aGlassDarkly

…yeah I’m trying to imagine a scenario when this would ever happen. I’ve never seen someone try to upsell someone else on coffee before.

Oh wait. Is it the initials? My brain got hung up on using parts of the name.

I’ll bite. What?

Affected workers say the shutdown has been a continuation of attacks they have experienced under the Trump administration, from mass firings – many of which have been overturned or blocked in federal courts – to drastic budget cuts, pushes to take early retirements or resignation buyouts, and threats of withholding back pay for workers furloughed during the shutdown.

I mean…no?

Is The Count of Monte Cristo really that much better than Robin Hood? I don’t think it should be, but its adaptations hit harder and I think there are more of them.

Speculating here, but maybe the rich people that pay for these adaptations to be produced find it easier to relate to Dantès, who starts poor and ends rich than Loxley (or however they want to spell it this time), who starts as an aristocrat and becomes an outlaw.

Dantès does most of the “work” of the story himself; sometimes he gets a plucky sidekick, depending on the adaptation of the book. Loxley, in almost all of the adaptations I’ve seen, bands together with the common folk and leads them to rise up against oppression inflicted on them by the greed of one or two men.

I’m probably stretching it a bit, but if I was a billionaire deciding what people get to watch, I assume the Count would scare me less than a band of commoners overthrowing their rich oppressors.

Then again, even though I’m common as they come, I’ll admit that I like Dumas’s coherence and Dantès’s complexity more than the looser jumble that comes with the Robin Hood myth. Monte Cristo will probably always be at the top of my list of books to read and reread every couple of years until I’m dead, simply because it has everything for a fun adventure story — a simple guy, the woman he loves, the enemies (and one drunk sot) who betray him, a wise mentor, growth through adversity, revenge, saving your friends from bankruptcy and suicide, helping nice people marry each other, realizing that revenge tends to not limit its damage to the targets you choose, more growth, and…weirdly marrying that nice lady you bought.

Okay, the last thing is a bit odd and Haydée gets left out of some adaptations, which is a bit of a shame, since the scene with Dantès and Mercédès where they realize they’ve become different people than they were when they were in love 800 pages ago, and they’ll never be together and that’s okay, is probably my favorite part in the whole thing. Someday, someone will do that scene well.

kernel-level AC

This sounds like they did you a solid by not working. I’ll have to look up this genre of shooter, though; not something I’ve heard of before. I tend to be too easily annoyed for anything that isn’t single-player or local co-op these days, although some part of me still remembers some MMOs though rose-colored nostalgia glasses.

I keep waiting for the headline to be something like “Vance slammed face-first into the sidewalk by passersby until he stopped twitching,” but I’m always disappointed.

This may be the first time I haven’t fallen into the subset of “everybody.”

Everything I want to play runs using Linux/proton. It seems like the only things that have trouble are things I’d never consider even installing, let alone running.

Every time I think it can’t get more embarrassing, they find an even more cringey way to act.

Oh, that I did not know about. Sounds even worse.

Thanks for the link, that was a fun read.

I’m guessing that thing from a few months ago where he was scared of gay people in a cartoon.

Well, she did awesome, so fuck those people.

I mean I don’t think this’ll work, but I don’t really get why anyone is mad about it. It was a little difficult to get used to but not exactly impossible. Seems like harmless fun.

Great summary work — this part makes me a little crazy:

The Agriculture Department could also turn to a specific interpretation of existing law to justify continuing to fund food stamps, said David A. Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. Under that theory, food stamps are an entitlement program, like Medicare, that is not subject to the annual appropriations process.

“The simplest approach for the U.S.D.A. would be to recognize that language in the Food and Nutrition Act makes SNAP an entitlement independent of appropriations, and continue paying benefits on the strength of that language,” Mr. Super said.

Because of course food isn’t already an entitlement program. Always money for weapons, never for starving people.

I dunno if they would have made it without him ramming into Clu in a moment of clarity.

This was what turned me away from it, too. I loved the first one as a kid. I enjoyed most of the sequel(?) as an old person.

There’s a shit-ton more they could do in that universe, a place that seems to offer escapism from reality but comes burdened with its own conflicts that parallel ours — conflicts that are solved, largely, if I’m remembering right, through self-sacrifice in defiance of money-grubbing capitalists and power-hungry rogue-program autocrats.

There’s a lot of hope in the two movies; I didn’t get that feeling from the trailers for this one and will probably be skipping it.

That does sound pretty likely.

My understanding is that humor is a very common coping mechanism — in the face of an abuse of power this absurd, I imagine it’s sometimes all someone has the strength for.

Haven’t played this, but I think Bastion is the first game I remember doing the grandad voice thing. I enjoyed it there, not sure about liking it elsewhere.