Jump to content

atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    60250
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    153

Everything posted by atomheartbevo

  1. How bad does he want that Nobel Peace Price? Because Putin is shitting all over that for him. Not that he ever had a practical chance mind you, but he believes he does, and he knows Putin is shitting on any chance he believes he has at it. It is embarrassing that he's scared of Putin. It's a good thing he doesn't follow Julia Davis and others covering Russian state media, because he'd absolutely believe that any given week, NYC or D.C. were about to be nuked.
  2. So played a bit in the spring, then played with my son in July, and then a little bit over the past few months, on the official UO shards. Impressions. The event they held over the summer was pretty fucking cool, and it was a demonstration of a new quest/event/dungeon system that was just implemented. The "New Legacy" speciality/seasonal shard is cool (the rewards are worth it). It's also the test-bed for new code that's being written to replace the old "spaghetti" code. Atlantic completely, utterly sucks ass. A decent-sized house in a decent location (not even max-storage mind you) runs into the hundreds of millions. With that said, you can place 9x14s and 10x15s here and there when houses fall (Ye Olde IDOC) but there's always a dozen people also trying unless you stay up really late. But Atlantic is over-run with middle-aged 12 year-olds talking shit to each other in general chat, and the best housing plots that are available were placed by scripters who had automated bots place the micro-second an IDOC spot was available for placing. Apparently 1-2 people have placed about 90% of the best spots that have opened up over the past few years. Developers say they are going to deal with them harshly, soon (2 weeks?). Prices also suck on a lot of things, and it seems to be populated by shit-talkers, item collectors, and people trying to sell stuff for real-life money. Lake Superior, Catskills, Chesapeake, Baja, Pacific, and the Japanese shards are the best shards - not as much activity as Atlantic, but not overrun with shit-talking and scripters, and you can place 18x18s (And even towers and keeps). They ran the events this summer just fine (the events required cooperation from several players to even have a shot at making it through all 5 steps). Luna no longer matters as far as housing because we have a shard-wide vendor search system you can access from your home or in a city. People still hang in Luna a bit, because the bank has all of the NPC shops around it, but it's not like it was. According to a friend who has gotten me re-engaged with UO, UO is slowly being rewritten to address various issues (it has 5-6 person team doing coding/design/graphics). This summer, the back-end of the Classic Client was migrated to "modern tools" (guessing the same as the Enhanced Client). Right now they are working on making the Classic Client run at 60fps or more, and with a resizable window. If you are wanting to play production shard, I'd go with Lake Superior. I'm on there and can help anybody who is interested. It seems to run on a central time zone, and the reason why I originally picked it back in the 90s was because of how many Austin-area players were on it (it had a really good ping, I think it was located in Origin's offices here in town). Yeah, there's Lake Austin, but that came later.
  3. And then we have things like online gaming- those of us who play the various online games see and hear a lot of stupid shit coming out the mouths of middle-schoolers (or younger). A lot of racist and misogynistic bullshit, but overall just a lot of stupid shit, and these little shits get used to this - if they behaved this way during PE or with other kids in-person, they'd get their asses beat. But they do it for hours every day online, with no pushback, and in fact encouragement from their peers and while they initially may not realize the impact of what they are saying at their age, eventually, down the line, it has to influence their personality. It becomes normalized.
  4. And it speaks to a deeper trend - we see really stupid fucking ideas being accommodated. We have a President who, when caught lying, immediately shouts out "FAKE NEWS FAKE NEWS" and the media doesn't push back. We see dumbasses in our government talking about chemtrails as if they were real or saying maybe we shouldn't be too harsh on the flat earthers or moon landing deniers, and they aren't being mocked for that, or worse, that 9/11 was a false-flag operation (look at how Laura Loomer was around Trump and how much influence she wields). The most popular podcaster adopts whatever beliefs the person sitting in front of him has, so tens of millions of people who think he is an authority figure are nodding along say "well maybe we didn't land on the moon!" 40 years ago, these people used to have an audience that consisted of themselves, hanging out in the back of a bookstore, and occasionally a kid in junior high who was bored at the mall and hanging out in B.Dalton and looking at all of the spiffy covers and blurbs on their books. We used to shove these people's heads in the toilet and flush it or give them wedgies. Here in 2025, these people are pushing the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories on platforms that spread their bullshit around to millions, unchecked, within seconds, and they are spreading it to people who are vulnerable to this bullshit - our parents/aunts/uncles who, for whatever reason, have lost whatever critical thinking skills they had when it comes to the internet. And when they hit the mainstream (MTG, etc.), they don't get pushback from the media because the media is afraid of them. We should not have state legislatures "banning chemtrails" and they should be routinely mocked, but they aren't outside of the Jon Stewarts.
  5. On the other hand, he also knows his troops couldn't handle a stand-up fight with the Polish. And this is absolutely mocking Trump and making Trump look weak, which Trump despises.
  6. When you've reached our age, generally you've encountered people who have fucked around and found out, whether it be skipping the shingles vaccine or whatever. And assuming you are 40s/50s, you may have even known people who were affected by polio (generally an old relative or friend's parents/aunt/uncle/etc.). So we tend to listen to the experts, because we have built up a healthy first-hand knowledge of shit going sideways for people.
  7. Finally got around to this. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter collaborate on a science fiction series. Easy read, plays to the strengths of both authors - what if there were multiple parallel earths and you could easily move between them. Was originally going to be Pratchett’s first series, but this little Discworld thing took off. If you liked Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series, it’s got that flavor of world building and society building, but an easier read. onto the second book, excited for the others based on the titles
  8. Ironically, Bill Burr’s wife worked on the Chappelle Show during its first season (but he wasn’t on there until a year later when she had moved on) Her dad worked at the Apollo and that’s how he knew Burr (she met him through her dad or something along those lines). She was working on Colin Quinn’s show on Comedy Central when he guest-started on it as well and they started dating or something - he’s talked about it a lot And pretty sure she’d beat his ass if he crossed any lines.
  9. It’s amazing how many relatives and acquaintances I have that would have definitely been Tories.
  10. So Israel tried to kill them while they were meeting about Trump's proposal. Pretty fucking bold, unless they knew Trump would not stand up to them and complain about it.
  11. Bet he's not even 5 1/2 inches.
  12. They are trying to thread the needle on not rehashing too much of TOS as well as bridging this crew to TOS. I expect the episodes leaning up to “Pike ending up crippled” will be fucking amazing. All the pieces are there.
  13. I’m not fully caught up, but Uhura and Chapel?
  14. It’s unfortunate that this will get Chicago bombed, but the story ain’t going to get buried otherwise.
  15. And the worm ate into his brain.
  16. We can blame our parents, but I can point to the fact that the fringe political movements in America (on both sides) over the last 50 years have always drawn heavily from the college crowd. Because they don’t know any better, and they read a little Ayn Rand or whoever, and whatever is read on the left, and think that they are enlightened and that is their world view. But there are also sheltered people (probably some overlap and college freaks them out) who maintain dumb beliefs that were passed down to them. I’ve had somebody I went to high school with claims there were no gay or lesbian students when we were there. Me pointing out several people in the LBGTQ crowd in our class, and that I went to two same-sex marriages of classmates of ours doesn’t change their thinking - because “they weren’t gay back then”.
  17. So apparently RFK Jr. is blaming autism on Tylenol, and that "report" will be out later this month.
  18. There are groups actively lobbying the Texas legislature and Abbott to drop vaccine requirements for kids as speak. And yes, we are this fucking dumb. Remember, Abbott has to outdo DeSantis/Florida.
  19. I didn’t peg you as somebody named “Counsel Refrig”. Interesting.
  20. Let’s call it what it really is - a good old fashioned distraction for the American yokels.
  21. That’s a “war” that’s been waged since the 70s. Sounds like we aren’t fighting a war, but instead feeding a military-industrial complex and a law enforcement and prison industry.
  22. Holy shit, Gun Jesus has a scuba channel https://www.youtube.com/@DeepDiveWithIan
×
×
  • Create New...