the end of Nikki Haley’s segment. Looks like she learned from the previous few and didn’t say anything completely stupid.
Low bar considering that Pence’s statment was gloriously stupid.
I figured she had to be watching Pence’s performance and taking notes. If she was smart, she had people watching social media and grading the feedback.
How will the nation survive?
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., the Civil Rights icon and former presidential candidate, is stepping down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, according to his son, Rep. Jonathan Jackson.
The senior Jackson will announce his retirement at the annual Rainbow PUSH convention in Chicago on Sunday. Vice President Kamala Harris will the keynote for the event. And a successor to Jackson is also expected to be announced.
——-
Over the years, Rev. Jackson has led protests to desegregate theaters and restaurants. He marched in Selma, Ala., after “Bloody Sunday” in 1965. And he was an aide to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before he started Rainbow PUSH. Just two years ago, Jackson led a march through Kenosha, Wis., in response to the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two men and injured a third during civil unrest.
I wonder what social justice dynamo they have lined up to take the helm.
One of my only brushes with fame was the time I was in an elevator at a White Sox game with Rev. Jackson and two of the biggest bodyguards you’ve ever seen.
I got on an elevator where I worked with Carl Eller back when he was still rocking a really bad hair piece. Took me 5 floors before I realized who he was. Then I was a total fan boi. But those first 5 floors were “Please, please, please don’t laugh at this huge guy with a crazy wig”
I’m on pins and needles.
It’s another weekend in summer, and I’ve got a packed weekend. So I give you the Zoom link, and hope to be able to drop in for at least a bit.
Aviations are on me!
Dammit!
I near-burned my steak. 🙁
What a waste.
Dude.
I got distracted arguing about video games.
Never mind the steak. How are your hands? Did you have on your steak cooking gloves?
The Biden bribery whistleblower who was indicted for a string of bullshit charges, released a video detailing his allegations against the Bidens.
Styx had an interesting take on this the other day. It looks like the Bidens are hitting back, but maybe this guy knew he was in trouble, and pre-emptively fingered the Bidens in order to make the upcoming case against him look weak? Hard to tell.
Unregistered Foreign Agent and Lying to Feds are the charges they reach for when they don’t have real crimes. If an Israeli was selling weapons to Iran, why not just hand him over to Israel?
That is true. And it is pretty vile that Hunter Biden probably did those same things a dozen times.
I think I see where things went off the rails.
Tucker bagging Rhinos.
Vivek is on now, he’s doing a pretty decent job.
If only someone halfway smart who worked for a major media company was watching. They’d go “Hmmmm, maybe we could get a lot of viewers if we decided to really go after politicians too”.
Talk about a market differentiator! All the others could fight for the bootlickers and you could have the rest all to yourself.
They get their ad dollars not based on viewership, but on adherence to the narrative.
$16m for the medal tosser to use to fuck the American people while flying privately.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/13/climate-czar-john-kerry-cant-answer-a-question-about-his-own-staff-let-alone-his-private-jet/
On the google news page there is a photo of Trump, and almost everybody in the background is wearing a mask. Is the A P too cheap to buy a new photo, or is this some weird attempt to stick a thumb in his eye?
“Haha, remember when there was that plague, and Trump did a really shitty job of keeping the Grim Reaper away and everybody died because he wouldn’t kowtow to SCIENCE?”
I’ve seen recent news stories about the Ukraine war with pics of Russian soldiers credited back to 2014, presumably when Crimea was seized. For whatever reason (royalties?) they often use out of date photos.
Legit LOL
Under pressure from the government, Microsoft may be shifting its approach on which logging features are available under lower-tier licenses. A Microsoft spokesperson told CyberScoop that the company has “historically provided security logs to customers” with options on how they are stored. The company is “evaluating feedback,” remains “open to other models” and is “actively engaged with CISA and other agencies on this.”
https://cyberscoop.com/microsoft-china-hacking-state/
You want logging, you gotta pay for logging my friend…
Meh. I just assume everything is out in the open. If somebody wants to “hack” you, they will and ain’t nothing stopping it.
If somebody thinks they can do better than Microsoft in that space, they’re welcome to try.
I’m sure they didn’t get anything too useful. They probably thought they were compromised.
“Look at this idiotic drivel! They must be onto us and are feeding us bullshit. No one can be this dumb”
Dadgummit, now the Critical Drinker has me wanting to see the newest Mission Impossible movie.
That means I have 3 movies on my list this year! The last movie I saw in the theater was “They Shall Not Grow Old”
Now on my list:
Oppenheimer
Mission Impossible
Sound of Freedom
Guess I have to find a comfy movie theater.
We have tix for MI for tomorrow. Will report back! We’re going for the IMAX. As an FYI, if anyone wants to catch the IMAX version, you have to do it this week, because Oppenheimer replaces it next week.
We’re also going to Oppenheimer, partly because Nolan, and also because I grew up in Los Alamos so I see all the Los Alamos-adjacent films. (Yes, Red Dawn was extremely formative for us! lol)
I read that Oppenheimer tried to poison his tutor, but his rich dad got Cambridge to drop the murder charge.
https://sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/the-real-tragedy-of-robert-oppenheimer/
At least he was a good physicist.
“ One night they got caught in a storm. The friends ducked into an inn and huddled around a fire. And like many young people aching to assert themselves, they had a pretentious chat about literature. One declared that Tolstoy was the writer he most admired. But another one—Robert Oppenheimer, future father of the atomic bomb—just shook his head. “Dostoyevsky is superior,” Oppenheimer insisted. “He gets to the soul and torment of man.””
He wasn’t wrong.
Interesting take but I’d counter that The Father of the Atom Bomb did just fine for himself. Einstein he wasn’t but he has more real world applied influence. Whether that influence works out to mankind’s advantage or detriment remains to be seen though.
The unbelievably aggressive ad campaign for Tom Cruise and A Movie He Happens to Be In has me really not giving a shit.
I can’t stand Cruise. It’s hard to take Xenu believers seriously about anything.
Xenu comin’
Are you clear?
With a name like hayeksplosives you are pretty much destined to want to see Oppenheimer.
2 things I learned about recently:
Peruvian singing jars
Gille suit made of trash for urban combat
*Ghillie
Ghille means boy in Gaelic, as boys were traditionally hunting guides in Ireland and Scotland.
Thats just Shille.
Seat boy.
Pedo Pete strikes again.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/07/shock-video-finnish-child-terrified-as-joe-biden/
But no mean tweets
Come on Joe, you’d think that kid’s hair was a line of coke for chrissakes.
Terrified seems a bit strong, but it is weird to do that to some stranger’s kid.
Uffda. Even for a program that they are highly motivated for, the Minnesoda DFL can’t get their shit together. How hard is it to give other people’s money away?
No one really knows what the fuck is going on and who will get these subsidies. What a clusterfuck. What is great is that a lot of people will go to a dealer thinking they can cash in only to find out…. ALL THE MONEY IS ALREADY GONE!
What happened to “fossil fuels are dead because green is cheaper”…?
Why exactly is it in our interest to degrade the Russian military? Wtf does a Slavic civil war have to do with the US? Why must we prolong a conflict that didn’t have to happen in the first place while constantly inching towards WWIII? Inquiring minds would like to know.
https://twitter.com/MLiamMcCollum/status/1679869158908108800
The Russian military is much more powerful than when the war started. What’s he talking about?
Could be that actual combat is making the Russian military reform and clean house?
Instead of faking the funk like they always do in peace time, they have to get serious and promote the competent and get rid of the losers?
It’s also that the war is creating resurgent Russian nationalism.
The neocons are idiots.
Not to mention the US looking like a bunch of assholes to anyone outside the West.
Russian oil embargo, anyone? Assholes.
Because US foreign policy has effectively been the British one of old. Allow no peers to rise. Stoke wars, revolutions, and strife in order to hamstring your opponents.
It works until it doesn’t, but the human costs are incalculable.
Because the Ukrainians have a ton of blackmail material on our policymakers’ money laundering schemes and it would be a shame if someone were to find out.
Mundane detail Mike.
https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1679918905601425408
Canned answer is canned and full of bs.
Pence is an idiot and he just ended his political career.
He obviously thought he was more important than Carlson and that hubris led a massive unforced political error.
LOL seriously? That’s got to be cherry-picked.
Nope
He’s done
I’ve been laughing about it all afternoon.
It’s sort of in context. But he goes on a standard R prepared non-answer after that.
Doesn’t matter. The soundbyte has got him by the shirt and curlies.
“My globalist neo-con overlords have no interest in your welfare”.
Brown Snow and the Seven Figure Loss
https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1679837544962195462
I could’ve also gone with “Snow Woke and the Seven Figure Loss.”
Personnel is policy.
Until Disney axes all of the wokesters (which probably are most of their staff) they’re not going to recover.
What are the odds that Dopey is one of the darker pigmented actors?
lolzero
Damn it. It’s Pitch Black and the Seven Big Honkeys.
Read your Bloom County people!
Additional video of Joe Biden’s interaction with the children on the tarmac surfaced and it is shockingly creepy.
Joe Biden nibbled a little girl’s arm before sniffing her hair.
The child was terrified.
It’s too bad her mother didn’t stab him in the eye with a knitting needle.
She was too busy getting trying to get a selfie.
now the Critical Drinker has me wanting to see the newest Mission Impossible movie.
I caught part of one a few nights ago. Astoundingly dumb. I realize stuntmen have kids to put through college, but come on.
I realize
stuntmen have kids to put through collegeTom Cruise has kids to put through Scientology, but come on.Oh, hell no, says the guy who cruised decades ago. After they had one float around in the Gulf of Mexico for about a week with no power or potable water I realized how little redundancy these things have.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/13/icon-of-the-seas-labeled-a-monstrosity-ahead-of-first-sail/
Good. Playa haters gonna hate. They can stay away. I shall eventually be dragged on it and post a review.
Obligatory.
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf
$14k per ticket oughta keep the riff raff away.
Why the fuck would it, when it will be insanely popular? “Hurr no response to online rando trolls durrr” 🙄
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/14/23794366/hello-kitty-island-adventure-apple-sunblink
Wish in one hand…
Tucked into President Joe Biden’s ambitious, sweeping climate commitments is a crucially important goal that dates back to his campaign: Transforming the US electric grid to run entirely on clean energy by 2035.
The goal could make or break Biden’s pledge to slash the country’s planet-warming emissions in half by 2030. And if successful, 100% clean electricity could energize vast sectors of the US economy: electric vehicles, home and office heating and cooling, and appliances. It could even power heavy industry and manufacturing, which is currently reliant on fossil fuels.
“When you have a fully clean grid, versus a grid that either is a quarter or a half clean, that makes a significant difference in terms of the greenhouse gas performance of the things you’re plugging in to that grid,” White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi told CNN. “That electric vehicle now is twice or three times cleaner when you shift to a fully clean grid.”
Yet while renewable energy has exploded over the past decade, bringing Biden’s cornerstone climate goal to fruition by 2035 could be beyond his grasp.
Clap harder, America! Tinkerbell needs you!
Has anyone at CNN ever read the fucking Constitution?!
Math and science wasn’t part of his education.
Ben holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Music from Florida State University and a Master’s degree in Public Policy with an energy and environmental focus from Georgetown University.
https://rhg.com/team/ben-king/
More public policy grads…
I can’t decide if they’re worse than the public health grads.
They are the most reliable and trusted clean energy sources for utilities and developers, and they have quickly become cheaper than fossil fuels – so inexpensive that it is becoming more cost-effective for some utilities to build new wind and solar, rather than constructing new fossil plants or even running existing ones, experts told CNN.
Wind and solar are also mature technologies that developers know they can finance and get huge tax breaks on through the Inflation Reduction Act.
They are the “natural choice for developers who are looking for those low risk and very cost-effective projects to develop,” Sonia Aggarwal, a former White House senior advisor for climate policy and CEO of nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, told CNN. “We will see them play a large role because of how good they look from an economic perspective.”
If you have to shift part of the costs off onto someone else to get people to adopt it, that doesn’t make it cheaper.
LOL there it is!
The experts said so!!11
Whenever I am asked about my time in Africa, I’m tempted to tell a story like this.
Another gem from Cleese
Speaking of Africa, odd that this has dropped off the news:
***
The U.S. embassy is urging people in Sudan to shelter in place as two rival generals battle for control of the country, leaving 16,000 Americans stranded in the war zone. There are no U.S. plans for a mass rescue mission. NBC News’ Richard Engel and Courtney Kube have the latest.
April 24, 2023
***
Keep in mind that there were only 52 Americans involved in the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.
Tucker Carlson got fired on April 24th as well. The headline story on the Fox News site that day was about UFOs.
Sudan is home to more US citizens than any other country in Africa. It also has excellent relations with Russia. I get the feeling they fomented a civil war there to effectively take US citizens hostage. So Biden’s handlers in an impotent rage forced Fox to fire Tucker Carlson, who was sure to report on that very thing. Biden gloated over it at the fancy dinner on the 29th.
I wouldn’t be surprised if another civil war breaks out in an African country home to thousands of US citizens.
It’s fallen off the radar for the same reason conflicts in other tinpot African countries do: it’s not as if there are any major new developments to report.
stranded implies that there is a support or infrastructure level that those expatriates have come to rely upon that is somehow obligated to continue to support them even when not unlikely bad turns such as partisan clashes arise
normal people would simply say that living in the Sudan has always been a risky proposition and wouldn’t go to any trouble to choose verbiage to imply that those folks haven’t happily put themselves in harm’s way (and, of course, frankly, more or less, deserve whatever happens to them)