I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn't terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it's like a tower defense RPG game. It's kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to "Auto-fight" for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I've been playing for something like 6 months now, but I've been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I've stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I've put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I've wasted a bunch that way, but I've never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don't know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.

I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there's so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you're trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you'd have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don't even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you're that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this... maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn't the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven't mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they'll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.

Also love my plain black and white RM2. The pen just works without needing to charge and the simple ability to just twirl it around and erase like an eraser is what makes it the most like paper. Also works great as an e-reader tablet, which is what I end up using it for half the time.

I think choice and/or the illusion of choice needs to be there for either side's fringe elements to have a safe outlet for their frustrations. There needs to be a viable left-leaning party to control potential socialist or communist agitators. If they just completely shut down the Democratic party, then there's the potential that somebody outside of the control of the aristocratic classes comes to power. Having the Democratic party around gives them a chance to funnel those people through the system and subtly bend them and make them more agreeable to the system. So maybe somebody would've been a bomb-throwing anarchist advocating for blowing up the status quo and beheading all the billionaires, but when processed through the Democratic party, maybe they turn into somebody like AOC or Bernie Sanders or something, still willing to work within the system and less likely to advocate revolution.

I'm still not sure about Trump, he still seems like an abnormality or a glitch in the system. I don't know if he went AWOL and the aristocracy doesn't want to move against their own, or if he's just part of "the plan" to move the country to the Right and having a crazy man-child as president gives them cover to push through all their extreme right-wing policies while everyone else fixates on the latest dumb thing that Trump tweeted. Or maybe it's all just anarchy and there is no conspiracy of the aristocracy, I don't know. Trump's existence just seems like one of those things the TVA would've come in and destroyed this whole timeline over.

How much easier it's gotten and most of what you download nowadays is usually exactly what you're looking for. In the 90's/00's, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener "What the fuck are you doing?" At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I'm probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.

I think with torrenting, there's a certain amount of trust that's inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there's 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn't be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don't pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don't know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it's not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it's better to be safe about that stuff.

Ridiculously enough, it's still a neck & neck race and Trump still very much has a good chance of winning. And he really has no incentive to drop out, he absolutely needs to get back into power in order to quash all these lawsuits against him, because at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters to him. Biden had the humility to drop out for the good of both the Democratic party and for the Country, Trump has no humility whatsoever and doesn't care if he tanks the Republican party or plunges the Country into some sort of Civil War 2.0 (not likely, but it's a possibility), none of that is a priority to him.

This is kind of similar to the Roman Republic in some ways. Holding on to power made some Roman officials immune to being summoned to court while they were in office, and our own Supreme Court has almost brought that practice back (give them a few more years for the rest). So the incentive for shitty office holders is to just keep holding on to office so that none of their illegal shit they do comes back to haunt them. That November sentencing will mean nothing to him if he becomes President again.

I like to treat every standard like a limbo bar and see how much lower I can go.

That’s an episode of “Will It Blend?” I didn’t think we’d ever get in real life.

This was a really interesting video on how modern wargaming is used by the military and its links to the recreational scene, I just got done watching it yesterday. I think Quinns, in typical fashion, seems to try to moralize a bit much, especially with his pointed questions, but then does a good job of coming back around to show the other point of view, though I think the overall view he had seemed negative. He tried to present both sides at least.

He did recognize the need for militaries in general, but then seemed to equate any use of wargaming as resulting in deaths, which was automatically bad. I think some of the wargame professionals made pretty good cases for why it was justified and how “wargaming” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s more a way of contingency planning and working through possible scenarios you might encounter, so wargaming just helps prepare for different scenarios by showing the range of actions that players/actors might take in a given situation. They’re mapping out probabilities using human psychology, along with boardgame and videogame mechanics.

I think the ending portion where he called on gamers to “do something” about making wargaming ethical was kind of whatever. As if the gaming community was any sort of unified bloc that could even do anything about it. Something like that would probably require like a wargamer’s guild or union that added some sort of restraints on the kinds of projects they would work on (only scenarios that minimize casualties) or something like that, but that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to map out probabilities, since you’d purposely censor certain probabilities from your line of thinking. I think wargamers will just continue to do whatever they’re doing.

The only things I don't like about pooping at work is when there's no private restrooms or when they don't have some sort of white noise in the bathrooms (in the case of public restrooms). Inevitably, there's people who don't care about shitting in the stall next to mine, which I absolutely hate, I don't want to hear you shit. I only want to shit when nobody else is around or when the sound of a fan or something blocks out the noise. It's like some sort of instinctual feeling. Otherwise, pooping at work is great.

Hello fellow Net-heads. My name is Wilbur Arnofsen, I live on 326 Cherry Lane in Sansquata, Michigan, very pleased to meet you all. I’ve heard great things about the information super highway, but I’ve also heard their may be some… problematic things, things like p**nography. Does anybody know the worst sites that I should be on the lookout for to block my kids from looking at those?

Thanks, Wilbur Arnofsen III

Overall maybe only like 5–10%. Known numbers always, unknown numbers get iffy when I might be expecting a call from somewhere but don’t have their number saved.

Maurice’s atrocities were so bad that they don’t even put them in the history books. The Holocaust pales in comparison to the things that Maurice committed.