johnzo

oh damn I'd forgotten about Jedi Fallen Order. Is it good? Star Wars games have been a real mixed bag since TIE Fighter... And the Order sounds real promising. "Not lengthy game that looks gorgeous" + "Knights of the Round Table vs. vampires in steampunk London" is a solid pitch.

ugh double post

Okay I am stuck inside waiting out the coronavirus, what should I be playing? Got a PS4, a Switch, and an i7/16gb PC with a budget GPU from 2014ish ... a GTX 730Ti. Games I really like: Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Mass Efffect, Panzer Corps, Master of Orion, Stellaris, Crusader Kings II, the Last of Us, Twisted Metal, God of War, Rimworld. Lots of different kinds of things. I'm more into single player games; not competitive enough for multiplayer although everyone tells me that Rocket League is a blast for even a beginner to play. In general I don't want a big learning curve, which is why I don't really play the NFL or NHL games; depending on how I set the difficulty they are either cartoonishly simple or completely impossible for me. Couldn't ever get comfortable with those. also am getting away from giant sprawling RPGs with hundreds of hours of play time .. have bounced off the Witcher and Horizon Zero Dawn a couple of times.

yeah, there's so much cool storytelling you can do with wrestling, I don't just want two big guys beefing and that's the story. The thing about Luchasaurus and Marko Stunt is that those guys can really really go. Luchasaurus' superkicks are unreal. They're not just getting by on a gimmick, they have actual skills to pay the bills. I think Defy in Seattle gets it right; they do a lot of your traditional pro wrestling kind of things, they spice up their local guys with some great fly-in indie talent, and they also feature the weirdo hero Randy Myers and his kissing gimmick at every event and he always gets over. A little goofy fun breaks up the serious stuff nicely.

Jack Ma is kind of a Musk type with an eye for a headline and a big grand gesture. But he's also a heel, his 9-9-6 formula for work is insane, he posits it as what you have to do to change the world, but "changing the world" really means "making him obscenely wealthy." Glad he's not my boss.

Hangman Page gets over with a press release. Nice.

hey Speedflex, I hope your family is doing okay! That sucks that you had to cancel your trip. My family is fine here, although I'm a little bit vulnerable to it so we're being really cautious. Been working from home for a week now. Haven't got the cabin fever yet, but we'll see what happens when we run out of Netflix to watch...

there's also the matter of a monetary policy that prioritizes miniscule interest rates and makes the stock market basically the only investment vehicle available to little people like me, though that's been true for a long time now and is not a problem I'd hang on the present administration, or China.

he gets his marching orders from Do or Die just like the rest of us.

oh yeah and while I'm singing the blues here on morningbigblue, lemme just add that I've lost a chunk of my retirement savings in the past week or so and since Trump was all over owning the bull market he can own the crash too. but yeah, it's just a game to me. (and I'm lucky enough to be someone in the USA who even has retirement savings and I've still got a ways to go before retirement so this is just like a mild periwinkle blue instead of a deep ugly camo Signature Sweater blue, but still, a bummer)

nice!

I live right in the middle of the hot zone, and I'm immunocompromised (being medicated for autoimmune hearing loss; my antibodies are apparently coached by Jim Marshall) and I've got a history of some bad lung stuff. I'm not as old as DoD but I'm still pretty old. "fun and satisfying game" is not where I am right now. You are projecting a bit. and hey let's see what those lefty progressives at Business Insider are saying: https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-scrambles-to-clarify-details-on-coronavirus-response-2020-3 I can't imagine why anyone would say that Trump isn't serious about coronavirus. Note that the people walking back the comments were those famous gotcha merchants at DHS. (anticipated response: lewinskyglobalistschappaquiddickdemocratswerepartyofslaveryleagueofnationsglobalistsglobalistsshrilllibrarian)

I can't believe the Woke Basketball Association canceled its season just to own Trump. Sad!

People who have polled on Obamacare are well acquainted with this dynamic. When you describe a lot of the stuff that Obamacare does, people like those things -- preexisting condition coverage, college students stay on their parents' insurance, requiring a basic level of care from an insurance plan, contraception coverage -- this stuff is enjoys a high approval rating. But when you say "are in you favor of Obamacare?" the affirmatives plummet. A lot of that is due to the grotesque romneycare public+private/tax penalty for not buying insurance thing. Fair enough. But still that ridiculous individual mandate is gone now, and many people don't realize that Obamacare survives and has a lot of good and necessary stuff in it .... because it was endlessly marketed to them on its weakest points and also it was named after a scary foreign islamic devil who broke the law by even trying to become president. just gotta figure out how to market social democracy for the American public. Neither "competent middle-aged librarian type who collects plutocrat scalps" or "angry flailing Brooklyn oldster who stokes the hardcore kids" got it done, we'll see what's next.

if globalism caused or complicated pandemics, why haven't they gotten more frequent or more intense in the years since the 90s when Clinton liberalized American trade with China and really kicked off the modern economic age of outsourcing and the freedom of capital? red tape is one thing. The Trump decision to defund pandemic response in 2017 was a different thing, an act of foolish mismanagement akin to Bush's not bothering to read "Bin Laden determined to strike in USA." and yeah, I know that state and local governments have a role to play. but the federal government has/had more resources and better labs. Also state and local governments have no control over airports and airport security, and a large component of an effective pandemic response is to identify high-risk passengers and taking the appropriate precautions with them. so while Seattle is busy outlawing gatherings of 250+ people, setting up quarantine shelters, and working on a business rescue strategy for all the small businesses that can be killed by a bad month, we are also freely exporting our coronavirus load to the rest of the USA and to the world because the people who could help with that don't have a clue, or don't give a ****. people say "oh let's not politicize this" are people who are against accountability. We grant the president near immunity from criminal prosecution and give him a free flop on top of that, why is it so distasteful when we hold him to the low standard of merely doing his job? What's wrong with accountability? I know where the buck stopped in 1948, where does it stop now? TLDR: another typically empty post that reeks of bothsidesism and punches the globalist strawman for good measure. (edit: I guess we're not exporting our coronavirus load to the world anymore. just to africa, asia, australia, and the UK.)

Wrote this on Facebook today, just in case people ever wonder why I engage with political discussions with strangers on the internet, and why these issues are personal to me. Context is a lot of left wingers in my circles being grumpy at Joe Biden's sudden phoenix-like rise in the Dem primary. most of the audience for this is American.

I guess if you think that all problems reduce to just writing a cheque in the right amount, you could believe that. The trouble is, when you're fighting a pandemic, you're not just battling a lack of resources, you're battling a lack of time and opportunities. There are key moments when you can act; afterwards, cleanup and recovery become a lot more expensive. Trump squandered precious time with his feckless management of the White House's emergency apparatus and the starvation of the CDC. Think of it like some idiot who replaces a fuse with a penny because a penny is cheaper than a fuse and the lights still come on with the penny in there. Then his family dies in a house fire, but it's okay because insurance will write a cheque to cover his losses. That idiot is in charge and you're carrying his water. Who hurt you, man?

People in Canada might not realize that in the USA. regulatory capture has led banks to pursue a wide range of unethical and criminal behaviors to keep the bottom line up and to the right. Wells Fargo, one of the biggest banks here, has basically been Saul Goodman Financial for years, with billions in illegal profits. Liz Warren has done way more than most to hold those criminals to account -- you can look it up -- and this is why wingers' talking points about her are so mean and sexist. Wingers love corrupt banks, or at least, they love carrying water for corrupt banks even as they shriek about evil globalists. But I'm surprised to see you (Zontar) repeating that National Review talking points on Warren so uncritically, I didn't think you saw eye-to-eye with the neocons and the globalists.

that's exactly what we need in the USA -- fewer people with healthcare. That covid-19 has to incubate somewhere! Trump has already done his part to damage health care in the USA by firing the CDC pandemic response team, while his justice department argues hard in court that insurance companies should be allowed to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. In fact, Trump's most recent budget proposal calls for further cuts to the CDC, and his budget director defended those today to Congress. c'mon, dude. learn to read a room.

c'mon, give the Democrats a break, orchestrating a massive undetectable immigrant voting conspiracy is hard work!

They're all bums, they're all the same, a plague on both their houses! is also a classic Goebbels move. It's a classic because it's a twofer: one, it makes people cynical and disengaged and authoritarians love no one more than the disengaged. two, for more engaged people, it normalizes abnormal behavior by drawing false equivalencies. When someone tells you "it doesn't matter, they're all the same," that's inherently a defensive thing to say; they're acknowledging the wrongness of their position, then dismissing it. Consider why they're being so defensive. (Though I do believe that to a certain degree they are all the same. American politics selects for certain qualities. but that doesn't mean that one side isn't better than the other. when one side appeals to racism and imagined pasts, attacks science, attacks education, felates demagogues, starts credit-card wars, and blames the most vulnerable for all society's ills, there's definitely some daylight there.)

and hey Z while we're talking about your boy Trump and you seem to know how this stuff works, why did he fire the white house pandemic response team earlier in his term?

note how Zontar punches out of the discussion as soon as he's challenged, and changes the channel from "ugh icky gross trans people!" to the old reliable "democrats are hypocrites." It's like watching MJF try to worm his way out of his match with Cody. Still waiting to hear on all those illegal votes, btw. Do you still believe that?

yeah, the ideal response to the troll demonstrates the troll's bad faith to bystanders and doesn't engage the substance of the troll. They're there to reblog the current talking points, which is why they can't engage substantively; they're not capable of it. those talking points are powerful and semi-truthy and they gain power every time they're repeated without challenge. the people who make them are extremely clever and good at hitting people's buttons. Creeps like Goebbels and Atwater and Karl Rove talk openly about this, these techniques are not secret. they're just effective. "conspiracy diarrhea" is a great term, I'm stealing it.