Bartimaeus

Two audience members are reported to have been killed, along with the shooter. (e): Two audience members may have been premature, just one confirmed so far, other in critical condition.

Yeah, an almost successful assassination attempt is not going to help Democrats any...or really, the rule of law. Sigh.

There are no easy or obvious solutions that will bring everyone together. The primaries, as limited as they were, are already over and done with, and there wasn't a serious alternative to Biden during them anyways, who was overwhelmingly and confidently voted for at the time. If there is any hope of not further splintering the various factions that make up the Democratic (which I am sure is on just about every Democratic official's minds as they weigh whether they should speak up for him to drop out), Biden must choose to step aside, not be forced by the nomination process which he convincingly won. If he's obdurate in deciding not to, I don't think there's really a whole lot anyone can do about it. And even if he did choose to step aside, it'd come down to party politics to decide as to whom would replace him, which in of itself is a proposition very fraught with danger and no clear answer to: the Democratic Party doesn't really currently have any popular national figures that are known quantities outside of maybe Bernie Sanders, who would obviously never be the party nominee over Biden for a whole host of reasons I'm not going to get into. I'll remind everyone that Joe Biden won George (16 electoral votes) by 11,779 votes, Arizona (11 electoral votes) by 10,457 votes, and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) by 20,682 votes, a combined 37 electoral votes won by 42,918 votes which swung the election from a 269-269 tie that would've seen Trump stay president thanks to the U.S.'s silly contingent election (i.e. no electoral vote majority) system. It's fun to look at "he won the popular vote by 7 million votes", but the popular vote has never mattered in the slightest: despite some here saying "Trump is finally finished" and that we no longer would have to worry about this again right after the 2020 election, Biden in reality just ever so barely won the 2020 election (and only thanks to Covid-19 and Trump's largely terribly handling of it), even more threadbare than Trump's already very weak win during the 2016 election. If Joe Biden can't win a majority of Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, and North Carolina, then the question is who will? Who's going to capture and motivate all the young, Black, Hispanic, Jew, other minority, college-educated, and women voters necessary in order to win this election, especially when we have a major ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine angering and splitting young and most other minority voters from the rest? I really don't know. It doesn't help that when you pick and shine a presidential spotlight on someone, they can turn into a very different kind of candidate than how they initially appeared, which makes me very wary of any "candidate X polls better than candidate Y against Trump" soundbites.

1. What's funny is that smaller forums like these feel like one of the last few holdouts of the old internet where you could actually talk to other humans online. There seems to be fewer and fewer places like this out there as time goes on, and now they're even trying to infiltrate here! 2. Practically every content medium (be it movies, television, music, books, video games, news, artists, bloggers, video essayists...even increasingly niche sub-genres within mediums like "artists who make and post pixel art online") was already over-saturated to the point of it being virtually impossible for any one person to sort through all of it. Generative content threatens to transform that from a waterfall to an endless ocean. 3. I don't really have a point three, but you can't have a list of just two things to say, that's illegal. Form interests and hobbies that don't have much or anything to do with the internet (especially not anything that is brand new and therefore highly subject to online bot interaction and manipulation), because in another ten, twenty years...I just don't know. It's better for you, anyway.

The King Kong Pro 2 is still pretty solid, but there are now better controllers out there - with the advent of hall effect controllers, it's been a rapidly iterative marketplace. The GameSir G7 SE and the new 8Bitdo Ultimate 2.4G (not to be confused with any other cheaper previous generation Ultimates! I hate it when companies release different models with the same name and expect the consumer to just figure it out...) are both good mid-end options - if you're always going to want to use the controller wired, I'd probably go with the GameSir G7 SE, otherwise the 8Bitdo. The GameSir G7 SE also has older-styled membrane buttons, which some people prefer but others think feel bad ever since mechanical buttons became a thing: if you end up trying it and don't like it, I'd return it and try the other one. If you don't have much experience with either, it may not matter; I don't mind either way personally, but I do generally prefer membrane gamepads for playing retro games. (e): Why is there a giant empty spot after the first link? Wasn't there when I posted, but it is now: thanks, forum.

I was partial to "Christofascists" for a while, but now I'm favoring "NatCs"...

Damn, they saw what I said about new accounts needing to automatically be suspected in this new age of AI-generated spam and made the perfect counterplay. They're evolving!

@PK htiw klaw eriF None of the PC Souls games were ever technically unplayable with a M+KB: it's just that it was way more finicky and the learning curve was much higher, which naturally results in players having a worse time and there being a higher likelihood of quitting early on. But I knew people who played even Dark Souls 1, the game that easily had the worst PC controls, with M+KB at a high level. I only played about two hours of Elden Ring before I quit and uninstalled it forever because I pretty much categorically disliked or hated every change in gameplay compared to Dark Souls, so I never tried it with a M+KB, but I would still recommend gamepad, especially because it's my impression that the Souls games got increasingly faster-paced, more difficult and complicated, and just generally more unfair towards the player as FromSoftware went along, so jumping into Elden Ring as your first FromSoftware Souls game seems like it might not be the smartest idea even at the best of times, i.e. before you throw in trying to play with M+KB. If you need recommendations on a specific model, I might be of assistance there...unless you want a Playstation-like controller, because I don't do those. A decent Xbox-like controller will run you probably anywhere between 40 and 60 dollars...cheaper than that and you're likely to get something that feels bad. @Humanoid Is Cyberpunk 2077 actually mostly playable without fast-paced shooting and stabbing? I played just a little bit of it but it seemed like the focus on how it wanted me to handle encounters was all wrong and I wasn't into it at all, but maybe I should've tried sticking with it a little longer. @majestic Okay, now I've watched the hbomberguy Fallout 3 video. It was kind of funny to see him mention Moira as one of the few bright spots in the game, because I had completely blanked out her existence up until the moment he mentioned her but instantly remembered liking her a lot too. When that game came out and I played it, the overbearing internet commentary I saw on the game was that it was "Oblivion with guns", and really, I feel like that's still pretty much spot on, so I never even really questioned the fact that it had the same old terrible writing and quest/story/dialogue outcomes, or that it just vaguely painted itself over with the Fallout setting while missing all the nuanced details that made it special to fans, or the various systems around the combat not meshing well together. What I mostly remember is the fact that I had started playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl before Fallout 3, and so I really disliked both the open world and combat design, which is unfortunately something that I wasn't able to get over for with New Vegas, even though I knew New Vegas was much better in practically most every other way. If somebody could Stalker-ize New Vegas' combat so that your stats don't affect the damage or accuracy of weapons (outside of if you use VATS, maybe...which is not something I ever liked using in either games) and adjust the power and/or concentration enemies to match that new design philosophy, I might be able to play it. That sort of thing is a big part of why I've always stayed away from most RPG shooters that aren't Stalker.

If you fall asleep during a movie, have you truly watched it? I think you have to go back and start over, .

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). I sat down and watched this from beginning to end. The whole thing. These movies are just terribly constructed from about every possible aspect - most egregiously writing - but their one saving grace is they are very easy to make fun of and laugh at, not to mention the memes. This whole saga is basically Baby's First Romeo and Juliet Space Opera Parody, except the baby here is George Lucas. Don't ever let this guy back into the writing room...or the director's seat. Being easy to make fun of at least makes them more enjoyable to watch than the sequel series, which just hurts my brain and makes me want to initiate a system shutdown. It's something.

Um, I don't think this whole Biden re-election thing is working out. It really kind of sounds like he's lost his marbles. Now, Biden without his marbles is still approximately...let me check here, oh yes, infinitely better than Trump, but I'm not certain that's going to get the guy re-elected. Actually, I'm pretty sure that the more he talks in public, the less likely he will be.

I'd just like to point out that the spambot post that BruceVC was apparently replying to has now been deleted. P.S. Yes, I am a bastard.

Oh yeah, that always made it super easy - that, and if your site had it, filling out fields like ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM Messenger, et cetera. Nobody in the universe ever filed those out.

HELLO, THIS IS THE BARTIMAEUS BOT ALERT! Evidence: #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. All only tangentially related posts made on various random forums by a newly registered user within the last day by the same username. This one had a decently believable post, I almost didn't look them up...but the fact that it didn't seem to be addressing anyone in particular despite starting with "I agree with you" combined with the random words smashed together username (which in my own experiences of forum moderation, is almost always a dead giveaway that the user is a bot) made me make sure, and yep. Once the idiots running these AI-generated spambots figure out how to use different usernames across different websites (i.e. doing the bare minimum to disguise themselves) and maybe some mild textual improvements to avoid easily patterned behaviors, we might really be in trouble, because I honestly thought that this could be a real post for a moment.

The dissent authored by Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor and joined by the other two liberal justices starts on page 68, a direct excerpt: Will Biden use his new extralegal powers to make sure this ruling does not stand? It's not really his modus operandi, but letting Trump waltz into the Oval Office while this Supreme Court does its best to kick start another civil war (it wouldn't be the first time) and crown a dictator is absolute madness. I do wish Gromnir were around to, uh...say something. Some legal analysis that the media isn't necessarily doing the best to cover would be much appreciated right now.

A 6-3 Supreme Court decision has declared that the United States president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts during their terms. I think Biden's first act as Emperor of the United States should probably be to kill the entire Supreme Court and appoint a new one that makes better decisions.

majestic just meant that I might be replying to Wormerine's Fallout 3 video, hence why I suddenly brought up Fallout 3 in my previous post. (e): I see I got a new KP signature quote. Turns out AI bots are good for something, I suppose.

Don't worry, I happened to leave a tab of this page open earlier and took an image of it. Learn to live with your mistake of approving AI-generated spam, you commie bastards! There's certain to be more of it that I'll have to point out anyways, with the way things are going: the least you can do is not delete our posts over it. And here I was, seeing that you replied in this thread, and thought to myself, hey, @Bartimaeus surely commented on a link to hbomberguy, but nah. Another spam bot got through the mod screening. I actually haven't seen this particular hbomberguy video yet, and I'm not too knowledgeable of Fallout 3 (or pretty much any other Bethesda game...or actually, any of the Fallout games for that matter). Anything that says a Bethesda game is bad is pretty much automatically approved by me, though.

Well, that probably explains why it often felt like "right, we just did the one or two things we were supposed to this month, so let's write a barebones couple sentence summary and get into the next one"...

I guess, but I can't imagine Dumbledore would take too kindly to Snape exposing and/or killing one of his teachers without justification. That was a whole arrangement which was necessary for Lupin to be able to work there in the first place. Seeing Lupin "in league" with Black to be able to do away with both of them seemed to be exactly what he wanted...but my goodness, I did rather overlook the whole Lily Potter aspect. Whoops. Funnily, that connection is instead actualized for the readers by Black right after Snape is knocked out...that would admittedly seem to be too much of a coincidence to be an accident, as much of a lame trick on the part of the author in order for readers to give some confidence in the morally dubious Black while denying the same to Snape - not that it's something Snape would've ever mentioned to anyone but Dumbledore, and only because he would've already known. I also went back and actually read some of the specific barbs Snape directed towards Harry about his father, and there's a pretty clear hinting of a "your father was a fool whose poor judgement got your mother killed" pattern going on, which would fit perfectly with the whole secret keeping and having trusted Black to keep them safe (the fact that it actually instead turned out to be Pettigrew whom James instead trusted the secret to and IIRC on Black's suggestion kind of proves what Snape said about the two of them). Alright, you've convinced me that at least Snape's character must have been planned from the beginning.

All I have to do is remember the Supreme Court and their ongoing spree of suspect decisions - with the possibility of Trump getting to nominate even more of his justices while also trying to make good on unitary executive theory - and I suddenly get very enthusiastic about voting for Biden again. Of course, I didn't watch the debate in the first place because seeing both of these guys speak makes me uncomfortable, albeit in different ways: ignorance in this particular way, at least, is bliss.

Gleefully trying to get Sirius Black and Remus Lupin executed in book The Prisoner of Azkaban over their childhood quarrels is where he officially stepped over the "cruel, petty, depraved human garbage of a bully, but technically not evil" line for me. The fact that it's not directed specifically at any of the core cast doesn't really change that. Movie The Prisoner of Azkaban 'mysteriously' just about completely glosses over that entire conflict between them and puts his character in much greater of a bind due to a lack of information...but in the book, he is explicitly written as having been in the room under the Invisibility Cloak and having heard much of the exposition dump by an unsuspecting Black and Lupin, and he just doesn't care about any of it, he becomes quite literally sick in the head with the possibility of being able to get Sirius killed. I don't think he was ever planned to be a villain, but if she had spent the same amount of time consistently making it clear what a piece of crap Snape is in The Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince as she did throughout the first four books, I think the character's turnabout would have been much more difficult to understand and accept. Well, who knows, the entirety of The Order of the Phoenix was "quite different" from the four proceeding books, for some reasons organic and others seemingly less so... Rowling got very serious with the story and squeezed so much into it, some of which just doesn't go anywhere. If she had his whole character planned out from the beginning, the way he's initially portrayed throughout those first four books just seems a bit at odds with how he's portrayed for the rest of the books and all the movies, and the coincidental timing of The Order of the Phoenix coming three years after the previous book and also after the first two movies doesn't help either.

Unrelatedly, a fire started inside former Green Bay Packers player Randall Cobb's house Tuesday night after his Tesla charger spontaneously ignited while they were sleeping, and the couple of pictures they posted makes it look like a bomb went off in their garage. From what I gather, firefighters were able to put the fire out before it burned down his whole house. Everyone got out of the house without injury, including the dog: may you be so lucky, ShadySands.

I feel like "Alan Rickman changed how I wrote the character in later books" might be a cover for a similar but perhaps more embarrassing explanation on Rowling's part, but that's admittedly mostly mean-spirited speculation on my part: she either didn't know what she eventually planned on doing with the character (i.e. she hadn't actually planned how the/his story would end) OR at some point during the making of some of the early movies she realized that what she had been doing with the character just didn't really jive with what she had planned (i.e. she had planned it, but a fresh look at the series from the very beginning helped her realize that it was a poor plan which wouldn't satisfactorily come together and so happily took the opportunity to agree to some needed adjustments and even try to integrate them as much as she could into her own writing). Movie Snape ends up working a hundred times better than book Snape ever did (especially because in the books, we only ever see events from Harry's explicitly hateful perspective whereas in the movies, Snape is afforded a somewhat more measured perspective on the part of the audience outside probably just the first film), and I'm not feeling particularly generous to the idiot writer with a professed love for re-writing and retconning her characters and story on Twitter just for funsies. Like I said, director that didn't know what they were doing because they didn't really care about the source material or making the film fit in with the previous entries. Movie Goblet of Fire had a lot of additional nonsense that it really just didn't need...except for cutting Dobby out of the film. Despite all its sins, I can at least say good job for that...although it only further weakened how much the audience should care about him and his eventual sacrifice. Whatever, I wouldn't have cared about Dobby no matter what. I think I can forgive something like that because it's not really key (it would be pretty trivial to have just...you know, mention the sword being in Dumbledore's office when Harry visits him earlier and then just have Fawkes carry the sword to him, although it certainly would have heavily telegraphed how the basilisk would eventually be defeated) and I think it kind of fits in with a lot of European mythology...Arthur pulling the sword from the stone and all that. One of those things that feels like a cute thematical fit but then makes you wonder how anything actually works in this poorly written universe that doesn't seem to have any actual hard rules, especially when the author seems completely disinterested in doing any work to flesh anything out.