He’d dismiss the sarcasm and make it genuine, “Yes, Timmy, we really are very impressed. Good job, Billy!”

Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.

I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.

That’s pretty funny, and it’d probably work the first few times, if not more lol. I agree with the last part for most of them. But, in a real civil war, it’d include people that aren’t completely idiotic. Like I said, there hasn’t been a quick, clean civil war ever fought in history. Those lessons are useful to take heed of.

They don’t have to be fighters for it to be a headache. During a civil war you have to deal with feeding, securing, housing, etc. all of those people when areas inevitably collapse or are taken over for military operations and people evacuate (i.e. refugees).

Then there are people who do support whichever side and do small acts of sabotage, espionage, etc.

To play devil’s advocate, the US is enormous with over 330 million people. The current military strength is roughly a few million, including civilians and contractors. Additionally, there are roughly about 4,000 main battle tanks in service. There’s maybe a couple thousand fighter jets and bombers combined. Keep in mind, a lot of the US military is abroad, especially our combat ready equipment.

Now, try to spread all of that out over roughly 4 million square miles. Hell, LA itself is around 470 square miles with almost 10 million people. The military would be idiotic to just blindly carpet bomb everything, since y’know, soldiers have families living all over the US, too. Not great for morale. Not to mention, the economy is pretty essential to keeping the machines of war going. Also food. And fuel. And infrastructure for logistics. And medicine. Etc, etc.

A civil war would not be cut and dry, regardless of how well armed and trained the formal military is. It’s why China tries to keep an iron tight grip on its mass surveillance program to squash uprisings before/as soon as they start (and they periodically have them, think there’s been one or two in the last decade). That’s what the US is also trying to do. They call it antiterrorism precautions and other bullshit, but it’s to keep all of us underfoot so no one is able to start an effective movement against the State.

Ukraine isn’t fighting the bulk of their war with drones, so it isn’t really an appropriate comparison. One of the main reasons they’re still in the fight is the plethora of highly advanced munitions that have been provided to them by NATO members. Lastly, drone warfare has become less and less effective over the last year against Russia. There are lots of countermeasures that can be implemented to take out drones. Hell, if you jam radio signals (which is easy to do), remote controlled drones become virtually useless outside of preprogrammed kamikaze tactics.

Just to clarify, I don’t say that to discredit them being a viable and deadly weapon in guerilla warfare. They’re very effective in certain situations and quite dangerous. Just pointing out they’re not the end-all-be-all of modern warfare.

Everything is possessive. My wife, my husband, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my significant other, etc. “Someone to call my own” isn’t really strange; it’s not super common, but definitely not that uncommon, either.

Last I’d read, there’s no consensus that he actually voted for Trump. Dude’s views were all over the place.

Regardless, if someone takes Trump out, I will literally lose no sleep or tears. I don’t advocate for violence, but MAGA sure as fuck does. Reap what you sow and all that.

Quite a number of far right idiots are, unfortunately.

All valid and fair points.

Regardless, I truly hope we never have to find out either way. The human species is capable of incredible things if we just set aside historical, cultural, and petty differences and worked towards a common goal of lifting everyone up. Wars of aggression are barbaric and unnecessary and I hope one day we all mentally evolve past such tendencies for mass violence. It’s a naive pipe dream, but one can always dream.

If nukes started popping off, there’d be zero reason to send in ground forces until it was all over. Lastly, I’m not convinced Russia’s nuclear program is much better off than NATO’s. So many interviews with nuke watch officers talking about how old and decrepit our silos are. The DoD supposedly approved a modernization package a few years ago for all of them, but I’m still skeptical how efficient the targeting is on everything and how well they’ll avoid missile defense systems.

Agreed, wider and thicker with maybe a wavy/ ridge texture on the bottom half of the mustache and slight rounding/flaring on the sides that narrows to the top.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1262480275/ron-swanson-250fp011911_400x400.jpg

Feels like that’s a good reference pic for OP.

Edit:

But I do prefer #2 more. Like others have said, it’s simpler and easier to tell the expression.

Very true, especially in countries like the US:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unsolved-killings-record-high

https://thehill.com/homenews/3878472-nearly-half-of-us-murders-going-unsolved-data-show/

For the US, the national average is around 40-50% for unsolved homicides. Some states/cities are even higher. Pretty depressing, really. We live in a heavy Police State society and yet law enforcement fails so badly in their primary purpose.

In today’s dollars (US), that’s roughly $90,000. Depending on what a large volume means, that’s not too shabby for a random CIA grunt. I also try to remember that not all classified info is actually that worthwhile. When I worked for the government, sending generic emails on a classified network could make them classified (unless you properly marked them as Unclassified, which most workers didn’t due to laziness).

Oh for sure, they’ve made some progress and there are a lot of D reps and senators who want to do much more, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But, the modern American public at large act like the president is some grand arbiter of getting laws passed single-handedly. Many ignore that it’s Congress that’s the most dysfunctional component when it comes to actually getting things done for the last two-some-odd decades. Hell, we have tons of people that chalk up the entire state of the economy on a single person every election cycle, it’s craziness.

Anyway, my point is that anyone that’s actually paying attention in good faith knows it’s almost entirely the GOP blocking healthcare reform. But, as we’ve especially learned these last 10+ years, many Americans don’t pay attention to reality.

That 8 years thing for healthcare could easily backfire. The majority of Americans are very fed up with our healthcare, and Democrats haven’t done much to fix it this administration either (not entirely their fault, we have a gridlocked Congress and Senate, after all). The concept of a plan quote is hilarious, though! My friends and I plan on using it at work from now on.

Anyway, even most Republican media outlets have conceded that Harris won last night. As for the MAGA cult itself, I honestly haven’t bothered to go down that internet hole yet, nor am I likely to. I’m sure there’s countless bots/trolls spinning the story and creating a fake reality already, with plenty of zealots lapping it up because their collective delusion requires it.

Same. I logged about 20 hours on it before my desire to play just kind of slowly faded away. The game was too large and long to warrant such basic gameplay mechanics. You could be fully upgraded within 5-10 hours and then you’ve essentially seen all the gameplay there is. There’s maybe 6-12 random “quests” you’ll see while traveling (those dynamic events, e.g. a wagon being robbed), so even that part of it becomes repetitive pretty fast.

I’ll get downvoted, but RDR2 is a really overrated game, in my opinion. The game was well made, no doubt about it. Its graphics and environmental design are still gorgeous even to this day, despite being 8 years old. The voice acting, writing, direction, cinematography, etc. are all very well executed. However, at the end of the day, I just found it kind of boring to play.

Right? For a game to be a collector’s item, it needs to still be able to function in its intended capacity. Additionally, they need to be considered good. Most games that become a collectable do so when they transition into the “classic” category, usually 20+ years after they released. In 2050, no one’s going to think, “Oh man, Concord was hailed as a masterpiece in its day, I need to own that piece of history!”

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It’s one banana, how much it could cost? $10?