Rynjin

Picked up Humble Monthly for once, I've wanted Civ VI for a while and Owlboy I've heard nothing but good things about. Wonder if the other games will be as good?

It's not dismissal of esports in general, it's of Overwatch as an esport. It was designed from the ground up to be a casual game, and is great for that. But so much of that design makes it a really shitty competitive game, especially the focus on stuns (and other forced movement/passivity abilities) and ultimate abilities. Genji and Mercy alone make it a bad esports game, aside everything else. Resurrection abilities are unsatisfying to play against and set in stone part of the meta from the start; the other supports may as well not exist. And having somebody that can completely determine an engagement (Genji determines whether you fight at all, when you're allowed to fire shots, and when the fight ends) with little counterplay means you're also stuck playing around another really dumb roadblock (though at least he's not a 100% pick like Mercy). Don't even get me started on how shield tanks make it an exceptionally uninteresting game to watch.

I didn't know anybody actually cared about Overwatch League. It's such a badly designed game for a competitive format I figured nobody actually bothered.

I had a group of about 10 friends that all hung around outside together during lunch. We had fun. One time I accidentally shot a bottle cap into a friend's face and he had a mark on it for a week.

Happy New Year everybody, here's to another year of jolly friendship and cooperation!

I've been semi-keeping up with Kekkai Sensen/Blood Blockade Battlefront 2 (the dub, it's a good dub). I tried to watch Inuyashiki but the first episode was so laughably bad I couldn't force myself to watch any more. I've watched one episode of Ancient Magus Bride and plan to watch more. Thassaboutit.

The main reason I suggested what I did is because the Spy's main issue is his toybox is limited and predictable. No level of toybox improvement will completely eliminate rampat paranoia screwing you, but buffing it enough so he can (appear to) do more things while disguised could make the paranoia work for you, since it's no longer possible to tell just at a glance who is a Spy (spoiler, it's the guy not scroll wheel swapping his weapons constantly or randomly swinging his melee as he moves along or rocket/sticky jumping, etc.). Other utility buffs would be welcome but Valve has shown an intense reluctance to give Spy a fourth slot like people have been begging for since...2009 or so? So any new utility item would have some kind of big tradeoff in what Knife or revolver or Watch you get to use, which can be a dealbreaker having to choose between not killing, being helpless(er) when caught, or not being able to get into position in teh first place. Having a utiity Sapper slot for more than just skins would fix that, but I've long since grown tired of hoping against hope for that.

They really should just add a feature to allow Spy to fake class-specific functions like that. Even adding the weird trails behind a Scout's jump while disguised would be helpful, but other stuff like fake airblasts would help too.

Ehh, with the Spy speed buff from a while back it's less egregious. A Scout moving at base speed is suspicious, but a Scout moving at Medic speed is less noticeable, especially if your Scout is using the BFB.

That'll teach ya to shop online like a normal person next year. =p

Just disable auto-updates and only launch through the SKSE launcher and it'll never matter. The extra stability on SE is worth it.

Yes, it is their fault. I'm surprised this hasn't fallen under some kind of anti-trust investigation yet. It's cool that Marvel finally has...everything but Spiderman I think back, but monopolies actually are pretty bad. Especially with how copyright strike happy Disney is.

Read it again, in context. The whole paragraph is in the context of the sentence "You have me, whose parents made almost all of the right choices in life, and you, whose parents made almost all of the wrong choices in life". Including "we vote red, you vote blue".

If he'd left it there, sure. "Your parents made bad choices and my parents' were good because my parents have different political views and I have never suffered any hardship in my life because my parents love me (but yours didn't that's why their divorce was rough) here's some advice" is pretty close to the cuntiest thing Caveson has ever said, and he has some strong contenders. I've given up on engaging him when he starts acting like this and I'm not sure why other people haven't already as well. He comes into a thread ENTIRELY IGNORANT of the topic of discussion (but knowing he disagrees with everyone else because he's a ball of preconceived notions), asks questions about the subject, gives up discussion after people do his god damn research for him and then starts crying about how the libruls are ruining this country and he's had it so much better than everyone else because his mommy and daddy are great. He's fine to interact with in the first half of this cycle but y'all need to stop feeding him in that second half.

You might then note that the FCC's vote will include not only repealing Net Neutrality rules at a federal level, BUT ALSO instituting policies that prevent state governments from having their own local laws on the matter. In essence, I think you're looking at this backwards. The current rules are almost completely hands off, dictating only basic rules of conduct for how these businesses can treat their customers. The new rules would be freeing the corporations to do whatever they wish to the people, but also leashing state governments to federal mandates. In a certain way, the FCC repeals of the current status quo is even more involved than the way things are now. I wasn't exaggerating when I said these rules aren't good for anyone but the corporations that stand to make even more money off of a captive customer base. It's not good for the consumer, it's not good for small government, it's not good for OTHER businesses that rely on the internet (i.e. a lot of them), it's not good for new start-ups, or anything else besides Ajit Pai's fascination with purchasing ever larger novelty Reese's Peanut Butter Cups coffee mugs.

You might then note that the FCC's vote will include not only repealing Net Neutrality rules at a federal level, BUT ALSO instituting policies that prevent state governments from having their own local laws on the matter. In essence, I think you're looking at this backwards. The current rules are almost completely hands off, dictating only basic rules of conduct for how these businesses can treat their customers. The new rules would be freeing the corporations to do whatever they wish to the people, but also leashing state governments to federal mandates. In a certain way, the FCC repeals of the current status quo is even more involved than the way things are now. I wasn't exaggerating when I said these rules aren't good for anyone but the corporations that stand to make even more money off of a captive customer base. It's not good for the consumer, it's not good for small government, it's not good for OTHER businesses that rely on the internet (i.e. a lot of them), it's not good for new start-ups, or anything else besides Ajit Pai's fascination with purchasing ever larger novelty Reese's Peanut Butter Cups coffee mugs.

The Net Neutrality "laws" are more a classification than anything. Access to the internet is deemed a telecommunications utility and therefore falls under the same rules as phone service, as a simplification of the issue. "The internet" isn't considered anything much like "the phone network" or whatever is. Access to the internet however is deemed currently as a basic utility along the same lines as phones and cable/satellite TV, whose providers (most of the same companies, in fact, since Comcast, Verizon, and Century Link at least all have their own phone and TV services too) also already fall under the exact same rules that are currently protecting Net Neutrality. I'm unsure if you're arguing that these services should also be "unshackled" from government oversight as well or you've merely misunderstood what's going on. These are not new rules. They've been in place for over 50 years (over 80 in one form or another) [Edit: Correction, over 150 years in one form or another], it's merely the classification of internet access that is fairly recent as a simple ruling on something that has been in place in one form or another since close to the internet's inception, since ISPs have been trying to throttle access to certain sites (among other things) for at least that long. Net Neutrality does not protect from a theoretical threat, all of these laws and classifications stem from ISPs (primarily Comcast) having attempted in the past to do the exact same things people are afraid they will do now. The Wikipedia page is pretty thorough. Some of this I didn't know precisely until now (though I was certain about the Title II classification and what it meant), it's actually an interesting read. As for this: It is when it's blindly assuming and declaring that the government is bad no matter what. By all means, advocate for a smaller government presence where they're not needed or actively make things worse, but complaining about the government making the lives of its people better is asinine. The entire point of a government is to serve its people to the best of its ability. Saying any government intervention is bad is just advocating anarchism which, yes, is edgy. It's probably the most stereotypically edgy emo teen thing that exists.

It's at a point where government intervention of some kind is necessary either way, yeah. If some legislation was made to break up the mafia-like territorial control agreements all the ISPs have FIRST, then repealing the Net Neutrality rules would make sense and arguments that the free market would sort itself out would hold weight. As-is most people have either no choice or a choice between at most two ISPs (here in Florida it's Comcast and Century Link with MAYBE Brighthouse/Spectrum if you happen to live in one of the like 3 cities they cover), so there is no market. Making it fall under utility rules like light and power makes a lot of sense since that's pretty much the way ISPs have set themselves up. You have little to no recourse if Talquin Electric fucks with you because you have no other options, so it makes sense for them to be government regulated so they can't do that. Same here.

It's not about trust. These laws have a proven track record of working for the benefit of everyone. Repealing them has no tangible benefit in the current landscape of ISP semi-monopolies, and repealing them now can do nothing but harm. Yes, it's all trendy and edgy to be like "Lel the government is evil they shouldn't touch or do anything" right now but fact of the matter is sometimes, as shown in this case, government regulation has a net benefit for everyone but the executives of these ISPs. On the other side, yeah, no shit Amazon/Netflix/Etc. stand to gain from these laws staying in place and that's why they advocate for them. So? What's the issue with that? It's a win-win in that case, that's a GOOD thing. Again, yeah, it's cool and edgy to bitch about corporations making money these days, but at least attempt to look at the bigger picture. Bad for corporations =/= good for everybody else and vice versa. If you want to talk about trust, can always trust a megacorp to do what's in their best interests and they have a lot of swing in that regard. Why be pissed when it swings in your favor because interests align for once? Just so you can shoot yourself in the foot to "stick it to the man"?

I borrowed my friend's copy for Xbox to play Half Life 2 (I used to stay over at his house a lot but woke up way earlier than him so played single player games until he got up) and decided to try TF2 offline. I liked how it played and all the quirky characters so much I played for years on Xbox (online, of course, I didn't stay offline forever) before migrating to PC in late 2011.

Because the tool already has issues, and just because the first person to use the flawed tool uses it right doesn't mean it's not responsible for other people looking at that success and utilizing it with much less finesse. I think you miss Jim's point. It's not so much that Overwatch is dumb and bad and Blizzard should be ashamed, it's more a pointing out of the origin point of this mess. Overwatch IS responsible for all of this right now, they pioneered this business practice for full price games. Should they have anticipated where that might lead? Could they? That's another debate. But they are in a sense patient zero for this whole plague of loot boxes.

The D'arby match still makes my blood boil. LITERALLY THE FIRST THING YOU LEARNED HOW TO DO WAS TO STOP WATER COMING OUT OF A CUP UPSIDE-FUCKING-DOWN AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I get that he's out of practice, Word of Araki being he stopped practicing Hamon so that he'd age and grow old with his wife...who I guess we're supposed to believe he loves so much even though he cheats on her, but it was the FIRST THING he every learned how to do!

At least as far as the US goes, it'd be 21. Need to be the same age to legally drink and gamble in casinos. Considering both have the same potential to be life destroyingly addictive, it always made sense to me. Also Jim has a video that pretty succinctly sums up what he's been saying RE: Lootboxes for a while now.

I'm not seeing the issue. But if you're some wimp that can't stand brisk weather, you should already be in possession of a space heater and some blankets, no?