neonrev

I can't speak to whatever a wide boy is, but that conversation was baffling to my sickness addled mind because there is a kind of glasses frames I sell called 'wide guyz', which are just eyeglass frames for people with real big heads. I thought you guys were talking about guys with big heads being weird gamers.

Oh dude, that's still totally a thing. I'm only in my early twenties and I got a drivers license at 13 and a car at 14, and I know that's still how it works in South Dakota. It's definitely still an important thing in states with large rural areas, just to get to school in the morning or off the farm for a bit. I started driving a bit just to the store or whatever when I was 11. It's a weird-ass thing.

So due to a lack of workers and the existing employees taking advantage of the massive job security that gives them (they can just not show up without consequence, we need them), I'm currently running a machine shop/lab meant to have 4 workers by myself for most of most days. I love my job, it pays way better than anything I've done before, but christ am I getting sick of covering everyone else's asses while busting mine.

Electorally, Clinton has it basically locked up. Almost every state that is at all in play would have to swing his way, and he has basically no ground game, and the Clinton campaign is still in the locker-room lacing up with teams upon teams of some of the best political actors in the country working with thousands across the nation, and Trump's been out in the ring yelling and flinging poo with some of the political actors least effective at building a broad base of support. We haven't even seen the gloves on yet, let alone off. Labor day is her real campaign kick-off, til now she's been letting him create and hand her ammunition all by himself.

I've had mushroom ketchup once, it was way more watery than tomato ketchup and closer to steak sauce I thought.

Pretty decent actually, especially for a group of modders working on what is apparently just a mess of source code. The game is still exactly what I remembered, the driving feels better than I remember and it's still as much fun as ever to strip a car down to a chassis and build it back up. I remembered there being far more detailed info about each part and a lot more interaction between them than is visable right now, but they are also overhauling a lot of the UI to bring it to a more modern place it seems, so maybe it'll be added in later. Right now the game is quite buggy, there are a number of hard crashes I've experienced and a lot of reports of other instability, but the most recent version seems much better, and is no longer forgetting my audio and video settings after shutting it down. The team working on it is doing a good job, there are minor version updates every few days while they are focused on trying to fix bugs (the release version was seriously bad, and was never really fixed, just spackled over.) and make it play nicer with modern hardware and OS's. After that they say they intend to bring in workshop support (It turns out it had a vibrant mod community) or just mod support of any kind, do a pass to improve textures and models (some of that is already started, they seem to be getting help from outside modders submitting new textures and such), add some content that was locked off, add more simple 'race' events (that's new to me, but it's possible that it was in the old game), and then just keep adding new cars and parts I guess. Multiplayer support has also been talked about, but I have little hope for that. It's really interesting to think about the motivations and practices of a group of previously separate modders joining together into a small team that then takes on the task of fixing someone else's broken game, and then supporting it into the future. It's cheap and I don't think money, or at least profit is really a priority here, it really does seem like these guys loved this game and want to see it be it's best self. The community is a pretty vile and rabid place, which surprised me, and I worry slightly about the team, as modders, getting distracted by the literally constant screams for workshop support (which I'd guess is actually a complicated thing to set-up) and more cheats from the actually vital work of stabilizing the engine and bringing graphics and the user experience up to modern standards. I'd say it's well worth a buy, and worth keeping an eye on. This game, looking better and running smoothly, would beat the shit out of any other street racing game (that has a 'build the car' element) I've ever played.

Dishonored: Gin and tonic. A classy gaming experience. The Yawhg: Gin and tonic. You have friends over. Civ 5: Monster Energy Drink and Jack Daniels (only for nights off. You will not notice the time passing, nor will you care.) Silent Storm/Jagged Alliance: Gin and Tonic, shifting to Gin and Lemon or Gin as needs dictate. MMOs: Purple Drank. Grinding made fun? Other people made tolerable. Life skills optional. War Thunder: Pabst, but only once you're on a sliding scale between skilled at the game and sober and bad at the game and drunk enough to just enjoy whoosh-whoosh airplanes. Rimworld: Whatever is at hand, I dunno, maybe that Fernet Branca can taste okay on it's own? This shit's unbearable. Any Halo game: Cheap Vodka, cheap oragne juice, regrets. Hitman games: Sippin' whiskey Fallout games: Sippin' whiskey, but you use an old jar. Stardew Valley: Wine, but not good wine. Gone Home: Wine, but you actually try and buy 'good' wine. It's a treat.

I hate having a bunch of tabs open, and I reserve a special disdain for people who use permanently open tabs as a bookmark system. A program we use at work uses firefox to load and print job specs (so it can also send the info to the machinery I guess), and it creates a new tab for each job. At the end of the day the system is slower because it has around fifty firefox tabs open. There is not a situation in which having the tab open in the browser is useful in any way. Literally no one there had any idea that having a lot of tabs open was a performance hit, and they were just leaving the browser open day after day until it crashed. Me telling them to close tabs a couple times a day was an actual significant increase in production speed and was considered an act of great computer knowledge. The day I noticed that was what was happening, we had just under 500 open firefox tabs, all to static pages, but leading to a massive memory issue that slows down the entire process. I make medical equipment, by the way. This is in a 'laboratory'. Some of my co-workers are actual doctors and they failed to notice this. Mind-boggling. I use just an adblocker (unblocked on sites I like/support, blocked by default because ad-based revenue systems are broadly toxic and also virus-ridden.) and an extension that allows me to collapse my bookmarks into just their icon so I can fit more on the bookmark bar. Chrome is fully featured enough that I never needed much else.

I finally felt like I'd gotten away from the hype around Gone Home enough to enjoy it, so I played through it a few days ago. I can't remember having higher expectations for the actual content of a game, not just its gameplay. It was incredible. I am certain I have nothing new to add to that conversation, so I won't try except to say that I have never, in any media, felt as emotionally involved with a character as I did here. I'm not an adventure game player by any means, and I did find the attic and the basement unlocking to be either confusing or poorly signposted, as I needed spoilers, and I could not stand being restricted to walking, and I very much did not find that adding to the realism or immersion. If I'm trying to discover what I believe to be a secret passage hidden within my families house but need to go double-check something across the house, I'm sure as hell not going to walk there, I'm going to run, or at least move faster than "Aiding the elderly across streets" speed.

Street Legal Racing: Redline, an early open-world racing game/early entry in the car parts and tuning sim game genre was released as abandonware in 2014, and a community-cleaned up version just hit steam. SLR:R was one of those games from when I was young where I played hours and hours of it despite it not being great (still pretty good though) because I had nothing else. Gonna pick it up, only $7 and I'm pretty sure I had a freeware version with a trivially removable timer back in the day, so I should pay for it at least once. Maybe check it out? Looks rough, but I remember it fondly as feeling like an open world racing game RPG, where you start off with a little shitbox racing other shitboxes for petty cash, and slowly work your way up by upgrading individual parts of engines and buying new cars, flipping them as you go, simulating in great detail the effects of crashes, making cooler and cooler cars until you enter some Fast and the Furious desert race. There are also hilarious police who enforce traffic laws but are not great at driving themselves.

Dear lord no, I ate that mac and cheese with hotdogs (with Heinz 57, please, we still had some class) meal all the time as a kid. It's exactly as good as it sounds. My mother knew dozens of ways to make a box of mac and cheese seem like it's a different meal every night, and like 80% of these combo's included either ketchup or 57, and this included the 'Mexican' variety with a can of chili beans mixed in.

I'll try and screenshot it later, but a very promising colony of mine was just (probably) doomed to failure because the 'hive' event fired inside of a structure deep in a mountainside that also happened to contain a bunch of mechanoids, spawning a scarab that killed one mech and awakening the other 8, 4 centipedes and 4 sycthers, who are now tunneling their way out of the mountain to come and kill everyone. There is a flip side to this, which is that the gods of crash landing gifted me an apparel section full of (probably mod) body armor, helmets, and one full set of power armor, next to a different weapons section containing some high-end (also mod) weaponry, including one set of EMP grenades, the bane of mechanoids. I was just finishing up a session before going on a hike, but later today there will be a battle royale over the as-yet-unnamed colony.

This is a game where I have repeatedly constructed deep and remote areas to allow my psychopath characters who are good (eh, not always) doctors to harvest the organs of living, wounded people on the off chance I need them or can sell them, after having optimized my defenses to leave as many raiders alive after attacks as possible so I can brainwash those I want. I've intentionally isolated 'egg rooms' for chickens and the like so I can intentionally breed chickens, not for the eggs, but for the meat of the freshly born chicks which is slightly more valuable. They are slaughtered en masse once juvenile. I've certainly stolen colonists purely to put them to work in deep dank hydroponic rooms with tiny bedrooms and limited access to the rest of the base to feed the names I care about. I used to have a mod so I could cremate the piles of dead bodies because graves take up space. I often execute wanderers who join me if I feel they would be a drag on the rest of the colony. This includes everyone with the 'dumb labor' inability. Hauling is life. The lazy die and I take their clothes and weapon, and also usually the meal they brought. I really don't feel like the good guy ever in this game after a colony lives long enough. You only exist long enough to become the villain. Maybe that's just me. I also had a long-time colonist die of a heart attack suddenly once, and I closed the game and never went back to the save I was so sad. It puts a person in a weird emotional state. I wasn't sure about the sapper thing, but in the most recent Rimworld with Chris stream a group was explicitly called out as sappers, so I think that's a thing in vanilla now. I don't know if it's mods or not, but I've also had raiders set up mortars and turrets and attempt sieges of a (really poorly planned, bad AI) sort. I think the AI is far more extensive than it appears at first. It takes many games to get both skilled and lucky enough to survive into the mid to late game, and I have a high opinion of it there. (I fucking love this game.)

I think maybe sappers (although mine were not 'sappers' in the notification, they were just 'a raiding party') and other AI can maybe identify 'areas of danger' (turrets, sandbags and the like) and avoid them? I do my best to find hard-points to build myself into and see a bit of avoidance after a while. I don't know how much the AI changes depending on the kind of raid. Tribal raids are the easiest to rebuff even when underarmed, then local other colonies (if you piss them off) then pirates then the mercs. Serious late-game can get silly depending on the difficulty settings. I have a thing with this game where I played the vast majority of my time with it (maybe a thousand hours? I don't have Steam tracking for basically all of it., but 80 hours since it came out.) in early versions and got bored with vanilla and got heavy into the mod scene long before it hit the wider steam audience, so while I have a shit-ton of experience with it I have difficulty telling what was super early, what has always been that way, what is current vanilla, and what was mods. This game has a fantastic mod scene, and I consider the base game to under-fleshed out without them. Two that I consider vital, core to my experience with the game and one that is totally vanilla in tone and fixes some basic issues while adding some more options; Crash Landing This is Rimworld that actually has you start in a spaceship crash. You can start either normal, in drop pods with full health, or as wounded crash survivors. There are also other falling sections of the space ship, resource sections for food, material, trade goods, cryptosleep sections with random gen pawns in various states of injury, prison pods with newly escaped criminals, engine sections with radiation poisoning and fire hazards, animal pods both wild and pre-domesticated. Oh, also, falling sections start fires. It adds a sense of realism and randomness, and the deciding whether to go and try and grab up the late-game resource or the couple of decent looking pawns (also, how are they hurt? Is it worth keeping this amazing grower in a bed until you can get them a peg leg? Will they be able to stand it? Do you just deny them medical care to save for your other, unhurt colonists? Maybe someone less wounded?) is just good. There are settings you can use to change whether it's allowed to rain during this (can be kinda cheaty if it starts raining while the fires are starting, but can also just lead to massive devastation.) and other aspects of the crashing. It's narratively good, and adds an extra layer of variety once the base start loses it's edge. This one is maybe pretty rough if you are not already good at the basics and getting a colony up and running, but once you are it adds so much. EdB Prepare Carefully The new scenario feature is a far weaker and harder to use version of this. It's basically the "prepare carefully" option from dwarf fortress, where you can pick the skills, attributes, start items and animals of the colony. It's very fully featured, has a point system for balance which includes both items and attributes/skills which can be disabled if you want. I find it a powerful tool for storytelling. Want to have a a colony starting with 3 very skilled farmers and no one who can mine well? How about a team of super-soldiers, well armed, but no practical skills? What about the cast of a TV show? How about a perfectly prepared set of 5 skilled colonizers with no resources, or 10 total useless idiots flush with everything they need? What if everyone is a slow moving abrasive brawler? Maybe a colony of murderous psychos, or maybe a team of hyper-social doctors and researchers is more your speed? What if you just want a comfy start to make it more of a builder, or a really brutal survial game? All this and more. It seems to work well with the new scenario editor, as in changing world state and such, but it's still a bit buggy as it's a tool that messes with pretty base elements, but I've never had a serious issue in years with it. You can certainly sit around and reroll waiting for 3 decent people, or you can just edit promising looking ones or create them from scratch, this one is more seen as cheaty, but if you use it to cheat that's your thing. It's a great way to start a with a specific set-up, and that's been the life of the game for me. Core Panda This is more of a kitchen sink/minor bug fix/base for other mods. It notably adds more materials (copper, glass, bricks and rubber, nothing extreme.), some things to do with them (windows for light and joy that are fragile, fatigue mats for high traffic areas, sinks for improved cleanliness and more upkeep, some storage options besides the ground and some basic production options in the very early game.) It's basically just a quality of life mod, nothing I'd consider outside the spirit of the base game. I don't have as much passion for this as for the other two, but I still always play with it on, and several other mods from the same author. I linked to the forum topics for all of these since they are more descriptive in some cases (and I had them bookmarked), but all are also available through the steam workshop and work seamlessly there too. Seriously, this game was made for mods, it expands so easily being so systems based and graphically basic. There is no reason not to explore them beyond stodgy "Not the way it was made to be played" bullshit. Mod control came early, this is a base game expected to be expanded upon by the community, and it has workshop support. Check the mods out. Edit: Also, this is a pretty good game if anyone was looking to get into basic modding. It's an endless fount of "Oh, but what if..." and pretty easy to mess with as I understand. No good mod tools, but very open code. I have zero coding experience beyond basic C in high school, and I've always been able to find and change anything I find annoying, plus the art style is really basic and imitate-able. I've been toying with a leadership skill thing that came up in the slack and glancing over the skill coding, and I might try and give it a shot sometime I have more time.

I think the wall thing is an impulse that makes sense and works for early game raids, but fails to later, harder raids. They absolutely will attack a point in the wall instead of a doorway, although I'm not entirely sure how their AI works so I don't know why/how they decide, and they will do it with explosives and fire. They will sometimes literally begin tunneling through a mountain to get to you, it's happened to me. I had set up in this little peninsula of clear land in a mountain side, and had heavily fortified the one narrow entrance. I saw a raid notification, chuckled at my new victims, and waited for them to hit the front gate and get wrecked (I also had a mod that added non-lethal weapons, so i would usually try to trap them in this little kill zone I'd made, pound them with beanbags from cover, then pick and chose who gets indoctrinated and who gets their organs harvested.) It took a while for them to come, so I went looking. 3 of them had made it about a third of the way through mountain to a rear section of my base where I kept all the art and clothing making stuff. They were cornered and summarily executed (for having lousy stats and making me run guys all the way around to them.). I always forget that other people build outside houses in this game. I came at it from DF, and my first impulse is to start mining out a little home in the side of a big thick mountain. Safer, and you get your later building materials as you go.

This is repulsive. I gagged at the thread title. On a related note, people who get steak well-done and then slather it in ketchup are also monsters. People who over-use ketchup are babies. It is a baby food that we accept a certain use of in adults. Edit: Also people who put only ketchup on hotdogs. Babies, all of them.

So, as someone who makes eyeglasses, a thing to consider. The online places are just as good at making glasses as a store with a lab, but depending on your exact prescription, the exact fitting of the frames can have a significant effect on how the lenses should be cut and ground. Everyone's face is asymmetrical, and while I'm sure they have some solution to this online, it can't replace actually wearing the frames and seeing how your ears, nose and pupils align with where the lenses will be. Some prescriptions this doesn't matter much, but I have a hard time imagining making a properly set pair of progressives without having had the frames on the patient, and it'd be off in a way that can't be solved with adjusting them after the fact. Also, for some people things can be off and they don't notice, but there are some people who are simply very sensitive to very slight problems (a few degrees off in axis can give some people splitting headaches.) and the best way to avoid that is to get them in person. You might be totally fine though, it depends on the prescription. One other thing, don't anyone ever pay for an upgrade to polycarbonate lenses. They are only slightly more shatter and scratch resistant to plastic, and that comes at the cost of heat resistance, chemical resistance (bug spray can fuck them up) and a worse ABBE value (they are a worse transparent thing, basically.). They are a total scam.

There's a number of atheist groups that preform non-religious church-style services, with the usual group in pews, a sermon (or lecture or speech or what have you) on some topic, with study groups on more focused topics for those who want it. It basically imitates the social structures of a church, but they aren't organized or large enough to achieve the same level of services like counseling or financial aid that a lot of christian churches provide. I often times find myself really missing singing hymns in church as a kid, as it's one of the few places that you can sing loudly and poorly in a group setting and no one minds.

So my life had been pretty rough for the past few months before June, I had to quit a dead-end job because another employee (the son of one of the owners, which made him untouchable and it dangerous to accuse him of the things he was absolutely doing) was stealing cigarettes, hunting and fishing licenses, bait, soda, anything you could get at a gas station and fucking up my numbers, which gets scary when those numbers are reported to the state and are heavily regulated like cigs and licenses, I couldn't get another job in town for a couple months because it was a tiny town with no real jobs and a ton of competition for what there was available, relying on my GF to help me out while I was broke (and she was finishing college and in a terrible mood anyways, so the financial side of things added to that made things tense), dealing with some health issues without either insurance or money, living in a wreck of a house with sky-high utilities bills, terrible internet, gross water that made us and our rabbit ill, no real friends in town after college, just kinda feeling lost and without any real options. Then, I moved to Duluth at the beginning of June, which was stressful at first because it's a long way from home and my entire massive extended family all lives within a couple hours of each other, and I was going to be about 10 hours away from them all and I share their farmer mentality of staying close to home, but since I got here things have been really looking up. Within a couple days of starting my job search I happened into an eyeglasses maker, where an old buddy I've known since kindergarten was working (I thought he had moved away), he helped me get a solid 9-5 full-time job I really enjoy with health and dental, 401k, paid vacation and all that, our new apartment is very nice and in good shape, and actually cheaper than the old place at the end of the day since utilities are included, the rabbit is in good health with a specialized vet right down the street, things with the GF are going much better now that she's done with school and I'm not a bum, I have a couple of college friends up here who are also looking for people to hang out with, there are some communities of makers I have some ins with, we know people who raise chickens and ducks and thus have a surfeit of free food, basically a total turn around in fortune. I went from feeling lost, miserable and alone all day to feeling like I actually have a future I can look forward to, living in a town I love with a person I love who is no longer freaking out over graduating, in an apartment I like and having social options again, and I feel just great. There isn't really an upshot to all this, but holy shit did things really turn around for me in only a week, and I can barely believe it actually happened and I wanted to share.

Nabbing something someone else posted on my home away from home metafilter because it seems appropriate: "Speaking of voter suppression, the Kansas Secretary of State's office put out inaccurate Spanish-language voter guides with the wrong registration deadline and omitting a passport as a valid form of ID that can be used to satisfy the state's voter ID requirement. The English-language guides had the correct information."

Should be back up now, Dewar. Edit: Dammit

There's also the argument for maintaining a strong liberal voice all the way up to the convention. I don't see any way Hilary doesn't end up moving more to the center to grab up repubs and moderates fleeing Trump the moment she no longer needs to compete amoung the definitely-not-voting-republican crowd, and if that happens before the general then the earlier that starts. I haven't had the privilege of seeing a major party candidate who even slightly spoke to my views, I want them up there yelling for as long as humanly possible.

In what context? In the case of WWII there are really a lot of things to say about video game representations of the Eastern front in particular, few of them good. Outside of works explicitly about that war, Russians are usually depicted as Soviets or as mafia, and Germans are usually implied to be Nazis or at least somewhat sadistic. Either that or a really good engineer. Russians are the modern Nazi, in video game terms. Interchangeable enemy, except usually they use modern day Russians with the nationalism turned all the way up. It's a very weird space. I think one of the biggest problems with representations of Russians, in the US at least, is that the existence of the Soviet Union turned everyone from anywhere it ever covered "Russian", regardless of actual ethnicity or nationality. I'm German/Ukrainian, and live in America, and it can actually be hard to convince people that Ukraine isn't part of Russia (well, harder before the war. People seem to get it now.) and that people from there are not always Russian (This is still pretty sticky.). I'm guilty of it, I've called myself Russian before to avoid having to explain the geopolitics of Ukraine. People are very comfortable thinking of everything east of Germany, north of the middle east, and west of China as being "Russia" in some manner, there's decades of cold war conditioning behind it, and it's really detrimental to any sort of nuance there. Everyone is Russian, and they are all either criminals, nationalists or former soviet agents, possibly all three, and modern politics make them acceptable targets.

God, I'm so sick of hearing this. How can it possibly come as a surprise that turnout is greater than most years and probably insane in places heavy with young people? It was like that for me in MN, like they hadn't even planned lines or printed out the right fucking forms. I'm still not sure my vote actually counted, I had some weird form they said wasn't right but also that it didn't' matter, and there were too many other people crushing into the fucking bar (A FUCKING BAR?) the polling place was at for me to stick around. There's really no excuse anymore, volunteer costs and all that be damned. I'm so fucking sick of hearing about how it's too expensive for (poc, young, poor, old, queer, take your fucking selection of the disenfranchised.) Americans to exercise their god-damned voting rights. This makes me SO mad, I am sorry.

I have the worst crash bug. At the end of the day on Spirit's Eve when you go to sleep, full-on crash to desktop, leaves no error report in the error log. Doing pretty great otherwise, surpassed 24 hours played today so I'm extremely reluctant to try a restart. Horrible. Edit: Okay, 5th time's the charm and I got it fixed. Some weird patch problem with gog? Crash was solved in a patch but didn't work for whatever reason and it needed a clean reinstall of the updated exe. This is the worst game to have a save bug with though, having to play through an entire day over and over to see if you fixed it.