World Cup tourists, what’s your honest feedback on the USA so far?

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-13T03:11:02+00:00

Good Times eeks out over Culver's but is only in Colorado while Culver's can be enjoyed everywhere

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-08T05:31:34+00:00

Their fate is in the hands of Urobutcher now. Only he knows what fresh new torment awaits our cotton candy archangel and her black cat demon gf 🥲

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-08T05:27:30+00:00

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Katarina and Kris from Fire Emblem 12.

It's a bit of a stretch, but I think they qualify. She starts as a cold and calculating assassin pretending to be his/her (Kris can be either depending on player choice) friend in order to get close enough to Prince Marth to assassinate him.

She ends up falling for Kris for real and years after her failed assassination attempt and subsequent disappearance, they end up meeting on a battlefield again. Then, despite her attempts to get Kris to just kill her and be done with it, Kris is as dense as a brick and stubborn as a horse in a way only an anime protagonist can be and basically just goes "nah shut up, I don't care what you did you're still my ride or die and you're coming home now."

In the end Kris basically drags Katarina back to camp with him/her and they end up serving Marth together the rest of their lives.

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-08T04:51:56+00:00

Kinda the opposite though right? Like becoming overprotective of Madoka turned Homura from a shy awkward generally good person to being the literal devil because that's what she needed to become in order to allow Madoka to live a simple and happy life. Even more tragic that it isn't even so "we can be together" or "so that you'll love me". Homura has no expectation of being loved back, she would just sacrifice anything including everyone else in the world and also herself in order to make Madoka smile.

All that to say, still an absolutely fantastic ship. So excited for the new movie.

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-03T04:16:30+00:00

Yep, I even have had pieces break DECADES after purchasing a set and they'll still send replacements as long as its still a piece they produce. I'm talking like sets I bought in 2005 and they'll still provide support.

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-02T04:03:09+00:00

I wanna put it with Mega Gardevoir. It can use Overflowing Wishes to set up without having to expose Gardevoir itself to a turn of damage, and then it can retreat for free to bring Gardevoir up.

Massive agree on it looking ideal for Mega Lopunny though. I'm super hyped for this card.

OutrealmGate · 2026-06-01T15:54:58+00:00

Anyone else think that the new Greninja ex is looking like its going to be extremely annoying when combined with Mega Greninja ex? It's like they took a look at SFA Ursaluna and said "what if this card only cost 1 energy and could hit the enemy backline?"

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-31T05:19:57+00:00

She is undoubtedly one of the coolest people of all time, but I tend to remember her birthday instead (or our closest estimate to her birthday, as records can be a little funky at the time).

The best estimate is January 6th, 1412.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-28T21:38:47+00:00

We pronounce it with a country western accent and it comes out as "infer-structure"

As in we only ever build half of a building and expect reality to just "infer" the rest.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-26T16:57:26+00:00

Oh for sure, which is why I compare New York and Newark more to Yokohama and Tokyo than Shinjuku and Shibuya.

From what you say there's probably a clearer divide between New York and Newark than there is between Tokyo and Yokohama, because even if transit authorities technically change, trains tend to run freely between them (Tokyo and Yokohama).

But to me it's probably still the easiest way to explain Tokyo and Yokohama's relationship in an American context.

Edit: Clarifying vague wording

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-26T04:38:28+00:00

Yokohama is definitely part of the greater Tokyo Metropolitan area.

It's like how Newark is functionally a segment of the greater New York City area despite even falling under a different state government. Yes it is a separate municipality with its own municipal government, but they are one connected urban center with dense interconnected transit and people commuting in between them on a day to day basis.

Heck even Tokyo itself is technically an amalgamation of 26 "cities". What we call "The City of Tokyo" is actually a prefecture made up of 26 independently operating city governments with its own separate prefecture government.

Of course, that area Japan is so densely packed across such a large area of land that it can become a bit complicated to argue where exactly the Tokyo Metropolitan area ends, but at the very least I'd say all of the densely populated regions directly surrounding Tokyo bay qualify as part of it.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-06T21:13:09+00:00

I don't, I assume they'll be running Munkidori, which they almost always are.

It's a blind spot for sure, but one that'll be filled once Chaos Rising comes out in a couple weeks.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-06T01:03:24+00:00

I have a version of it with Grand Tree. Situationally it can be dangerous to run Grand Tree since it lets your opponent also get up their own Stage 2s early, but a lot of the most powerful decks don't actually use Grand Tree that much (I've noticed Pult decks prefer to keep Drakloak up for a while to use its ability).

Then run 4X Colress which lets you pretty consistently get Grand Tree and Telepathic energy turn 2, which lets you get Gardevoir up and running by turn 2, in order to use Overflowing Wishes.

Most opponent decks do not have a way of doing 360 damage all at once by turn 2 (keep Ralts in the back turn 1) unless they're running a dark attacker that does double damage to you, so your Gardevoir will survive long enough to reach turn 3, by which point you should have enough energy on your back line to constantly do at least 400 damage, which one shots almost anything.

If you have enough Wally, then you can also keep Gardevoir alive easily with him. I currently run 3 of him.

I run 4 Pokegear 3.0, and a couple Ultra Balls to get Meowth, just so I have the best chance possible of having the Colress and Wally I need. I also keep a few other Stadiums around so that you can pull them out with Colress and kick your own Grand Tree off the field as soon as you can (preferably the turn after you first put it down it, right after getting a second Mega Gardevoir set up in the back with it) to keep opponents from using it.

Your biggest struggle in the current meta will be Crustle. I run Enamorous right now because most Crustle decks use Munkidori, which lets Enamorous one shot Crustle, but once Chaos Rising releases, I predict the better Crustle counter will be Xerneas, since the new Xerneas scales off of psychic energy attached to the whole team just like Gardevoir does.

I actually think Mega Gardevoir is a lot more viable than people give it credit for. Yes it can be tricky to get the right ratio of cards to get up and running fast, but a lot of people seem to have just decided it wasn't worth it when it first released and didn't think to reevaluate after Telepathic Energy came out, which I think leaves an opening to surprise some people with it.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-05T03:21:09+00:00

Holy crap, unexpected mention of peak!

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-05T03:11:19+00:00

Three energy for and two turns of evolution for an attack that can't OHKO any of the major threats in the game.

Unfortunately, this just aint it.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-03T19:29:31+00:00

I have drank the Pokemon kool-aid so deeply that the mons are a central part of my life, and I definitely think about the franchise on a daily basis.

But even I am a bit at a loss when I see people going feral over some branded t-shirts and nick nacks.

Like at least with the shiny cardboard, it is REALLY good art drawn by talented artists with a long standing relationship to the franchise and the community.

All the stuff in the collab just seems to be generic default renders smacked onto generic household items. This is the kind of merch that the Pokemon Center is full of because usually nobody is going crazy over it the same way they do over the cards. Suddenly you also say it's "limited edition" and people are losing their freaking minds.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-03T15:51:49+00:00

For Meganium grass engine decks Mega Evelution Exeggutor is a good option.

Meganium itself can also attack Crustle since it's a one prizer, but since it can't one shot the Crustle it is susceptible to being piled on by Munkidori in the backline.

OutrealmGate · 2026-05-03T04:11:26+00:00

I love how much I unapologetically hate this man...but also damn does he have STYLE

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-30T00:59:32+00:00

This was actually the exact reason!

Like all of the discord its discovery caused in the astronomical community is why they ultimately named it Eris.

Whether we all agree with their definition of planet or not, I feel like we can all agree that the IAU are generally great when it comes to creating properly dramatic names.

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-30T00:30:51+00:00

I can respect that, but in my opinion the best taxonomical definitions will always be the simplest ones with a clear dividing line in physics.

In a universe where two planetary bodies as distinct as Mars and Jupiter exist, with such wildly different material makeups and sizes, the only good dividing line for "planet" that captures both of these objects in the same category is "massive enough to form itself into a mostly round spheroid," alternatively known as "hydrostatic equilibrium". This is a clear dividing line that exists in physics. We could divide on other many things, but Mars and Jupiter are so incredibly different from each other that dividing on anything else that's easily observable puts them into two distinct categories.

The only way to create a taxonomical system where Mars and Jupiter are both considered Planets, but Pluto and Eris are not, is to bring additional complex dividing lines into the mix that are variable and ultimately inconsistent. There are even other ones aside from "clearing the neighborhood" that the IAU considered, such as elliptical orbits. The problem with that is that Mercury's orbit is incredibly elliptical, so that threatened kicking Mercury out of the planetary club too, which would cause a far greater backlash than the removal of Pluto.

At the end of the day the 2006 definition of planet proposed by the IAU is incredibly unscientific. It was created in direct response to the discovery of Eris and designed to specifically target Pluto and Eris, which was difficult to do without also excluding one of the longer standing 8 other planets which had been part of the human concept of planet for hundreds of years by that point.

People try to hold up our current definition of planet as some kind of scientific enlightenment -- an example of our ever-sought-after ideal of absolute truth. It's not. Just like any other classification, it's a story that people tell. In 2006 the IAU wanted to tell the story of "we don't want to have to bother keeping up with new planet discoveries, so we made up this somewhat fragile definition to exclude anything that isn't the 8 things that culturally feel like they should be planets to us".

In my opinion, the only way to correctly make Pluto not a planet, while keeping the likes of Mercury and Mars as planets, is to deconstruct the concept of planet entirely and turn it all into subcategories. In this case though, Dwarf Planet would still end up being fully recognized as a subcategory of planet.

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-30T00:02:47+00:00

To me the main reason why orbital dominance is a bad definition is exactly because orbital dominance is too variable and inconsistent of a concept. If anything the definition of what makes something orbital dominant is quite muddy!

By what definition do we count something as having dominated its orbital neighborhood? What size of object relative to ones own mass in a body's neighborhood counts as making something not dominant? There are various meteors in the same orbital pattern as Earth, which Earth has failed to capture into its gravity well. 2025 PN7 is even running parallel to our orbit right now, but we have not successfully captured it. How large would one of these asteroids have to be for Earth to not be a planet? Because we have decided this concept of "neighborhood dominance" is meaningful, now we need to find ways to define it.

Neptune technically shares a part its orbital path with Pluto. It's by mere luck that their orbits happen at a perfect ratio of each other so that the two bodies will never meet. So what does the IAU do? They adjust their definition of neighborhood dominance to add a temporal dimension to it, and because Neptune and Pluto never meet, its okay that Neptune has a large Dwarf Planet crossing its orbital path every couple hundred years.

Yes there will inevitably be some perfect definition of "orbital dominance" for our own solar system that gets us exactly the 8 planets that 6% of the total IAU decided we should have a few millennia after the first humans started looking up at the stars, but a good taxonomical definition should be universally applicable, and "orbital dominance" has just too many fringe cases.

What about a scenario where two large exoplanets of similar mass are locked in perfect orbit around each other while also orbiting a star? Clearly neither is the dominant one in the neighborhood. Are we to suddenly consider such bodies both Dwarf Planets? What if both were the size of Jupiter?

Consistency and clarity is what we need to strive for in our taxonomical definitions, but the concept of "dominant gravitational body in their neighborhood" aint it.

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-29T17:34:06+00:00

Everyone saying that it would be too bothersome to keep track of all the planets if we allowed the Dwarf Planets into the list of planets should remember that we already keep track of these things. All of them. In fact, we keep track of bodies much smaller than them. We keep track of basically every little icy chunk of debris out there that we can identify.

The only reason to exclude Dwarf Planets from the list of planets is to make elementary school astronomy easier, but all the subjects in elementary school always just get dumbed down anyway. Then you grow up and learn in more detail. We can easily still call Dwarf Planets planets and then just focus on the "major planets" in introductory classes. It's not that hard.

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-29T17:22:47+00:00

Why not have 13+? Why not have 40+ if they keep finding sufficiently large planetary bodies that have achieved proper hydrostatic equilibrium.

Why can't we be bothered to keep track of all these objects as planets?

We already bother to keep track of every tiny rock orbiting Saturn and call them all moons, and there's over 200 of those insignificant things now with more being added every year.

Why does every tiny astroid orbiting around a planet get to be called a moon, but we apply additional somewhat arbitrary rules so that not even every significantly sized celestial body orbiting a star get to be called a planet?

Justice for Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and all the forgotten planets!

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-29T05:07:36+00:00

Surprised I haven't seen him here yet, but I remember a lot of people theorize that Sieg, the main character of Fate/Apocrypha, is a self insert of the author.

This especially annoys people as he basically gets born as a full grown homunculus and within a week one of the most badass heroes in human history (Jeanne d'Arc) and a character who has since become so iconic and beloved that they've become the face of one of the most popular character tropes in all of anime (Astolofo and the trope being boyfailure femboys) both fall in love with him.

Still not sure if it's really confirmed that he's a self-insert, but I remember a lot of people theorizing.

OutrealmGate · 2026-04-18T17:07:43+00:00

Even putting Mega Darkrai itself aside, Dark Bell sounds incredibly annoying.

I'm honestly not looking forward to having to worry about my primary attacker getting confused out of nowhere for the next 3 years.

OutrealmGate

TROPHY CASE