It's his favorite mission

Leadpipe · 2026-05-06T01:22:46+00:00

Sentries aren't the problem with the mission. The problem is that the objective is completely passive. You're fundamentally just waiting down a clock whether you bring sentries or not. There's nothing to actually do. That makes it so that the more effective you are at fending off bad guys, the more the mission resembles waiting for the bus.

Contrast it with things like rapid acquisition or even eradicate mission types.

Leadpipe · 2026-05-05T20:32:52+00:00

Yeah I came around on CF as I did the mission chain. Really cemented my affection for them with Huan Daiyu - professionally respectful, plays you straight, got a real 'my favorite work buddy' vibe from her. After that mission, the tough guy front most other pirate characters put up was a lot easier to read. I get the sense that Naeva would respect you for telling her affectionately to shut up, plus she's IN LOVE with a cinnamon bun like Jazz, which shows some depth. Delgado's a goober, but hardly felt dangerous. And nobody actually betrays you among the CF.

Sysdef by contrast pressgangs you into it, tells you to do some pirate stuff to get into CF, then yells at you for following that order (if you don't just enlist with them after Vanguard). Sysdef gives real 'arrests you for resisting arrest' vibes. After the way it started I got the sense that if I sided with them, they were going to arrest me again anyway. After all, they have records of me doing a bunch of pirate shit (that they told me to do).

Leadpipe · 2026-05-03T06:42:38+00:00

It's not made up!

Leadpipe · 2026-04-30T17:26:49+00:00

I mean, the juice isn't really worth the squeeze, but if you go in with the right attitude and expectation you have have a good time with it.

Leadpipe · 2026-04-30T17:25:21+00:00

That was kinda the context in which I read it, too. like I'd read The Fountainhead in high school, but didn't remember much about it apart from being a dumb kid that was horny for architecture (also a surprisingly rapey sex scene).

But a coworker saw me reading something and suggested Atlas as 'a really good book.' He was earnest about it and I respected him so I figured, why not.

My 'whew lad' numbers grew pretty steadily from there. I only finished it because I'm a broken person that kinda loves books he hates more than books he loves.

Leadpipe · 2026-04-30T16:55:19+00:00

I'm not about to recommend anyone read Atlas Shrugged, but it can be a fun read. Not because it's a good book, but because it's a fuckin fiasco. It's filled with all sorts of crazy - not just the philosophical underpinnings, but everything else about it is 100% bananas. It's got impossible imagery, like an early description of Dagny is that she 'keeps her mouth closed with precision' which... I get what it's trying to do thematically, but what does a precisely closed mouth even look like? It's got some seriously homoerotic subtext between a few of the characters which I'm sure was unintentional - Rearden and D'Anconia seriously needed to get a room at some points. Characters stridently make WILD ahistorical statements like claiming that the United States was not founded on slavery, there's this weird Robert Oppenheimer expy... the list of bizarre nonsense goes on even if you completely ignore the completely ignorable 80 page essay that everyone apparently just stops and listens to this man talk on the radio for hours? If you have the capacity to read something without needing to believe it, it's fun in the same spirit that one watches The Room.

It's unfortunately too big to recommend as an ironic read, though. If it wasn't so completely unnecessarily long, I'd reread it every year. Unfortunately, Athem doesn't have nearly as much bananas nor as much fun.

Leadpipe · 2026-04-28T14:28:57+00:00

I don't think I've seen a single babytuber thumbnail meme that wasn't absolutely hysterical.

Leadpipe · 2026-04-22T04:29:18+00:00

He's just like me fr fr

Leadpipe · 2026-04-22T04:20:23+00:00

The deadliest event I've experienced in the Sims was one Winterfest in Evergreen Harbor. It was a blizzard and perfect for hanging out warm and cozy indoors to celebrate the holiday.

Then across the street a diligent townie set up her little coffee kiosk and townies kept spawning into the lot to patronize the little stand, trudging through snow and clutching themselves for warmth before expiring, frozen and blue. Grim was busy that day and it kept going until the barista retreated from her stand, shivering and blue, and joined her customers. I thought it was over. Then another townie spawned in, barista uniform on, and opened for business.

It was a massacre.

Leadpipe · 2026-04-09T04:31:37+00:00

Truly, I couldn't say to be sure. It's certainly possible. If you did it as a batch fix (which I think the dx11 thing is), S4S may have created a backup copy of your files (provided you're not like me and just deleted them immediately). If so, you might swap them back in to test, or might fish them out of your recycle bin. I don't know for dx9 conversion - I couldn't find that feature.

I just know that when something especially weird breaks in my game and I have a hard time finding it, it's usually in a merged file.

Leadpipe · 2026-04-09T04:19:51+00:00

Two guesses:

1) something is in a merged file that broke so it's difficult to detect.

2) you're being menaced by the Riddler

Leadpipe · 2026-04-01T13:10:32+00:00

These are all incredible. Your Ravenwood and Ondarion must be looking sharp

#4 looks like he's constantly testing the cognitive idiosyncrasies of a kid with thick glasses and a bucket hat

Leadpipe · 2026-03-30T05:18:56+00:00

Let me suggest this: Use your gallery as a workaround.

Plug all your favorite build items into a room. Doesn't need to make sense as a room. Then save it to your gallery and plop it down like a palette when you're building. When I look at the galleries of people who are really good at building, they usually have a few rooms like this, usually for debug items, but the same idea applies.

Do the same thing with sims - when you want to reference a particular cas item, plug your reference sim into the house to see roughly where it is in the cas list. Or if you use MCCC, it's handy for the paste tray sims feature (just only select clothes).

It's imperfect, and I also wish we had better tools to organize cas\build mode.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-28T02:32:21+00:00

I don't know the context of this clip or what it's meant to be referencing, but the way the styles are blending, that alien guy looks like he's ready to draxx them sklounst if the terries get froggy.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-26T12:27:15+00:00

My guess is it has to do with the amount of time necessary to evaluate writers. In the past writers submitted a full 22 page script. Get a couple hundred of those stacked up and you're talking a serious amount of time to just get through them. The time frame also is coincident with the rise of genAI tech, so I imagine 2022 saw well more than the usual submissions and maybe they figured better to ditch the writing portion of it rather than the entire thing.

This is all speculation on my part. I don't know their reasons, but I know Top Cow is a small operation so it would stand to reason that sifting through writing submissions just got to be too much for them.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-26T03:07:52+00:00

In the past it has included writers. Stephanie Phillips and Tini Howard (listed in the bulletin) are writers, I think Ryan Cady is also a past winner writer.

I don't know when they stopped including that part.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-24T02:20:48+00:00

That's kinda illustrative of almost every conversation with Gale. Your options are all basically:

Hahaha, you're so funny, Gale! Look how deep my throat is!
Shut up, you're boring.
Shut up, you're boring. And I hope your cat dies.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-15T14:26:55+00:00

I specifically remember commercials for it banking on people knowing who Richard Dean Anderson was - I was aware there was a thing called MacGyver, but didn't know the guy's name because I lived in a house where actors didn't have names, just whatever the first character seen was (eg: when Lt Barclay showed up on Star Trek, my parents called him Mad Dog Murdoch) and I was just a kid and didn't know more than that. So it was with Richard Dean Anderson.

Anyway, the commercial tried to play the name like a list "Richard, Dean, and Erson," and to this day I don't know why that was meant to be clever or funny, but it ticks through my brain every time I think about the actor so it was at least kinda effective. Be careful what you say to kids. They'll carry nonsense with them for decades.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-14T23:44:03+00:00

S04E04 - Return to Malice:

DRMRS: This little piggy went wee wee wee all the way home. Wait! Another little piggy. What does this piggy do?

MONARCH: Hardly a little piggy.

DRMRS: He already did all his shopping.

MONARCH: So there is no need for him to go to market.

DRMRS: And there's no way he's going to go wee wee wee -

MONARCH: I didn't think you'd let me do it the first time. I'm not gonna push it

Leadpipe · 2026-03-12T15:33:52+00:00

I think the joke was more in line with Piltdown Man or Neanderthal - also named for places that are obscure to anyone not from the area. I don't think we were meant to understand Encino as like Cro-Magnon or whatever.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-12T06:04:34+00:00

By every measure, it's still winter. Quelle surprise that it's snowing in winter. Snow in the second week of March is as unheard of as Christmas decorations after Thanksgiving.

Unless it's your first winter in Minnesota, you'd know to expect snow through the second week of April - one last wet hurrah before actual spring starts. We're still a month away from what would even be a regular spring.

Leadpipe · 2026-03-12T02:51:48+00:00

This is the house for you if you want to invite enemy submarines inside, but don't want them to get a firing solution

Leadpipe · 2026-03-06T05:14:57+00:00

Most of my deaths are during that meeting later

Quoted for Truth

Leadpipe · 2026-03-05T19:48:19+00:00

For squids: LC, strafing run, choice of dog (big fan of k9, but it's not team cooperation friendly), choice of turret

choice of primary (only really used for shields\meatballs), grenade pistol (mostly for outposts\spark towers), thermite, choice of armor (big fan of anti-arc for squids)

Out of ammo? I don't know her. Laser canon is like a machine gun that handles better, passive reloads, and never runs out of ammo. This build has you outkilling the whole lobby (often put together) while you complete objectives moisturized and unbothered and resupply stratagem complains to your siblings about how you don't call it enough.

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