adaptive systems posted:

My father’s mother recently died, in her late nineties, after two solid decades of fervent, daily, devoutly Catholic prayer for release from her increasingly humiliatingly decrepit body. I remember sitting with her in the dead of winter, in a lovely seafood restaurant, a few miles from the Atlantic. It wasn’t too long before her mind went, and almost as if she knew she didn’t have much time, she talked hurriedly, pausing only to sip her mineral water, and then returning to all the wondrous things she had the great good fortune to witness, from hearing the news that Peary had made it to the North pole, to actually seeing the Spirit of Saint Louis in person.

She remembered very keenly an afternoon spent doing the laundry in the alleyway with her mother in the Irish ghetto of Philadelphia. While they washed, they each kept an eye on her two younger brothers Frank and Joseph playing at war. A neighbor woman stopped in passing and said that she thought it wasn’t proper, to let kids play at war, what with the American boys dying over there, nowadays. And plus, it wasn’t Christian to encourage that sort of thing, now that we knew how horrible it could be, what with the mustard gas and the machine guns. My great-grandmother nodded, she understood perfectly. But, she said, since there was really no danger of these children ever having to go to war, she couldn’t really see the harm in it. Might as well let the little ones play, without scaring them by telling them that it wasn’t a game. She thought it could hardly do any harm; everyone knew there wouldn’t be any wars after this one, this war to settle all disputes, to settle the course of human civilization for the next millennia. Humanity simply couldn’t afford it, and all the leaders of the Great Powers knew it, finally. The Neighbor saw her point, and confided in her how she too felt so lucky to know that her children would never have to sail off and fight in a distant land, but that she also felt guilty, knowing that Missus O’Shea’s son had been born too soon for her to enjoy the same comfort.

Two decades later, my grandmother was living in San Francisco with her husband, a structural engineer who quit his practice designing skyscrapers and went to work for the military designing battleships. She heard the news of the Pearl Harbor attack while her husband was out boozing with his floozies. He came home late, and she clutched at him in a fearful frenzy the instant he came in the door. Assuming she was on again about his living in mortal sin and all that poo poo, he slapped her in the mouth and called her a crazy bitch before passing out. She went out to the bank that week, and remembered seeing all the pretty Japanese girls in the city all made up like movie stars, but so scared they trembled and looked like they would burst into tears at any moment.

And then, a few short years later, her brother Frank was leaning out of a tank hatch, not too far from Berlin. He was in the middle of a small town, one that had been cleared of Nazis, listening to an officer in the street, who was directing tanks forward. While he was trying to hear the officer’s voice over the din of the engines, he caught a glimpse of a man appearing in the open doorway of the ruined building across the street, and saw him instantly unleash a Panzerfaust directly at the center mass of the tank that he precariously balanced from. The Panzerfaust sparked across the street, and the officer, shouting orders, never seeing it coming, took it squarely in the back. It exploded through him, sending a shower of shrapnel and flesh cascading off the tank and through Frank’s torso, neatly slicing his left arm off just below the shoulder.

After the war, even with one arm, he was still able to find good factory work, and being a purple heart helped, though not as much as you might think, given that everyone was busy trying to get in on the rising tide and join the middle class. Frank’s brother Joseph spent the war doing clerical, rear-echelon work. After the war, he became an accountant and did well for himself. Each brother silently knew who had gotten the better end of the bargain.

Frank suffered a stroke in the bathroom at eighty. Three more the next week, and a drooling but largely lucid death that I am sure he thanked his loving Catholic God he had lived long enough to enjoy. Losing your arm as a kid teaches you a few things, I think. Like, “Better to die flat on your back in bed than cut in half on the cobblestones,” and don’t let the liars fool ya, kid.

Everyone is sad to see the greatest generation go, and rightly so. The wars of the past century are myths to us; we all want to draw near the old veterans sitting around the dimming campfire and be regaled by the tales of their heroism, and fanaticize about the acts of courage we would have been capable of, if only history had seen fit to grace us with the chance. The simplest of us mourn openly for lack of an opportunity to prove ourselves, though most of us, even the most decent, will find some similar longing if we search honestly enough .

But none of us is too eager to have been the wives of some of these heroes, trying to understand why they could only sleep on the floors for years after coming home, or deal with them sinking into Alzheimer’s, limping around the house shouting. Where are you? Where are you? Sergeant, Donny’s in the street! Sergeant! Get out of my way you German bitch! Sergeant! Donny’s hit! And none of us fantasize about being the mothers, getting the telegraph with the details of our only child’s death. And none of us, honestly, is too eager to have died at Iwo Jima, no matter how much fun Hollywood makes it look.

Instead we imagine what it must have been like, wearing bomber jackets, flak flying by on our left and our right, having no fear, knowing we were as pure as Arthurian Knights. We relish the thought of outflanking our enemy and taking vengeance for poor, poor Kowalski’s death, because we always imagine it’ll be our best friend to go, and never us. We comfort ourselves with the compliment that it will be us that stays coolly, crucially detached in the heat of battle while the blood of our fellow teenagers is hacked brutally into our faces, between hideous pleading sputters.

For some, the fact that I should merely pause to reflect upon these truths is disgraceful; a sign of cowardice and shameful slander on the dead, if not outright treason. For them, for those brave souls unencumbered by dread of slaughter, who weep not for broken cities, who see shallow corpse-strewn puddles as a paths to glory, who see war coming to them as a sacred calling, a chance to make prideful sacrifices and secure a lifetime’s worth of valor, for them I bring this consoling reassurance:

Have no fear. There is still time to be a war hero. The Great War is still coming. It’s there, over the horizon, and its sails are full with the wind that beats from the wings of the angel of history on her endless journey to escape us.
That ghost ship rushes towards you every bit as fast as you could hope.
Faster than you might have wanted, in hindsight.

Assuming you get to enjoy that peculiar wisdom of the living.

quote:

It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)

Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.

Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!

Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.

Mayor Wilkins posted:

I'm like a scientist who's conducted the same experiment a hundred times, an experiment where he coats a man with raw meat and then tosses him into a shark tank. Yeah, he's pretty sure the sharks will eat him, but he just wants to make sure, for science. He wants to give the sharks a chance to prove him wrong, to demonstrate that they do have the capacity to value human life and to appreciate human suffering, to prove that they're not just mindless evil eating machines.

TheCosmicMuffet posted:

Is this a real question? Because the ones from that crazy game about spiders that use naked torsos to lure victims has nicely sculpted breasts for days. Especially on the breast slug monsters made of breasts attended by unclothed nubile maidens--many of whom are killed while rearing the creature's young.

Sexual behavior pervades everything. What I worry about is that we'll spend so much time demonizing the product and the target audience, that we'll lose sight of the pain that this crass enterprise masks. Wouldn't that wargamer with a cabinet full of sex prefer a partner and kindred spirit with whom to play strip-40k (roll 2d6 and consult the table for the area of the body from which to remove clothing--if you roll doubles, roll twice--then roll a 'strip' dice against the toughness of the clothing--for each strip, roll any applicable 'layered clothing' saving throws to determine how much clothing is removed). Or even a menagerie of rotating partners in a 'tournament' style swinging environment? Wouldn't the simple addition of showers and lockerrooms to public gaming facilities do much to bring this dream closer to reality, and promote a society free from shame and depravity of a mind starved for affection?

And what of the companies who make these things? In a niche market with otiose marketability, isn't it nearly impossible to differentiate oneself? If Star Wars wasn't so appealing, wouldn't the urge to produce a TIE with a topless Howlrunner card, just to make ends meet and hopefully get your game into someone's hands be overwhelming? Recent policy changes at my job have put a term limit on my contract in June which I had not foreseen. While I should be able to find new work, nevertheless, the stress of this deadline is getting to me. Especially now that I'm trying to buy a house with my wife. If I could secure my future by putting breasts on something, wouldn't I?

I would.

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

vanisher posted:

http://i.imgur.com/YM7MmQv.gifv

vanisher posted:

I certainly am not trying to harass anyone
I thought the dev was pretty okay with light jokes from their posting
Just let me know if you'd like to make this a serious thread and I'm happy to jump on board

vanisher posted:

http://i.imgur.com/eaq0hSX.gifv

vanisher posted:

vanisher posted:

http://i.imgur.com/qpDnKHQ.gifv

Krankenstyle posted:

Your implied causation is a little shaky there... Are you saying that the GBS content creators left to create /pol/?

Coucho Marx posted:

Reminds me of the Blue Stripe series, specifically the holodeck janitor one!

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

this is the second time in recent memory that a super unambiguous bestiality joke has shown up in Garfield

Gumbel2Gumbel posted:

Subjunctive posted:

I’ve seen outlets above cupboards before, most frequently used for speakers.

Largepotato posted:

This is currently on the front page new and trending releases list.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/705280/Hakoniwa_Explorer_Plus/

Synthbuttrange posted:

lol

Light Gun Man posted:

OK so a friend of mine gifted this to me and...it's actually pretty fun? And kinda funny? Like yes half the bosses are giant monster women that attack you with their rear end but...I dunno, I'm having fun.

There's actually an entire partially rear end-based morality system if you can believe that. The store page says you can touch the one girl's butt but the truth is you can actually touch almost any NPC butt. Even cats and dogs. Even the developer of the game. And all these NPCs have unique dialog about it. Sometimes you do this on accident, because they'll turn around while you're trying to talk to them. The more butts you touch the more of a bad reputation you get. Stores might stop selling you items and stuff. NPC dialog will change, people will start telling you to go die in the desert and stuff. Some NPCs might even straight up start a fight with you in town about it. Oh yeah, you can also accidentally or purposefully attack any NPC. There's achievements for killing the developer and musician who did the BGM.

There's an evil version of the school swimsuit girl who catches you in an eternal text loop where she forces you to touch her butt and charges you 1000 money every time. When you run out of money she makes you take a butt touching loan and continues this until you are 10k in butt touchin debt, at which point she fights you.

The game itself is a solid isometric dungeon crawl. Controls were slightly strange but I got used to them pretty quick. The Save menu was weird for me but this may have been a controller config issue, I'm not sure. You talk to people in town to learn about new locations, walk around the world map to find them, then clear them out to advance. You can, for some reason, still attack on the world map, and thus if you want to you can cut down forests and mountains and stuff. All your equipment in the game has a durability meter, so you've got to kind of constantly cycle through items or find repair items to keep using ones you like. There's upgrade tools that will add different effects to them as well. It's pretty well executed, although you'll find yourself wishing you had a bigger inventory a lot. You can increase inventory size by beating bosses. This leads to a pretty frantic kind of gameplay most the time, scrambling to snag an item you want on the screen and equipping it in time. Bringing up the menu does pause things though, thankfully.

tl;dr creator clearly has a thing for touchin butts but it's pretty fun

frankee posted:

no its this thing

TheMaskedUgly posted:

The hunky werewolf, after failing to get between the teenaged lead and her 1000 year old rapist, explicitly diverts his romantic interest to their recently born baby; with full support of the family

theflyingorc posted:

People are critical of things that they've heard of, you say????

They were very bad AND very popular. We don't criticize bad things nobody is reading, you're correct.

EtchaSketch posted:

She actually left me back in September over the stress related to the other bad poo poo I used to do. She got sick of me having to sweep my car with a mirror looking for bombs while she waited inside for me to give her the signal that I was satisfied my car was safe to approach. I've pissed off some people over the years. I'd marry the girl in a second if she gave me the option and I'd rather have risked my own safety to die with a smile on my face than live with a frown. It sounds melodramatic but it's loving true, when she left me I lost the reason I hung on to life so hard and she took the dog with her. That dog was my baby.

I haven't done coke since October 10th at 7:57pm, the time I did the lines that led me to locking her in the bathroom.

I figure I'll be in love with her until I either get her back or meet someone else who makes me feel the same way.

People who hear I paid for her college and that she left me afterwards always want to criticize her, but knowing what I know about how it went down, and knowing what she knows about what I've done to support us, I can't blame her. Every time someone wants to say she used me, I want to put them in a coma, that girl put up with my poo poo to her breaking point; it broke up our little family. If I could figure out a way to have changed anything while still being able to provide for both of us and support her through getting a dual major and the first half of grad school, I would wish I'd done that.

I still love her so much I'd rather she be happy with someone else than unhappy with me, but I'd absolutely prefer to find a way she could be happy to be with me again.

Disgusting Coward posted:

Writing snotty letters to teachers should only be allowed if it's done in the style of a 1980s pro wrestling promo.


WELL LET ME TELL YOU DR. BUSSIERE, YA DAMNED PENCIL-NECK MAGGOT, YA MAKE ME WANNA PUKE WITH THE CRAP YOU WERE TALKIN' ON MONDAY NIGHT BLACKBOARD. YOU DARE STEP INTO THE REALM OF DISGUSTING COWARD, THE MOST ELECTRIFYING STUDENT IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, AND YOU DARE SHOW ME THE DISRESPECT OF SAYIN' THAT I AIN'T UP TO THE CHALLENGE OF YOUR FEEBLE STATISTICAL HYPOTHESIS TESTING EXAM? IF I DIDN'T WANT TO REACH OUT AND CHOKE THE LIFE FROM YOUR FRAIL BODY IT WOULD MAKE ME LAUGH! HOUR AFTER HOUR, DAY AFTER DAY, I BATTLED, AND I STRIVED. I DIDN'T BACK DOWN, I JUST KEPT LABOURING ON, MY THIRTY INCH PYTHONS STRAINING AS I STUDIED, WHILE YOU STRUTTED AROUND, A PAPER CHAMPION, INSISTIN' THAT "I CAN'T TEACH THIS". "WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD" YOU SAID. "REAL WORLD" PUNK IS WHERE I'M FROM. HARDCORE RULES, 24/7. I'M NO MAT TECHNICIAN, I AIN'T BEEN TO NO FANCY PANTS DANDY SCHOOL OF HARD STATS LIKE YOUR MOBY-LOOKIN' CARCASS, BUT I AM THE TOUGHEST DAMNED S.O.B IN THE HISTORY OF COGITATION AND I GOT 89% IN YOUR PANTYWAIST TEST, NO GODDAMNED THANKS TO YOU. SO YOU WANNA SPIT IN THE COWARD'S EYE, CLAIM MY NEGATIVE FEEDBACK WAS BECAUSE I AM ENTITLED, AND BECAUSE I'M BITTER THAT I'M NOT YET THE CHAMP? HA!

HA!

SO ENJOY YOUR LIFE, DR. BUSSIERE. CAUSE WHEN WE MEET, MAY 30TH, AT STIRLING UNIVERSITY'S EXPLOSIVE FINAL EXAM, IN FRONT OF 40,000 SCREAMING COWARDMANIACS WE'LL SEE. I WILL BECOME THE "A IN STATISTICS" GUY AND I WILL LEAVE YOU A FEEDBACK YOU AIN'T NEVER GONNA WALK AWAY FROM. OHHHHH YEAH.

Trouble Man posted:

I understand your problem. I have a morning ritual that I need to share with you. I call it "the terminator". First I crouch down in the shower in the classic "naked terminator traveling through time" pose. With my eyes closed I crouch there for a minute, visualizing either Arnold or the guy from the second movie (not the chick in the third one because that one sucked) and I start to hum the terminator theme. Then I slowly rise to a standing position and open my eyes. It helps me to proceed through my day as an emotionless, cyborg badass. The only problem is if the shower curtain sticks to my terminator leg. It ruins the fantasy.