Wow, a hugely wealthy oligarchical capitalist facilitating the rise of fascism?

How completely unpredictable, with no historical precedent whatsoever!

Who could have possibly expected this?!

According to Mutahar:

1. The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.

2. He's fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it'll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.

In general, he's done with playing GTO.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l

But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:

All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.

And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.

There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don't fucking care.

Same with autism.

If you get low grades, off to special ed with you.

High grades? Oh you're just a socially awkward dork or quirky nerd or something.

It will at least be extremely funny to watch all the right wing gamer bro chuds freak the fuck out when an immediate consequence of their actions will be that gaming pc components instantly inflate 50% in price.

Glad I already got my Steam Deck, fuck.

Actual autist here: Took me a loooong time to figure out a whole bunch of social concepts when it comes to what neurotypicals basically deem as small talk.

Firstly, you basically just have to accept that for most people, a level of classist, racist, other kinds of stereotypical insults are socially viewed as basically acceptable, even though its usually quite obvious they are, in fact, insults.

Then you have to understand the concept of proportionality in small talk. You have to reply with something that's very obviously and directly relevant, and of the same magnitude.

(Jumping from an insult about dietary preferences to an insult about war crimes is not the same magnitude)

Encapsulating this entire social interaction is the setting: coworkers of mixed nationality likely and an after work dinner likely implies an expectation of basically corporate social etiquette, ie, back handed compliments to establish a social dominance hierarchy, where the name of the game us getting as close to breaching the invisible 'wow what an asshole' line without actually stepping over it.

To avoid looking meek, docile, awkward or antisocial, you have to figure out an appropriate small talk style reply, which actually requires a fairly detailed knowledge of the other persons you are conversing with. Their culture, personal history, personal beliefs, etc.

If you don't do this at least semi-regularly, then you are a pushover who will be given higher workloads with no extra compensation and likely will not advance very far in your career, as you seem to be fine where you are.

So ok, if you know a bit about Israelis, you might attempt to insult back along the lines of dietary preferences.

But, its a faux pas to escalate even within this realm of responses: If you retort that you 'prefer your potatoes with pork', well, that's probably going to be viewed as quite rude, as that's still a higher magnitude, as it references something that is commonly known to be forbidden to most Israelis.

What might be a proportional response would be 'Sorry, I'd make them (the potatoes) into latkes for you, but I don't have any eggs'.

But that may still be deemed as overly offensive, depending on the temperament of the Israeli and the level to which the other coworkers feel the need to be defensive toward perceived anti-semitism.

So, as an autistic person, you have to consciously have all this knowledge and think through it all logically in real time, all while your actual emotion is anger because you don't give a fuck that the potato comment was supposed to be a joke, because it was in actuality a racist insult that actually references a fucking famine and a dietary stereotype that exists largely due to imperialist exploitation of your ancestors.

In summary, yeah small talk is an absolute nightmare for autistic people who are in an aggressive, hostile social environment, which, at least in my experience, is almost all of them.

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

The news outlet these fucktards accidentally leaked their detailed operational plan and timeline to...

... is still excersizing better OPSEC than the actual head of the CIA.

EDIT:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_2sODSpJo2A

Watch this clip of Mark Kelly with some pretty on point questions for Gabbard and Ratcliffe, listen to their responses, and go read through the full text chat.

Watch more of the hearings.

I think there's a pretty decent case Tulsi actually fucked up enough in her testimony that she actually did a perjury, Ratcliffe however, was both a bit more conciliatory and ever so slightly more honest, and also a bit better at just giving 'I don't recall' answers.

Hey, anybody remember 12ish years ago when Alex Jones' worst fear was that Obama was going to use executive power to order the military to be deployed on American soil, violating Posse Comitatus, to massively round up and inter a bunch of Americans in FEMA reducation / death camps?

Anyone?

No one?

Whoo boy, growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household where I was the only one to go to college and everyone else became a Q Anon zombie sure was fuuuunnnnn!

A few things about America's Army:

It may (I am 90%, but not 100% sure of this) have been the first PC, online, FPS to feature ragdoll physics for dead players.

It employed a... rather baffling way of doing team conflicts:

You are always on Team America, and the opposing team is always Team Generic Terrorists. (With 80s/90s movie era costumes for the bad guys, dependent on map location)

What this results in is... you have your M4. You are shooting at bad guys with AK74su's. But... from the opposing team's POV, its the same.

So, if you kill someone... you can now pick up an AK74su. Even though from their POV they dropped an M4.

And so on, with rough equivalents as an SVD and an M110, an RPK and an M249.

These 'picked up' weapons would basically morph into having the ballistics of the Eastern Bloc weapon at the point they were picked up.

Very weird, I've never seen another game do that.

The game also had a good number of training courses, many of which were initially bugged as all hell.

I remember the SERE course failing me consistently, showing that I had been detected by guards who are apparently able to see through boulders or 30 feet of a hill (the camera would show you how you were spotted like a 'deathcam' and it was quite obvious it was often total bs).

Also, in certain training missions it was possible to shoot your instructor.

This would result in you being sent to the brig: Log in to your account, and for a week, all you get is a view from inside a prison cell, no game menus or options at all, rofl.

Oh, final thing: I am pretty sure this was the first online PC FPS that modelled that M203 projectiles must travel a certain distance before the explosive charge will detonate, so taking out someone with an M203 round to the face, non explosively, became a way to humiliate people, as you either had to be pretty skilled to do it , or your opponent had to have very poor situational awareness.

Currently we are about 10 minutes into the debate.

Trump is confidently stating lie after lie after lie, basically the condensed version of his recent speeches main lies.

Biden on the other hand is saying things that are far closer to true, but he is mumbling and has already trailed off and forgot what he was talking about.

We are doomed.

Sounds to me like the dude is doing a fantastic job roleplaying and gal's idea of roleplaying is just acting out low budget pornos from the 90s.

'I want a real roleplay!'

You're getting a pretty damn real roleplay, what you want is cheesy, netflix-content-mill tier schlock.

Ok so, going to the CNBC article and my own memory, as charitably summarized as I can:

Boca Chica is originally built with certain parameters and specifications, before Musk announced they would be doing all of the testing for Starship at that location.

Then, SpaceX just started doing so, and then asked for permission from relevant regulatory bodies ... later.

At this point, Common Sense Skeptic on YouTube did a video or two specifically going into the details of exactly how bonkers it is to do huge scale rocket testing basically half a kilometer away from protected nature zones.

Then, one of the Starship tests blew apart huge parts of the launch pad after Elon had said that would not be a problem.

Then, Elon folded on that notion, and built the water deluge system and modified the launching configuration, without getting any permits beforehand from relevant regulatory agencies.

So the run off from all that water has been going into a protected natural environment for... about a year now.

The EPA began investigating this in August of 2023, and informed SpaceX they were in violation in March of 2024.

Literally the day after SpaceX was formally notified their water deluge system was in violation, SpaceX did its third Starship test, again using the water deluge system.

Now, cue SpaceX lying all over the place, saying that they've been told they were allowed to do this the whole time, and that there were no detectable levels of mercury in the discharge, even though their own permit that they belatedly filed indicates the detectable level of mercury in the discharge were about 50x the safe level.

SpaceX said in its response on X that there were “no detectable levels of mercury” found in its samples. But SpaceX wrote in its permit application that its mercury concentration at one outfall location was 113 micrograms per liter. Water quality criteria in the state calls for levels no higher than 2.1 micrograms per liter for acute aquatic toxicity and much lower levels for human health.

To conclude:

“Further wastewater discharges could trigger more investigations and criminal charges for the company or any of the people involved in authorizing the launches,” he said.

• Eric Roesch, Environmental Engineer

Basically, the environmental aspects of this have been a known and ongoing shit show for over a year, but have only been covered by a few YouTube channels and blogs, vastly drowned out by the cacophony of SpaceX fans.

I highly suggest every one check out Common Sense Skeptic on YouTube, they have been calling bullshit on SpaceX for a while now.

In particular, one interesting vid they did shows that a former NASA administrator bullshitted her own request for project process to get it awarded to SpaceX, using blatant double standards.

I say former NASA admin because quite quickly after rubber stamping a huge amount of taxpayer money toward Starship development, she now works for SpaceX.

In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.

The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player... who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s... and performed terribly at LANs...

Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.

Amazing.

Wow that is bullshit. Reminds me of the teacher who failed a student for drawing a digital clock in a square that prompted 'Draw a clock showing 4:30 pm.'

Kid wasn't wrong at all. Poorly worded question.

Further, please enjoy my own bitching about bad teachers all the way up into college:

I had a college professor for Political Science give me a shit grade for only one of the multiple papers required of the class.

Why?

I referenced US Army soldiers out right stating, on video, and with legit newspapers covering this, that they were being instructed to guard opium/poppie farms in Afghanistan, back when even liberals were pretending that was not happening. It was a paper on conflict goods, such as blood diamonds, and she pretended I was a conspiracy theorist.

Next year I had an Econ professor give my group and I got a crap grade (got nearly 100% on every thing else) on a report and presentation about Iceland's response to the Financial Crisis of 08.

Why'd he do that?

Because Iceland's actions and the subsequent effects on their economy did not fit into any of the possible policy choices (send all the corrupt bankers to fucking prison) and outcomes that his macroeconomic paradigm allowed to be possible, and functionally disproved it, as according to the model he was teaching us, this should have resulted in basically a total collapse of their economy. (There were some short lived negative effects, but faaar from what we should have expected)

I got a BS in Econ and a BA in PoliSci, double majored in 4 years, and what I learned was the only way to excel in either of these fields is to pick some kind of ideology to pledge your allegiance too, suck up and kiss ass and you'll go far.

So, as a Majority Report fan... there's a bit here that makes this even more funny and ironic.

::: spoiler Putting this in Spoiler because its a gigantic wall of text

So, sometime last year, Emma (MR's primary cohost) went on Tim's show, actually on location in his compound.

During their exchange, Emma brought up how right wing shows such as Tim's, just generally have a whole lot more funding than similar left wing shows...

... alluding to how most right wing shows tend to have large donations or grants from wealthy right wing businessmen, or their 'foundations', whereas left wing shows tend to get much smaller donations from far more people, which sum up to a whole lot less than what right wing shows get.

(This is all like a year before the Russian funding story broke)

....Tim's response to this is to deny that his show has any large benefactors, begins talking about no, we just have a larger audience and thus better ad deals, and the suggests to Emma that the Majority Report should focus on stories people want to hear that draw a larger audience, and that they should a CTO to manage their finances better.

...

So ok fast forward to now, and it's all but certain that Tim got all this Russian money, assumed it was legit, and normal, despite it being a very large sum of money, for very little extra or specified work...

... and then he massively expanded his operation with this money.

And then he not only lied to Emma's face, in person, but also had the gall to magnanimously critique the financial operations of the Majority Report and pretend to be some kind of helpful, well intentioned business guru.

... And now that Tim's stupendous Russian donor that he lied about not having isn't funding the his operation any more, welp uh it appears to be time to close up shop.

...

So this is on its face just astoundingly, perfectly representative of the total falsity of the 'self made man, bootstrapped my empire from the ground up, I'm just better at business and thus life than you' narrative that basically all wealthy people, and certainly all wealthy conservatives in America promulgate.

...

But it gets even funnier.

You see, in the last, roughly two weeks....Sam Seder, MR's main host was invited to Tim's show, for an in person appearance and discussion with Tim... on November 1st.

If you don't follow online political drama much... basically no conservative talking head will agree to debate or even discuss anything with Sam, because he's been doing this shit for like 20+ years, and basically, in a rather composed manner, he always makes fools out of any conservative he's ever verbally sparred with, or the conservative ends up cancelling or backing out for some reason.

... So... November 1st is a Friday.

And Tim Pool appears to have stated that if the show does continue, well Fridays he won't be there, it'll just be his cohosts and guests.

... As it currently stands, Sam legitimately does not know if he will be appearing on Tim's show to, you know, talk to Tim.

... So....Tim may have also (inadvertantly?) added himself to the list of conservative talking heads that are too afraid to talk to Sam.

:::

... entirely seriously, he does not seem to be able to actually stand up straight.

There are hundreds or thousands of photos where he is like this, this very strange forward posture.

He... almost certainly has some kind of diagnosable posture/spine related condition.

You add tiny, mini, useless balconies so that you can check off another tick box on a zillow or trulia search, justify an increased rental cost.

Then you make the balconies as small as possible, as featureless as possible, and throw a whole bunch of rules into your rental agreement that prevent you from actually using them for basically any reason: Can't smoke on the balcony, can't dry clothes on it, can't cook on it, can't display any thing like a flag or banner on the balcony because of some made up aesthetic code, etc.

I've lived in a lot of different apartments of differing quality and location, and while I'm not saying that modern apartment residential balconies are entirely a scam, they very often are.

A relative bright spot amidst a sea of bad news:

"Bottled water alone can expose people to nearly as many microplastic particles annually as all ingested and inhaled sources combined,” said Brandon Luu, an Internal Medicine Resident at the University of Toronto. “Switching to tap water could reduce this exposure by almost 90%, making it one of the simplest ways to cut down on microplastic intake.”

Dunno if anyone reading this is still drinking bottled water, but, uh, now you have another reason to not do that.

It's actually worse.

The core MAGA people are utterly convinced that 'fact checking' is literally the moderators lying to prevent Republicans from saying what is actually true.

They are way, way, waaaaay down the rabbit hole of the lugenpresse, I mean fake news, that basically any time the figures they adore/worship are ever fact checked, well actually that is evidence of a vast liberal media conspiracy against them.

They actively despise fact checking, and when it happens, this triggers their conspiracism harder.

The reason why Vance made a show of crying about fact checking was partly due to personal anger/embarrassment/whatever, but the other part is that he knows that complaining about it is appealing to core Trump voters.

However, it's only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat. If it's only client-side or server-side, it's optional, but Valve say "we generally think that any game that makes use of anti-cheat technology would benefit from letting players know".

I will always love Valve for their ability to use corpospeak against corpos.

Your game has anti-cheat?

Wonderful!

I'm sure that always only results in an improved experience for all gamers, lets let them all know!

=D