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Mrs LMNO decided to watch a movie on Netflix: Don't Fuck With Cats.

A few minutes in, I asked myself: "how do I know that name?"

A few minutes later: "Holy shit."

I watched it sometime during the COVID blur of this year. Soon as I heard that name, I was like "heyyyy, I've heard this tale before..."

Um.

Wow.

This is so American it makes my teeth itch.

https://apnews.com/087793aca502274877c4763383c2f151

I have to just rephrase this because it's so fucking absurd.

A man is trying to barricade himself in his apartment because of a dog attack. A neighbor enters the apartment, goes "that's a dog attack alright", then goes to get his trusty FUCKING crossbow. He shoots a dog with his FUCKING CROSSBOW ARE YOU SHITTING ME and the bolt penetrates the dog and kills the dude who was trying to create a barricade against the dogs. Cops show up, and kill the dogs. Crossbow man realizes the person he was trying to help is dead and he killed the poor bastard.

...

One of the dogs belonged to the man who died, she said. The other belonged to his girlfriend, who also lived in the home.

"My friends pets were fighting amongst themselves like they do all week, so I got them all killed - finally some peace and quiet."

So pretty much I feel like everyone was at fault in this situation, except the poor dogs.

Splurging at the end of the PS4 holiday sale, I picked up Divinity II and Witcher III. Haven't played any of the games in the serieseses leading up to these.

Divinity II feels like a spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate (which is nice, cause it's made by the company making BGIII). My friend suggested it to me, saying, "Hey, you like RPGs with a fucking shitload of stuff in them, right?" and jesus christ, he's right -- the combat is more complicated than D&D. It's a turn-based system where a lot of the abilities affect the terrain around you. One spell throws a boulder and leaves a 5 meter wide oil slick on the ground. Use your next action to hit a guy with a flaming dagger, and BOOM, the whole slick lights up, setting a portion of the battlefield on fire. Oh but if your other mage is a water-and-ice based spellcaster, that's a bad synergy, because being on fire makes people WARM, which buffs them against ICE damage, and the hailstorm spell will put out the fire. So there's a lot of things to think about, a lot of different strategies and plans you can come up with. Very tactical, very customizable. Every problem has 3 different ways of solving it. Lots of dialog options, and all the text is voice acted.

Witcher III seems good too, I haven't played nearly as much of it. Does the TV show spoil the video game or vice versa? I've watched one episode of the TV show and it was pretty good but (being unfamilliar with the franchise) I can't really tell if it crosses the same material.

Maybe a year or 2 ago I played through the first Divinity with my brother and it was a lot fun (I always liked Baldur's Gate, too). I did like the strategic use of spells in combat and how much everything interacted with each other, the problem solving, multiple dialog choices, and them some. It kept things interesting throughout. We have Divinity II now as well, but are waiting on two of his friends to finish the first so we can do a playthrough all together.

...this is gonna disrespect the dead, but whatever.  Dude was a Randian. As in Ayn.

Good drummer, tho.

Interesting. Do not think I knew that. I like the band, thought he was a good drummer, but didn't follow personal/political lives that closely. Kind of makes sense with the few people that told me he was a good writer, though.

I ran into a cover of "Every breath you take" of The Police, with the guitar and bass lines intact, just the voice work is like a male guy rapping and a female soul (?) chorus accompanying it, and the lyrics got retconned to not be about stalking, it feels really dumb.

??   https://youtu.be/NKMtZm2YuBE

Puff Daddy/Faith Evans cover in memory of Biggie's passing. It's alright. Not terrible in that context.

I like it.

Same. My commentary seemed a bit underwhelming, but that's about as much mental and physical enthusiasm I can muster right now. "Not terrible" is/was a sort of inside joke with my Dad when he was still alive, and still is with my family, and generally doesn't mean terrible or bad at all.

I can't believe it's been over 20 years since that came out.

I ran into a cover of "Every breath you take" of The Police, with the guitar and bass lines intact, just the voice work is like a male guy rapping and a female soul (?) chorus accompanying it, and the lyrics got retconned to not be about stalking, it feels really dumb.

??   https://youtu.be/NKMtZm2YuBE

Puff Daddy/Faith Evans cover in memory of Biggie's passing. It's alright. Not terrible in that context.

Brain cancer too. That's awful 

I've always enjoyed Rush, but I've heard (before and since his passing) that a lot of Neil's writing was really good too. May have to check it out at some point soon.

Bronn, with a promise of gold that Varys has stashed away with one of his "little birds", should he kill Dany.

That's what I'd do, but Varys has kinda dropped the ball lately, between "not noticing your queen is insane" and "being burned alive".

Yeah, while Dany going apeshit on King's Landing wasn't really super shocking, Varys and Tyrion kind of dropped the ball seeing as they were always portrayed as smart and politically savvy. Even before she found out about Jon, she'd been paranoid about traitors and didn't tolerate any threat to her rule. Then Tyrion finds about about Jon, tells Varys, tells Dany about Varys and then is all (*insert shocked Pikachu meme here) when she decides to burn Varys alive, followed by King's Landing.

And Jon trying to get everyone to stop fighting - little late for that bud. You don't really get to call "time out" in the middle of everyone hacking each other to death.

Grew up in Lawrence, several friends that live and work there, and my mom & brother still live in one of the neighboring towns that thankfully wasn't hit. I live on the MA border not far from the highway and could hear sirens all night from all the surrounding fire departments rushing down there. Scary stuff. It's bad enough as it is, but surprised and glad it wasn't a lot worse, in scope and casualties. I still can't imagine what the people that lost their homes and the family of the young man that was killed are dealing with.


Sorry your mom again, Dok. I'm hoping they can beat this one back too.

My favorite part is the one where we learned that we're all Tyler Durden.

My side? Are you even on the Left or do you just pretend to be?

I do hate to get involved in problems between two people, but I can't help but feel that this sentence kind of drives the underlying theme of this thread home.

Like so?

From what I understand, it relieves the cashier from the consequences of making a judgement call.  A "no exceptions" rule ensures that they won't get the borderline scenarios wrong.  Sure, it might annoy some people, but when one's liquor license is on the line (plus a lot of fines), it's not gonna change.

A grocery store I used to work at in MA had a no exceptions rule like that. I was certainly awkward/embarrassing to have to ask someone that was clearly old enough to buy alcohol several times over for their ID, more so if they didn't have it on them and I had to tell them that I couldn't sell it without first getting my supervisor's approval. But, I wasn't going to risk my job over it, and while in certain cases it may be glaringly obvious said person is old enough, I understand not wanting to leave that sort of judgment call to a cashier when it comes to grayer (no pun intended) areas.

So, the general concept here is to destroy 4000 years of history, incidentally killing a hundred thousand people or so, to escape barbarism?

Surely peace will finally come to the world then!

Also

So, the general concept here is to destroy 4000 years of history, incidentally killing a hundred thousand people or so, to escape barbarism?

sounds like the founding of america to me - why do you hate america?

B-b-but, rapists would be "frowned upon"! Problem solved!

(this bit of snark brought to you by the fact that Cram already addressed the issues in a well-thought out, succinct manner).