dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

So I take it this dipshit finally got around to watching Elysium? Surely his handlers should know by now that you shouldn’t let Donny watch movies by himself after dark.

I think the implication is supposed to be that when you beat Bowser they’ll be turned back.

What war?

“Don’t worry, we brought it with us in our luggage.”

The synopsis in the manual also states that Bowser turned the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom into “stones, bricks, and field horse-hair plants.” In a given playthrough, most players probably smash a lot of bricks. Bricks which used to be Mushroom Kingdom people, who are now dead. Because Mario killed them.

It’s a big maybe on Mario being the hero because he may or may not actually succeed in reaching Bowser and rescuing the princess depending on how much the player happens to suck, and/or of Luigi winds up being the victor instead.

I’m with the other commenter below. I’m not sure this is terribly usual, even where legal.

I keep an eye out for this sort of thing just sort of out a professional interest, and in terms of openly carrying firearms (not knives), I’ve only spotted two people doing it this year. And one of them was a guy who I think was intending to carry concealed, but was not doing a very good job due to an ill-fitting shirt.

Oh yeah? So I guess that’s why Jews take off their yarmulkes when they go indoors or are in prayer, right? Oh, they don’t? That’s strange…

Whole huge wide swathes of what people insist passes for modern Christianity are basically what amounts to fan fiction. Dumber people will fight you tooth and nail insisting that various culturally ingrained tropes and details really are in the book when in fact they’re not, but you’ll find that the religious apologists with a little more brainpower at their disposal have instead invented an array of tricks and deflections to downplay or just outright dismiss these discrepancies.

A few of my favorites:

The big one, of course, is that pretty much the entire modern interpretation of hell, including what it looks like and how it works, is taken entirely from the Divine Comedy. Particularly Dante’s Inferno, and to a lesser extent John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The bible itself is actually curiously silent on the location, mechanics, accessibility, and even temperature of hell. The Book of Revelation does make a reference to the “lake of fire” multiple times but it’s not actually outright stated that this is hell itself, merely where the devil, the beast, and the false prophet will be cast after their final judgement.

While we’re at it, it’s the Book of Revelation, not the book of “Revelations,” plural, no matter how many times you’ve watched the Matrix trilogy.

How many wise men visited Jesus in the manger? Wrong! The bible never actually specifies, not even once. Three gifts are mentioned, but the number of magi bearing them is never referenced. The only thing we know is that they were plural, so it must have been at minimum two. It’s only assumed that there were three, one per gift. Further, the now traditional names of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar are extrabiblical fabrications that stem from the Excerpta Latina Barbari which was an 8th century Latin translation of a Greek compilation from some 200 years earlier, but still well after the heyday of Big J himself, not to mention anyone who could have been a living eyewitness. At least they managed to make some cameos in Chrono Trigger, though, so we got something out of the whole debacle.

Also, only the gospel of Matthew mentions the magi at all.

Infamously, in 1 Kings 7:23-26 as well as a reiteration in 2 Chronicles 4:2-5, the bible describes in some detail a presumably circular cauldron which, if we believe the dimensions as stated, would force pi to be equal to three. No mention is made as to the involvement of Bergholt Stuttley Johnson in all of this, but in light of that maybe we can’t rule it out. Either way, the notion that pi is in fact not equal to three is obviously thus an extrabiblical interpolation in and of itself, never mind the fact that it’s part of the math that makes the modern world work and, among other things, keeps satellites from falling out of the sky.

The notion that “Lucifer” is one of the names of the devil is also a modern-ish misunderstanding, and the story that “everyone knows” (possibly courtesy of the Spawn comics, or Jay and Silent Bob) about the devil being a rebellious angel who was cast out of heaven by god and cratered so hard he landed in hell is not really supported by the bible and is probably a myth absorbed from other nearby cultures. The name is only mentioned once in the entire bible, in Isaiah 14. It’s never actually said that whoever Lucifer may be was actually an angel, and in fact it’s understood that he is actually supposed to be the mortal king of Babylon at the time. Nor anything about how he might have became the devil after falling from heaven. Ezekiel 28 is also trotted out as allegedly being the other half of the Lucifer/casting out of Satan story, but the object of god’s ire here is the King of Tyre, also a mortal as explicitly mentioned by god twice. Halfway through god starts calling the dude a cherub and claiming he was present in the Garden of Eden, so suddenly mid sentence he’s talking about somebody else? This is god, right, an entity to famously direct he blows up entire cities because a couple of their residents piss him off? And on that note, god clearly burns whoever he’s talking about to a crisp and kills him very dead by the end of the passage so that doesn’t make any sense either, even if all the purple prose about cherubs and Eden and blamelessness and so forth weren’t just mockery for getting ideas above his station (which seems a bit more plausible). So even if said entity were the devil he’s not ruling in hell; god killed him.

Revelation is no help there, either. The devil is just there already by then, with no details given on where he came from.

We could go on like this forever.

Neat.

I use Alexandrite on desktop, and don’t use Tesseract because I’m banned from the !tesseract@dubvee.org community despite to my knowledge never having posted there. Alexandrite does at least show if a user is deleted (or banned), with some bold red text, so the culprits are easy to spot if nothing else.

I’ve noticed the drive-by accounts that immediately delete themselves afterwards lately. I was wondering what was up with that.

Everybody thinks they have a plan to fight a squirrel until it’s time to fight a squirrel.

They are incredibly bitey. Remember that they chew through walnut shells with ease. Lots of people have underestimated a squirrel and gotten bit right down to the bone for their trouble. I’m not saying anybody couldn’t stomp a squirrel flat, but you’re going to lose some blood in the process.

Probably not terribly relevant if their only requirement is to drop one on Pyongyang if necessary. Japan’s got planes. I don’t think anyone else outside of their hemisphere is saber-rattling at them at the moment.

From what I understand from sitting in the comfort of my own armchair, North Korea’s air defenses and indeed pretty much all of their traditional military is pretty rickety at this point. They rely on the nuclear threat plus the assumed support and intervention of China, along with a battery of conventional artillery pointed directly at Seoul, to dissuade any other state from just steamrolling them. North Korea’s missile game is pretty weak, too, but likewise really all they need to be able to do is hit Japan. Hell, if all they wanted to do was cause chaos in the south they’d just have to truck a bomb to the edge of the DMZ and set it off right there.

With the best will in the world, given the dire performance of Borderlands 4 even on much more powerful hardware, the notion that it was ever going to work on the Switch 2… how should we phrase this… was never realistic.

Randy seems more interested in running his mouth than getting anything done about the game’s performance issues on any platform, so this decision is hardly unsurprising at this juncture. The fact that they were able to pull the plug this close to the alleged release date also points to the fact that this was to be yet another one of those game-not-actually-on-the-cartridge deals, if they were even planning to make cartridges for it at all, so that would have been yet another nonstarter for many potential buyers. This whole thing was dead on arrival. The only difference is, now we know it’s official.

Borderlands as a whole doesn’t have a great track record on portable platforms anyway. The OG Switch version also had less than stellar performance, and the best that can be said about the PS Vita version of BL2 is that even with all the cuts and downgrades its frame rate is probably better measured in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. (I have direct experience with that one, being one of the six people on Earth dumb enough to actually own the Vita version of Borderlands 2. But in my defense, it was literally cheaper to buy the BL2+Vita bundle than to buy a Vita on its own. That’s right: It’s so bad, the Vita release had a negative retail value.)

I always ignore the downvotes. I am both waterpoof and invincible!

It’s satire, dude.

Obviously Apple is previewing their next upcoming invention: After dropping physical buttons and the headphone jack, the iPhone 18 will remove Wi-Fi support. Apple will call themselves “corageous” and make up a laundry list of reasons why we don’t need it. (But obviously, it’ll actually be because they are in cahoots with all the cell carriers who want to charge you for data 100% of the time.)

The iPhone 19 will drop the charging port, and the iPhone 20 won’t have a screen. It’ll retail for $1899, and millions of people will buy it anyway.

Well, grab any file manager app (I use Root Explorer, or the free version thereof) and you could check the count of files in your photos folder (probably DCIM\Camera) and see if that number jives with the number of photos Google reckons you have in your gallery.

Root Explorer can only view local files and can’t hook up to Google’s cloud services at all. So by definition anything it’s showing is physically located somewhere on your phone.

Here’s one that’ll hit them closer to home: The original Donkey Kong is literally a mod for the earlier Radar Scope cabinets. Nintendo had better hope they don’t wind up with any video game nerds in any juries or they’re going to open a can of worms on themselves that they really don’t want to have wriggling all over their lap.

http://massgrave.dev/.

Install the LTSC IoT edition of Windows, which comes minus the bloat. It’s sort of an official Microsoft minimal install version. You can activate it with the scripts you find at massgrave.

Yes, but the other poster is correct with the other half of the argument. Right now at this very moment in history, appliances are the cheapest adjusted for the median household income than they’ve ever been. Why? Because that’s what consumers demand. The manufacturer knows full well they can’t make a durable machine at the price point consumers are willing to pay, but it’s okay for them because they also know consumers will happily buy another one in 5 years.

Don’t like it? Buy a Speed Queen washer or dryer.

“But there’s no way in hell I’m paying $1449 just for a damn for a washing machine!!!”

Yeah, my point exactly. And theirs, too.

Guess what, my dudes and dudettes: That oldschool classic Kenmore or whatever-the-hell washer your parents had when you were growing up that’s still trucking? Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what it would cost in today’s money, give or take a couple of percent.

(I sourced that Sears pricing by stealing it from here, by the way. The management apologizes deeply in advance if you wind up pissing away your entire afternoon going all nostalgic over the contents of that link.)

The source of the order is pretty apparent. Bicycles (and other tandem two-wheeled vehicles like motorcycles, etc.) are self balancing as long as they’re moving forward. This is due to a combination of gyroscopic effect as well as the offset of their front wheel relative to the steering axis. They stay upright by allowing the front wheel to meander back and forth in a regular pattern. Insofar as I can figure from a lifetime of riding bicycles and motorcycles, the length of the “wobbles,” i.e. forming the peaks in sine wave pattern above are not influenced by speed. Rather, they’re some multiple of the distance between the front axle and steering stem. The frequency at which they occur relative to time is of course directly proportional to speed, which is why when you get into such a tank-slapper on your motorcycle at 65+ MPH you’re likely to eat shit. But the distance on pavement per wobble remains roughly constant.

This self stabilizing effect is going on all the time and in fact even if you’re riding your bicycle in what you might think is a straight line, it’s keeping itself balanced by wobbling back and forth minutely at this same frequency. If you try locking the stem on a bike solid, e.g. by cranking down the stem nut until the handlebars won’t move anymore, you’ll find it nearly impossible to ride even in a straight line and completely impossible to steer – even if you try to do so by leaning.

Three casinos.