Everyone who got Rick rolled will click on it. The view number will double from 1.5 billion currently to +3 billion views and YouTube will crash. All will celebrate the annual rick roll day henceforth, causing Never gonna give you up to become the most played song of all time ever with hundreds of billions of views in the year 2100. Trust me, never gonna lie.

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

Totally. Been a gamer for 30+ years, and none of the new stuff holds my interest. Also, my hardware being less than a full time mortgage, means most new games run poorly. So, old stuff it is.

I read the book

Couldn’t even get the image right. Atlas bore not the earth, but the sky.

Eh, the original from the 90s is a more solid game. The game is good is some ways, but flawed in many. First of all the dumbing down. In 90s version you recruit soldiers for money, then check their stats and make them snipers, grenadiers, shock troops or even suicide bombers depending on their skills. 2012 version, you get a bunch of gamified units that have set upgrade paths.

90s version you build and attack multiple bases, administrate a world wide war with great wins and painful losses. In 2012, you pretty much have to win each scenario or the game becomes unwinnable.

Old version, more units, lose one or two, the fight goes on. New version, two dead soldiers will make many fights unwinnable. Old, all aliens are on map at start. New, aliens spawn suddenly in illogical positions and often put your troops in impossible situations that you would never have wandered into if the enemy was on the field and not suddenly appeared out of thin air.

Old, no limits to equipment, give every man 2 grenades and 2 smoke grenades, no worries. New, only Carl can carry smoke grenades, because the game wants to force strategic choices.

I could go on, but long story short, yes new xcom was good, but it really was a dumber version of the original, which had small flaws, but is still an amazing game. New xcom I would just not want to play again.

Your knowledge in this field supersedes mine, I defer to you. I merely summarized the article in my simple understanding. Which, I feel is kinda the same as what you said, only simpler and less accurate. Thank you for the elaboration.

Also, grinds my gears is an expression, and so is gets my goat. Yet clichés make us all dumber so I decided to grab the readers attention with a mangled metaphor, hoping it would draw smiles and further attention.

Skatusen?

Argh. As a Wikipedia supporter this grinds my goat, if I can maul two expressions at once. On the other hand, reading the article I see that AI is scrubbing Wikipedia already and it’s driving up costs. What wiki is doing is creating a model where AI companies will pay them for what they’re currently doing anyway.

I don’t like it, but until they can be blocked or otherwise prevented from access, at least wikimedia should get something out of it. However I fear that this will lead to dependency on AI money, and that, that’s not good.

What does it take for people to realize that the pooch is screwed, the frog is cooked, the tomato squashed, the cat’s out of the bag and dead in the box? The emperor is naked, and doing a nazi salute, the evidence has been lost in the noise, the law broken, the perpetrators have gotten away with it, the grand wizard revealed behind the curtain, the good guys lose, it’s really dark outside, the dragon ate the fucking hobbit AND STILL people are saying “You know this could be not cool” instead of “It’s general fucking strike time”.

Have you ever held public office? Do you understand the limitations and possibilities of such a position? Do you know that you could have done more in the same situation?

If you’re angry and disaffected, join the party and work from within, decisions are made by those who show up. Angry people on the sidelines are sidelined. I get that you wish you were listened to by your representatives more, but they’re listening to many and there’s only so much they can do.

Also, when being critical it sure helps knowing what you are talking about lest you reveal you know little and understand less. BTW, Ilhan Omar is a woman.

-Free Stars on steam, used to be called Star Control 2. Old school space adventure. And it is literally free as well.

-Imperialism 2 on GOG, 4x game set in the age of exploration and industrialization.

-Civilization 4, the best of the series in my opinion, I’ve played them since the 90s.

-Beyond Good and Evil, comes to mind, don’t remember much about it, except that it’s good.

-To the Moon, indie adventure / puzzle game. Has great reviews by the developers aunt, among other things.

-Banner Saga 1-3, holy Nordic inspired epic tactical strategy, batman.

-Jagged Alliance 2, another tactical combat game, modern time, funny, realistic and really difficult.

Eh, realized that only the first one is free to play. But the other ones are old (or very old), so you can snatch them on sale on steam, GOG or Epic for less than a chocolate bar and get dozens of hours of enjoyment from them.

I’m on the side of the Vietnamese

Historically occupations tend to be troublesome affairs. The west spent 20 years in Afghanistan and got nowhere. I agree that the mafia state must be dealt with, but going by the west’s ability to run an occupation that doesn’t turn the inhabitants against them, is practically nil.

I have the ungrateful job of teaching English. I have two types of students. Screenies and non-screenies. The former are like this meme, they pick up a lot from popular culture, games, etc, and are often bored with classes. Then you have the latter group, they have very little exposure to English and usually very little interest as well. A third group exists, and they’re the kids that are in between and do the work in class.

Now one would think that getting everyone into the first group would make my job easy, however, those kids are usually a special subset of kids who will learn independently just from their interests. The other two groups could do hour for hour exactly the same as the Screenies, but they would never reach that proficiency level without other instruction. On the other hand, a lot of screenies do poorly at formal English, like grammar, spelling and word choice, because much of their learning is casual.

So long story short, to the meme, yeah, I know.

In some ancient text I read it talks about how the ancient Greeks had stopped wearing swords all the time for protection, but there were still some primitive areas where they did. Civilization reduces the necessity and the rate of return on individual violence it would seem.

How you fit your parents in law in microwave?

Dang, if those agencies ever see my Civilization 4 save games, I’ll be so royally embarrassed that I spent so much time on it that they could blackmail me to anything.

Just listened to the Empire podcast about Catherine the great. Turns out the twat she was married to was the kinda idiot that managed to get everyone against him, so when the two came to blows everyone he tried to recruit was already sworn to her. Didn’t go well for him. Then Catherine’s son was exactly the same as his father and when she died, his own children joined in on the coup against him. The point being, if you piss off everyone by being an absolute ass, then their dislike of you will force them to join forces against you.

The Empire podcast goes quite deep into some of the issues and roots of partition. It was very clear that the English wanted out ASAP. One reason was the sectarian violence they could no longer contain.