VindictiveJudge

Now I want to play Plague Inc…

You can buy worms for fishing at stores. Someone has to breed them to maintain consistent supply.

She’s a Qanon die-hard first, Trump supporter second. A portion of the Qanon faction has started to break with Trump over the Epstein stuff.

The first and third for sure, don’t think the second will be a significant factor.

Dipping sauces?

I don’t know why I remember this, but there was also a Spongebob episode that showed a potted peanut plant with peanuts growing on it like peas do.

The 360 had far less RAM than the average PC of 2010, and the engine has had a memory leak since Morrowind. I never finished New Vegas due to that, even on PC. Moving to a 64-bit version of the engine with Fallout 4 helped a lot, just because it took longer to run out of memory.

The monitor has to send some data to the computer to tell it what screen resolutions it accepts. VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort will all do that for sure. Less certain about component, composite, and S-Video.

Fuck yes. A slave that takes on the slave owning Templar? Sign me up all day, I want to run into a confederate camp and crush them.

Freedom Cry, the standalone expansion for Black Flag, was essentially this concept in the Carribean. You play as Adewale, a slave turned pirate turned Assassin, and liberate plantations.

Cowboy Bebop and the Ghost in the Shell movies are great places to start.

Anyway, it’s not so much a change in what’s being produced as what’s being imported to the US. There was a good mix of shonen and seinen at first, but shonen sells more merch so we get a lot of it now. Just watch stuff tagged as seinen if you want more mature themes or more sex and gore.

Star Trek?

This has been a problem for far, far, longer than you think. The silver age definitely had it, the golden age probably did, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it cropped up in the proto-superhero stories, like Zorro. It’s a consequence of having a long-form story where the narrative’s status quo isn’t allowed to meaningfully change and characters either aren’t allowed to die or aren’t allowed to stay dead. Recurring antagonists also can have much richer characterization and more complex relationships with the protagonists, which makes writing stories about them more appealing the more often they appear.

The usual trajectory for a new superhero or new incarnation of an existing superhero is to start off with street-level problems, then get a nemesis that has strong ties to those street level problems, then have the dynamic between the two grow in prominence to eclipse all other parts of the plot. The Joker, for instance, always starts off as either a mob boss with a gimmick or a serial killer with a gimmick, not far removed from the mundane crime Batman always starts with, but always winds up with a fixation on Batman and spawns stories designed as some commentary on Batman’s no-killing rule. Again and again and again, dozens of times over the decades.

Why? Because the dynamic between the two characters tends to be fascinating and results in audience engagement.

Europeans and Asians also have roughly 2% Neanderthal DNA on average, so it’s likely we absorbed a significant chunk of their population into our own.

Lightfall sunsetted everything I was using that wasn’t an exotic. Completely destroyed my build.

At what point does it become a grass roots movement?

Putin’s made it clear that Trump doesn’t call the shots in their relationship. Trump’s ego can’t handle that, so now Putin is his enemy. We’ve been seeing Trump slowly figure this out over the course of the year, starting from him saying he could end the war in, what did he say, a week? He clearly wasn’t let in on the invasion plan, either because he can’t keep his mouth shut or because Putin thought the war would be over before the election.

Of course, with how senile he’s becoming and his probable recent stroke, it’s unclear if this will stick or he’ll forget about it in a day or two.

Fun fact: The bible says that only God knows when the world will end, so everyone that says they know when it ends is technically comitting sacrilege.

A lot of that article is a stretch. Some of these things are very basic storytelling elements or ancient character archetypes, and things like Empire vs Imperium are only similar in that they’re empires in space; everything about how the empires actually work and their relationship with the main character is completely different. And space empires are older than Dune, but nobody accuses Dune’s Emperor Shaddam of ripping off the Flash Gordon character of Emperor Ming.

Everything is derivative. Even the Epic of Gilgamesh probably borrows from some older oral tradition that was lost to time. While Dune influenced Star Wars, Flash Gordon and pulp fantasy were stronger influences. Dune, meanwhile, is essentially Lawrence of Arabia crossed with Hamlet.

The cool S.

When life gives you lemons, make more of them?