Bartimaeus

Wow, didn't expect it to happen that quickly. Life can be gone in the blink of an eye... RIP.

No, that is terrible behavior. In what world is it alright to try and lift up a lady's skirt? I couldn't even doing that to my wife outside of a private setting. It's completely terrible. I'm not a woman, so I can't pretend to know exactly what it's like to have something like that happen to you (since this sort of thing is obviously viewed differently if you're a man or a woman). The rough equivalent for a guy would probably be getting your pants pulled down* - that's pretty humiliating, especially in a professional setting (which from the sounds of it, this woman was in when it was occurring). He did it enough times that another co-worker had to tell him to stop - I literally can't imagine how embarrassing it would be to continue to take that crap (especially after having your co-workers notice!), because I literally wouldn't allow it to continue. But again, I'm not a woman - from what we've seen in many cases (and from stories our wives, sisters, mothers, etc. have told at least some of us), some women obviously feel they have to take it and simply try to work around it as best they can until they can quietly get away from it. *Very roughly. Generally, for guys that would be done for laughs - there isn't usually a sexual element involved, which there obviously was here.

Yeah, that one's not surprising, especially because there were rumors of him abusing his granddaughter for years (who's now dead, after being brutally murdered by her boyfriend in an attempted "exorcism"). And CNN asking questions without specifically mentioning him and repeatedly getting Morgan Freeman as an answer seems especially damning, though it may depend on exactly how leading the question was.

Wouldn't it have been *better* as a non-Star Wars film, given that it might've actually been somewhat original and not had the outcome already completely known instead of just another sad, desperate retread of some of the things that characters happened to say in the original trilogy? You know, because the writers actually had some ideas of their own when making those ones.

No, but it helps explain why there's still an ongoing fight. For worse or for worse, our president saying players should be deported over kneeling for the anthem (a gesture Kaepernick chose specifically because a veteran he spoke with told him it would be the most respectful way of drawing attention to himself without insulting the anthem - hah!) is something people care about.

It definitely did not warrant the controversy, and almost everyone had stopped caring about the handful of people doing it until Trump suddenly decided to make it a campaign issue (and he's still talking about it...just said today that players who kneel should be deported).

I read someone else sum it up as, "Patriotism is not nationalism, nor is it fascism. We should strive to be a country where people WANT to stand up for the national anthem, not one where where they're forced to." P.S. Trump's summit with North Korea was cancelled. What a shocker.

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.