moakley

If you’re reheating a pizza without an air fryer, you’re just plain doing wrong. 2-5 minutes, no preheat, and it tastes better than the night before.

Thumbnail looks like a bloodhound.

I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.

My Minecraft survival world is awesome, but I think in this context "productive" is usually referring to, you know, *farming* and stuff.

Personally I think Ass World is overrated. Don’t

Starflight on Sega Genesis. Starflight was a formative game for me. It’s an open world space exploration game with ~800 planets in over 200 solar systems. And it pretty much just drops you in the middle of it without any explanation. After a bit you get some news updates from your home base talking about a huge, imminent threat that’s destroying entire solar systems, but they don’t hold your hand, and the galaxy is massive, and it’s impractical to find the points of interest in such a large space. I watched my dad play it as a kid. We spent hours exploring and gathering resources up upgrade the ship and explore further, but we never really scratched the surface of the main quest. Then as a teenager I went back and finally read the fucking manual. The back half of it was a journal written by a space captain not unlike myself, which had been sent back in time from several months in the future. It gives tips, like how to communicate with the different alien species and the locations of some rare items. More importantly, it guides the player to the main quest, which is fucking amazing. All of this written like a captain’s log, so it’s a fun story in its own right. Starflight manual: expand   Second answer: Tunic. This one is cheating because the game is about nostalgia for manuals, but it’s so well done. You find these beautifully illustrated manual pages throughout the game, and they become an essential part of figuring out the world. Part of it is written in a made up language, and every page you find gives you more context to translate it. Then there are abilities you have from the moment you start the game, but you won’t realize how to use them until the manual gives you simple button instructions. Amazing game. If you love old school game manuals, you need to check it out. They later released a version with a physical manual, but you shouldn’t look at the pages until you find them in the game. Tunic manual: expand

My six-year-old daughter has the flu today, and I was just saying I’d rather have the flu than take care of her. Not for any selfless reasons, but because trying to get her to take a single sip of water is more taxing than being sick myself would be.

I’ve had two different people tell me that my chicken soup is the greatest soup they’ve ever eaten. If you’re not getting excited about soup, go and find better soup.

You know what, sure. I’m on board.

Too difficult. Better to ask someone who’s good at painting to do it for you. Then you can give them something, as a sign of respect, to compensate them for their time.

Don’t buy your wife a wide vase. Just get her a normal sized one. Otherwise you’ll have to buy twice as many flowers for the rest of your marriage.

Keanu was famous, but the way I remember it he wasn’t a huge box office draw yet.

It's been almost 25 years, and 9/11 jokes still aren't funny.

Some were, some weren’t. I was thrilled. And then the hate grew to the point where it was a meme, where everyone “knew” that Anthem was bad, even people who hadn’t played it. Then it was over.

I played it at launch. It worked fine for me. But yeah, some players had technical issues that were quickly patched. That’s how launches work nowadays. The reaction seems justified in a vacuum, but if you compare it to how glitches affect the scores of other games, it’s weird. Cyberpunk 2077 still got good scores despite major technical issues that took a lot longer than a week or two to fix. I can go buy the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release of Skyrim and still encounter the same game-breaking bugs that I encountered fifteen years ago. So I still feel like Anthem got treated unfairly here. If it was some bland, unimaginative game that didn’t do anything else well, sure, I get why they wouldn’t pull their punches. But again, the gameplay was immaculate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better game treated worse.

Honestly Anthem was so fucking good. It’s a victim of the internet hate machine. My hobby is video games, but some people’s hobby is hating things, and those people decided that Anthem was the next thing to hate. The hate was insanely disproportionate to the actual problems that Anthem had. The endgame grind needed some work, but that’s always the case with a live service game. Comparing it to Destiny, which had been out for five years at that point, there wasn’t a lot of content. Comparing it to video games in general, it was fine. Easily worth the cost of a new game. Graphics-wise? Top notch, triple-A. And as far as gameplay, the actual most important part of a game? Anthem was a fucking masterpiece. The combat was fun and varied. Classes were distinct. And the traversal was the best I’ve ever played. Soaring through the air like Iron Man and dipping into a waterfall so my suit doesn’t overheat is one of the video game highlights of my life. But the internet ruined it. The same outrage machine that was built to respond to things like “a sense of pride and accomplishment” was turned on Anthem, not because it was that bad, but because there wasn’t anything else particularly hate-worthy that week.

But one of the things Russian troll farms are paid to do is spread general anti-American sentiment. I’m not trying to explain away the comments; I’m describing a real thing that happens.

I appreciate your perspective. I’ll do you one better and say that a lot of times it comes from chronically online Americans who got their opinion from said Europeans. And at least some of the time it’s from third world bots whose marching orders are to spread any and every kind of anti-American sentiment. Lately I just prefer to put the opposing idea out into the aether rather than try to dig into a whole online argument… thing.

There are large sections of the US that don’t have consistent access to great food, so crappy fast food is what they get. Then there are other parts of the US where the fast food is amazing. Also the other food.

Fun fact: when birds have sex it’s called a cloacal kiss.

Maduro cheating comes from the same people that said the US 2020 election was rigged Do you have a source for that? Because from what I can tell, the exact opposite is true, and the sources for these two claims are generally opposed to each other.