Draft horses: “Am I a joke to you?”

That is one of the stupidest takes I have ever seen, and I’ve been on the internet since AOL chatrooms.

Not voting makes politicians less accountable to you. If you somehow organized everyone who thought like you do, regardless of your agenda, and convinced every single one of them to not vote, then you would achieve the lofty political goal of… absolutely ensuring that no politician would ever try to pursue your goals.

Voting, by definition, is what makes politicians give a shit about your cause. There’s a reason why the Greek word meaning “one who does not take part in public affairs” is the root of the modern word “idiot.”

With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.

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!”

Like they say in the Altered State of Druggachusetts, “Only take what you can handle, and always know your dealer!”

“I WANTED ORANGE FANTA!” [Throws 17th century emerald cup across the room]

First they came for the beer and soda drinkers, and I did not speak out—because I did not drink beer and soda.

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.”

There was another questionably real Trump tattoo and I had the same thought: is it more disturbing to think that a person would earnestly get such a tattoo, or that a person would pretend to get such a tattoo? Why in the world would they pretend that? To convince people that they are in fact gigantic morons? To manipulate someone even dumber into getting a real Trump face tattoo? It’s all very mysterious.

Did you catch all-despising baby skull last night?

The Nerf Demolisher was released in 2014.

The Chainblazer was released in 1994.

Feed, by Mira Grant, is fun because it takes place years after a zombie uprising, but in a world where George Romero movies existed, so everyone knew what to do. It was a catastrophe, but not an apocalypse.

In any sane society, closing a private prison would be cause for celebration.

I’m curious: what would that mean, within Brazil’s borders? Would they be able to prevent Starlink from being used? Broadcast a Starlink jamming signal over the whole country? Or turn it into a diplomatic issue, with the US State Department getting involved?

Russia would never threaten China with nukes, because 1) China ALSO has nukes, and 2) China has been the only thing keeping Russia afloat recently.

But it would have to be a scorched earth kind of invasion. The kind that pisses off basically everyone, because it leaves every single Russian, military, or citizen, dead. They’d have to come in, take everything, and kill everything. Take the land.

First of all, if you’re being invaded by an army planning to genocide your entire population, then you have no reason not to use every weapon in your arsenal. If the options are A: China kills 100% of your populace or B: Launch nukes and even 1% of your populace survives whatever follows, then B is the most rational choice.

Secondly, there’s no reason to assume that states will make rational decisions to begin with. I’d say the current state of affairs in Ukraine is a very good example of that in action. So even if China wasn’t planning to genocide all of Russia, even if it was some kind of “benevolent” invasion where they were going to tiptoe around the flower beds, gently pry Putin out of the Kremlin, and basically leave everything the same except that now Russians pay for groceries with renminbi instead of rubles… there’s still every reason to imagine that Putin and his top brass would still launch nukes on the mere principle of the thing.

So no, let’s not glibly plan for a fast forward on nuclear Armageddon, thank you very much.

Not to mention the security that comes from being able to not pay if you get scammed for whatever reason. I paid for a course at a community college with a credit card, but then my schedule changed so I tried to cancel the class before it even started. The college gave me a whole runaround, and whether it was willful or just simple incompetence, I wasn’t able to get a refund. So I called my credit card company and explained the situation to them, and they resolved the whole thing for me. Sometimes even mentioning that you’ll refer such a problem to the fraud department at your credit card company is enough to get someone to back down and give you a refund.

Credit cards have issues, especially if you have problems with using them responsibly, but that’s one particular way in which they can save you a lot of headache.

I think SMBC nailed it with All-Despising Baby Skull back in 2012. Make advertising as horrible as possible, then jack up the costs on making it go away.

Fan Wang