#two decades we aged??

[cosyatp]

is no one going to say how perfect brittle bones nicky is for charles and edwin specifically verse 3 and the breakdown

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

Between Cerkonos of the Fire Ashari and Dr. Howard Margrove Robbie's proving that he can and he will play the weirdest middle-aged men you've ever seen in your life

[aces-to-apples]

I'm gonna be real, so little of previous games have actually mattered in any way beyond flavor text that I literally could not give less of a shit about this whole debacle. Like it's such a non-issue to me. Idk what games y'all have been playing for 15 years but truly this is the norm. Barely anything carried over from Origins to Hawke and all pretty minor shit, and I genuinely cannot think of anything beyond flavor text carrying over to Inquisition. Oh you could customize Hawke and they can answer a few vague questions with vague bullshit? Cool, presumably that's what the Inquisitor will give us. Like idk guys but I think maybe building up your expectations for a decade has had a detrimental effect on what should be reasonable expectations for a video game that's truly been in development hell for like eight years and wants to be functionably playable to brand new players without alienating them.

[onedivinemisfit]

Reminiscing over how Brutus used to sit at Max’ grave for the first few weeks following his death. We’d let him out to do his rounds, he was very diligent in keeping his “inherited” territory, but he’d always start by sitting for five minutes or so at the grave. Just sitting there, looking at nothing in particular.

[spiritcc]

at this point I don't even know if tag fragmentation in the general russian holmes space is worth addressing. a few years ago I successfully kept the ancient customs intact because I wrote a post so deranged and pretentious it displeased people into doing what I wanted but nowadays what's the point in making a grand return of being terminally online if yall kinda right

[coralsgrimes]

Benny Boy doing the one uncle who's the real life version of the how you doing fellow kids meme.

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

we should be very concerned what children are being taught about the Third Reich and the Soviet Union by institutions which cleave to the same materialist worldview that spawned those regimes

[kariachi]

Okay, looking at the history of Alan's page on the wiki, look into age shit. Going to try to keep my "I was literally there" commentary to myself.

~~

First mention of his age comes on April 28 2010, claiming it was stated by McDuffie but with nothing backing the claim.

It then back and forths a bit between his age being listed as 10, being listed as in his teens, or not listed at all based essentially on 'you don't have proof he's that young' 'you don't have proof he's not' and presumably 'guys he's like an inch shorter than Ben and built like a teen' it seems, eventually being left on 'he's 10'.

On January 2 2011 McDuffie is asked if the wiki is accurate as far as Alan's age and answers with "No, he's 11". This claim isn't added to the wiki, it seems nobody was citing any sources at the time.

On January 15 2011 the wiki is altered to show Alan as being 14 in AF, though the same page also lists him as 11.

January 16 2011 sees the 11 removed and replaced with fifteen.

An January 20 2011 the page is again altered to list him as 10 in AF and remove the mention of his age from the main body of the page.

On June 20 2011 somebody alters the wiki to state that he's 12 during AF, again with no citation.

This is changed back on June 24 2011.

On October 8 2011 the page is again changed to state that Alan is 14 in AF.

The page stays this way, including through multiple edits by the seeming originator of the 'Alan is 10' concept, until July 6 2014, when his age is removed entirely from the page.

The next time we see his age listed is after a long stint of the page being partially broken, on November 23 2014, listing him as 14 in AF.

His age is then removed again on January 18 2015.

And it stays like that until February 13 2019, when his age in AF is listed as 10 again, this time at least with a damn citation. The first, by the way, up until that day nobody was citing shit.

And that's how shit remains to this day.

~~

Now, doing this for 2 reasons. One- to back up my claims that 'he's 10' is inaccurate, there's a reason it was changed in the first place after that first comment from McDuffie ended up staying up nearly three years. And these weren't inactive years either, there were plenty of people going in and editing shit. Two- to give me a time to start looking to see if I can find where McDuffie clarified his age- somewhere between Jan 2 and Jan 15, probably closer to the latter.

Probably I won't be able to find it, it's been ages since the forum was taken down, and surely if it hadn't been lost to time somebody would have tracked it down by now, but I have to try. It just, burns at me so damn much, I have to make as strong an attempt as I can.

So, here I am off to search...

~~

And back several hours later with nothing to show for my trawling of archives, and I did fucking trawl. I've got 80 tons of shellfish and not a sign of this damn post because there's a massive chunk gone between the thread page fuckers managed to find and the next one I could get my mitts on.

Also the fucking site this thread page can be found on. It has like 70-odd pages from the old McDuffie site saved, all of them random single pages. How did this happen? Who set this up? The Internet Archive has shit in small batches, but this shit is just individual pages with whole chunks unaccounted for between them. Fucking weird. If nothing else these fuckers need to get in touch with each other and share what they've got.

~~

In the end though, I think this is if nothing else a solid reminder to archive shit. And to cite your goddamn sources when you're editing a wiki! Seriously, how the fuck did it take over twenty years to get a single citation on Alan's page? If people had been doing that from the start we would have had far fewer problems because we could just go 'this is what was said'! But no, now we're here, with me having to submit to the fact everybody is going to take a sarcastic remark as gospel despite contradictory evidence on the fucking screen until all knowledge of this fandom fizzles away!

Sorry, sorry, was trying to stay off that soapbox.

But, as important if not more so than the citations on wikis thing is still, back shit up people. Archive crap if you can. The Internet Archive has a Firefox extension, you can literally set it to automatically archive pages you go to. Because if this whole situation brings anything into the spotlight, it should be the fact that it's real easy for information to be lost to time. One man died, and because so much wasn't backed up, hundreds of pages, we've lost entire huge chunks of WoG and worldbuilding that now exists only in the heads of the people who were there to read it.

'The internet is forever' only holds true if we put in the effort, because otherwise everything from fandom crap to news articles to instruction manuals can vanish in a poof of lost funds and lost attention. If we wanna know shit later, we've got to store it now.

[isfjmel-phleg]

I am very sorry to make a terrible joke, but our student workers whom I was overseeing were being super efficient today with their shelf shifting project in the children's section. They were totally booking it.

[phantastragoria]

Preview for GotG #03...

[septembersghost]

me watching any piece of media ever made: how can i make the thesis here about the wondrous, fulfilling, frightening, destroying, restorative, glimmering thrall of, and tragic inevitability of grief within, any and every form of love?

elvis (2022): *very first thing we hear* oh, let our love survive... *later*: love song i've known since childhood used in a dark, ominous way and a desperately tender one: some things are meant to be. take my hand, take my whole life too, for i can't help falling in love... *later still*: it was love. *last*: i need your love...

ah. okay. so you just made my job too easy. i don't even have to search for it. thank you. guess i'll go insane.

[strixhaven]

pc players talking about missing the combat of dao and how good it is as if they don’t have twenty million quality of life improvements and still constantly use skip combat mods. you do not want dao combat again. you hate it. take it from a console player who is forced to endure dao as it actually is: you do not want this again. you are not playing dao and you can’t even begin to understand how little you know it nor how good you have it

[foldingfittedsheets]

Mattresses, unbeknownst to many, are a lot like cars. Every year new ones roll out, they’re always tweaking and innovating and you’ll never find the same one you loved decades ago when buying a new one.

Where I sold mattresses had a three month return or exchange program for this reason. New beds take a while to break in, and they’re a big expense. Your body is used to the old one. So we made sure people were loving it. If a bed got returned we’d take it back, sanitize and clean it, then sell it again on clearance.

To sell these we always had to disclose what clearance meant to customers, and they had to sign that they knew what they were getting. (FYI, not every company is as… forthright about the used bed situation)

In clearance we had beds that were floor models, we had returns, and more rarely we had old models whose line had been discontinued. These clearance beds were always final sale, so a bed could only be sold twice.

Now, the manager at the store I was working at had realized a vital fact. Clearance beds in the warehouse didn’t sell, especially old models that salespeople weren’t familiar with. And even more especially in odd sizes, like twin extra longs. So he set up a split king on the showroom floor to exhibit clearance beds, pulling all those forgotten twin extra longs out onto the showroom.

Almost all of these were brand new discontinued models. Beds I’d never learned in training were exhumed to be displayed. The manufacturers had moved on to new lines and they’d been left behind. Why would he take such in interest in selling old stock, you might wonder? Because we made double commission on the sales margin of clearance beds, and if we’d had a bed long enough they dropped the cost in the system so it was a fucking cash cow to sell these. Even with huge discounts the commissions were wonderful so it was a win win.

When I got started I was jazzed about this program, I was so on board to sell weird old brand new beds and make a ton of money. I had a wonderful older couple come in, looking for a split king adjustable set. This was a white whale sale.

The current clearance models on the floor were a latex mattress that was brand new despite being of an age to start first grade, and a tempurpedic floor model. The couple laid down and it was like magic. They each loved the bed they’d laid down on. They wanted to buy the whole shebang.

I. Was. Thrilled. I told them about the clearance program and what that meant, and they weren’t bothered in the least. I wrote up the sale then dashed into the back, fizzing with excitement to tell my manager what I’d done.

“You sold the death bed?!” He asked in delight.

I pulled up short, my smile freezing in place. “What…?”

“Didn’t you check the notes?”

I hesitated for a long beat then slowly shook my head. You see, dear reader, all beds had a personal history. Every clearance bed had logs written up by the person who took the return, as well as warehouse crew after sanitizing. It helped us know what to expect when selling them. “Wasn’t it just a floor model? You said it was a floor model…”

He slowly shook his head. I checked the notes.

It turned out, it had been sold as a floor model. The first time. But the company had made an exception and taken it back as a return two months later. Why? Because it’s owner had passed away.

I stared at the computer in horror and my manager shrugged. “They signed the clearance form. Technically it was a floor model.”

“We know for a fact that a man died in that bed!”

“What they don’t know can’t haunt them,” he said philosophically.

The man came back a week later for more sheets, utterly delighted to tell me how well they were sleeping. I clamped my teeth down around the secret of the deathbed, choosing to let them love their new bed without the stigma. Only one person would be haunted by that deathbed, and it was me.

[lindstromm]

My state is ruby red. Last week, I put up a Harris-Walz sign in my front yard up close to the porch. Every couple days, as I got braver, I moved it a few feet closer to the street where the visibility is better. Two days ago, my sign achieved its curbside position with maximum visibility.

Yesterday, I was out digging in my front yard (I'm rewilding my lawn) and a truck pulled over. A 62-year-old woman gets out, thanks me for my sign, and admits how scared she is to put up her own Democratic lawn sign. She's a registered Republican who hasn't voted for Republicans in more than a decade. We talked for half an hour and I just texted her about the VP Debate watch party this Tuesday.

Things learned:

Not all registered Republicans are actually Republicans.

Boomers and Gen X age voters are changing their minds.

Having a yard sign makes a difference.

Even ruby red states are more purple than you might think.

[bourbontrend]

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[theblehthatbloos]

I'm 31 now and I was going up to one of the kids I work with , shooting dice with some other youths, I told them to go where they need to go or at least don't do that here. They gave me hella sass and instead of pushing it I pointed out the camera there at the school and said "I mean, I'm not going to make a big fuss about it but I wouldn't be doing something I'm not supposed to be doing in front of a camera. Specially when I know my fam can see it." And they immediately moved on, the kid with the mouth dabbed me up and I told him "Look, just be safer, be aware, and maybe really think about it." They ended up going to class and they've gotten better about being in class.

There's so many stories like this I can tell where they slipped up a lot but eventually got their stuff together. It's so easy to get mad or react to a lot of the shit they'll say or do, repeatably. But if you take like a second to breathe and not be a dick you can literally help someone become a better person in the future.

the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern