ryven

I can't believe all the previous controversies mentioned in this bit are the game design kind, and not the "send the Pinkertons to your house to threaten your family" kind.

Regularly? Maybe 1, allowing for an extremely generous definition of "know." Even when I was in college I didn't really hear about people going clubbing that often.

The kids are alright.

Does OOP always play characters with the same backstory beats? I'm always making up new insecurities/obsessions/neuroses for my characters because I feel like I can't use the same backstory twice. (They have to have something going on, though, because well-adjusted people don't make a career out of going into trap-filled holes in the ground and fighting to the death for the inhabitants' pocket change.)

This is the one where we bully our little brother into going back to the world where he can't walk, right? :P

I feel SO free right now. :P

Canceled Pride? Well, I canceled my sub!

I think the fourth panel is better than the fifth panel. If I were going to cut one, I'd cut the fifth one.

The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you've played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you're presented with a narrow passage you can't crawl through. At this point, you'll discover that you can also go left. There's another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you'll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can't jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.

It sounds like they wanted to run someone but had trouble recruiting a candidate:

But Bloom thinks that would-be Democratic candidates were disinclined to challenge a sheriff’s office power structure that tends to be dominated by conservatives, saying, “The people that [party leadership] asked to run were scared; given how conservative law enforcement can be, they didn’t want to blow up their careers.” Unlike other states, Virginia does not require that sheriff candidates have a background in law enforcement.

And later in the article:

That no Democrat filed to run in Chesapeake does not surprise Liam Watson, director of Bluegrass PAC, a Virginia group working to fund and elect downballot Democratic candidates in rural areas of the state. Watson, who is also an elected council member in the city of Blacksburg, knows the dynamic well: His own community, Montgomery County, leans blue but has a Republican sheriff.

“The challenge is finding people who are both qualified and interested,” he told Bolts.

He and many others noted that the most obvious path to being a sheriff is to work as a sheriff’s deputy, and that there are clear disincentives to challenging an incumbent who could then make your life difficult or fire you if you lose. “Nobody wants to run against their boss,” Watson said.

I think she has to act through the Board of Police Commissioners, and I'm not sure she can fire them before their terms are up. She could definitely threaten to not re-appoint them, but I don't know how much leverage that really buys her.

And those armored bulldozers sometimes destroyed humans along with the houses, such as the case of peace activist Rachel Corrie.