Train them to… what? Get their shins instantly broken by someone with capped boots and realise real fights don’t have rules like UFC does? Cops have guns and tasers and stuff because they’ve already learned this won’t work.

I’m stuck at work, but I brought my deck for a little Monster Hunter Stories 3. I opted to start over rather than import the save from the demo, so I’m not very far in yet. It’s such a satisfying game to play and it looks so good!

I also smashed out a little Pokopia (brought the Switch too… Security can get a little slow some nights) and did something I’ve been ignoring for a few days but was told today is a limited time event. I hate timed shit in games :/ It took like 20 minutes to get more than enough trade-in items to buy everything, but I still don’t like being told when to play games. Oh well.

Are the pumps all covered in those “I did that” stickers?

Is this complete or a work in progress? I’m asking because a bunch of stuff is missing in some areas, like Luxury Chirp-Chirp Meal says nothing spawns there, but Pidgeot’s entry lists it as the habitat. Quite a few of the habitats have missing or no spawns.

Not accusing you of anything, but I’m also curious why you’ve posted this a bunch of times to different comms each with a different new account that has no other posts, it looks kinda dodgy.

On my way to work today two of these passed me, I was doing 40 in the city and they zipped by at 55-60 by my estimate. There was a passenger on the back of one, none of them were wearing helmets, and they were weaving in and out of traffic closely enough to touch each car. There was a red light up ahead so they just turned straight into the flow of traffic at a higher speed than I’d do in a car and kept going. I’m not at all surprised hospitals are seeing a lot of people from incidents involving these.

Usually it’s just a couple of kids driving through the parking lot and screaming at the top of their lungs every 15 minutes all weekend, and yeah that’s annoying but at least they aren’t as likely to get someone killed.

Yeah if you’re into Pokémon and want a simple little game (or big game because apparently it’s huge) I’d rec this. It’s worth it, the others are having fun too and you can’t put a price on your loved ones’ enjoyment. This is the first I’ve heard of that tradition and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a real one, but check your DMs.

I’m an outlier there. I like slow, atmospheric survival horror punctuated with small segments of high pressure action. 4 is a full game of all of the worst parts of the series, I hate it.

I loved 7, 2 Remake and 3 Remake, then pretty much find most of the rest of them dull & tedious to an unplayable level. I wasn’t paying much attention to Requiem, but I’ve been watching a mate play it and it looks really good. I think if you liked 7 it’ll be right up your alley. As for Village, it wasn’t for me (there’s one section I thought was great, the rest was eh) but most people I’ve spoken to who are into the newer ones rate it highly, so I hope you like it.

Since you asked for a follow-up, I’ve played a bit of Pokopia.

It’s cute, and it’s a lot more Minecrafty than I expected. You build little habitats for Pokemon like a few bunches of tall grass or tall grass under a tree or whatever, and things will move in to live there. Everyone has a basic personality, and it’s all super friendly. There’s no pressure, you can half-ass everything without consequence, but you advance by making your community happy by providing them with what they ask for. I’ve done the first 2 maps so far (they’re all based on towns from the Kanto region). The last thing I did was get to a map that basically has no real story and lets you build however you want, and the game said I can move my Pokemon from other maps there so I’m going to build a little community for my favourites.

As for negatives, building is quite tedious, you can place blocks in 3D space around you based on where the camera is looking so you kind of have to swing it around madly to get things where you want them, and building in a cramped area is rough. Destroying blocks takes a few punches but you punch in a little AoE attack, so you have to line things up very precisely with the same annoying system when you only want to hit a specific block. You can make pre-made building kits that require the help of a bunch of mons with different skills. This is great, but anything past the most basic couple of huts takes ages and it’s in real time (as in “Come back tomorrow and we should have this done”). Thankfully you can just change the console settings to time travel without consequence, because fuck that.

Anyway, it’s a nice cosy, low-pressure game with a surprisingly grim story. You wake up in the post-apocalypse and everyone’s gone, so you have to try to make the areas nicer to attract more Pokemon back, while rebuilding towns in the hope that humans will come back too. As you explore you find pre-whatever logs, & some post-whatever journal entries that seem to be suggesting the world became uninhabitable due to climate change so everyone “went away.” A lot of the friends you make are so sad that their trainer is gone and can’t wait to find them again, and I don’t know how this is going to end but well… I think you should get comfortable without them, guys.

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Other than that last week I mentioned Digimon Story Time Stranger, I played the demo but didn’t really like it. Then there was Monster Hunter World, which I mentioned was one my favourite games but my gf isn’t really enjoying it so my dreams of playing that together with her have been crushed. On the bright side the demo of Monster Hunter Stories 3 is fantastic, I never finished the 2nd game because while I liked the game I started to really hate the teammates’ AI and couldn’t force myself through it, but the upcoming game fixes a lot of issues and it so fun to play. I just dropped $330AUD on Pokopia this week (one for me, my for my gf and one for my sister’s birthday present), so I’m not sure about dropping another $108 on this, but it’s extremely tempting.

Oh man, I like Nekrogoblikon but I haven’t been able to listen to Jericho’s podcast for years and there’s just a sour taste there now. It bothers me too much that he won’t (or wouldn’t, but he probably still does it) stop platforming people like David Weiss who will push every conspiracy under the sun without ever stopping them to call them a stupid idiot. Stick to musicians and disgruntled ex-WWE guys who just want to bitch about the company.

I might be wrong but from what I can find it’s just comic artist Tim Doyle drawing various characters killing ICE agents, it doesn’t seem to be a series. Absolute is DC, but like you said it’s not out of character for Punisher so I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been a real storyline at some point. I haven’t read enough to point you to anything specific.

Henderson has not presented the morning show on Kiis since an on-air spat on 20 February, in which Sandilands mocked her for her interest in astrology. Speculation over whether she would return to the show has since run rife, culminating with the shock announcement the highest-paid partnership in media was over.

There’s no way that’s what ended a 20-year partnership, I wonder what really happened. Was that just the final straw in a long line of problems or was it something serious? A hundred million is a hell of a lot to throw away, I’d do a radio show for a couple of hours a day with that immortal snail that’ll kill me if it touches me for that much cash.

Same, I even use dev mode to knock down enemies if I can’t be bothered with a raid at that time. I don’t want them turned off or anything, I just want to deal with them when it’s convenient for me. I do turn off things like solar flares though, that’s no fun.

I like to hoard stuff and build extravagant buildings out of money. The usual place it ends up is with half of the colony operating a giant silver hotel, restaurant (/drug den) & casino with the Hospitality mods, and all of that bankrolls a facility that turns my colonists into superhumans one by one with bionics & implants from various mods, which usually snowballs as they start researching and crafting more parts faster and faster for the next set of colonists. At that point I generally get bored and drop the game for a few months before doing it all again.

Desperate first home buyers have bid up the price of affordable properties as they face off against investors

Oh, those damn desperate first home buyers! Of course they aren’t deterred by rising rates, their choices are to pay $870,000 for a two-bedroom apartment, or be homeless. In October 2023 I bought a shitty little apartment for $310k (and only got it because the real estate agent said the seller wanted it to go to someone who needed to live in it rather than an investment), by mid 2024 other ones in the same building were going for $430k, one sold a month ago for $587k. It’s fucking insane.

I was pretty poor all through my 20s, I think the most I made at any time until I was 28 was $400 a week, and I never expected to own property until I started saving every extra cent for a hopeful deposit in 2022, looks like I got in at the last second. Good luck to any desperate first home buyers these days.

Nope, I’m not a hype kind of guy. I want a title and release date, then nothing else until it’s out. I didn’t even want to see the starters but it’s unavoidable unfortunately.

I have no idea about Pokopia, it looks vaguely Animal Crossing-y but I’ve never really played that either. Hopefully it’s fun. I don’t buy enough full price games to really care about that, maybe 1-2 a year. If I mainly played games on console I’m sure I’d have to be a little more frugal.

My sister and I both finished our shiny living dexes in Z-A, so it’s back to Arceus and Violet for me. I’ve also been told to try out Digimon Something Stranger (🤷 can’t remember), I’ve never been into Digimon but why not.

My girlfriend has started Monster Hunter World which is one of my favourite games, and I’m looking forward to some co-op with her for the optional stuff. I’m making her do the story missions on her own so that she’ll actually learn how to play without being carried, because the endgame will be rough if she doesn’t.

Other than that, just killing time until Pokopia.

I like a minimalist look, so on my home PC it’s just a solid colour. My work computer is this:

This is what I hate about the “broken clock is right twice a day” thing. The process you use to get to a conclusion needs to be sound for it to matter. If you have a couple thousand stopped clocks showing different times, you can’t claim to always know the correct time just because it’s in there somewhere.

Sure, atrazine causes birth defects in frogs. If you tell me that frogs are being intentionally turned gay because the globalists are using them to test a chemical weapon that will be used to turn people gay so that they’ll stop reproducing as part of a global depopulation plan, then you support a president who relaxes regulations on chemical disposal including atrazine, you don’t get to wait for most people to forget all that context and claim your initial kernel of partial-truth as a victory. This is exactly the same thing, and we see it over and over and over and over.

Does the text size work for you? I’ve changed the font and the layout and everything, but the text size, which is the only thing that doesn’t appear to have a global setting that I can find, doesn’t change. The slider works, it just doesn’t do anything.

I’m willing to try it out for the rest of this book, but it doesn’t really seem to do anything I’m interested in that ReadEra doesn’t already do, and the performance is worse. If I can’t get the text size to work properly that’s definitely a dealbreaker.

I couldn’t give two shits about what society thinks of my appearance. I feel better and can move better at a healthy weight. I sleep better because there’s less pressure on my throat so I can breathe more easily, and my girlfriend sleeps better because I’m not snoring and struggling to breathe. I also prefer my appearance because I personally find a muscular physique more attractive, and so does she.

Do what you gotta do, if you want to eat a huge slice of cake go for it (I’ve just spent 6 months stress eating and am trying to lose another 8kg, I’m certainly not judging anyone). You don’t need to justify yourself to anyone, but if you insist on doing so ignoring legitimate health impacts to stick it to the man who doesn’t even know you exist is a pretty weak justification.