Me and my friends had a lovely evening playing The Game of Mao.

Do y'all have any favorite card games?

Hey bud, this post sent me, so I did a research deep dive: The funds were 4.5 billion yen, not 450 billion yen, and the submarine claim is dubious and hard to pin down with credible sources. Only source online is a single, relatively old Japanese language article from TBS News Dig. There are allegedly english language sources but they've not been digitized and one is a FOIA request no one has seen, so. That said, still massively fucked. The church knew Korea would spend the money on weapons dev, and paid them anyway. They actively broke sanctions to fund a rogue state with nuclear ambitions for a vanity project.

The Unification Church (a Korea-based megacult church) provided Korean Leader Kim Il Sung with 450 billion Yen in 1991, supposedly with the intent of funding 'light industry', it was instead diverted to nuclear weapons development. Then in 2016 it was discovered by a South Korean governmental report that the church (via a proxy Japanese scrapping company) had sold NK a Golf-II class ballistic submarine with the missiles still onboard in 1994, massively boosting North Korea's missile program.

Ok new game. What's the thing you're a fan of that you're the most pretentious about. NOT the most pretentious thing you're a fan of, I mean the thing that makes *you* act like one of those "oh yeah? Name five of their albums" people. There is a difference

wheres seasons greasons

Since I've been able to vote in 2008, I've always felt forced to vote for the lesser evil. Yet somehow, perplexingly, this string of lesser evils has not produced a single greater good.

Ah yes, the plan of "Use an extremist group to justify kicking the current population off of a piece of land and then scatter them across the globe in isolated conclaves." A brilliant maneuver, and one I am sure has no precedent in history, especially one with marked negative consequences. By the way, has anyone read up on The Bar Kokhba Revolt, particularly the aftermath? Fascinating stuff!

Do You Think God Stays in Heaven Because He too Lives in Fear of What He's Created

Bold strategy Cotton

My problems and struggles are kooky, quirky, romantic, and maybe a little sexy. Your problems and struggles are gross, unpleasant, alienating, and maybe a little problematic. At no point will I consider how in my attempts to rebuild my shattered self-image that I might be romanticizing things that are genuine problems as a coping mechanism in a way that isn't entirely healthy for me or my relationships. Nor am I going to reflect and consider how my problems and struggles might help me empathize with yours. God is in their Heaven, and all is right with the world.

I definitely felt a lot of this.

Act 3 was a huge mess. There's so much content, none of it feels well integrated once you get into the lower city, and your companions stop having anything interesting to say aside from 1-2 sentence comments on whatever just happened at camp. Shadowheart has a huge plot critical arc in Act 2 and in Act 3 if you go to the Shar cell and deal with them she has nothing left to do aside from a single cutscene which is less a resolution and more an epilogue. Lae'zel's arc is hugely important to the finale but aside from a few comments as your doing other stuff and the confrontation with Vlaakith she just doesn't do anything. Gale definitely feels supremely done dirty, having nothing to do in Act 2 aside from Be Sad and then he has a five minute Joker Arc in the book store in act 3 and that's... it. Wyll has a lot of stuff to do in Act 3, but his quest ends with you literally shooting the Shaggy Dog just to make sure you know the Emperor is A Bad Guy. All of these problems are made worse by just how long Act 3 takes. Chances are the companions will run out of stuff to do or say long before you finish going through the 10-12 quest long critical path just to get to the ending. And of course, without knowing exactly where the point of no return is (something the game absolutely punishes you for in Act 2), the natural course is to do all the companion content first, leaving them with nothing to do as their arcs conclude 20-30 hours before you beat the game. The multi-layered Sophie's Choice the game forces on you at the 11th hour was deeply unsatisfying and the writing flip-flops on how to present it and the game literally ends with barely a denouement. Hell, there wasn't even closure on the romance the game kind of shanghaied me into. Karlach just started exploding and I had to make a snap decision and the game ended with me, Wyll, and her going to Hell to fight demons on the cover of heavy metal albums forever - which is a cool ending! But it's weird that the game just drops it on you with no preamble and no chance to tie up any other threads. I honestly think the game benefited a lot from being so long in kind of a bad way; I imagine most of those 90/95 reviews were from people still in Act 1 and 2. It really is an incomplete 9/10 game with a 6-7/10 game stapled onto the end. Honestly, fingers are crossed that the inevitable Definitive Edition fixes how fucked the pacing and content in Act 3 is, but it is a huge kick in the balls a game with that much promise went sour in the final inning.

im kind of conflicted on bg3 because on the one hand it inarguably has a lot of fundamental flaws and shortcomings, but on the other hand, they're the kind of flaws you only notice after sinking dozens of hours and at least one playthrough into the game, so you can't really call them "dealbreakers" because by the time you notice them you're already hooked. that being said, the single biggest gripe i have with the game at the moment is how blatantly unfinished huge chunks of it are, especially in Act 3.

to put it bluntly, it feels like the writers spent the majority of their time on the "good ending" Tav's romance arc with Astarion, branched out from there, and had the game come out of early access before they fleshed out anything else. the further away you get from this intended path, the more holes you notice in the writing. comparing Astarion to the other base origin companions just shows that he has a bit more dialogue at points, but then you start comparing him to Jaheira or Minsc or God forbid Minthara and it becomes a joke. i'm not exaggerating when i say that i'm pretty sure Astarion has more dialogue in Act 1 alone than Minthara does throughout the entire game combined. meanwhile, because they just straight up never implemented the Upper City into Act 3, Karlach's good ending is inaccessible, leaving her storyline to conclude with what amounts to

the part of all this that drives me fucking insane is that people are still pushing BG3 as an example of a Good AAA Game with No Microtransactions that Wasn't Rushed, and like, are we playing the same game? it's a textbook example of releasing an unfinished game and then pushing hotfixes as players hit issues. if i was more cynical, i'd say that Larian knew Astarion was going to be the most popular romance option based on early access data, so they focused the initial writing effort on him and then planned to flesh out other characters after launch based on who else fans liked the most

this is fucking animated crazy good, how come ive never seen this

False. Bodytype, gender identity, and genital configuration are all entirely independent of each other in character creation. So with that mod you can give your dragonborn guy the fattest fucking naturals.

Looks like there's already a mod that gives dragonborn gals fat dragon tits.

Link

FOOD HUBRIS BY COUNTRY america: believes their shitty local burger chain is a once-in-a-lifetime culinary experience because their mayo includes onion paste canada: if your poutine tastes better than the styrofoam plate it comes on you will discover the cold rage that lies under the canadian's polite exterior united kingdom: despite thriving and unique fusion cuisines spreading from the UK to the rest of the world in recent decades, when asked to think of 'british food' the average UK citizen will start a fight over whether cold beans with a modest side of white bread is haute cuisine france: McDo Ortolan Bunting italy: extremely mad about american versions of italian food. blissfully ignorant of what happens in brazil brazil: if the scientific genius applied to making cronenbergian pizzas were applied to anything else, brazilians would all be commuting to jobs on the moon. They have pizza that can feel pain russia: obviously mayonnaise is the perfect topping for all foodstuffs, this is solved. The question is what to put on top of mayonnaise, and it might never be answered germany: less a joke than a fact: the single most produced numbered Volkswagen part is a standardized currywurst

Back in the aughts and early 2010s I was really in to web 2.0 stuff I didn’t run adblockers as a matter of principle. Gotta feed those starving artists yelling about old movies and all. Then I switched from Mac to Windows and, like, immediately got a virus from visiting a sketch site I found through a search engine. Note that I never downloaded anything from that site and to my knowledge did not download any sketchy software for other sites. I just visited it. After that I swapped to ad blockers and did not get a virus (to my knowledge) again.

web 2.0 companies that try to frame people using adblockers as greedy freedloaders always conveniently turn their heads when those same “greedy freeloaders” tell them that advertisers are paying to put malicious and predatory ads on their playforms and adblock users are, by in large, using adblockers to protect themselves

Hey, quick question, didn’t we have a whole thing about a group of germanic people who looted wealth from ethnic undesirables including, infamously, gold filings and teeth? Didn’t we, like, fight a global war that killed millions largely on the premise that that was not cash money behavior? I recall, like, there was a lot of other stuff involved, but I remember the gold teeth stealing from minorities thing being a detail of that mess and kind of emblematic of the larger issues at question. ...also, followup, weren’t those people who were definitely not cool kind of infamous for trying to defend themselves by saying they were just following orders? Wasn’t that, like, a meme we’d throw around to highlight how shitty their behavior was for decades afterward? Didn’t we do all sorts of insane, unethical experiments exploring if that was a valid defense? Didn’t the whole idea kind of drive us collectively crazy?

all cops are bastards because all cops are just doing their jobs