These puns have me in stitches!

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

Denny’s, where fun goes to die!

May I suggest you take up learning a martial art?

Not sure what they’re like in your area, but when I learned Karate as a kid in the 90s/00s, everyone was treated according to their skill level and discipline, gender/sex is irrelevant (beyond cups for guys and thick sports bras for gals).

Its not likely to make you bullet proof, but it does stand a decent chance at bettering your physical and mental health, give you more options when a gun is not part of the scenario.

Also, I would second the notion of going to a range and signing up for basic pistol and rifle familiarization, as well as basic medical training, unless you legitimately are totally terrified of firearms or have some kind of trauma or PTSD related to them.

Such courses usually provide you with firearms for the course, you don’t own them or take them home, they stay at the range. You just learn the basic principles of operation and safety and shooting technique, under hopefully an extremely serious couple of range masters who will hopefully teach you to treat all guns as if they are loaded until you have personally verified they are not, and to never, not even accidentally, point the barrel of a gun at something you do not intend to destroy.

You don’t need to go buy a gun first and not trust yourself with it.

In fact usually a novice shooter is going to want to experiment a bit with different calibers and guns with differing grip styles and weight distributions untill you find something comfortable to shoot.

Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.

Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI

And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8

Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…

So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?

Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?

What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?

To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:

You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.

All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.

Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.

Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.

I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…

…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.

These people have literally zero self awareness.

They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.

On the one hand, I am glad this is finally happening.

On the other hand, I am 99% certain my father, who’s worked at variously the Everett and Renton plants his entire adult life, is continuing to be a scab, as he has also done his entire adult life.

Raised me on Rush Limbaugh, last I talked to him he was a Q Anon nut that believed Antifa did Jan 6th and Tom Hanks’ son rapes and kills children for their adrenochrome.

The 1% uncertainty is not from a 1% chance he might actually also be striking, its the 1% chance he’s either retired or died from a heart attack since I last spoke to him.

Either way, fuck Boeing.

Well, I’d say 100k to 300k qualifies as more money than I’ve ever made in a single year of my life, more than I’ve made in my entire life if we go closer to 300k…

But what I meant was that the ultimate hiring process is dictated, signed off on or altered, all the way down, by the wealth holding members of society. The top execs, the board.

And that the society created, and largely owned, by their policies is essentially gaslighting us every day.

Have you ever spent an entire year applying to jobs… as a full time job? After having had a career, losing it to a disability, then trying to go back after years of recovery?

With maybe one reply every few months, despite being qualified for everything you are applying to?

Becoming depressed as everyone around you spends the first month giving you mindless cheery platitudes, then forgetting you exist, then becoming angry when you tell them you can’t afford to do anything that involves money?

Then when you finally cave and go work some bullshit job you are immensely overqualified for, everyone blames you for not living up to your potential?

They made it, it worked out for them, why didn’t it work out for you?

Even though it never once occured to them to maybe help you out monetarily and avoid going into massive debt, or by putting in a good word for you with their network of contacts.

All there is to accept is the knowledge that the vast majority of employers, the wealth holding members of society, do not actually care about anyone that won’t earn them more money.

And then also that not all, but most of society will also tell you that you must be doing something wrong, it must be your fault.

It’s a very friendly neighborhood

Mhm, sure seems like it.

I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Reminder that on either the day of or day after 9/11, Trump just had to mention that he was now the owner of the tallest building in New York.

https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1436667149297274880/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1436667149297274880&currentTweetUser=RonFilipkowski

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

Twilight’s Last Gleaming…

chef’s kiss

Alex Jones and others have been pushing this notion for over a decade, that Planned Parenthood actually operates a black market for baby parts and organs.

I think they used some shitty, vastly out if context stealth footage from Project Veritas, if memory serves.

Hell, the whole crazy Q Anon adrenochrome shit at least partially spawned from this: Live, scared babies have more or more pure adrenochrome, therefore thats how we know they do post birth abortions!

Its a delusional reinforcing loop of explanations for things that are not happening leading to explanations for those explanations… evidence is no where, but if you’re prone or susceptible to the idea that there is a true, objective, hidden evil in this world, then uh, well facts don’t care about your feelings and if you feel scared and angry, any ‘facts’ will do.

Except that you can effectively screen for basic interpersonal skills with a casual conversation of 15 to 30 minutes where the interviewer throws in some flashpoint / hot topics and asks a few more pointed or consequential questions after a general report has been established.

Or better yet, do that with their possible coworkers, or get said coworkers to suggest topics and questions for the recruiter in the above scenario.

Every day my disabled ass gets closer and closer to relearning Spanish and just moving/‘retiring’ to Costa Rica.

So, the article isn’t specific enough to explain whether or not the 5 rounds actually fired or cooked off.

Normally, ammo is said to ‘cook off’ (the irony in this specific situation is literally physically painful to me) when the gunpowder in the cartridge is heated enough that it deflagrates, usually with less of a total and rapid burn than when a gun is normally fired.

This is because primers (the substance that is actually struck by the firing pin and actually explodes, thus setting off the rest of the gunpowder to deflagrate) typically have much higher temperature thresholds before they will react than the gunpowder itself.

Basically what this usually means is that when ammo cooks off, it is still quite dangerous, but the bullets will have lower velocities than normal, less predictable trajectories.

I’d be curious to know whether the round in the chamber cooking off actually successfully had enough energy to cycle the action and load a subsequent round, or if half of them just exited from the magazine and handgrip.

Either way this is an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, jfc.

I thought it was bad when my idiot roommate left a pan of nachos and the plastic spatula in the oven after telling me she cleaned the kitchen. Went to preheat the next day and… oh. She did not clean the kitchen, now our spatula is molten and my chance of getting cancer has increased somewhat.

I guess thats not as bad as a fucking gun.

Why ask?

To further solidify the notion that you, as a recruitee, must show total devotion and unwavering loyalty to a potential employer.

Obviously recruiters know that people jump around after contracts or when they feel they are not being paid enough, that people scatter shot apply to anything like guys swiping on tinder because their prior experience trying to get a job has shown them that there’s really no rhyme or reason to it, that desired qualifications are nearly always absurdly niche or dramatically overinflated, and that there’s a hundred or a thousand people applying to every job opening.

It is literally their job to facilitate this process. Of course they know how all if this works.

This rhetoric is basically an attempt at conditioning you into being servile. If you ‘play ball’, you might get this particular job, and then they’ll basically lie to you about upward mobility, job stability or repeating contracts.

They are salesman. They sell the job to you and you to the company.

Why would they be anything other than slimy underhanded liars?

The deforestation of the Amazon is largely driven by a desire for more land to grow biofuels (sugarcane) on.

The byproducts of sugar production (the leaves and stalks) are used to produce ethanol from a biological, renewable source, as opposed to fossil fuels.

Oh, and in the Amazon, said sugarcane farming is often done by slaves.

You either need more farmland to grow what will become biofuels on it, or you have to stop growing food on existing farmland, which means food gets more expensive.