Mira

No need to apologize; you've already done an astounding amount of unpaid work for the community. I hope things turn out better for your personal situation in the upcoming year.

For some reason it looks fine to me in the quote box of your post. Might just be a weird browser thing

The worst month of my life was when I worked as a dishwasher at the National Museum in Amsterdam, two and a half years ago. I've worked several different manual labour jobs but none of them were as strenuous as that one. On the first night I had to work from 6PM to 2AM without any breaks, being ordered around by impatient aggravated people who all hated being there, and was only given leftovers to eat during five-second interludes when there was no work to do. After my shift was done I found out that, contrary to what I'd been told, there's no bus service between Amsterdam and my home town on weekdays after 2AM which meant I was stranded until daybreak. To top it all off, I found out later that they wouldn't fully cover my travel expenses. The actual work involved running back and forth between the kitchen and the dishwashing machine carrying heavy loads of dirty equipment (which involved a lot of bending over to pick up said heavy loads; I heard most of my coworkers were getting physical therapy), put all of the equipment and all of the dirty dishes and cutlery in the machine, put everything back in the right places (which changed frequently), clean out the machine during quiet moments and take out all of the trash. Ideally you would need at least three people to make everything run smoothly, but I was often expected to do everything by myself for eight hours, sometimes with one other person. As a result, I spent my whole shift in a state of near-panic trying to keep the restaurant afloat and always found myself having to skip the one 30-minute break I was granted every day (only during day shifts, which is thankfully what I was mostly assigned to after that disaster of a first night), and still I'd leave a mountain of work for the guy after me. Also because I constantly carried around hot plates and my hands came into contact with hot water all the time they were covered in blisters and the ends of my fingernails kept coming off. Also, the trash bags were really cheap so they'd usually tear open when I tried removing them from the bins. The only good thing I can say about it is that they gave their employees free dinner (again, only during day shifts), but since I never had time for a break I couldn't really make use of that offer. Everything combined with coworkers snapping and yelling at me when I failed to keep up reduced my mental faculties to those of a scared cat within a matter of weeks; I was still getting flashbacks of that time up until the last time when I was able to go to a restaurant.

There have got to be more diplomatic ways of conveying this to the person without whom Game Dungeon wouldn't have turned into anything...

Why are YouTube embeds tiny now?

He still refers to himself as "Robotnik" in that game IIRC, it's just his enemies who call him "Eggman".

Not every episode is going to be equally strong, but I'm absolutely not seeing an obvious downward trend in quality, personally. I enjoyed the Satan cameo too, but then again I'm also apparently one of the few people who enjoyed watching Freeman get high on morphine so maybe I'm just weird.

My God, does that mean he's played this to completion more than once?

I admire your patience but I don't always envy you for it.

So you admit then that Trump's conduct was in fact of influence and that deliberately lying about the threat of the virus was a decision that turned out to be bad. I'd like to remind you that Trump knew as early as February 7 that COVID is "more deadly than even your strenuous flus"; simply recommending a change in people's behaviour, like other world leaders did in the early stages of the pandemic, could have slown down the spread of the infection. At the beginning of the outbreak there was a lot of confusion about a new disease, but the CDC came around and has recommended face masks from April 3 onward. The WHO followed suit in June after evidence in Europe pointed to the efficacy of face masks. Trump didn't personally start wearing a mask until July, and even afterwards has continued to make fun of his political opponents who wear masks and accused them of weakness and wanting to appear politically correct. He has made wearing masks a partisan issue. In April the Justice Department threatened to take legal action against any states imposing strict anti-Covid measures, and followed up on its threat a month later by backing a lawsuit against the state of Michigan. Trump himself meanwhile didn't help matters, to put it mildly, by calling on his supporters to "liberate" Michigan and other states with similar lockdown policies, in spite of those policies being overwhelmingly supported by epidemiologists. The first case of COVID in the United States was reported on January 20, but only in mid-March did Trump order FEMA to lead the federal government's response to the disease and begin stockpiling medical supplies. The president put his own son-in-law, a man with no experience in epidemiology or organizing government action of this magnitude, in charge of a task force that was supposed to assist FEMA in identifying reliable sources of protective equipment but made numerous blunders and prioritized political loyalty over competence. The government's chaotic response combined with Kushner's warning that "the federal stockpile is supposed to be our stockpile" and not "the states' stockpile that they then use" led to states bidding against the federal government and each other in a desperate scramble for supplies. Trump called PPE shortages "fake news" and bluntly dismissed the concerns of governors like Cuomo, whose request for a sufficient number of ventilators when his state was the epicenter of the disease during the height of the first wave fell on deaf ears, before the president eventually complied after warning the governors to be "more appreciative". Politicization is inevitable; it's happened in pretty much every democracy that's been hit by the pandemic. However, in a healthy political environment the focus of the debate should simply be on whether the government is doing a good enough job preventing deaths and keeping infections under control, not on whether or not the disease is really as bad as all the evidence points out. In February, around 70% of both Democrats and Republicans agreed that COVID was "a real threat"; one month later, the percentage of Democrats had increased slightly while the percentage of Republicans had dropped to 40%.

New Zealand has held out a lot better against the virus despite being built on similar cultural foundations as the USA. That's absurd; the Trump administration has seemingly done everything that is in its power to sabotage an effective COVID response. The president and the executive were aware of the danger of the virus early on but chose to deliberately downplay it as long as possible, in addition to denying the effectiveness of face masks, supporting lawsuits against state governors who did attempt to proactively combat the disease, bumbling the distribution of medical supplies to the states, and generally contributing to the politicization of the pandemic to the point where a lot of people see refusing on an individual basis to comply with measures to stop the spread of the virus as an act of support for their president.

Great episode as usual. I'm still holding out hope that Freeman will eventually find someone he can have a pleasant interaction with... ?

World Health Organization and government health agencies of pretty much every developed country on earth OWNED because two Democrats don't take masks seriously

Are you five? This isn't the way to try and get to know a girl better, sonny I have a degree, I have a job, I have an apartment, I have no criminal record, I pay my taxes, I get by without assistance... and I am arguing with a stranger over the internet about whether or not I deserve to be locked up so I suppose I can't be completely right in the head, but what specific problem do I cause for which I need to be "handled"? Why should anyone besides you care if you don't like what I have to say?

You haven't really explained why this is a significant enough problem to warrant drastic action, or even why it's a problem at all except for the fact that you personally have a distaste for mentally ill people, so you're not giving this discussion much of a choice but to revolve around you and your own warped beliefs. Speaking of which, you call yourself a proponent of freedom of speech yet you support silencing entire groups of people simply because you don't want to be confronted with their existence, and you're afraid blanket banning tools on the internet will be misused by power-hungry authorities yet you support indiscriminately locking people up if they're "mentally ill" (a not-at-all ambiguous label which I'm sure you apply with fairness and nuance). You are an interesting specimen.

I don't know what to think. The backgrounds and environments are very well done, but the animations are a bit rough around the edges. The main character's voice is solid, the other voice actors range from over-the-top to downright amateurish and the sound effects can get annoying too. The gameplay has a lot of pixel hunting. The story kept me interested enough to want to see it through to the end but I don't like how it needlessly plays up the cruelty for shock value, and the supposedly big reveals at the end just left me cold. I really like the idea of going through an abandoned place, following in the footsteps of dead people and reading their logs along the way, but it's not done organically here like in BioShock or Soma; it's just a collection of tangentially related biographies that you stumble upon one after another. I think I understand what the "doubt" rating means a little better after playing this. I wouldn't say I regret putting in the effort but there are much more enjoyable adventure games out there than this, and certainly much better stories with similar themes as this one.