Mal

So guys, I've been holed up in Vegas for work. The food scene is bomb here, even far outside the Strip.

Hold on to your hats. I feel like we're in for a rough ride. Depending on how things goes, I expect the next act on the 2020/George Floyd Uprising (which has their roots to earlier BLM protests and even Occupy). To be clear, ACAB, fuck them all.

I think it's this vocalist (Kin Lin) that wowed me years ago but I never was able to follow the band well back then: Bloody Tyrant is far easier to follow and they seriously got a great vocalist. Also for the first song, the Spotify has a picture from Shigurui. Holy shit if the song references Shigurui.

If you get into the weeds of it all, none of them are under a legal duty to protect anything. LegalEagle just posted this today too, which summarize it all. You can blame the SRO or the police but they literally didn't have the duty to do anything. If they wanted to, they could still be at their offices or just go about their day while Uvalde or any shooting went down. It should be noted that these rulings comes from a conservative/libertarian school of thought/worldview. Under other schools of though/worldview, things can be different but these are the precedents we kind of have to work with.

Regarding people coming over here... Sure there's a COVID signal but our response to COVID is another nail on why people are hesitant to come over here. This country, as a whole, is fucking insane. The story has been changing by the hour it seems but whatever the initial response was, the following 40 minutes to an hour is inexcusable. Also, Parkland had a school resource officer as the first shots happened. He fled.

The Uvalde school shooting aftermath is just getting worse and worse as the fog clears on the timeline and facts. And no, the shooter locked the door. That's the barricade. The shooter was 18 so probably knows all the procedures... And of course the powers that be in Texas is going all in on the NRA talking points.

I mean, no surprise but if that's a joke, then it's a poor one. Normalization of war criminals.

The video makes the song much better due to the context.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473 Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned. I guess it's just too hard to just let women decide.

Also, the end of an empire isn't so much a hard stop but a slow decline. Yes, the USSR is long dead but its ghost is still with Russia and the other former Soviet republics. Russia and their elites leverage their influence hard. Probably why they control the fossil fuel industry (this is more or less what prop them up) and they manage to get it intergraded with Europe. That was probably done in good faith since, hey, the Cold War ended and Russia and others should be reintegrated back into the world. Then of course people (the US) didn't want the Cold War to end end (old habits die hard). Seriously, why the hell is NATO still a thing? It seriously siloed Russia wanting to act like the USSR. With that said, Just to make it really clear, IT DOESN'T JUSTIFY ANY OF RUSSIA'S ACTIONS. From Chechnya, Georgia, now Ukraine, and other conflicts. But yeah, it's the nukes that allow them to continue on this path. None helps the situation. The much alive Cold War mindset is a curse on the world. Russia is doing their bullshit while we, the US, do our bullshit trying to fill that void.

inb4 the Mexican Missile Crisis

NSFW Processing this one.

Pretty sure I've read that any strays will involve the full response. Basically, if the Russians are close enough to send something into NATO aligned country, they are way too close. In no simple terms is to tell Russians to fuck off. Of course, I bet they have something like what Ethan said. In similar news: This is basically a dare and basically forces a cease fire in Kyiv. In other Ukraine news: I'm not sure what I feel about China sending aid, not sure if any lethal aid, to Russia. I can't help but think it'll paint a target on any Chinese person. Ah... one day at a time.

It was a pretty good sandbox game with decent AI (I think?) but it was rather limited in scope. I honestly probably went around punching and tossing stuff at people to death more than anything.

This suddenly got stuck in my head

Europe is that reliant on Russian gas. It's rather simple to not certify Nord Stream 2 since it's not operational thus not in use and relied on. Different story about Nord Stream 1. I think we are already seeing a shift in US O&G production (things seems to have gotten funny) to counteract the need for Russian gas but it'll take a while for anything substantial to come online (better to not rely on petrol at all...). Honestly, I think most people were expecting Donbas to be at most what Putin wants, not wholesale regime change (I kind of don't buy the idea of going through all this to have an East and West Ukraine unless as a fall back plan). Ukraine probably would've given Donbas and others up after a struggle. This is probably why there wasn't much reaction to the official Russian "peacekeeping" force from earlier in the week (or even with Crimea back in 2014). Like it is very aggressive but have your fucking buffer state. Then of course, the full-blown invasion happened, which included Belarus involvement! Even the Russian troops in the separatist region of Moldova didn't run over (it's obvious why the Russian came over from Belarus, it's a stone throw to Kyiv). Putin was seen a somewhat sane but after his speeches before the invasion and with the invasion, he's off his rockers. May the Ukrainians hold the Russians till they give up this fratricidal war. I think a lot of the Russians troops and civilians (the Russian anti-war protesters are brave as fuck) realize this is so pointless.

Horizon Zero Dawn Pretty damn good game for keeping me occupied for 70 hours. Mind I went and did most things on foot. I hated riding a mount since it's not as nimble as I would like. Even on foot, Aloy does some strange things. It's kind of frequent on how I fight with how she moves or reacts. Quite a few stunlock deaths. Story wise, the Frozen Wilds kind of overtook the main storyline endgame by like a lot. Main storyline endgame just fell flat but built up to it was pretty good (the previous quests). So I am still looking forward to playing Forbidden West, whenever it ever appears on PC. I just hope the next game has better ammo management. Way too much stopping the game to craft ammo. Piss poor inventory management system. Using the focus is a pain in the ass and slows the game down. If they manage to improve those three (and related) things where thing is more seamless, I'll be more eager to play the sequel.

Probably more of a proving ground before what Metal posted above really gets going. See them soon at a war zone or protest near you!

So I'm watching this which made me think of this video: They are both mentioning basically the same thing but in different games. If you are coming from games with particular look AND feel then you better get both right if you are claiming direct lineage from the older games.

Horizon Zero Dawn Man, this game is a long one. I kind of expected to be in and out but no. Overall I do like it since fighting the machines is pretty ace. Fight humans though is much more vanilla. I actually do think it's a lost opportunity of not having any machines to climb on to kill, like Dragon's Dogma (my favorite open-worldish game). With that said, what is there is pretty solid. I can't wait to see what they do with the sequel. I do have some issues with the game: 1) Ammo. Stopping gameplay to restock on ammo all the time is not a good thing, at all. Somehow this really got to go. 2) All quests are active BESIDES the tutorials quest, which you need to toggle as your primary quest in order to complete it. This is kind of a bad oversight because I have done all the requirements for lots of these tutorials. I just frequently forget to toggle them to be my primary quest. All weapons have them so I guess I'll have fun with tutorial quests till the end game.

I want to suffer with Nier. I also finally going to try HZD. I just finished Friendship Level 10 with Aloy in Genshin so, yeah. I would get Death Stranding but I'm unsure how the whole Director's Cut is going to go down on PC so I'll hold out.

All hail our robot overlords. Anyhow, I feel that robot vacuums are far along enough to get one. Main thing for me is object avoidance aka don't run over poop. This is kind of there for my mom to keep the floor cleaned since we're all busy for weeks at a time. With two dogs, this might just knock out one more chore to do. Mind, you could get a far cheaper one if you say have no dogs (no poop avoidance needed).