majestic

So, like, watched the new Fantastic 4 film. It's your average, run-off-the-mill Marvel film. A fun first hour where everything gets established and a less fun final hour of really schlocky superhero battles including your average sky beams, although it was the good guy's skybeams this time around. There's one pretty bad thing: The moral dilemma. Almost made me barf. There are better Marvel films. Much worse ones too.

Plenty of our real estate "investors" and "developers" who kept buying houses and apartments with those great (almost) 0% loans are going bankrupt at the moment. They also can't really pawn off their "investments" because they largely consist of large housing areas build mainly to invest in, and all the apartments in them have terrible room layouts no one wants or even can live in, as they were just built to be pawned off to investors who in turn would sell them for a 50%+ ROI five years later. Then the unthinkable happened, the ECB increased interest rates, and what was even worse, our government introduced a loan limit for banks: Private households' monthly loan installments must not exceed 40% of their income in order to put a curb on the rising private bankruptcies. Because all those great variable interest rate loans they took out suddenly went from 0.7% interest rate to 4+% and monthly installments exploded putting middle class families in financial duress (which in turn combined with rising prices due to greedflation is currently causing our economy to be stuck, who would have throught). Private demand is down and companies are sitting on massive amounts of debt they can't clear without the fake income of rising real estate prices. Housing prices are pretty much stuck because selling for less is not an option, and no one's buying. It is especially satisfying to watch because all these investors and companies paid donated millions to our conservative parties who made sure that nothing was done against the energy and supply chain inflationary shock of 2022. The conservatives let the energy companies (who they all have a stake in, mind) run rampant with their merit order inflated prices, causing a feedback loop of increased rents (now if that makes no logical sense for you, dear reader, then keep in mind that our rent prices are by far and large linked to inflation, i.e. if the average statistical inflation of a year is 10%, then rent prices will automatically be increased by 10%, and no, that makes very little sense and is just kept up by the conservatives because many of them are on the payroll of receiving donations by people growing even richer from increased rent prices) and increased labor costs, which in turn now means that while everyone else in the Euro-Zone is sitting at the target 2% inflation rate, we're still stuck with 3+%. Energy and housing is sucking up free income because there's no alternative, and groceries are incredibly expensive because three companies have 90% market share. There are goods available in literally the same store brand in Germany and only a handful of kilometers away for a 50% premium in Austria. Products actually manufactured in Austria, mind you - if that can be sold for a profit for 50% less in Germany where the income levels are very similar (if not actually better in the low income brackets that supermarket employees usually are in), then it certainly can be sold for a profit at the same price in Austria. What are you going to argue with? Transportation costs across the border (wait, that would make the product more expensive in the country exported to, huh...)? Can't be labor costs. Right, got it, it's greed. The regulartory body supposed to prevent the formation of cartels and oligopolies keeps saying they can't find any proof of price fixing between the large players. Not sure what sort of proof they're looking for to be honest. Transcripts of phone calls or e-mails going back and forth discussing how to best price gouge? Meanwhile the government has no idea why the right wing extremists are rising to power. Between living expenses exploding and the 2015 influx of culturally hard to intergrate people from certain areas of the world it makes me wonder: Are politicians in this day and age really that dumb, can't they really not see the forest for the trees or are they all just corrupt asshats best put under the guillotine's blade? Not that being dumb and a corrupt asshat is mutually exclusive, one just needs to look at the Orange Sex Offender.

As an 80ies nerd I felt right at home in Night City. The setting's not for everyone though - not even for other 80ies nerds. Game's pretty good though, easily CDPR's best in terms of writing and thematic exploration. It's also everything a FromSoftware game would like to be when it comes to storytelling by item descriptions and little bits of lore found here and there - in addition to, you know, having an actual plot. Which is a little hole-y in the first chapter due to it being seemingly hit the hardest by time constraints (i.e. cuts). I am, generally speaking, not someone who replays games a lot, with two exceptions. The original Wing Commander and Cyberpunk 2077. That is not to say that I didn't like other games more (Ocarina of Time and Planescape: Torment come to mind, among others), it's just that there's something about Night City that makes me come back. In spite of starting with my least favorite RPG setup that there is: First person and open world. Guess it helps that Cyberpunk 2077's open world busy work is limited to randomly shooting criminals for bounties, and the storyline is rather focused and not bogged down by having a lot of - mostly irrelevant by the end - choices and consequences outside of deciding which ending you want, including the Phantom Liberty ones. The gameplay itself is, well, I guess fine. Netrunning is still as broken as it was in 1.6, except in different ways. LMGs are still fun to play with, but not really viable, Assault Rifles still suck compared to virtually everything else, and a bunch of little things here and there, but there's something about the game that made me play 550 hours already, and single player games rarely get that much time out of me.

I noticed that I've become like the Q continuum and the Q in them, as depicted by the Voyager epsiode Death Wish. Just an endless, dusty road with the same people who read a newspaper and every now and then talk about the same things - because everything's been said already.

Man, you guys just made me check if Malcolm McDowell died, but no, Hurlshot can't keep Admiral Tolywn and Chancellor Valorum apart.

Just prepwork so the national guard can "oversee" the midterm elections in large, mostly Democratic centers next year.

Have to disagree here, Professor Michaels. Even so much as printing any sensitive material on a public printer in a hotel is a breach of security. We have tighter security checks at work.

Wait, is that a rhetorical question? As a serb, shouldn't you know the answer?

I can only repeat myself: Fetish Locator is a gem of an adult visual novel. It even has a taboo mode for whoever doesn't want to boff their sister. If that doesn't tell you how much thought went into the game then I don't know what will.

There's plenty to watch even without rentals or buying films, but Amazon is trying really hard to sell their sub-channels/access to other streaming services through Prime Video. Just on my landing page it shows me all the things I could watch if I subscribed to Discovery, MGM+, Paramount+, Apple-TV, and so on and so forth. Plus current rental movies. Takes some scrolling down, and they sneaksily encourage users to click on the pay-to-watch stuff. Free for a week, free for a month, free first episode, kinda like a dealer. We noticed you watch a lot of horror movies, how'd you like to subsribe to Thrillbox, Home of Horror or Bloody Movies? Each one for just 3.99€/month. Free week included, we hope you forget to cancel!

Yeah, don't know. Prime Video bundles a lot of channels and other stuff and is a video rental system, but since this is a Prime Video exclusive title you can only watch it with the Amazon Prime subscription. Can't even rent it without, so it's not an Amazon ad per se, probably just a plug for Prime Air. It helps to bear in mind that it was filmed in 2020 during the lockdowns. I don't know how Prime Air is doing these days, but it sure shows no sign of being available here, and I'd venture there's a ton of troublesome EU regulations preventing an easy rollout. Methinks Mango Mussolini needs to threaten some more tariffs if they don't give Bezos unrestricted access to the airspace.

Yeah, Amazon Prime Air saves the day, basically.

War of the World (2025) I don't get the reviews. When you're sitting in front of your TV, looking at Ice Cube sitting in front of a green screen that is reflected in his glasses, the correct choice is to review and enjoy the film for what it is. The wrong one is to review it as if it would be a serious work of art, because if there's one thing the reviews are right about, then it is this: War of the Worlds (2025), which was originally filmed during the 2020 lockdown, is an utter disaster. From the terrible cinematography, to the forgettable sound design, to the incredibly bad acting of the entire cast and digital effects on the level of 2003 game cinematics (the arrival of the tripods basically looks like it was copied and pasted from the arrival of the Burning Legion in Warcraft 3), one can only come to the conclusion that even Uwe Boll movies are better. Now, the techincal aspects aren't Neil Breen level terrible, but if you've ever seen a The Asylum film (I would recommend Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies if you haven't and are interested), that's about what you're getting - just that everything looks like found footage because most of the cast filmed their scenes with their phones' selfie cams. With that out of the way, what an enjoyable silly ride this was. The premise, the acting, the cinematography, the editing, the effects - combined everything is so bad it breaks the laws of physics and becomes a stunningly enrapturing mixture. Plus it has Clark Gregg, and let's face it, anything that has Clark Gregg in it automatically gets taken up a notch. If you don't agree, then fine, but know that you're wrong. Spoilers from here on out. I'll not mark them, because, well, what would be the point? The film features, of course, Ice Cube sitting in a chair, cast in the worst role you could think of for him, a high ranking intelligence officer. His daughter Faith, a genius biologist, is dating an Amazon delivery truck driver so Ice Cube can get a thumb drive at the end of the movie. He keeps a really close tab on his family, down to checking what Faith eats during her pregnancy, but he's completely oblivious to the so-obvious-it-hurts fact that his son Dave is the hacker and conspiracy theorist Disruptor that he spends the first fifteen minutes of the film trying to find. Shortly after yet another failed raid, meteors rain from the sky. The Burning Legion tripods arrives on Azeroth Earth. In what is a fun little twist and about the only interesting thing the film really does, the initial counter attack by various militaries around the world is highly successful. These tripods are not invincible, and they're taking down easily by concentrated missile and tank attacks. Ice Cube is swivelling on his chair yelling BOOYAH at the green screen - you know, like any seasoned intelligence officer would. Who could blame the guy. Alas, all that was just a diversion. Some tripods manage to locate data centers, and that is where the film really goes off the rails. See, the tripods in this version grow tentacles and start injecting tiny cybernetic insects into the data centers - insects that feed on data, and the more data they consume, the smarter they get. All the world's data gets eaten from the data centers. Power plants fail everywhere, Facebook pages disappear, the military is now completely incapable of fighting back as fighter jets and commercial airliners just fall from the sky, tanks stop dead in their tracks and not a single digital gizmo keeps working. Except Ice Cube's computer and Faith's, Mark's, Sara's (NASA friend of Ice Cube's) and Dave's smart phones, plus all the apps running on them. The internet is still working fine too, in spite of a global power outage. The tripods also forgot to attack or deactivate all the US drones cruising about. After Ice Cube finally finds out that Dave is DISRUPTOR, Dave's hacking collective develops a computer virus to drop the enemy mothership's shields infect the tripods, but it fails. Why? Well, as Eva Longoria puts it, the insects are part biological and part cyber. A couple of seconds later they got it all figured out, they combine Faith's research into anti-viral agents with their computer virus (DNA is just a sort of code, after all). Now all that is left for Ice Cube is to plug in his thumb drive, download CANNIBAL_CODE.EXE and upload that to the super secret government surveillance programm GOLIATH - which will infect all the aliens once they consume it. Only hitch in that plan? Ice Cube doesn't have a thumb drive. Top secret military installation, he says, ain't allowed to bring one to work. Makes sense. On the other hand, he's using Facebook at work and has Zoom and WhatsApp installed. Well, can't be perfectly secure in all aspects, can we. Anyway, now's Mark's time to shine, because Ice Cube just needs to buy a thumb drive from Amazon - which still works, by the way, even after the world's data was eaten by cybernetic insects - and out comes the Amazon delivery drone. Dave covers Mark with a leftover Predator drone and shoots down some aliens and crashes the drone into a tripod. Meanwhile the tripods are converging on Washington D.C., and a couple of B2s take off to carpet bomb (nuke, maybe, they are talking about a blast radius of five miles) them into oblivion. Well, them, the residential area of D.C., and most importantly, the GOLIATH data center hidden beneath Ice Cube's workplace. Please don't wonder how there's still working military equipment at this point after it all failed without data, and also don't think too hard on how and why the military would not constantly fly sorties against the alien invaders. They just knew they'd need to be on standby to bomb the ultimate goal of the alien invasion. Mark saves the day by successfully delivering the thumbdrive to Ice Cube, who barely makes it down to the server room. He plugs in the thumb drive and poof, alien threat vanquished. Yep. CANNIBAL_CODE.EXE does the trick. While writing this post I've racked my brain trying to find a worse film that I've seen, and somehow I come up short. Not even 80ies B-movies are this bad. Definitely a "so bad it's good" sort of film. A+, a 10/10, five stars. Will be shown at film schools all over the world in the future as an example of how not to make a film.

Scrambled, not whisked is the superior method. Very much am on @ShadySands' daughter's side here. You can vary the degree of doneness until you find one you like, I personally prefer them to not be too dry, but unlike sunny sides up, the yolk isn't supposed to be runny on scrambled eggs. Salt them a little in the pan. Lard makes for the best eggs (guess also the highest cholesterol ), followed by butter. A neutral oil works too if you have nothing else. Season liberally with paprika and add some freshly ground black pepper, but I can see how crunchy garlic with chili oil works perfectly fine too.

Ah, that's the fun little bug where a notification tells you about a like in a thread moved to the moderator forum for moderation. Had that one too, after I replied to a SonicComradYellowMage117 post. God told off for trying to "evade" the word filter by "accidentially" misspelling a common colloquial term for fornication. Edit: Kinda bizarre, that was over five years ago.

Go play SOMA next.

Here's Mekuna's Ice Shard Hydra build if you're interested. There's also a link to the theoretically best build in it too, but that is only interesting after you've found really good Greater Affixes and the appropriate Mythic gear. I didn't like the playstyle with Floaty Bobble and Teleport Enchantment*, so I left those out. I got lucky and had a very early Nagu rune drop, which makes for an infinite summon loop (Nagu + Ceh) always maxing Primordial Binding out. In the highest DPS meta build that is replaced by having Unstable Currents on all the time and proccing Lightning Spears en masse. *General idea is to have enough cooldown reduction on your gear that you can permanently evade between casts. If you're nowhere near that it's just better to use Hydra as enchantment. Can't say no to that extra damage, and handling Teleport and Evade separately gives more controlled mobility without all that CD reduction.

Are you playing the Unstable Currents version of the Hydra build? That one has just way too much visual clutter, the Ice Shards variant is more than good enough damage if you just want to finish the season journey and much less chaotic. Actually, don't really need Ice Shards/Hail of Verglas. You can make do with just using Ice Blades, Lightning Spear and Hydra all the time. 's an uncharacteristicly low APM sorc build that's viable in this season.

Hey, some of these are real gems. Fetish Locator in particular.

That's a glazed pear.

Oh, look, AI bots trying to talk about food. That's new. How are your tastebuds, buddy? To post something on topic, work cantina makes pretty good food, all in all:

Tired of winning all the time yet?

Maybe they're allergic to water?

OH MY GOD BRO THIS IS SO FIRE. 32% of YouTube is screaming idiots these days. 67% is AI generated slop, and there's 1% of decent content.

That's the point @uuuhhii was making. People just promise Trump eleventy billion billion dollars in investments that will never materialize and he agrees to screw over the local automobile companies to sell a quick win now that his base is falling apart over electing a pdf file. Personally I find that rather hilarious - I mean cognitive dissonance or not, people knew who and what Trump is. It is bewildering to see even the QAnon Shaman being weirded out by Trump's handling of the Epstein list and its implications. You're too hung up on the word bribe. Yes, relenting and giving the US meaningless wins so Trump agrees to lower tariffs isn't bribery in the legal sense. Not that anyone in the Trump administration would be stopped by doing something illegal, but one can dream of a world where actions being illegal isn't the stopping point for politicians. There's still an ethical layer that used to sit well above the legal one. Alas, o tempora, o mores.