dual_sport_dork

As opposed to... makeup? Like, from the dollar store? I'm surprised he doesn't have a full time stylist on staff anyway. Or does he spraypaint that orange shit on his face himself?

All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you're regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you're an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you'll run across all of the components. Ignore all other risks.

This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I've got such an immense respect for the latter. If you're willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac's strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally...) to see what sticks, with a garnishing of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.

A bug which was later fixed by Raymond Chen.

The pinball game itself was licensed from Cinematronics/Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball, which had two additional tables as well as a sequel, both of which I still have on CD somewhere because I am a gigantic nerd.

Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven't checked out the new update yet but insofar as I'm aware those still are.

I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don't know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac's theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it's unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.

At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don't show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.

No crimes should be thought crimes. All crimes should be action crimes. There can be no middle ground as long as freedom of expression exists.

Doing Nazi shit should get you locked up (or beaten up, or whatever). Talking about it should just get you ridiculed by everybody.

Ah, yes. Thoughtcrime and suppression of freedom of speech are totally okay as long as it's our side doing it. No, no, no, see, when we do it it's totally different from when other people do it!

The problem is, everyone has this fantasy storyboard in their heads of the cops showing up going door-to-door with their MP5s and riot shields in a nice neat line loudly announcing their intentions. That is absolutely not how gun confiscation is going to work.

Instead, once they've declared that trans people or Democrats or whoever else are now blanket banned from owning guns, any time you interact with the police, let's just say during a (probably spurious) traffic stop, your name will come up on their little computer as a "person prohibited" and they'll put you in handcuffs and stuff you in the back of a police car right then. And then go break into your house and toss it looking for guns when you're not there to stop them. There will be no fight. You'll already be under arrest for something else. They'll find (or plant) whatever they want, and charge you with an additional nine hundred crimes that are all rewordings of the same thing, and put you in jail. When they come up to you they're not going to be talking about guns, they're going to start off with some low-grade bullshit you think you can talk yourself out of but use that as a pretext to lock you up for your guns.

There will be no headlines of jack booted thugs going around systematically kicking in innocent people's doors and garnering a bunch of negative press for themselves that people can rally themselves around. There will be individual local little news articles, one at a time, all along the lines of "Arsenal Of Illegal Weapons Found in [town name] Man's Home/Car By Brave Policemen After Conducting Traffic Stop, One Of Which Was a High Capacity Black Semiautomatic AR Glock Assault Child-Shooter," with an article underneath carefully spin-doctored to slander the individual in question as a mentally unstable transgendered pot smoking child grooming terrorist. They'll do this one at a time, forever, even long after they've gotten everyone the think they wanted to get.

The only defense against that is to assume that any time a cop looks in your direction you need to lock and load right then and there and initiate a fight for your life. Even if you win, you'll automatically be the bad guy.

Are you ready for that?

Is anyone ready for that?

Hey, hey, hey. Watch the penguin-bashing, bud.

That talk about substitutes happened when it was initially handed over to said data miner, and anybody concerned should have switched back then. I did, moving to Lawnchair, and never looked back. Oodles of other options are doubtlessly available.

Twice.

Well, good news!

The raid was authorized by a judge-issued search warrant following a monthslong investigation of the facility, Schrank said. The investigation of the worksite remains active, he added, but no charges of wrongdoing have been filed.

...Oh.