You can start a Kia with a program downloaded onto a USB stick. There was a Tiktok video that showed how to do it, it went viral, and now kids can basically pick and choose any Kia on the road and drive off with it.

Those are super unsafe and you can’t drive them in the rain.

Well, you can, but you’re taking your life in your hands.

I remember reading an article long ago about car salesmen and was shocked at the story of a family that came in with their old clunker and left with a new car a few hours later. The idea that people would just make a major purchase like that was deeply unsettling. You didn’t even read Consumer Reports on that model!!@#$% Madness!@!!*!!(((!!!

But it doesn’t work that way. They get lowered to the level of the customers who don’t want to overcome challenges. All they want is a good feeling. And those brain chemicals that get released by being led by the nose around a level are real.

When you pay full price for a game, do you deserve to experience all of the content contained therein? Or do you have to spend hours of tedious frustration, feeling bad brain chemicals, just to get what you already paid good money for? You feel enough bad brain chemicals with your job and your family already, why are you spending your precious few free hours doing the same?

Uhh…😅 I did…

I thought it would basically be No Man’s Sky. Fly around to planets and do stuff. But the designer himself flamed me on USENET so I quit following it and never played.

Battlecruiser 3000AD! By Derek Smart, Ph.D! Wow, that takes me back. The original “in development forever” game way before Daikatana or Duke Nukem.

to make people suffer in some way

Yes! That’s it! You’ve hit the nail on the head. People don’t pay $60 to feel frustrated. They pay $60 to feel good. If the game doesn’t deliver what they paid for, why does it even exist?

Gaming isn’t fundamentally about overcoming challenges. It used to be, but it changed long ago. Now, gaming is about generating pleasing brain chemicals. When gamers “win”, they feel good. When they meet a challenge that stops them, they feel bad. It’s just that simple. People don’t shell out $60 so that they can feel frustrated and angry. You paid for the whole game, you get to play the whole game. With lighted signs pointing the entire way and a companion to overcome the challenges if you can’t solve them in the first ten seconds.

I had never heard of them until Milo Yannopolous got popular in 2016. Back then, it meant “alternative right” as an opposition to GOP establishment and RINOs. Boy, they sure got a lesson in entryism as every piece of shit in America jumped on the train.

Children (overwhelmingly boys) who played vidya games were nerdy. There was a brief period during the Pac-Man era when vidya games were for everyone, and soon it went into hardcore weirdness. Games got hard and unless you had the patience to play again, and again, and again, and again…you can forget being a part of the crowd. Games with 45 levels when nobody ever got past level 4.

UNIQLO

is just Japanese Old Navy

Wow, I came here to say this.

And for a supposedly hands-off Creator, Iluvatar sure gets involved a lot. Not just at Mount Doom, but he raised Gandalf from the dead and did a bunch of other stuff that I forget.

GOLLUM

WAS

PUSHED

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634373403/d-c-couple-killed-in-tajikistan-attack-were-biking-around-the-world-together

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/theater/19peac.html

“Accepting rides with strangers was crucial to the art performance’s success”

It is politics of The Other. To the conservatives, the ingroup is Americans and the outgroup is non-Americans. To the liberals, their ingroup is the conservatives’ outgroups and their outgroup are the conservatives. This is why you will see things like libs cheerfully go into dangerous locales to prove everything is OK. These are their ingroups! And then they get beaten, stabbed or run over and can’t understand what happened. To the people that live there, all Americans are definitely The Other to them, and thus are fair game.

I think everyone knows how The Other gets treated: you can do anything to them. They’re not people, so they are outside the law. That’s where the word “outlaw” came from, once you were declared an outlaw it was no longer a crime to do things like rob you or kill you. With all the things Trump can be criticized for (correctly), you see people calling him a piece of shit because he’s fat. Or Clarence Thomas or Candace Owens being called a house Ns. I mean, that’s the best you’ve got? You can’t pick up any of the problems they are clearly guilty of? No, it has to be one of these.

Lib take:

One person is accused of rape, which the other person denies - which means either one person is a rapist or the other is making up a claim bout rape in the middle of a presidential campaign and by extension derailing democracy in America and imperiling the lives of millions.

That means either Joe Biden is a rapist on the loose or Tara Reade is essentially a terrorist. Compassion for victims does not apply here - Tara Reade needs to provide detailed accounts of everything she’s done for the last 25 years and find some way of verifying this - or she needs to acknowledge she’s a liar and face the consequences. Joe Biden needs to provide double blind presentation of timelines and like you say, lets see where the chips fall. And if Tara Reade is lying, she needs to go to jail for decades.

Compassion for rape victims is one thing. Taking allegations seriously is one thing. We have a democracy under threat from a fascist president. Tara Reade is an adult and she needs to be treated like one AND she needs to act like one. Prove your claim Tara. The burden is on her.

In order for shame to work, you need to have respect for the person attempting to shame you. If you don’t, it just bounces off you. This is why a six year old calling you poopy pants gets laughed off.

It wasn’t a “regional accent” it was an entirely different language. Remember that Doonesbury character that was introduced as being from the same village and being the only one who could understand him in his old age?

I’ve heard Mao speak Mandarin and it’s bizarre. I can’t imagine ruling a country without even being able to communicate with people. Imagine coming from Arkansas, speaking only Arkansasese, and only being able to talk to other Arkansans (who come from the same part of the state as you).

Sure you can…a splitter is like $5.

It’s one of the few times you get a view of the Federation from two aliens.

The “root beer” scene has always stood for what the Ferengi think about the Federation in my mind.