Open Thread

Open Thread #167

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

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49 thoughts on “Open Thread #167”

    1. I heard about this and it’s not too surprising after the whole Desmond is amazing thing. And I thought FL was supposed to be one of the more decent states. We must be paying too close attention, because I don’t understand how normies aren’t day of the roping teachers and crooked politicians yet.

    2. Aaron,
      On a related note, didn’t Germany experience the same thing or similar to what is happening in western civilization with the whole wokeness of transgender, homosexuality after WW1 and eventually this came to an end with the rise of the Nazi Party? I came across the book Sex and the Weimar Republic. Would you say that all great civilization collapsed due to degeneracy and not over-expansion of their borders as most teachers like to highlight?

    3. Yes, Weimar Germany was a cesspool. The rise of the NSDAP was a counter reaction to communist terror and the systematic destruction of society. The problem today, though, is that our men have significantly lower levels of testosterone, so I am not hopeful that we will see a similar change. Instead, we may see foreign takeover. This happened in Germany as well, but only after the Western world had ganged up on it.

      I think Mexico will at some point claim part of the US while in the big cities there will be open race war, which is already starting. Thus, you end up with a deeply fractured society. This will be a net positive for the rest of the World because it entails that the decade-long US occupation of other countries will come to an end.

      Yes, I think that degeneracy is a leading cause of the collapse of civilizations.

    1. Just build your own company, guys. I remember when Molyneux got booted off youtube and he was at one point bitching on Bitchute about the huge hit he took in followers etc. I just wanted to look at him and say, “But what about muh free markets?”

  5. In the last year I’ve watched three Bond films, two of which I really enjoyed — From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. However, the one I want to briefly touch up on is Casino Royale (2006), which I just finished. The contrast between Craig’s Bond and Connery’s is quite something and almost acts as time capsule for the progression (destruction) of Western society.

    The big takeaway from the film is that women are cunning, strong and independent, and no longer is there any room in this world for a pompous man and his fragile over-inflated ego. Bond’s charisma and tendency to take matters into his own hands is consistently undermined by female characters in the film, such as M and Vesper Lynd. He is able to suavely seduce the wife of a villain early on in the film, which inadvertently gets her tortured for information and subsequently murdered, to which Bond is scolded for his cold hearted ways by his female boss, M.

    On to the Bond girl, Vesper Lynd, who is extremely average-looking for an actress in my opinion, yet makes up for her lack of beauty with brains and cunning. During their first encounter together, Bond actually critiques her on her masculine demeanor to which she tears him a new asshole, deservedly so. She is very stand offish to him at first, but slowly warms up to him as the film progresses, as does he. Now, I’ve watched a few of these films in past featuring Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery, and never have I witnessed anything as sad and pathetic as what I’m about to detail (heavy spoilers coming).

    After Bond narrowly manages to win a massive fortune and fuck over the main villain of the film, Vesper Lynd is kidnapped and must be rescued. While in high speed pursuit of the kidnappers in the dead of night, Bond quickly swerves to avoid running over Vesper who has been placed onto the road in bondage. This causes his Aston Martin to flip several times and for him to also be captured. This is where things get very interesting.

    Bond is tortured by being stripped naked and placed on a chair with no seat, his dick and balls dangling through the opening. The main villain, Le Chiffre, takes a rope with some kind of weight at the end and continuously pelts it against Bond’s nutsac, literally busting his balls, in an attempt to recover a password for the funds just won. And that pretty much sums up this entire film, merely a ball busting marathon where we get to witness an icon be broken down into a shell of his former self.

    Immediately after Vesper and Bond manage to escape with their lives and after a short recovery time, Bond confesses his love for Vesper and we learn that his dick apparently still works. Vesper has been cemented as Bond’s equal very early on in this flick, but now he has become her inferior. She never tells Bond she loves him back, in fact, she double crosses him because her ulterior motives lie in trading this large sum of money in exchange for the life of her true love interest, making Bond out to be sort of simp or a cuck.

    An extravagant action-oriented sequence ensues and Vesper ultimately drowns, and though we don’t see Bond actually shed a tear, it can be assumed he does as the camera does a long shot of Bond gripping her body tightly one last time. I only gave this film a chance because I read good reviews for it, and it just happened to be available to me. I certainly won’t be watching any of the follow ups to this movie, and I’m pretty sure 007 is supposed to be a butch-looking black female moving forward. Consider this franchise effectively a waking corpse, just like Daniel Craig’s Bond was a corpse of man after being neutered and dissected into Beta male oblivion.

    Reply

    1. Hell, I didn’t even know M was female in the Craig movies. I don’t bother with Daniel Craig. He never sold me as Bond, James Bond. No fucking “it factor.” He was the transition period for a black female Bond. When he made his first movie they even questioned if his Bond was gay.

      RIP Sean Connery!!!!!!

    2. The most troubling thing is how many guys think Craig was a great Bond. That’s how many simps we have out there.

    3. This movie came across as a chick flick, in fact, my aunt really likes the Craig Bond era. I can see why, because it appeals to the female fantasy of taming the alpha male. I think what’s really disturbing about this film is that it’s meant to be a prequel, so the series has been retconned to undermined all the great Bond films that came before as now it’s established that Bond is a sucker with crushed testicles.

    4. “You Know My Name” is the best Bond theme song for me, but Cornell is my favorite singer, so I’m biased. I thought Casino Royale was cool. The follow-ups are indeed lame though.

      The Vesper double-cross is in the book, so I can forgive that. The line “the bitch is dead” is also in the book. I agree with your overall sentiment though, it’s a far cry from the films in which Sean Connery would man handle the women, and the women would ashamedly enjoy it.

    5. There is also a particularly female reaction to male-to-female disciplining on screen: They gasp audibly, with an undertone of sexual arousal.

  6. How do you guys effectively deal with “haters?” I’m talking about dudes who want to see you fail, even “friends.” The short answer is “ignore them.” But it sticks iny craw because it echoes what my abusive female family members told me. All suggestions welcome.

    Reply

    2. Male. I took your advice and don’t have female friends. But I guess they are acting like females.

    3. Men you can shut up differently. As I don’t know how they try to put you down, I can only refer to generalities. Those guys engage in status posturing. Shrugging it off is indeed one way of dealing with it, but the fact that they seem to be saying the same things over and over implies that you are somewhat affected by what they say to you. Looking them sternly in the eye and telling them to cut it out would be one way of dealing with it, another is to hit back at them verbally. As they are pushing your buttons you may also know what buttons you can push on them. More generally, you may want to reconsider your friendship with those guys as this is not acceptable behavior for stable friendships.

    5. @ GoodLookingAndSleazy
      I’m not sure whether this might help, but I was raised different. At a young age, my dad drilled the concept/idea that there are no real/genuine friends in life. Friends are only for entertainment purposes. They will never be there for you at your lowest point in life. There’s more to it, but I pretty much grew up being a loner all my life not needing anybody other than my parents and becoming self-sufficient. As a little kid, I never sough out male peer validation or to be part of a group and be accepted. I guess most guys want friends so they can go clubbing or bar hopping to meet girls. When it came to women at clubs and bars, I went by myself all the time and I’ve had my share of hook-ups and failures as well. The other thing is that most people can’t stand being alone by themselves, or let alone be loners. I’ve seen to many people care what people think of them. I quite can’t understand this concept because I never gave a fuck about what other thought about me as a little kid. We’re talking elementary age (no joke). Consequently, I never learned how to form male friendships or built rapport and/or common interest with other men. I was always seen as a threat and cold-hearted person which I am. Not a threat but definitely cold-hearted and very distant. When I did manage to have a social circle in my life, it was a matter of time before my peers ostracized me from their group. It never bothered me at all. In the end, I became financially successful while they become failures in life. My parents did push financial success onto me at an early age.

      It funny how many people buy Mark Mason book on “How not to give a fuck.”

    6. I ended a friendship of 9 years with someone who was verbally abusive and in one instance physically abusive. Ending that friendship did wonders for my self-esteem. Something to keep in mind.

      I suppose you have to decide how much you value the friendship. If you value the friendship, put a stop to it. Don’t blow up or sperg out, just say that you like hanging out with them, but you can’t put up with their disrespect anymore. Do it in a way that feels natural for you.

      If the only reason you’re friends with them is because you’d be lonely otherwise, I’d say that you don’t value the friendship, so just end it. Actually declaring to the person that the friendship is over takes balls. You’ll feel good about yourself after doing it.

      I’ll add that I had a right wing therapist at the time I ended that friendship. He was someone who I spent a lot of time with, so I was indeed alone more after doing that. Having the therapist was a useful crutch for pushing through the loneliness.

    7. Thanks guys. Much appreciated. Herker, I think your right. I only hang out with them out of fear of being alone. I need to meet new people. Either way, I’ve always been a “lone wolf.” I can survive on my own. I definitely don’t need toxic people in my life regardless of how long I’ve known them.

  9. Apparently Rumble bought Locals:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eus2pfsEQJs

    It’s pretty interesting because I didn’t realize Rumble had grown so much. Locals was getting pretty influential, lots of the people who left Patreon etc are on Locals.

    Apparently Rumble has been building an infrastructure behind the scenes to support stuff, they say an alternative to AWS.

    Reply

    1. You can’t rely on big tech anymore, even as a mainstream creator as you can get shut down any minute for no reason at all. The irony of big tech censorship is that it entails the very real risk of the stalwarts turning into legacy media. Looking at the YT home page with its woke recommendations, I would say that they have made significant progress towards becoming culturally irrelevant already.

  11. It is a shame that Google and Big Tech have destroyed the non-corporate Internet but a few sites are still around. Here is a rather insightful one I recently came across that illustrates the “values” of Chicago, i.e. it tracks shootings and deaths:
    https://heyjackass.com/

    Reply

  12. I recently picked up Final Fantasy IX. My initial impression was very positive, with a masterful introduction that gets you invested, without even revealing much of the story. This compares very favorably with the still very common story dump that games do where you get ten minutes of exposition that are, more often than not, very tedious because it assumes that you are interested in the world. In contrast, FF IX wants to get you engaged. I also enjoyed that one of the first CGI scenes where you get to see a beautiful female face because that is not at all common anymore in gaming either. The humor in this game is refreshing. I liked the first introduction to the battle system where your gang leader puts on a dragon head and plays a prank on you, triggering a fight scene. This made me chuckle.

    I could write a bit more about how much I enjoyed the first one to two hours, but then it all fells apart when you enter the overworld for the first time, the game gives you no clear indication where you need to go, and there is one random encounter after another. This quickly sapped my motivation to continue. From what I have read online, the very frequent random encounters are indeed a problem of the game. Considering that Chrono Trigger, a few years prior, did very well without them I really wonder why Square did not just stick to that system. After all, when you want to move from A to B, you probably do not want to get into one fight after another, and the loading times of the PSX do not help either.

    Reply

    1. Chrono Trigger was the last RPG I finished, and that was within the last few years. If I remember correctly, FF had random encounters all the up to X. I’m guessing they stopped around XI. Are you aware of any other RPGs that implemented CT’s battle system style? I’m not. They actually still make turn based RPGs today with random encounters (Octopath Traveler).

      Even though Chrono Cross had the enemies walking freely in the overworld like CT, there was still a shift sequence similar to FF while CT had a seamless transition into the battle. I can’t figure out why this wasn’t utilized more often by Square or other devs for that matter considering the critical success of CT, other than perhaps the teams were too lazy to work it in somehow. Now that I think about it, I believe the overworld in CT actually looked better than the ones in the FF games during the PSX era.

    2. Chrono Trigger is arguably the best RPG ever made. There are a lot of fantastic ideas in it. Seeing your enemies on the map and being able to run past them seems trivial in hindsight but it was revolutionary. Also, it is a relatively short game, taking only about 20 hours, and afterwards you can do a “new game+” and start a new playthrough with your old party to explore content you have missed the first time around. This feature has entered the mainstream only with Dark Souls 16 years later. What also stood out to me where the graphically very impressive combinations of powers of the various characters. This motivated you to frequently change the setup of your party. Lastly, you can replay Chrono Trigger in a reasonable amount of time as it only take about 20 hours to complete, but the same would not work with a typical RPG. Final Fantasy VI takes about 40 hours for instance. Those games are necessarily one-and-done affairs, except for the most hardcore of fans.

      I am currently going through my video game bucket list and I am quite surprised at which games hold up and which do not. For calibration, I started with one of the GameBoy games I enjoyed, Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge, and was quite surprised that it immediately struck me as well-made and pretty fun to play. In contrast, a lot of other games have elements I now find hard to stomach such as the pacing of Ace Attorney or filler like random battles in RPGs. By the way, I intend to check out Clock Tower pretty soon.

    3. Yes, I really wanted to play Clock Tower for SNES. I was only able to get the Japanese version which made progress seemingly impossible. There is an English patch available but I never got it to work with my emulator.

    4. I recalled your posts on this game, and I did a bit of research myself. As it turned out, the SNES version was ported to the PSX and that version has been translated as well. I am only guessing here but I believe that if you load up GTA V and search for “Clock Tower: The First Fear (J+English Patched) PSX ISO” on their in-game Internet, you will find it. I also came across a patched version of the SNES ROM, which seems to work.

      By the way, what emulator do you use? The best one seems to be “bsnes”. Then there is “snes9x”, which has minor inaccuracies in a few games but it is easy to use and runs very well even on pretty old hardware. There is also the strange phenomenon that some patches only work in fairly inaccurate emulators like ZSnes or early version of snes9x, the reason being that they were tested on emulators, which exhibited behavior that is different from the real console. In contrast, current emulators replicate the behavior of the original hardware very well, which leads to those patches no longer being useful. This is apparently a particular issue for the Super Mario World hacking community, torpedoing a lot of their early work.

    5. I’ve been using RetroPie exclusively for a while now. The only PC I have that’s powerful enough for emulation is running Windows XP and is dedicated to recording, so I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi for emulation. Thanks for the Clock Tower link, btw. I wasn’t even aware of a PSX version of this game, I copied and pasted it in my browser and it popped right up. I do have the 3D Clock Tower for PSX but I’m not sure if it’s worth my time or not, I fooled around with it some. I’ll try it out soon and see if it works.

  13. Aaron,
    Have you heard of Jack (Willem) de Nijs music? He’s known as Jack Jersey. I came across his music. His voice resembles to that of Elvis Presley. He was popular in the Netherlands and Germany. The genre is Indo-Rock.

    Reply

    1. I don’t know him, but I will check him out.

      EDIT: He really does sound like Elvis Presley. It is possible that I have heard his music on the radio at my parents’ place without me knowing. Here is one of his songs:

    1. Thank you for these recommendations, Chris. I hope to keep myself and my family healthy without having to see a doctor. There’s also the fear that they’ll refuse healthcare to the unvaxxed.

  15. Any fans of Motown? Basically music that came out of Detroit in the 1960s from black artists. Incredible music IMO. I can listen to it all day.

    I think it was a reflection of the way people felt back then. Optimistic. Confident. The middle class was roaring. The manufacturing base was strong. The sky was the limit. Then globalization happened and Detroit was smashed. The country followed suit.

    Out of the ruins came rap music. Influenced by crime, drugs and poverty in the wake of the economic ruin. Now we have no art to speak of. Sad state of affairs.

    Reply

    1. Never really got into Motown at any point but you do make some good points. Wes Montgomery, for example, was considered one of the best jazz guitar players in the world during about the 60s:

      https://youtu.be/zxTD1XQTcyk

      I wonder what happened? *Shrugs*

      Even popular rap music has in general tremendously degraded into flexing and incoherent trash talk in recent years.

  16. I was scrolling through Krogan’s twitter feed and saw a trailer for the new Call of Duty: Vanguard game. It features some Sarah Silverman lookalike that casually walks up with a shotgun and takes out about a dozen Nazi soldiers without breaking a sweat. One of the Nazi’s, instead of defending himself, holds his hands up in surrender while begging for his life before being blasted.

    I checked on youtube to see the like/dislike ration and thankfully a good amount of gamers appear to be sane still. The official IGN trailer showed 1k likes to 2.2k dislikes, and the comments are reasonable also.

    “Someone give a basic history lesson to someone in charge for this game please. it’s getting really embarrassing.”

    Reply

    1. Edit: The ugly female character was actually supposed to be Indian. The British narrator says some nonsense about karma coming back for those filthy colonizers. Guess the devs forgot who colonized India. Or did they? Maybe after she gets done dispatching the entire SS, she can wreck the British as well.

  17. They have this great discussion over at Tim Pool:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIyI7iJSgRc

    It’s triggered by Rumble purchasing Locals… but they go a bit further… their main point is that alt-creators shouldn’t even have to cheer for or go for alt-tech. Their idea is that creators should just do their own thing, as these days its easy to set up your own membership site, payment processing etc…

    Reply

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