Bartimaeus

Does anyone know anything about framing/hanging posters? Wooden frames for the size (24x36") seem to run around $40-50, but I just don't know that much about poster-framing, and don't know if I'm approaching it from the right angle to begin with.

I actually did get MedicineDan and ComradeMaster mixed up. Whoops, that's my bad...thanks. Those nonsense double noun names get to sound a lot alike after seeing too many of them over the years, and it didn't help that that particular post really rather read like one of SonicMage's, but that makes Malcador's asking for an explanation make a lot more sense - couldn't really understand why he'd bother to ask, .

well no, of course not, but this is self-proclaimed political expert SonicMage I mean MedicineDan you're talking about (e): had the wrong username, RIP

y tho

@Gorth The fusion of traditional instruments and metal was certainly interesting. Not too big on the vocals, but still a decent listen.

...Have you ever actually voted for the person that, you know, ended up winning? If not, please vote for Donald Trump this fall, .

Don't know which Total War game you're playing specifically, but I've found the AI of Total War to be rather mindboggingly stupid. Like, they can't determine how to weigh the worth of anything and have a habit of giving absolutely outrageous trade offers - either in their own favor or against themselves, without much discrimination and in complete defiance of the realities of their situation. And really, once you start noticing the patterns that determine how they behave, you basically have to start setting your own limitations to make it so you're not abusing and exploiting their stupidity. I'd like to see a competent cross between a Paradox game (the underlying systems that it so everything works in a detailed and mostly sensible/consequent way) and a Total War game (real time battles and more cultural/leader/nation personality/variation) sometime in my life, but it's probably not ever going to happen.

I hate heat and noise, so I usually go for whatever mid-end card is the most power and price-performance efficient, especially since I'm finding current "realistic" 3D graphics more and more hideous. I'm hoping AMD's new series will be slightly more inspiring than nvidia's. Most likely, I won't end up buying a card this generation anyways, but I'd prefer to at least be able to recommend AMD cards to others this time around...

I started following the Bucks two seasons ago, but never actually watched any games. Even though the Bucks were very good last year, I still didn't watch any games. This year, I've actually watched a handful of games, including a couple of non-Bucks game. I don't know what's happening to me.

It's easy enough to read on a screen when the screen is only two feet away from me. On an actual flag with any amount of distant between you and it, it's going to be an unreadable blur. The least they could've done is use a bolder version of the font - tiny and thin lettering is not conducive to reading on fabric whipping in the wind.

Too small text generally makes my blood boil when I look at it. Years of image editing and seeing the horrific damage people do to text with .jpegs, I guess.

Second and third one kind of suck (tiny text on the second one makes it a no-go, third one looks like an NFL logo knockoff), fourth one is pretty decent, fifth one is just a busier, brighter, and not-as-good version of the fourth, and the first one is obviously the best.

Decades of forum-posting have taught me to always CTRL+C any post that is longer than a paragraph at most before hitting post. If it took you longer than five minutes to write a post, then you're technically no longer even logged in (timed out), and I imagine that causes weirdities.

IIRC, in the first part, they specifically stated that these are their "favorite" episodes, and not any attempt at determining the "best" episodes, which have different criteria. I think they also said it was extremely difficult to pick just 5 and there were a number they could've just as easily picked instead. (e): Nice, at the end of this, they said they were down to make a "top 10" to continue listing five more each.

That despite their best efforts, they haven't been able to make it completely fail yet?

"Hurlshot reacted to this: (sad face)" don't feel bad, I largely despise comedy as a genre and more or less ignore its entire existence "What kind of retiree wants to be in charge of an entire country?" who the hell wants to do that at any age, what the hell is wrong with these power-hungry monsters

who dat (e): oh some rando comedian I guess

Guard Dog might on the basis of "total incompetence and infighting + legislative gridlock is actually good for those of us that don't want anything to change" - it really depends on what you want out of a president. In terms of being able to accomplish general U.S. goals and maintain domestic stability (a little more objective measures), I would guess she'd probably be the best on account of not being a crazy old lunatic with dementia like either Biden or Trump. Don't know about Pence, but the current general Republican mantra of "business/money over literally anything and everything no matter the cost in any other way" makes me think she'd probably be better there, too.

I thought whatsherface from Minnesota was the much more logical choice in pretty much every way even though I don't particularly like her (...she's my senator, why can't I remember her name?), but I guess not. I wasn't going like any option they chose, I suppose, but Kamala seems particularly uninspiring.

The words chosen for these sorts of headlines are definitely carefully picked to portray things in a certain light, so I understand you from that angle, but in a more real sense, if the person was part of a protest and considered themselves a protestor and especially if that's what they were doing up until they decided to commit a crime, it does make sense to label them that way. Things get a little fuzzier, of course, when you have a case like this where trying to assault and potentially murder a cop is only tangentially related to their protesting activities, but as tangential as it may be, there is still an obvious connection. There is nevertheless a long and pretty terrible history of news outlets very loudly identifying certain kinds of people as belonging to certain groups (or involved in particular activities such as protesting) in relation to these kinds of events while conveniently not doing the same thing for others in equal circumstances, though, and it's unlikely to be an accident.

I remember watching footage of that game and thinking basically three things: Wow, cutting-edge 3D video game graphics have officially gotten into a terrible combination of "unstylized ugly" and "uncanny valley" for me. I really like Ashley Burch (voices the main character and also Chloe from Life Is Strange and Enid from OK K.O.! among other things), but the weird voice direction they gave her makes it sound like she has brain problems, and that is going to be really difficult to listen to in a game that has at least six hours of cutscenes (e: and by the way, six hours of cutscenes in of itself is pretty unbearably terrible to me as well - cheque, please). These 3rd person action lite-RPGs are really all starting to look like they play more or less exactly the same regardless of their window-dressing. Back to indie and retro games for me!

We're in a pandemic. A temporary pandemic, which will pass. Do we really all need to be treating grocery stores like warzones where we have to be ultra-alert of every single person in the store at every moment or risk our health and possibly lives? Not everyone lives in a place where foot traffic is low enough in your store that you can even realistically do this, either - I live in a very small town that's the victim of "tourism" during the summer (we call them the cidiots: city + idiot), and the literally one store we have is packed so often because of people preparing supplies to go up to their cabins or go fishing or other crap in the area that it's very difficult to be safe around them while also being able to do basic stuff. There's no order online or in-person pickup options, either. I get what I can from Amazon and stuff, but fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats kind of have to come from a local source by necessity...and so I'm exposed to morons, some of who are just feckless and brainless, while others are actively protesting masks and acting like you're some kind of alien or enemy for doing so. In an ideal world, laws wouldn't be necessary because people would act intelligently and kindly - towards themselves and towards others. A subsection of humanity has consistently, over thousands of years, made laws necessary because the threat of some kind of punishment is unfortunately the only thing that will keep them in line...and then there are the veritable horde of other type of people where not even the threat of some kind of actionable punishment is enough to dissuade them. On a side-note, I think what you're describing is literally the definition of victim-blaming: you are placing responsibility on the victim for wrongs done to them through no fault of their own. Walking down Chelsea Avenue is not an immoral or unlawful choice - I get that it is a choice that, if you have some combination of general wisdom and knowledge of the area, is foreseeably likely to expose you to risk because of the evils of others, but it's still not your fault, which is especially obvious when you start taking into account *why* people make the choices they do (I don't want to be exposed to coronavirus or shot up by some anti-mask gun-nut who's going on a rampage because of their """rights""" being threatened, but I do need to eat more than just plain cereal and rice...).

I am not a comedy person, so I did struggle with that aspect of the film, especially with the Holocaust as a backdrop, which I didn't think was treated quite seriously enough. It doesn't need to be Schindler's List, of course, but just a little more tense and realistic at times to contrast with the silliness would've felt better to me - but that would've just been more to my taste. It seems like the intent was to...have a feel-good movie without outright disrespecting the "material", so to speak, and I think in that sense, it was a success. All in all, I enjoyed it and it got a thumbs up from me.

Life Is Beautiful (1997). A very...strange mix of genuine Holocaust stuff and comedic love story - pretty decent given the uncomfortable marriage between the two, all things considered. @Amentep The opening drum of that trailer absolutely blasted my ears off because I had my audio set very high. Don't recommend.