I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.

If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.

Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.

The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.

Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”

Granny Gazoot! Let’s have a toot! And when I count three!

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

–Jean-Paul Sartre

PLEASE ADOPT VERIFICATION CAT TO CONTINUE

“To prove that you are human, donate $$$ to Doctors Without Borders.”

“To prove that you are human, register to vote.”

“To prove that you are human, adopt a pet from the local animal shelter.”

Did you catch all-despising baby skull last night?

In 1971, Rep. Tom Moore, Jr. of Waco, Texas sponsored a resolution commending Albert de Salvo for his unselfish service to “his county, his state and his community.” That resolution read, in part:

This compassionate gentleman’s dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology.

Albert DeSalvo had another claim to fame.

Not a widely beloved performance, but on this episode of Prairie Home Companion, he plays Jim from Huckleberry Finn, catching up with ol’ Huck. One of my all-time favorite bits.

Relevant part starts at 9:45

Hell, not even the fucking Nazis themselves claimed that they weren’t deliberately operating death camps. Here’s Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz:

Technically [it] wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers… The killing itself took the least time. You could dispose of 2,000 head in half an hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. The killing was easy; you didn’t even need guards to drive them into the chambers; they just went in expecting to take showers and, instead of water, we turned on poison gas. The whole thing went very quickly.

And here he is, after his trial, four days before his execution:

My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the ‘Third Reich’ for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.

Doesn’t really sound like the statement of a guy who was trying to claim it didn’t fucking happen, or that it was anything but a deliberate crime against humanity.

The Nerf Demolisher was released in 2014.

The Chainblazer was released in 1994.

Morpheus is the only one we ever hear the battery analogy from anyway. He might well be wrong about that interpretation, and the brain processors are what’s really going on.

Maybe you get “digested” in the sense that you get incorporated into the sarlacc’s body, like it’s using you in a parasitic sense. It makes you one of its internal organs, and it keeps you alive as it slowly uses you up over the course of a thousand years (assuming we take that phrase literally). I think acting as a gall bladder for an underground sand monster sounds like a fate worse than death.

Motel of the Mysteries is basically this joke explored over 95 pages, lovingly illustrated by David Macaulay, the guy who did those black and white books Cathedral, Pyramid, Castle, and The Way Things Work, as well as others. It’s hilarious.

Wouldn’t the men who were “best” at masturbation have the fewest children?

Blame it on the bossa nova!

Trump abandoning NATO, Russia going on the war path, and full-blown nuclear World War 3 would probably be bad for business.

Sure, but you’d need a lot.

https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-gaming/blood-iron-sword-myth-explored/#:~:text=At 4 grams per person,iron longsword out of blood.

There doesn’t necessarily need to be a hard limit on how rich you can be but there should absolutely be a limit on how poor you can be.

Now, I’m pretty sure that once we feed, clothe, educate, and provide for the general welfare of the entire populace to a humane level that it will be significantly more difficult, if not impossible, to become a billionaire, but really that’s just as it should be. It should be borderline fucking inconceivable.