Razputin

To be fair with your name I wouldn't even be certain I typed it right with black on white text

People also just need to curate where they visit better. I typically stay in higher quality discords and follow not a lot of people on twitter and I can avoid 90% of the boolshit.
 
But I still see that kind of stuff elsewhere or it can slip through the cracks on some discords I'm obligated to stay in, but I just don't bother most the time with that kinda stuff.

sorry I could probably appreciate the work put into this if I sat down and watched it but all I can think of is that one video about how stupid dramatic tf2 SFMs are

The AI art drama is so surreal to me, I get introduced to it by talking to some colleagues who are working on it, and like the very next week it is all over the internet and currently both the best and worst new thing. I think it's cute it seems to have some of the same problems with generating new imagery that dreams have too, like creating hands.
 
I don't directly have an issue with it other than it getting trained on people's artwork without their permission. That needs to be prohibited or regulated in some way, even though the last thing this world needs is more terrible copyright laws written by dinosaurs

The AI art drama is so surreal to me, I get introduced to it by talking to some colleagues who are working on it, and like the very next week it is all over the internet and currently both the best and worst new thing. I think it's cute it seems to have some of the same problems with generating new imagery that dreams have too, like creating hands.
 
I don't directly have an issue with it other than it getting trained on people's artwork without their permission. That needs to be prohibited or regulated in some way, even though the last thing this world needs is more terrible copyright laws written by dinosaurs

Had to resize it because the post editor kept yelling at me but updated 3x3
 
Even though I've been dishearthened with the Pokemon franchise for a while now it's still a huge part of my youth and the franchise definitely peaked at HG/SS. I remember playing it with a bunch of friends when we went to Barcelona together and the game just reminds me of being in beautiful sunny weather all day. Very pretty, very fun, very nostalgic Doom Eternal is far from perfect but man do I love the combat. I've replayed this game like ten times now and going ham swapping weapons and mods all the time, keeping all your cooldowns in mind is just so satisfying. The second DLC was excellent too and I really wish the hammer was usable in the main story mode as well Who would've thought Valve's complete negligence of the bot crisis would cause a TF2 renaissance. Community servers are thriving and I haven't had this much fun with TF2 since jungle inferno. Skill level is up, people are on mics again and with mapvote, scramble and nocrit the gameplay hasn't been better Furi is still in my heart. Best OST, best gameplay, really solid story for how short the game is Metroid Prime is still #1 and takes the center square. The immersion, the lore, the nostalgia, I just wanna go sit in the rain on Tallon IV. Spawned two excellent sequels too. I played Slay the Spire a lot, forgot about it for a while, then played it a LOT. This is the best single player cardgame. The art and story are best described as cerviceable, but there is so much depth to the gameplay, it is kind of astounding. The ascension system making runs a little harder and harder also makes it scale very well with your own improvement. Infinite replayability, I feel like I could write a book about this game's strategy. Ocarina of Time is often on all-time best games ever lists for a reason. It's just so influential, so massive, and so good, I'm willing to say that it is still unironically the best 3D zelda game without asterisks. I love both DS1 and DS3 and it was up in the air which one was the better one of the two for a long time, but the Ringed City cemented DS3 in my top 9 basically permanently. I haven't played a game with better lore and worldbuilding than this Nostalgia plays a big factor in this still being top 9 but even without that Golden Sun is such a solid RPG. Beatiful sprites and music, very fun combat mechanics and an interesting world. I still find myself coming back and replaying this a bit ever so often.  

nickelodeon all star has me super excited about a game I doubt I'll ever touch, what a beautiful punchline
 
The entire FGC has been on their knees crying, begging Japanese devs to put decent netcode into their games for over a decade, and now the slap city devs make what should have been a grandma-found-it-in-the-bargain-bin game into something that not only looks like a solid smash clone, but also has rollback netcode

he's been here since the beginning

nickelodeon all star has me super excited about a game I doubt I'll ever touch, what a beautiful punchline
 
The entire FGC has been on their knees crying, begging Japanese devs to put decent netcode into their games for over a decade, and now the slap city devs make what should have been a grandma-found-it-in-the-bargain-bin game into something that not only looks like a solid smash clone, but also has rollback netcode

To start: I'm defining a rock opera as an album (not necessarily in rock, though all my choices are some form of rock) which tells a coherent story across all tracks.  I'm ruling out concept albums that merely follow a theme (ex. Dream Theater's Octavarium or Sabaton's the Last Stand.)  Every track, excluding bonus tracks, must contribute.  So even though I really like the music and story of Rush's 2112 it doesn't count because the other tracks don't contribute.   Similarly Rainbow's Rising is out since only two songs feed into the story. Likewise the tracks must have occurred on a single album, so things like Saga's "Chapters" don't count.  If I can't get a rough feel of the plot because the songs are too disjointed (ex. David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust) or I can't understand the vocalist half the time (sorry Brendan Small) it doesn't count.  Music videos also don't count, so even though Daft Punk's discovery makes a very cool movie, the songs themselves don't tell the story.  The other caveat is that I'm limiting myself to albums I've listened to plenty of times.  There's some famous choices that will be excluded because I simply haven't listened to them enough. Choices are rated based on musical quality, story quality and how the album as a whole functions.  Also I only put one album per band though some bands could have earned multiple slots on the list.
 
That being said, here's my top ten:
 
10.) Electric Light Orchestra - Time
 
This one actually just barely squeaked by my criteria since while I can understand it's about a guy from the 80's who got pulled into the future and has various emotional and other troubles there, the story isn't that detailed.  There's some great individual tracks on here, in particular Twilight though I like Here is the News both for its offbeat lyrics and for being the best at presenting the future setting.  Plus there's a track about dating a sex robot if you're into that.
 
9.) Rhapsody of Fire - From Chaos to Eternity
 
This is kind of a stand in for any of the Emerald Sword or Dark Secret albums.  Basically almost every one of their albums continues a high fantasy plot, a long the line of what you would see in Terry Brooks or Raymond E. Feist.  Each saga is five albums long which has the downside of not a lot happening in many albums.  I chose this one, even though fans of the band would probably disagree, because we reach a satisfying climax instead of something like "our heroes finally reach the fabled treasure which reveals that a different treasure is required to beat the dark lord (see you next album.) It also has great narration from Christopher Lee, and an epic song based on Beethoven's first piano sonata.  My favorite is Ghosts of Forgotten Worlds.
 
8.) Haken - Visions
 
When it comes to albums I prefer Haken's Mountain, but that's not a rock opera so it can't appear in this list.  Still they are musically on top of their game, if maybe a bit excessive (especially in the final 20+ minute track.)  The story is simple and really you could be told it all in a paragraph, but both the mood of the music and the presentation helps push it along.
 
7.) Blue Oyster Cult - Imaginos
 
This album has an infamously tortured development.  It came from a big poem the band's manager had written and tried to get into their music, but before this album it mainly showed up in Astronomy and Subhuman from Secret Treaties.  Only one member of the band (Albert Bouchard, the drummer) was interested in the project so it got delayed for so long that the band had basically fractured by the time they started recording for it.  As a result there are a lot of session artists on the album and the sound is noticeably different from contemporary BOC albums.  The songs were also put on the album out of story order by executive meddling.
 
Still with all of that said the end result is damn good.  The remakes of Astronomy and Subhuman are noticeably more polished and complex, and with the context of the rest of the album their lyrics start to actually make sense as opposed to being pure word salad.  The story itself is a fun dive into the occult and conspiracies, very much in line with BOC's usual output.  Some people hate the studio artists but I think they did a good job (the guy on The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankestein's Castle at Weissaria, yes that's the real title, does a damn fine Ronnie James Dio.)  It makes you wonder what could have been if the band had been on board earlier.
 
6.) Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
 
What I like about this album is that basically every song can work very well separate from the rest, but they become something more when put together.  As with many rock operas the story isn't terribly complex; if you listen to The Clarivoyant you'll basically get all the themes (can someone with a future prevent his own demise?)  But each song puts a nice spin on the theme.  This is also the album whose sound I think of when I think of what "metal", without qualification, should sound like.
 
5.) Devin Townsend - Ziltoid the Omniscient
 
The only album on the list with a high degree of humor and absurdity.  I mean the plot is about a puppet alien invading Earth to get the ultimate cup of coffee which he will use to power a time machine that will allow him to be the ultimate guitarist across all eras of history.  But despite all that it manages to mix many different types of emotions.  Take Planet Smasher.  There's plenty of goofiness in it, such as Ziltoid's desire to smash a planet simply because he's frustrated with how his plans are going, or the titular Planet Smasher complaining about being in a musical.  But the opening riff is so ominous and creates a huge anticipation for what is to come which only builds as it built upon.  There is the since of hate and doom from the Planet Smasher, alternating with Ziltoid's ridiculous ambitions.   The whole album is like that, cycling through all sorts of emotions and somehow making it work.  But the plot kind of ends in the middle with a cliche "it was all a dream" scene.
 
4.) Pink Floyd - The Wall
 
If you ask someone to name a rock opera they'll probably say this one, or maybe The Who's Tommy (which I haven't listed to enough to rank.)  It's not hard to see why.  There's some pretty damn catchy songs, which only improve in context.  (If you've never heard Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2 without part one and The Happiest Days of Our Lives you're doing yourself a disservice.)  The plot isn't too complicated, but touches on feelings of isolation from society that will probably be familiar to anyone listening to a Pink Floyd album, as well as the relationship between the band and the audience and whether you can excuse your bad behavior with bad circumstances.  I also find it hilarious how the album goes off the deep end in the last quarter.  I mean, I get how everything fits together in terms of the plot and none of the songs bother me.  But I'm waiting for the radio station to have the balls to play Waiting for the Worms or In the Flesh on the air.  The main thing that keeps this off the top of the list is that it doesn't really evoke strong emotions in me like those do.
 
3.) The Protomen - Act II: The Father of Death
 
I think there's plenty of Protomen fans here so I doubt I have to do much to justify this.  Basically every song on the album is great on its own, other than maybe Intermission or How the World Fell Into Darkness (which are necessary transitional tracks).  More impressively they change genres to indicate characters and changes in time period, and all of them sound great.  The only thing I might have to justify here is why I put Act II over Act I.  But let's be honest: Act I is really about The Sons of Fate (which is legitimately amazing) and everything else is just setting that song up.  Most songs could be removed without much effect and the changes in style are done much better.  For example, compare the western style in Unrest in the House of Light to the mastered Ennio Morricone sound of the first three tacks on Act II.  Put that together with how nicely each song flows into the next and I don't think it's really a question of which is better.
 
2.) Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle Earth
 
This might be cheating a little since the album is based on Tolkien's Silmarilion, and without that book you'll probably miss a bunch of plot points.  But damn if this album isn't full of inspiring music that legitimately chills me.  Whether it's Feanor's oath on Nightfall, Fingolfin's challenge to Morgoth in Time Stands Still (at the Iron Hill) or basically the entirety of A Dark Passage Blind Guardian lives up to their reputations as Bards or Skalds.  You can imagine people in MIddle Earth singing arrangements of these songs to honor the great deeds of prior ages.
 
1.) Dream Theater - Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory
 
You could argue this is also cheating because Metropolis Part I is on a different album (Images and Words), but the song mainly sets up the themes of the album and is wholly unnecessary to understand the plot.  This might be the perfect rock opera.  The complexity of the story is about the maximum that could probably be told through song alone, and has plenty of twists and turns.  The overall plot is about a man using past life regression to discover why he is having reoccuring dreams, and the songs mix information from the past with his thoughts in the present.  As the album goes on we find out that some early assumptions, from limited regression or historical investigation, are incorrect and the true story is darker still.  The music itself is of course great, with Beyond this Life, The Dance of Eternity and  The Spirit Carries On probably being the fan favorites.  But I think Home and Finally Free are the real standouts (not that the other songs aren't also great.)  They both vary between the principle characters and reuse musical and lyrical motifs to slightly different effect each time.  Probably an album that cannot be topped (and as Dream Theater's recent output has sadly shown, if it is going to be topped it will have to be by a different band.)

Did an audit on the amount of entities each map in tf2 has. Unsurprisingly, the maps with the most entities are the halloween maps mostly. The limit for a server is 2048 entities and the map with the most is pl_bloodwater (badwater event) with 1586 without any players connected. Each player, cosmetic, and weapon is an entity so each player at least will count for 7 entities.
 
1586+(24*7)=1754 entities used up by players alone. Any player with a cosmetic item in their use slot (like a spellbook or duck) will add yet another entity, and certain classes take up more entities (engineers and spies alone can take up an extra 10 each with buildings and disguises). 2048-1754 gives us 294 entities to work with in a perfect scenario. This is a halloween map, which means everyone will have a spellbook equipped (minus 24, 270 entities to work with). Any spell such as pumpkin bombs, skeletons, or monoculi will add entities, can assume 40 would be in use by these at max at any given time. so we only have 230 entities to work with.
 
This means on the map with the most entities, that if the entire server went engineer and had every cosmetic slot filled AND built all 4 buildings that the server would crash.
 
Want less coordination? 13 demoman (max cosmetics) laying out 14 stickybombs with the Scottish Resistance, and shooting 4 pills each at the same time is enough to crash the server on their own (without any soldiers launching rockets, or other projectiles existing on the map).
 
What's that? Want even LESS coordination? How about this? If you can get 6 medics (max cosmetics) to go to an area with a high ceiling (badwater event last) and look straight up and unload their entire syringe gun magazine into the sky, then the server would crash from just your guys' contributions alone. You can queue into casual servers with 6 people.
 
Basically, what I'm saying is, the fabric of tf2 universe relies on the syringe guns not being popular, since it's the most amount of entities any one player can make on their own (without exploits).
 
 

I wouldn't want TF2 to make many more big balance changes this late in its lifetime. I'd like to see some stuff touched up but honestly, TF2 is probably the most balanced it has ever been right now. There's a lot to complain about but they're all nitpicks, there's no class that I think is truly overpowered or underpowered. Like I complain about the Kunai abuse but Spy is still the weakest class, it's more just obnoxious to see your team get eaten because everyone is apparently deaf to death screams.
 
That being said, in the fantasy world where we get TF3 I'd like to see sweeping changes:
-#1 with a point , an alternative to medic as currently even in a 12v12 game one team having a single medic greatly increases the odds of that team winning, like giving engie or heavy some kind of improved healing abilities to offset how powerful Medic is
-Spy and Sniper should probably be the same class, also Sniper quickscopes oneshotting half the cast gets pretty insane at high levels. I've seen several people argue uncharged headshots should deal 120, and then still charging up to 450 damage max charge in the same time.
-Demo somehow getting the melee class taped to him is super weird in retrospect and seeing an actual dedicated melee/tank class designed from the ground up would be great
-related to the above, melee hitreg not being complete yank would be great
-pyro serves no purpose and the few things he is good at currently are super obnoxious (airblasting ubers, countering spy way too hard with the homewrecker, also somehow countering himself???)
-In general I'd like to see some classes getting some kind of way to play around their hard counters, like scout becoming utterly useless once sentries get involved and spy getting bullied by half the cast (why the hell did scout get an anti-spy secondary???)
 
And of course remove random crits and get an anti-cheat that works, but those speak for themselves

I wouldn't want TF2 to make many more big balance changes this late in its lifetime. I'd like to see some stuff touched up but honestly, TF2 is probably the most balanced it has ever been right now. There's a lot to complain about but they're all nitpicks, there's no class that I think is truly overpowered or underpowered. Like I complain about the Kunai abuse but Spy is still the weakest class, it's more just obnoxious to see your team get eaten because everyone is apparently deaf to death screams.
 
That being said, in the fantasy world where we get TF3 I'd like to see sweeping changes:
-#1 with a point , an alternative to medic as currently even in a 12v12 game one team having a single medic greatly increases the odds of that team winning, like giving engie or heavy some kind of improved healing abilities to offset how powerful Medic is
-Spy and Sniper should probably be the same class, also Sniper quickscopes oneshotting half the cast gets pretty insane at high levels. I've seen several people argue uncharged headshots should deal 120, and then still charging up to 450 damage max charge in the same time.
-Demo somehow getting the melee class taped to him is super weird in retrospect and seeing an actual dedicated melee/tank class designed from the ground up would be great
-related to the above, melee hitreg not being complete yank would be great
-pyro serves no purpose and the few things he is good at currently are super obnoxious (airblasting ubers, countering spy way too hard with the homewrecker, also somehow countering himself???)
-In general I'd like to see some classes getting some kind of way to play around their hard counters, like scout becoming utterly useless once sentries get involved and spy getting bullied by half the cast (why the hell did scout get an anti-spy secondary???)
 
And of course remove random crits and get an anti-cheat that works, but those speak for themselves

Don't know about the other eight but Spy is 100% at the top of that list and I'd even say it's hard to argue otherwise
 
You get to play the suave cool character who is generally seen as a weaker underdog class, whilst at the same time getting rewarded for preying on inexperienced players AND you get to bait your team by lonewolfing without adding much to the actual win objective? Smug levels in danger of collapsing into a black hole.

What I remember from Crisis is a really exciting introduction with fun stealth combat vs human soldiers, then a blinding white haze of hot hatred and then a cinematic ending sequence I desperately wanted to end

I am proud. Beat Pikmin 3 on Ultra-Spicy with 0 deaths while 100%'ing it as I said, getting all the data files, fruit, and Piklopedia entries, all a day faster than my first playthrough which was not 100%. I really want to play Pikmin 1 and 2, and my friend who has both games said he'd mail them to me if I got a Wii to play them. But there's also emulation, which would be out of the question if only there weren't a mouse injector for Pikmin on emulator. So hmm...

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
 
Generally big number good, that goes for every part you need. The only thing that can be obnoxious is making sure everything fits in your motherboard but there's good sites for that too.
 
The big problem right now is that because of bitcoin mining, gpu prices not only have skyrocketed but any high end gpu is just constantly out of stock.

I'm having a fucking stroke

Pretty much.

Honestly if it wasnt for the bots I'd be completely fine with TF2 staying in the state it's currently in forever. I seriously think it's the most balanced it has ever been. The only weapon in TF2 that I still think is truly overpowered and would have liked to see changed is the Vaccinator. It charges way too quick and crit immunity is not ok
 
Two nitpicks are the state of Spy now being turned from stealth class to 200 HP annoying fly feeding off new players thanks to Kunai and DR, but that isn't really overpowered, just kind of a lame end point for a cool class. The other one is a single Gunslinger on KotH just kind of shutting down Pyro and Scout entirely but Pyro and Scout are also very good on KotH so it sort of balances out.