What I’m reading is that Black and Asian women can only be attractive when they conform to western beauty standards: petite features, small frames, perfect proportions.

Considering that some games these days use the likenesses of actual people to create their characters, it disgusts me that some random guy out there gets to be the deciding voice on beauty.

He seems to be pretty hung up on that one guys girlfriend though…

Why not?

Why is the default response for “nobody even knows I exist” to curl up in a ball and bitch about it on the Internet?

If there is nothing holding you back, then you can do anything you want. What do you have to lose if you feel like you have nothing?

And if your response is that you don’t have the motivation or mindset, or you can’t bring yourself to care… buddy, that’s a mental health issue, and there are people who’s job it is to help people experiencing the same things.

Being fit does not mean being ‘gym bro’. I am 34 and obese. I am actively dieting and working out in order to lose weight, not because I want to be attractive or live forever, but because doing basic daily tasks was hell. I existed in a world where casually walking 10 minutes to work meant I was so warm and sweaty that I needed to shower. I could not squat or kneel down to pick things up or my knees would burn with pain. I was not healthy. My weight caused me to snore, making me more tired. I was walking around like a geriatric at the age of 32.

You don’t have to be a fitness guru who eats kale and chugs protein shakes to be healthy, but the giving up entirely is 100% more miserable than having basic mobility. And it’s a lot harder to come back from when you’re too heavy to work out to your full capacity.

Cool. So which pre-ordered, $100+ edition of the game do I need to purchase specifically from Target in order to get access to this section of gameplay? Sure hope there’s a digital art book (aka, a pdf slapped together by an intern) thrown in at only the highest tier.

The game looks beautiful, but Ubisoft deserves to rot for still pushing this sort of thing.

Strangely, yes.

All on board until the suggestion to switch to Apple, immediately after telling the reader not to jump from one big company to another. I am an Apple user, but I also trust them about as far as I could throw them. They will 1000% become as bad as Google if everyone switches over. They are already a walled garden that wants to keep you all to itself.

I was hoping for a more detailed list of things to change from and to. Life hacker posted an article to this effect:

https://lifehacker.com/the-best-competitors-to-every-first-party-google-app-an-1834172092

But their alternatives are mostly Apple, Windows, or Facebook offerings. Kind of defeats the purpose I think.

That’s a lot of characters with a wide range of relevance to the Borderlands story. From Moxxi, all the way to… Atlas?

Can’t wait to see Borderlands bosses Krom and Knoxx on the big screen looking nothing like their in game counterparts.

And don’t even get me started on my main man Larry! Ooh! All the fun times I remember with… Larry…

Publishers: But the NEXT microtransaction-riddled live service looter shooter with a roadmap to completion years after release is sure to be the hit we’re looking for! Ignore every single proven failure! We will make this the future of gaming if it kills us!

Having watched the premiere of Acolyte, I am not convinced. They jumped 100 years into the past, and everything feels exactly like “present” Star Wars.

There’s a Jedi. There’s a Cantina scene. There’s an orange sabre to validate Rey’s sabre. There’s Coruscant, looking pretty much as it will in 100 years from now. There’s a wookie.

It all felt very same-y. Aesthetically, if Mando walked into the scene, he wouldn’t be out of place. Which is weird.

I get that it’s in the ‘Canon’, but when a character that lives a century before the trilogies are set referenced R2 units, it sent me on a spiral down wookiepedia. It would be like someone today talking about driving their T-Model Ford. Did the droid company really only release 3 more R series droid between now and when Luke buys R2 from the Jawas?

Acolyte is a fun story, but I don’t think the High Republic is as revolutionary as they claim. I guess it at least separates us chronologically from the Skywalkers… for now.

BBy Bby

Bby bby

Checks out

My first thought was Brain Age. But he refuses to hold the ds like a book as the game requests, hence his look of concentrated concern.

It’s like the nerds that came up with those nuclear warnings have never consumed a piece of fantasy or sci-fi media. “Oh, this ancient civilisation had immense power and locked it away in a concrete vault underground surrounded by harrowing warnings? Fuck yes I’m digging that shit up or settling my town on the ancient site of power. Blessings of the glowing soil! My son has been born with 6 fingers on each hand! Surely a wonderful portent!”

You are right. A lot of the micro aggressions I put down to the Finetimers just being naive, and wanting to live in their safety bubble, but all of your points made me feel uneasy at the time, and it makes sense that they were all related to racism.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

The social media society is a trope that has been done before, and I don’t feel like this episode did anything interesting with it. The character of Pepper-Bean did not have an arc, she began as a vapid mole, and ended as a vapid mole who killed a guy. Not engaging, and felt like a bit of a waste of an episode.

I did not feel any of the tension they seemed to have intended, because the characters were so insufferable that their death would have been a relief.

Ruby and the Doctor needed Pepper-Bean to turn off her Dot because they could not see into the Dome. How then did they switch to an external camera to have a chat with the pop star towards the end?

Feels like an episode written by a Boomer just to take the same old digs at the younger generations. “Kids these days can’t find their way without a gps”, “Gen Z literally can’t see past their phone screens”.

I don’t know if it was intended, but the conclusion felt like a commentary on racism, considering that a majority of the finetime characters that got screen time were white, and talked about their “God given duty” to “maintain standards”. And calling The TARDIS “voodoo”. I dunno, it could definitely just be more commentary on vapid millennials, but it felt more pointed, especially considering the Doctors reaction.

I had problems with 73 Yards, but at least it was an engaging watch and felt like it was trying to do… something?

When the episodes stop being self contained, let me know. We are going to get a reveal at the end of the series, no doubt, but at this point the episodes are only connected by vague references or shoehorned in scenes with Ruby making it snow. It’s no more connected than Bad Wolf or Vote Saxon. I do not expect this episode to get an explanation before the end of the season.

I think it’s not that she “says” anything, it’s that standing next to an old her, and looking at present her “breaks their brains” due to fairy magic and perception filter being crammed together. They likely still just see the blur, but subconsciously the paradox ducks with them. Like how when multi doctor episodes happen, the younger versions forget it.

Everything weird is because of the intersection of magic and time travel fields… Someone getting thrown back into time isn’t that off the wall. Especially if viewing her life and the fairy circle as two never ending loops.

When the fans have to make up explanations for an episode with no textual evidence, that’s good storytelling. I’ve had people tell me that the woman stays at 73 Yards because that’s the range of the TARDIS’ perception filter, but if that has ever been mentioned on the show, I’ve missed that little tidbit. Do people notice the TARDIS at the end of their street, then un-notice it halfway down the road?

It’s Dr Who mate… Unbelievable things happen every episode, but will likely eventually be explained by really advanced tech

It’s Doctor Who mate… even the most mysterious entities have a motive and rules. The Midnight monster is never explained, but we understand how it works, and what it wants. In Listen, it is never confirmed if the creature exists but that is tied into the story of the episode, and we still understand the concept behind the monster. In this episode things happen because they look creepy, and then it ends with what amounts to an “it was all a dream” twist.

How do you have Toxic Masculinity? That’s not how the concept works…

That’s nice. What about the other 10bn you’re wrapping your scaly tail around?

No individual needs a billion dollars, let alone 10, but we all clap and pat them on the back when they make a tax deductible donation to “women” or “famine” that usually feeds back into their own foundations.

If the choice is between my feet being slightly more sore than usual, or letting the sleep paralysis demon that has a cat skull for a face suck on my toes because I did not properly secure them before sleep, that sheet is getting tucked in. Sorry Better Sleep Council.

But by the conclusion we know who the woman is. We never learnt anything that she might know that would make people hate Ruby.

The more I think about it, the more annoyed I am. The very specific 73 yards. The ability to teleport. The repeated gestures. The inability to see her face. Her power of suggestion. Even the clothes she was wearing. It was all set up to create a creepy and mysterious stalker. But in the end none of it was paid off.