Bartimaeus

Everyone loves politics in their entertainment. They just hate it when it's not their politics.

Thanks for the wisdom, Mr. G. I think we should elect that guy, he's clearly aware of the dangers of authoritarianism! Oh...that Joseph G. Well, maybe not.

Trump has openly promised that we won't have to ever vote again if he wins, as he'll fix subsequent elections. I must confess, not having to care and be anxious about politics every two and especially every four years is certainly appealing...

This is pretty topical to me personally because I literally told someone recently that I'd vote for a Shrek .jpeg over Trump.

A couple week delay to make sure everything is as it should be is better than...uh, whatever Intel's been doing for the past couple of years, at least, . Funny comment: "Intel: delays performance-botching patch until after AMD's launch. AMD: delays launch until after Intel's performance-botching patch." Heh.

It's one thing if they're just unstable and the problem can eventually be fixed, but it kiiind of sounds like all these problems are contributing to permanently damaging two generations' worth of CPUs, which is, uh, not great. I guess we'll see when Intel rolls outs its updates in August to see if all the already unstable 14th generation CPUs continue to be broken, or if they're actually able to salvage at least that. Regardless, Intel's communication and transparency has been pretty terrible.

Sorry, KP, . Hope he was loved and cared for...though it kind of sounds like he was fighting to love and care for you guys.

Yes, the courts have license to overrule agencies and how they interpret the laws and statutes that give those agencies powers and duties. But given that Joe Biden currently is legally empowered to imprison and kill all of the judges that might disagree with how he might want those laws and statutes interpreted, I would place his authority as being higher than theirs...at least until such a time as that idiotic ruling is reversed. The scary thing about that ruling is that, depending on those who come into the office of President next, they may act to make sure that the ruling cannot be reversed. It's a Pandora's Box that no sane or stable country should ever open, which we clearly are not.

During times of crisis in the Roman Republic, the Senate would often appoint dictators to take supreme and direct control of the Republic, allowing them to bypass the bureaucracy, in-fighting, and intrigue typical to that time, springing the Republic into immediate and cohesive action in order to avert disaster. Once the crisis had been resolved and the dictator having admirably performed their duties, they would willingly give up their power and return to whatever position (or lack thereof) that they held before, allowing normalcy to resume. It was a system that worked well and saved the Republic upon numerous occasions...until it suddenly didn't. It takes incredible civic virtue to willingly give up power, a quality in dire lack across the world today, and I think there's a certain irony in the wildly corrupt Supreme Court having just enshrined absolute power into the position of President while the one currently occupying the position willingly relinquishes their hold upon it. No matter the impossible political climate and the issues of the day that he faced, may history remember Joe Biden fondly...especially if it results in our Sulla never returning to power.

...We've never had someone serve as VP for more than two terms, right? I'm pretty sure we haven't... (e): Nope: there have been seven VPs who have all tied for longest time in office at 2,922 days.

Yep, it's a mistake to always lock-on with your camera even when using a controller (your movement and camera controls become way too constrained due to being locked relative to whomever you're targeting, which is often very bad when you're trying to maneuver around certain kinds of attacks, get past enemies, or deal with groups), but I imagine this becomes quite a strength when you have way faster and more precise control of your camera with a mouse over an analogue stick. Like I said, even with the initial botched release of DS1 on PC, I knew people who played the game at a high level with M+KB...it just wasn't nearly as easy to learn to get to a base level of competency. But Elden Ring is not DS1, and it might not be a terrible idea to at least try it out for a bit both ways.

It should probably be noted that the Republican Party used to mostly be the progressive party prior to the 20th century. It's complicated, and how both parties evolved starting at the dawn of that century up until their transformations were (more or less) complete at the end of the 1960s is even more complicated still. Shooter was apparently a 20 year old white male registered Republican. Not old enough to legally drink, but old enough to legally own guns and...uh, illegally assassinate former presidents with them, I guess. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more information on this fun character in the coming weeks.

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.