Bartimaeus

Not since Obama left office. Gun sales are in the tank. That man could flat out sell guns. (...I think it was a joke in that guns are a weapon that can be used to kill.)

Yeah, I think so. My strategy was pretty much always have a massive amount of horse archers on one of the handful of civs that get good ones (e.g. Huns, Mongolians, Persians, Saracens, Spanish, Turks) and just constantly issue "false"/half moves to avoid incoming projectiles while shooting in between and guarding ye' olde trebuchets. A hell of a lot of clicking, though.

Yeah, moderate and above, IIRC, is the "full" version of the AI - it doesn't become any smarter after that (anything harder just cheats and gets free resources), and it loves mass producing and micro-ing units like crazy, and it can be difficult to keep up with. I played the HD version a couple years ago, and I could beat two moderates at once, but it was utterly exhausting because of just the seemingly endless lengths the AI would go to constantly build more crap and make more units (at a speed not really possible by humans except perhaps the most micro-skilled, since the AI can control so many units and builders at once) to make stomping them out as annoying as possible.

No doubt, but I did expect a little better from the man himself. Admittedly, it probably gets old saying "social democrat" over and over when people hear the word "social" and immediately jump to putting the "ist" at the end anyways. If nothing else, it helped some people people get over their phobia of the word.

​ IIRC, Sanders described himself as a "socialist", which wasn't really even correct, so that didn't help matters much. Then you throw in our scorched earth and Byzantine state of affairs in politics, and it's not exactly a surprise that the label so quickly got out of hand.

​Contacting an admin was probably the best way to go, but I suppose this will do as well - should get the attention of at least one of the moderators who will likely pass it on.

[people arguing with each other about different things intensifies]

Match Thread

I'll die if I don't, so I don't have much of a choice. ...Well, I guess I could choose to ignore all medical advice and keep eating gluten, but that'll definitely be even more unpleasant and probably kill me eventually.

Yeah, my nutrition my entire life has been pretty terrible. No presence of junk food is about all I can say, but I've basically never eaten any vegetables (besides peppers) and I've always been pretty light on fruit, too. Part of the problem is that I've always been an extremely picky eater, and that's partially because I just have the worst taste buds in the world, and also because I find a lot of textures really disgusting (e.g. any kind of cooked vegetable - but raw vegetables I've discovered are a different story). It's been...interesting trying to re-examine how to eat, and figuring out how to best integrate things that I have long ignored.

I guess it depends on what kind of food you eat and how much time you like to spend on preparing it. I was fortunate to grow up with Asian cooking (i.e. everything goes on rice), and so that makes it somewhat easier. I've always been a very light eater, though, and it's difficult to get enough calories in other meals when most "easy" calories are totally off-limits. Have to prepare all your own food all the time, and you have to shell out for a lot of things to get them gluten-free (such as any kind of noodles...and many things that don't naturally contain gluten are cross-contaminated due to wheat and barley being pretty much omnipresent in the American food industry). I was only recently diagnosed (...after a couple years of being sickly and unable to maintain a healthy weight - too skinny), and so I am admittedly still struggling to adjust. The easiest thing to fill up on are vegetables and fruits, but they (especially vegetables) just don't have great calorie density at the amount I would prefer to eat (like I said, I'm a light eater). (e): Oh, and it doesn't help that I never have much of an appetite to begin with. I'm shooting for like just 1300-1500 calories a day, and I'm finding that even that's rather difficult.

Or if you're like me and have celiac disease, shakes are an easy way of *getting* enough calories (because while eating a more paleo diet is good enough for feeling like you eat enough, it's often too calorie light to actually be sustainable unless you like eating giants amounts of food, which I do not).

Trump's warning to Kim Jong-un: make a deal or suffer same fate as Gaddafi: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/17/north-korea-trump-latest-warning-kim-jong-un-gaddafi Well, if we're going by the logic that "insane and aggressive lunatic that treats his allies the same as his enemies can accomplish in North Korea what the rational and coherent actor could not", this should theoretically help negotiations. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that was a complete load of crap and North Korea & China just played him, so I don't think it will.

I finally beat Terranigma. I started playing it in May of 2008 (I went back and checked...), so it only took me literally ten years to beat...with some long breaks and a couple of restarts in between. It's about time.

I guess we'd have to see the tweet in question to know for sure.

Ahh, the classic "finished watching/reading/playing something really good and I'm trying to come to grips with my life again now" syndrome. Always a bittersweet feeling - one that I love, but don't feel near often anymore.

Not quite. It's only one half of the block - has to go through the House, which it almost certainly will not.

Nearly hit both record low and record high temperatures today. It was almost freezing this morning, and then a heat wave came in and got it up to the 90s, and then another cold front came in and now it's storming. Thanks Obama.

looking forward to playing it in 2026

North Korea threatens to cancel Trump summit (poor article, but whatever): https://www.axios.com/north-korea-threatens-to-cancel-trump-summit-f9eee700-97b4-4e68-9ccc-68d2745dd701.html https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9&version=NIV

They've fallen off a lot in the past month or so. They're pretty close to what they were before the mining craze took off - which means they're still overpriced because of time passed, but not as much of a tums festival as they were a few months ago.

lol @ the 1000W power supply and then not even using a GPU. your build is probably using like a total of 150-175W at peak right now,

I didn't love the movie, but the soundtrack is pretty dope

tbf, there are still bugs in BGII:SoA questlines that can randomly happen after like 20 freaking years of modfixing, and mucking around with globals to fix them in that game is a disaster, too

That's pretty good time, IMO. I rip and encode 30-50GB BluRays at fairly extreme settings that usually take about a solid 24 hours per 15GB or so (...and on an i7 - clearly, I need a Ryzen). I used to use even more extreme settings that would take like a week+, but it was just too much for too little benefit over slightly less extreme settings.