Art historians from the future are going to have a weird fucking day going down the early millennium works.

I used to do a lot of mazes as a kid and one of the tricks is to often start from the terminus and go backwards. There are significantly less branches doing that in this case especially.

Bros plate is a fucking giant pizza slicer. That’s magnificent.

Every morning, instead of pouring ourselves a bowl of cereal, we get a bowl of war crimes.

I went to CachyOS recently. It isn’t my first swap, having tried Manjaro previously, but circumstances kept me from staying before. This time, I’m doing most of what I need in Linux and only swapping to a Windows dual boot for a few odd things, like Adobe for e-sign for work (they only accept that).

I think the only other frustration is work admins don’t let me use non-outlook for email or an alternative to one drive, but for personal use I see no reason to use Windows.

Also, and the strangest thing, the MMO I play with friends runs differently on Linux. It’s hard to explain, but the game has fairly bad net code that’s somehow resolved with Wine. So, what used to be a half second to a full second delay on things like attacks going off, it’s instant now. For better or worse, given it leaves less room for error, lol.

Oh also I’m enamored of KDE Plasma. So pretty and smooth, with themes I actually like. It’s much better than Windows UI by every metric I can think of.

Drat, too blurry to make out the less common horrifying things people are looking forward to.

It’s mostly awful for the first two badges, but playing with fast forward I beat my first badge in White 2 with in game time around 65 hours (so probably around 15 hours). It’s insanely tedious, but I enjoy it late game.

Hehe, it’s great work btw. You can only do so much with round balloons and I can’t imagine fire or logs in any other ballonish shape. Lol

My thought exactly. Although worms coming out of them and doing weird stuff to lady liberty there.

Beg to differ on the Pokemon example, but then again I am a completionist so that type of challenge gives me lots of self satisfaction (plus now I have achievements through RetroAchevements so a little bragging rights). Frankly, things like that should have internal motivation, so literally no reward is fine by me. I’m literally doing a professor oak challenge right now, which is significantly worse, lol.

Where I draw the line is mostly challenges that I just don’t see myself being able to accomplish in a given lifetime. Like the Balatro golden chip on every joker is way too RNG and time consuming for me. I also generally prefer not to have to do a speed run, but that’s mostly because I have kids now and setting something down without worrying about time is ideal.

The immigration part isn’t new, but her economic stance… she has said Margret Thatcher is an inspiration. It’s just that bad. Her views on gender are also quite backwards, which is ironic given she’s the first female Japanese PM.

I was a little surprised that AI was actually not too off, or at least when it was, it was because it misunderstood the distro I used. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go beyond basics though, like installing random stuff from the AUR to fix something can go horribly wrong.

I mean, not just a god in that mythology but one of the most important ones since she created a lot of other gods. If he’s got another boat named Izanagi, I am pretty sure it’s just a very, very funny coincidence. Almost like the universe is trying to tell him something about his bullshit Zionist ways.

I managed, but I’m a glutton for punishment. In the first one you can kind of go guideless as long as you know a few fundamentals: determination is most important as it gives more skill points and easily pays for itself - by endgame you easily have everything capped. Certain combinations of skills also become game breakers, like being able to duplicate items or pumping up exp gains, etc, but the game isn’t that hard and if you want to do everything you have to run multiple times anyway. That holds especially true in SO2, apparently.

On that note, SO games use divergent path storylines but rather than being a “choose a faction” or something, it’s dependent on party members. In SO1, it’s basically three ways things pan out for certain arcs depending on who you recruited, with some members required for others. Luckily there was a flowchart, so blind-ish runs can sorta use that without blatant spoilers. It gets kind of interesting because certain mutually exclusive characters are related in unpredictable ways, so multiple playthroughs kinda reveal more depth… at least as far as a game originally made for SNES can be.

Luckily the game isn’t that long so it wasn’t much of a chore to do multiple playthroughs, especially with fast forward functions of ppsspp emulator. Doing it on original hardware might have been more of a chore, though.

The skills system really calls out for a guide, it’s really easy to misallocate points early game. Or at least that’s my understanding; I did SO1 on PSP recently but uses the same system more or less and you can make life a lot easier with proper planning.

The recent remaster supposedly has better documentation, although I’m not sure I like it better.

I’m starting up… Pokemon White Version 2 completely out of the blue because RetroAchevements is beta testing their multiset feature and I’m a sucker for the Professor Oak Challenge grind. (It’s pure madness, truly a waste of time grind beyond human comprehension, but it’s also an excuse to binge watch stuff and keep my overactive brain in check).

As always I recommend RetroAchevements in general, though. Truly an endless supply of old stuff to do!

I’ve been holding out for a Full Body experience but might just have to emulate it at this point. Although missing out on cutscenes is a real shame-- when it first came out, my wife and I played the game and watched the scenes together and uh… was an interesting and tense situation. Lol

NPR yesterday mentioned quite clearly in an interview with John Bolton that economic sanctions are the biggest factor in Iran, and very much on purpose. It is a US strategy, even pre-Trump.

He acknowledged the cultural upheaval that’s been going on years ago, too, and also that negotiations with their regime is a “waste of oxygen.” But sanctions were definitely central.

Though I suppose NPR isn’t really sensationalized… you wouldn’t interview John Bolton if you wanted sensational news.

Pfft. We know guys who look like that prefer meth or heroin. That’s definitely heroin Jesus.

Yeah… That’s a violation of FERPA and is reportable offense that’ll get ya fired or sued. Lol