I think it’s the new normal

it’s really not though. You can tell because, while I’d be willing to bet that almost everyone in this thread has a bank account, none of us think of it as normal.

Wanna know which game I last broke my “no pre-orders” rule for?

No Man’s Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It’s become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven’t bought a game since then.

It’s kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you’ll develop and when (if ever) you’ll release it

Sounds like assault with a deadly weapon

If charged as a felony, you could be facing a sentence of two to four years in State prison. Regular assault (Penal Code § 240), is always charged as a misdemeanor offense.

The instrument used includes any type of firearm, knife, bat, car, or anything other type of weapon that could produce significant harm to the victim.

In order to prove a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, the prosecutor has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you assaulted another person and you used a deadly weapon or force that would likely result in great bodily injury.

An assault charge does not require that you actually make physical contact with or injure the person.

https://www.cronisraelsandstark.com/assault-with-deadly-weapon-penal-code-245-a-1#:~:text=Assault with a Deadly Weapon - Penal Code 245(a)(,four%20years%20in%20State%20prison.

If this was in California he is absolutely guilty of assault with a deadly weapon based on what he has admitted to personally.

I have shot and killed a deer with a flintlock gun. They’re not toys or props. He committed assault with a deadly weapon and the whole word is just like “Oh, that’s just wish.com iron man. You know how he is.”

https://www.eurogamer.net/no-cyberpunk-2077-didnt-remove-the-elon-musk-npc-because-he-wasnt-even-in-the-game-to-begin-with

You did not encounter elon, a character based on him, or a character voiced by him in cyberpunk 2077

They told him to get fucked, so one of his chode toadies on xitter started a rumor that they added him to the game and then removed him in a patch.

The measure of addiction is whether it disrupts your life or harms your loved ones.

It’s just a wet mouth on a long arm that reaches down to hell

I haven’t read penny arcade in years, but it brings me joy to see that the writing, at least, seems to be right where I left it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a deep crow that needs feeding.

that’s an intellectually dishonest way of quoting the person that you quote

is it impossible to have a balanced conversation about starfield in particular, or does the internet ad economy tend to exclude the middle of every conversation in favor of loud antagonism and engagement bait?

Rikers dig a ship’s counselor with money. At least the kind of Rikers that’d double down on a Lt Commander like me do.

Watching dude get sucked into the trap where he thinks that dominating this conversation is what’s important here is just 😙🤌so sweet. The only thing that could be more fun to watch is his face as what he said gets read back to him in a courtroom and he realizes that feeding his ego in this moment is gonna be what costs him his case.

Use coupon code CONVICTEDONALLCOUNTS to get 20% off a lumpy pillow that you can already get for 80% off at outlet and buyout stores nationwide.

Not really. You just have to know that the comms are going to or coming from a drone, which should be easy enough given that the AP needs to know how to route the comms so that information must be visible to it (and it can therefore decide to drop comms at that step in transport). Even with the content, origination and destination being perfectly secret you can do this like track which APs a given client connects to over a certain amount of time and infer airspeed and rough direction. Something flying at $droneTopSpeed +/- 10%, headed roughly toward some juicy target? Drop comms.

Remember that starlink is already in their communication chain and start thinking in terms of what you’d do if you wanted to intercept letters between two people and you’re already the mailman for one of them.

Once the killers have done all the killing they want, peace becomes paramount. Once they’ve stolen everything they can steal, then theft becomes a crime. A man with a gun kicks in your door, starts eating the food from your fridge and fucks your wife. He’s doing good peaceful things and if you resist you’re a warmonger.

It’s more complex than that, especially when all you’re looking for is denial of service. As an example: I don’t have to decrypt anything if I can use traffic analysis to determine which packets are sent to or coming from a drone and just drop them. Standard Internet security, TLS, encrypts the content of a packet but not the source or the destination. You could use a VPN wrapper but then it’s as simple as dropping traffic to and from the VPN.

They went into people’s houses to arrest them for being out after curfew.

They fired tear gas into people’s houses because they were suspected of giving water to protestors.

In Minneapolis a group of cops went around off duty, out of uniform in an unmarked van and fired irritant paintballs at everyone they saw. When someone shot back they arrested him for assauting an officer, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, etc. He was eventually acquitted because he stopped shooting as soon as they ID’d themselves.

The police are fucking animals roaming the streets and inflicting violence anywhere they can get away with it.

they could have asked for NG support before the event

The mayor of DC did, and was denied.

I didn’t realize Michael Flynn’s brother was responsible for sending in the troops

Look up when he was appointed. Trump put him in place during the lame duck period after the election specifically so that he could sabotage security ahead. No one “screwed up” security, they all did exactly what they were there to do. Capitol cops put up a token resistance then waved rioters in, NG was held away from the event until it was well too late, the only people who screwed up were the gangs of terrorists embedded in the crowd who failed to capture any government officials who could potentially have been ransomed in exchange for Trump being appointed. I’m usually a big fan of Hanlon’s razor but in this particular situation that would require a lot of competent people to become very stupid for exactly one day in a way that just so happens to benefit themselves greatly.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/jan-6-generals-lied-ex-dc-guard-official-523777

So here’s the head of the DC national guard saying that they were purposely delayed in their response and that the people from the army who testified in front of the jan 6 committee were, his words, “absolute and unmitigated liars”.

https://www.propublica.org/article/new-details-suggest-senior-trump-aides-knew-jan-6-rally-could-get-chaotic

Here are jan 6 rally organizers saying they knew before it happened that the rally was going to involve an unpermitted match in the Capitol. They say they called white house chief of staff Mark meadows about it and were ignored. The person who claimed to have made the call now says they didn’t and the white house was unaware of the plans to march on the capitol. Given the number of rioters who showed up in bespoke tshirts that said “storm the capitol” it’s fair to say that if the white house didn’t see this coming they were the only ones who didn’t. The article also establishes that Enrique tarrio, Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes were there and that organizers put up with their openly abhorrent beliefs because they can “push bodies where we point”. This is relevant because it means that people we’ve proven were in contact with the white house before 01/06 were there to cause a riot and knew it.

The above link also shows that capitol police knew what was coming. The released a memo on Jan 3 saying “Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike." An internal email from 12/31 said that rally permit requests were “being used as proxies for Stop the Steal” and that those requesting permits “may also be involved with organizations that may be planning trouble” on Jan. 6.

Another thing of note from that source is that no march on the capitol was permitted, but plans among organizers including those known to have been in direct contact with the white house publicly talked about the rally ending in a march on the capitol. It wasn’t until after those plans were published that Trump tweeted that he would personally attend the rally.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/11/955548910/ex-capitol-police-chief-rebuffs-claims-national-guard-was-never-called-during-ri

It’s also important to know that the DC national guard is unique in that it’s deployment is managed by the white house directly, rather than by state governors as other national guard groups are. The above source says that capitol police requested national guard support 6 times, including after violence erupted, and were denied all 6 times. Muriel Bowser, mayor of DC at the time, had also requested NG support ahead of the rally and had been denied.

So the white house was aware in advance of the rally, including that it would involve an unpermitted march on the capitol. Some organizers were so concerned that violence would erupt that they reached out to white house chief of staff mark meadows about it. They knew violence was coming. After the more openly violent elements announced that they would illegally march on the capitol, Trump tweeted that people should attend the rally and that he would be there personally. They took steps to amplify the violence. Trump also had the power to deploy the DC national guard. The guard was requested both before the rally by the mayor of DC and during the violence 6 times by capitol police. These requests could have been granted by Trump, but were instead denied. The trump white house took steps to hamper the response to the violence.

What else would you need in order to believe that this was a planned assault on democracy, coordinated directly with the white house and designed to take advantage of a legitimate peaceful protest?