Aw, but all my other bones are so low maintenance.

Mine is Magic: The Gathering, except I fully realize that I am pulling away from it and why.

The game sparked an immense amount of joy when I picked it up in high school. Now I barely recognize the game anymore. It doesn’t truly have an identity of its own and exists in this permanent state of limbo where 3rd party IPs are taking over the demand for new product and the rules are becoming so bloated that they can’t fit them on cards anymore.

This is such an “old man yelling at clouds” moment for me, because I heard just about every reason under the sun for why people quit the game when I was playing from power creep to changing art styles to just getting priced out of the hobby in general. I realize now that those people were not wrong, they were just not the target audience anymore. I am no longer a profitable demographic to pander to. I never buy packs anymore, and I’ve even stopped buying singles and I don’t attend tournaments or collect anymore, so why would Hasbro/WotC make products for me? Especially when there are deep pocketed whales out there who will pay top dollar for their favorite crossover set, no matter how silly or out of place it might seem.

I wish I could enjoy the game the way I used to, but I just can’t be bothered to hop back in when it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

I got accused of this the other day. Some random on Steam added me because he liked my profile pic. I was bored and decided to humor him. Two sentences in and he’s like “What’s with the ChatGPT sounding responses?”.

I honestly didn’t know how to react to that.

It doesn’t matter to anybody who has already made up their mind to vote/not vote for him.

It matters that justice is done and that the system holds him accountable.

Guestbook, hit counter, a midi file playing in the background, and a dead hyperlink to another page of the same website.

Edit: omg I can’t believe I forgot about marquees. Do that too.

I always thought that Fox was a cool name for a dude ever since I watched the X-Files. If I had to change my first name, that’s what I’d pick.

No, those are usually embedded into the video itself as a segment by the content creator. However, SponsorBlock works really well and will automatically skip those bits for you (assuming someone else already put in the effort to mark the sponsored content).

I want people to know that life was the greatest fucking thing to ever happen to me. I loved it all, even the parts that sucked, just because I got to take it all in. The highs of joy, the lows of sadness, the good, the bad. People will say “Too bad he never got to live a full life,” but I say FUCK that! This was fucking incredible! This IS a full life because it’s the one I got, and just the chance to experience this universe is so unbelievably goddamn beautiful

I don’t have anything to add to the discussion, but that particular line resonated with me. When I was in college, one of my professors said something pretty profound that I think is relevant to this. I can’t remember if he was quoting someone of if this was original, but I’m paraphrasing it here:

“Everyone who has ever lived was alive during the greatest time to be alive.”

So I think you are absolutely right. Life is a blessing and you got to be here for the best life had to offer, and that’s awesome. We are all but motes of dust, and the span of a full life versus a life cut short is inconsequential in the grand scheme. I’m sure you’ll leave something behind that will be worthwhile and will help carry your memory forward in time.

I mean, the philosophy behind correcthorsebatterystaple is good. I used that method for master passwords to password managers and it really does work well to help you remember a long complex password that can’t be guessed easily.

But some people might have been missing the point of that xkcd using correcthorsebatterystaple itself.

I used to use it way back when it first came out and I was a huge fan, but about the time Chrome was becoming a mainstream alternative I started to have a lot of difficulty with adblockers not working and webpages that refused to load on anything other than Internet Explorer or Chrome, so I switched.

Heard about some of the shady shit going down recently in the Googlesphere and decided it was time to switch back and I’m happy to report that everything runs smoothly again.

This flag is called “Thin Blue Line”, which is a pro-police symbol. The origin is from the thought that supposedly the only thing keeping peaceful society insulated from total anarchy is a “thin blue line”, or a small number of law enforcement officers who voluntarily put themselves between the two.

However, as noble as the origin sounds, the flag itself is only a modern artistic creation that can trace it’s actual creation to the counter-protest of the “Black Lives Matter” movement in support of the police (the ones who were the subject of accusations of racial bias and discrimination against blacks in America) and it often interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, supporting acts of police brutality, extrajudicial killings, and authoritarianism in general.

It’s a pretty right-wing affiliated symbol and you see it in conjunction with a lot of other conservative virtue signaling, iconography, and stereotypes.

My gripe with him isn’t so much his fight mechanic, it’s his absolutely massive hitbox that activates whenever it moves a centimeter.

Fighting him from the air is the most efficient, I’ve discovered, but I spent a good few attempts trying to get in close with the plasma blade and would see three quarters of my HP bar disappear because my recovery animation overlapped with the startup of his charge attack that shouldn’t have been able to hit me because I was to his side or rear.

The Cataphract has been my favorite fight so far. Really challenging, but really rewarding.

In my experience, you don’t have to compromise. You can take meta dual shotguns and two heavy hitting shoulder mounts and just vaporize enemies. Almost trivially, in fact.

The problem is, the game is not more fun if you force yourself into something like a melee hybrid build. It’s significantly harder and there’s less room for error when piloting lightweight ACs, so it’s no surprise that most people find the most comfortable build to be one where you have high health and damage mitigation, insane burst DPS, and stunlock potential.

In short, there’s not a good balance between the different playstyles and difficulty. Some bosses are actually really fun to fight, but two or three of them have made my shit list already just due to the nonsense you are forced to put up with. Juggernaut, Balteus, and Sea Spider are the three biggest offenders right now.

Oh look, a boss fight. Will this be a fair-and-balanced skill-based experience? Or will it be a DPS race against the clock and hoping I get good RNG on the enemy attack patterns so I don’t die to mostly unavoidable or unreactable damage?

What? This is simply not true. Yes, there was a dip in 2008, but the real estate market has since recovered and we are already well beyond what houses were valued at on average in 2008 and this time there’s no subprime lending bubble.

Buying real estate is still the #1 way for regular people to passively build wealth in America. It’s just getting a lot harder for average people who are not already on the ladder to take the first step due to prohibitively high costs, taxes, and interest rates.

Too many gold sinks at low level, not enough gold sinks at high level.