“It is not the severity of punishment that deters crime, but the certainty of punishment.”

Both things can be true.

Mark Meer is great, and definitely worth playing thru to experience. Not quite at the same level as Jennifer Hale’s performance, but it was still absolutely brilliant.

Still, I hear this every time I hear Shepard talk to Dr. Chakwas.

Given how he was threatening Merchan, the jury, and the witnesses (not to mention multiple violations of his gag order), I’d say prison time is unlikely, but not off the table. I’d be pissed if I were Merchan and somebody came into my courtroom and behaved in that manner.

An entire fandom has been pronouncing “Evangelion” wrong for the past quarter-century.

It’s supposed to be pronounced with a hard G, like hair gel.

Arkansas used a bit of ratfuckery to keep it off the ballot here, too.

They’re probably gonna get away with it, too. And to think, we could’ve had a bona fide scientist as our governor instead of Donald Trump’s personal liar.

Time is a flat circle.

Walmart is a retailer, because they sell basically everything, while Kroger only sells groceries. I think that’s the distinction they’re making.

To my knowledge, it’s the first time in history that a non-nuclear power invaded and occupied territory belonging to a nuclear power.

So, that’s even more dubious history Putin played a part in.

Since when was subway a “small business”?

It’s a franchise. Subway owns the name and sets the menu/standards, then pays franchisees to start and run locations in exchange for a (huge) cut of the profits.

The way I see it, just because it is lawful doesn’t mean it’s right. That’s what you get for hiring children.

Some people aren’t okay with their holy texts being warped into a cudgel and used to beat down the innocent.

Damn, if that isn’t a spot-on description of how I feel about my faith right now.

My parents don’t understand why I stopped going to church, amd when I try to explain why, they say that they’re different when they’re really not.

and the story takes a while to get started.

That’s the problem the game has always had, though.

I played for a bit right as Endwalker came out. I went in blind, played consistently for two months, and by then, I had just finished the first third of Shadowbringers. In contrast, it took me a month-and-a-half to level my first WoW toon back during Wrath of the Lich King.

People may praise the story, but while there was a lot of great stuff, it just takes so loooooong to get there. They really do need to go through and prune the filler quests or boost experience gains.

In DA2’s defence, the game went from concept to release in 16 months. With a development cycle that fast, it’s a miracle it was even playable; I wouldn’t call its rampant copy-pasting “lazy”. I’d call it many bad things, because that game had tons of problems, but that’s what happens when the beancounters have an unexpected success and want to capitalize on it yesterday.

instead of just playing the game as intended.

I feel like you just unwittingly hit on the problem many series veterans have been having.

People are approaching bosses in Elden Ring like they’re Dark Souls bosses, and in my thousands of hours across the series, the only bosses I summon help for is Sister Friede and the Demon Twins. Everyone else I was eventually able to defeat on my own, because that’s how they were balanced.

But in Elden Ring, you have the open world to grind in and Spirit Ashes and crazy weapon arts that are far beyond any that were in Dark Souls 3, and the bosses are balanced around these things. It’s harder to make a good guess at how powerful a player is at any given time in Elden Ring, so in order to counter the player’s bullshit, the bosses need bullshit of their own.

This, naturally, throws a wrench into the plans of veterans who are used to bosses that are tough but fair and approaching them in that manner. They then promptly get their shit pushed in because they aren’t using the things the encounters are balanced around having simply because they didn’t used to need them.

It makes the bosses binary. Either you get your ass kicked, or you summon help, use a Mimic Tear, and run a train on them. They’re either frustrating or boring, and fights that are frustrating or boring just aren’t fun. I’m not having fun getting comboed to death or just pelting the boss with spells while my goons beat them up.

The magic is gone. Bosses used to be the highlight of Souls games, and now I just want them to be over.

The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player’s settlements.

I hated X because I found most of the characters sans Auron and Lulu to be incredibly obnoxious.

X-2 just made those problems worse by largely getting rid of the few characters I could tolerate, and somehow making Rikku even more annoying.

It says something about how good the combat was in those games that I managed to power my way thru X and a fair chunk of X-2 before it just got to be too much for me.

I hate X-2 with the burning fury of a thousand suns, and I’ll still praise the combat.

Thing is, all the other major manufacturers are just as bad or worse.

As a PC technician, HP still somehow has the best service and support, which speaks volumes about how bad everyone else is. Dell’s support tools are a generation behind HP’s, and Lenovo’s build quality is atrocious. Not to mention Lenovo’s technician support is so badly fragmented and poorly run, they default to having the customer send the device in for repair and avoid sending an on-site technician just so they can avoid dealing with technician support. Speaking from personal experience, getting to the right person when I have a problem or need to order additional parts is like pulling teeth, and even if I manage to reach someone, they’re usually equal parts incompetent and unhelpful.

And Apple doesn’t even want to service their stuff.

These days, you have to pick your poison.