I'd say I missed out on this really cool map making period in gaming history (Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Half-life, counter-strike, etc.), but it kinda lived on a little when I was a teenager (countless, painful hours making halo 3 and halo: reach maps using a controller...fun times though). Kids nowadays have it the best though: When I was little we DREAMED of a lego video game and minecraft nails that (lego island and lego island 2 were awesome, but it wasn't infinite building awesome).

Apparently there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to Titanic Conspiracy theories, who knew!

In regards to swapping the Olympic with the Titanic, this section summarizes:

British historian Gareth Russell, for his part, calls the theory "so painfully ridiculous that one can only lament the thousands of trees which lost their lives to provide the paper on which it has been articulated." He notes that, "since the sister ships had significant interior architectural and design differences, switching them secretly in a week would be nearly impossible from a practical standpoint. A switch would also not be economically worthwhile, since the ship's owners could have simply damaged the ship while docked (for instance, by setting a fire) and collected the insurance money from that 'accident', which would have been far less severe, and infinitely less stupid, than sailing her out into the middle of the Atlantic with thousands of people, and their luggage, on board, and ramming her into an iceberg".

It is actually getting better, it just takes time.

In fact, according to the above Wikipedia article it was in a great spot in 2019 and then a volcano erupted:

In 2019, the ozone hole was at its smallest in the previous thirty years, due to the warmer polar stratosphere weakening the polar vortex. In September 2023, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the largest on record, at 26 million square kilometers. The anomalously large ozone loss may have been a result of the 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption.

.....is this a canary in the coalmine joke?

Just like Pal Battalions, we didn't realize how bad of an idea this was until after WW1

So, the Alaska Airlines door plug incident is more than likely Boeing's fault(we don't have the footage or a record of who did the repair because Boeing deleted/lost it....which makes me even more suspicious tbh), but this was a 25yr old 737-800 Boeing hasn't seen in decades. This looks like a united maintenance issue as do all the other united 737 issues.

Now, don't get me wrong, Boeing definitely has a plethora of issues going on, but I think the FAA might want to also look into United's maintenance department as well cause they're also having a plethora of issues.

I love that this comic about Octopi/Squids is posted by Flying Squid

When I used to manage people (for a call center) I would do that but via text. I didn't wanna catch anyone off guard with a phonecall where they agree to it without realizing they already had plans or something.

I also always tried to stress that this is optional, if there aren't enough people, that's on us, and we should have prepared better.

I've got 14hrs played so far and I am enjoying it still. I am currently level 21 and have beaten the first story boss.

TL;DR Jack of all trades, master of none, but does a good job of mixing things together. 8.5/10 so far.

Palworld is kind of like fortnite imo: it didn't invent the monster capturing, exploration, crafting, or building, but it is one of the first games to mix them and it doesn't run like complete ass. The building is kind of basic, the exploration isn't too in depth but there is always something going on( you can find fast travel beacons, area 'boss' monsters, story bosses, dungeons, and there are pokemon throughout all of this), the monsters have some variety but they all feel like a mix of different asset grabs, and the crafting is simple (BUT, you can use your monsters to craft for you and take care of your base).

I'd say individually each of these things are rated 7/10 or 8/10, but when you put them all together it's pretty great. The crafting and the base building are there, but I just come back, build some things up, and then the monsters do all that for me while I go back to exploring. Last week I went through and beat Raft and Palworld is a breath of fresh air: I'm not spending hours grinding resources and crafting shit, instead I'm wandering around finding new monsters and locations and I come back and stuff is built. The crafting and resource finding isn't the entire game but it's a nice accessory. Similar to fortnites building + battle Royale, I didn't think monster capturing + base building would be that fun, but they have done a great job of mixing the 2. I find myself looking for certain monsters so that I can have them do certain tasks at base, and that's a win-win in a way.

The game is kind of janky in parts: I've had monsters fall through floors, some areas feel like they were ripped right out of other games (I swear some of the old, broken down churches look like they were stolen from elden ring), and the climbing mechanic isn't fully polished, but unlike other early access games it runs pretty well so far performance wise. I've gotten so used to games like valheim, cyberpunk, and starfield where the game comes out and just runs like complete ass (30fps or less) for the first few weeks. Hell, we were playing Raft last week and our host told us to stop building the boat more b/c he was scared the game would crash. I'm not running Palworld like I ran CS:GO, but it feels like a steady 60fps+ at all times which is really great. As a counter to that though, hosting a dedicated server is okay at best so far. There is a memory leak that has the game go from taking 2-4gb of ram up to 8gb+. After 8gb gets used the computer I have hosting it tends to crash and then I have to manually turn it off and on again to get things going.

In the end, I know I'm going to get my money's worth out of it (30+ hrs), maybe even double that(we'll see) and I'm happy with that. I'm not expecting this to be the next Skyrim/baldurs gate/fallout, I don't expect to play this for thousands of hours non-stop, and that's fine b/c there is other stuff out there I'd like to play anyways. Similar to Valheim (I have 58.2hrs of playtime as of writing this), I expect to play through palworld, shelve it, and if there are any updates in the future I might come back to it.

I love the Key and Peele skit on this

Same Energy

I think he's having a flashback to his literal "first rodeo", which I imagine didn't go that well.