My sharpest shoes are to sharp for you, adventurer! You must find a cobbler that makes duller shoes!

I play FFXIV. I’ll break it down by expansions, but it’s the one that didn’t follow the general downwards trend so much.

1.0 - trash. They couldn’t figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It’s too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn’t match the building it’s attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It’s an unplayable mess. It’s literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:

2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy’s leadership. It’s playable, and works. It’s outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There’s a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.

Heavenward - they made a great story. It’s one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless “talk to 5 villagers” quests like previously.

Stormblood - not as great. There’s a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.

Shadowbringers - the best expansion they’ve ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.

Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to “death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now” kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they’ll get out of it. Well, because it’s Japanese and FF, it’s the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the previous expansions.

Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don’t make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can’t decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we’ll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.

There’s plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they’re gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they’re stretched too thin. They’re feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.

I love in Oklahoma, Tornado Alley, and most of our lines are on poles. So every bad storm or tornado, we lose power. And every time it’s suggested, “experts” cover back and say it’s too expensive. I didn’t believe it - all the manpower and cost to rebuild would be gone vs a one time burying cost. But of course, there’s no kickbacks on lines that don’t need repairing.

I’m sure the East coast is the same deal. Someone’s making money off that outage.

I love shakshuka, but only had it as a dinner. I’ll have to try it as a brunch. My understanding is it’s kind of made with whatever’s on hand, but mine looks like yours. It’s delicious! We try to make naan or some other kind of bread to go with it, as well.

I would, too. Which is the more exciting job? Unfortunately there probably isn’t much call for a trebuchet bombardment these days.

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I bet Everett was eating a meal with this dude, just scowling and chomping away. So this poor bastard brings up an interesting factoid to cut the silence, and Everett threatens him with assault and battery.

So far, all I know about Everett is that he doesn’t like abuse of horses or dogs, but he also just doesn’t like people interacting with him in general.

Which does shed light on what general morality people thought of animal treatment back then, as opposed to the often poor practices we hear about historically. I guess there’s a bit of anti-intellectualism here, which is sad but understandable for the time. Almost reassuring to see that there were always anti-intellectuals trying to stop progress in their own way.

But also, I wonder what views Everett might have on race, pricing, capitalism, socialism, etc. I think he leans pro-union though. Considering the time period, that’s probably fairly popular. Since really it’s just the voice of the cartoonist and I assume a segment of the population. Since this was really the early 1900s, it’s fascinating seeing what people thought back then.

Well, right, it doesn’t have to be a specific OS. I haven’t done much research because I’m my current situation, it’s not a good option for me as (for instance) some of my required 2FA apps won’t validate on a rooted phone.

If that changes, I’d do more research, obviously.

I rooted my phone years ago and it was a chore. Once it finally worked, hardly any of my apps would run and nothing important worked because suddenly a rooted phone isn’t “safe”. It was such a pain in the ass to do updates and fight programs to run that I stopped. I didn’t want to spend hours fixing a device that I really didn’t want to think about.

I would love to install GrapheneOS and have it mostly just work. I hate having my phone locked down like it’s not mine, and it’s one of the reasons I won’t use it for anything important over my desktop.

This parasitic infection isn’t actually any more debilitating than vaccines

Lol wat.

Maybe, but I imagine connected people knew something was up with that island. I remember hearing about the “Lolita Express” plane in maybe the early 2000s on the Internet. At the time I probably thought it was a conspiracy theory, but that it reached common people like me indicates that if you’re actually going there, you’d have some questions.

There’s no way he’d know that he’d be outed posthumously as an Epstein Island visitor, and thus no one in the future would want to go meet him in the past.

I’d say that means time travel is still possible!

It’s one of, of if not THE, best game on the SNES.

I don’t get it. Do we know that the trolley is heading for the people or not? Do we know if flipping the switch moves it away from whatever track that the people are on? Or is it going in the main track in all instances unless you hit the switch?

I assume a villain would aim the trolley at the people, regardless of what track they’re on. That’s why they’re villains. So I would always flip it.

I saw a theory that Charlie was reading “Pepe Silva” from “Pennsylvania” and it would make sense that a lot of the mail would say that.