Mira

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.

I genuinely love this

But the Tornado II is confirmed to not have a landing gear. We never see it taking off in the traditional way: instead it just sort of hovers inside some sort of cannon which it's seemingly propelled out of, and in the end Tails admits he downright forgot to install a landing gear before crashing it onto the Egg Carrier: From the way Tails treats his plane in Sonic Heroes I infer that in his eyes, destroying your plane (which requires a Chaos Emerald in order to work) and building a new one every time is apparently more cost- and/or time-efficient than actually putting a landing gear on one.