Chindie

I've found the handwringing and limp finger pointing over failures of 'deconfliction' pathetic. 

Perhaps Israel could stop flattening everything in Gaza with zeal instead. Maybe.

I never played the Last Guardian but from what I recall of the talk at the time it came out the consensus was it was a bit crap, largely because the AI of the creature was a nightmare. Some claimed it was like that purposely to emulate the nature of trying to train an animal to do things, and others just reckoned it was shit, but the entire game experience seemed to revolve around how much you engaged with the system or not.

I wouldn't be shocked if the general controls are rough - Team ICO never quite nailed character control and camera control, which basically is the only thing that harms Colossus.

Israel could blow up chunks of London and Washington and still would be getting shipments of missiles and rifles from the very same governments.

3 aid workers might stir someone to consider saying something mildly critical.

Jones sells a worldview and does so with the confidence tricksters handbook. The worldview he sells is a conservative Christian one, a very right wing very American worldview obsessed with classic Christian matters (even if he's a sinner in many respects by the same view) and classic US concerns like guns, that he packages up with some of the edges knocked off or cushioned and disguised. To sell it, he blusters and blathers through a never ending supply of stories and theories, invariably wrong but with little elements of truth (by little I mean things like he'll have the right countries involved but everything else wrong) and spouted with such conviction it sounds like it's spoken with authority from the point of view of a lay listener, and then he'll spin in elements of common conspiracies people generally believe (the usual stuff like evil companies, the government is evil, etc) or callbacks to a handful of real incidents in history. He'll rattle through news stories of the day and spin them with his viewpoint in mind, or often just outright misrepresent the news to the extent he's making the story have no resemblance to what is actually there and tying it into his view and making out how right he is, when a cursory glance at the stories and the reality will prove the opposite. He exceptionally rarely admits he's wrong (the rare times he does it's only in details not the thrust of things), and carries on spinning that he sees and speaks only truth. 

And all of it is just a package to sell supplements and snake oil with huge mark ups.

No matter is above using, he'll work up a froth over a tragedy as much as he will the latest political fracas - only last week he was broadcasting graphic videos of the Moscow attack and trying to spin up some excitement about that in-between flogging shit, and obviously the Sandy Hook matter essentially revolves around his lying about the murder of children to whip up a frenzy to sell his wares to the viewers. And it goes all the way back to 9/11 where he was one of the principle figures behind the truly despicable Loose Change 'documentary'.

He's irredeemably disgusting. There isn't a thing that could befall him that he would not deserve.

6 minutes ago, PieFacE said:

Just watched The Truth vs Alex Jones.

Never really paid too much attention to Alex Jones due to the fact he's obviously a giant cock. This documentary just confirms it even further. Despicable bloke. 

The world will be a better place when he's dead. He's absolutely meritless as a being, everything that's bad about us as a species incarnated.

Looks like Israel has got what it wanted from killing some more aid workers - at least 2 more organisations ceasing work in Gaza, as it's too dangerous. Why is it too dangerous? Israel keeps killing them, even when they're supposedly working with Israeli forces to advise where they are and who they are. May as well drive around with a big target on vehicles.

Israel has also decided to bomb the Iranian consulate in Syria, killing some high ranking military officials. The current line seems to be that this is ok as they didn't target the embassy itself. Just the building next door, that was used by the embassy and it's officials. Either way it seems stupidly reckless in the current climate. But then it's Israel and they don't give a ****, and are allowed to not give a **** with impunity.

They are a rogue state that, were they not on 'our' side, would be getting high velocity democracy from a few thousand feet until they got in line.

The regularity at which they kill aid workers and attack civilian infrastructure and targets makes a mockery of everyone.

Despicable nation.

Mat Armstrong has bought Marcus Rashford's crashed Rolls Royce. Or more accurately, Rashford's **** hideous Mansory Rolls Royce Wraith. I'd never even heard of Mansory, but it turns out they're a custom vehicle business for the richest of the rich, aka the people for whom taste has been outstripped by wealth.

Its hard to overemphasize just how horrifically disgusting this car is. And then you hear he spent $700k on it.

51 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said:

Both Rowling and Linehan, am I right in thinking that they both started all this kinda innocuously…for want of a better word (Rowling with liking a tweet and Lineham with that IT Crowd episode) and they both essentially just doubled, tripled, quadrupled down from there? 

It comes across like they had a little bit of critical pushback in these early instances and then just went “Ah, **** it” and gone to town in their respective ways.

With Linehan that's pretty much what happened, he got criticism for an episode he wrote, and then got embraced by a minority that liked his transphobic stuff, and then he just went deeper and deeper to the point he's torpedoed his career and spends all of his time railing against more or less everything trans. The nadir of which was probably his campaign to police a lesbian dating app by 'exposing' people he felt shouldn't be on it.

Rowling has a bit of that, she jumped into the debate clearly on a side though and has only kept pushing that further, but she's worse in some ways because she's said and intimated stuff that's really quite offensive (she's essentially suggested all transwomen should be under suspicion for example iirc), and she's gotten friendly with lots of figures that are deeply problematic - we're talking people that are far right Christian conservatives, people that have argued for the outright erasure of trans people, etc etc. And then she's very rich and sadly quite influential still. Nobody really gives a **** about Linehan, he wrote some solid niche comedy series 20 years ago he's not a public figure and he's not rich enough to carry weight. Rowling is the most successful author ever, a billionaire behind one of the tentpole entertainment franchises and a personal success story that has had various politicians like to cozy up to her and her story for a quarter of a century more or less, and she's rich enough to buy real influence. Linehan is a clearing in the woods, Rowling is dangerous.

Rowling 'challenging' Scotland to arrest her over new their new hate crime law. 

5 minutes ago, villa89 said:

So do a lot of Russians. Zero chance either ever happens. 

Oh absolutely. For different reasons of course, but definitely not. Russians as Russia is too big to have any face justice, and Israelis because they're on 'our' side so won't face any consequences for crimes against humanity.

Still won't change the fact that justice should see them in a dock thankful the Hague can't sentence them to swing.

A lot of Israelis need their day in the Hague.

The always brilliant DF Retro returns with a feature length marathon video covering the PlayStation and all of its launch titles.

Citeh are the most boring team in the world.

The only good result here is meteor strike.

It's anti-Semetic not to sell missiles to Israel for the purpose of sea front property development.

Games broken.

Buys a £2k MG ZR. It's quite a good one on paper, early, low mileage, top spec. But it's an MG ZR, a 23 year old one, that's sat for a while. As an enthusiast, wants one to save, as it turns out basically all of these MG editions of those 90s Rovers are gone. Gets a company to look it over. £13k minimum to repair, as it's basically **** in every respect below the windows bar the engine.

Mad.

Hunted isn't 'real' as in it's a straight game where what is shown is what happened and nothing is artificial, but everything is meant to be done within the realms of reality. Hacking a Facebook account I think might be pushing it, but if we assume the series gives the hunters the full extent of any power the police might have you can probably justify their hacking a social media account.

We quite like the series but it's hilarious how bad people are at it, and how much the show sometimes has to pull it's punches to let people have a chance of winning. Like, you're going on the run for a month, with limited cash, and at some point you're going to given an instruction to get to a specific place at a specific time to 'win' - you probably shouldn't go home, use a phone, especially to call close family, go anywhere near a big city or use a major train line, or contact anyone within your direct circle of friends and family. But all they do it.

Quote

Keir Starmer has told voters he cannot “turn the taps on” to fix the crisis in local authority funding as he was quizzed on how Labour would plug councils’ £4bn gap at the launch of its local election campaign.

“I can’t pretend that we could turn the taps on, pretend the damage hasn’t been done to the economy – it has,” he said. “There’s no magic money tree that we can waggle the day after the election. No, they’ve broken the economy, they’ve done huge damage.”

Grauniad

We're ****.

That's the hope. That.

If only it wasn't so predictable.

Sam Bankman-Fried got sentenced earlier. Guilty of one of the biggest fraud cases in US history, about $10bn, across multiple charges, for which he hasn't shown any sign of remorse and maintains hasn't done anything wrong, got 25 years. Worth noting the comment by a former prosecutor that someone moving a kilo of heroin, worth about $30k, would expect to get a heavier sentence.

Beat the MLS champions Columbus Crew last night, although by all accounts it was a comedy match.

You know you're in for a wild ride when you have you a first half that started with a bad kick off, ran for 62 minutes and included a red card, a missed penalty, a missed open goal, a disallowed goal and multiple VAR reviews.

For 3 series Game of Thrones is in the running for best TV show ever made. Crazy high production quality, lots of excellent characters and acting (ironically not including most of the main characters), and it's exceptionally well written with multiple extremely well plotted arcs and narratives that genuinely create intriguing and smart storylines. After that it wobbles and starts to decline but is still very good for a session, then begins to nosedive until the final 2 series where it completely abandons the smart character stuff and becomes a single minded spectacle generating machine trying to finish it's central plot at double quick pace even if doing so makes no sense, requires characters to do things that are completely inexplicable but necessary to create dramatic moments and push the plot, and puts character 'development' in the bin in favour of 'they're doing this now' level writing.

It's become clear in the aftermath that the showrunners didn't want to do it anymore now they had other projects come knocking and agreed to finish it for the studio on an accelerated timescale to get out and done asap, showing they had no respect for the audience and didn't care that they were the reason they had Disney begging them to do a Star Wars show and other studios ringing them with blank cheques. 

It's the perfect storm of bad government, especially at national level, and absurd income inequality.