In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been down for awhile with only my own stupidity to blame. I won’t go into full detail, but the summary was basically me wanting to switch some of my sites over to https, and while doing so moving my blog from one subdomain to the other. Somewhere along the line I accidentally deleted my website. Fortunately I backed up most of my website, like the entire folder and an XML file containing all of my posts, tags, categories etc. But something must have gone wrong during the xml backup, as when I tried to import everything it would stop at February of last year, so in other words my blog hated 2017 almost as much as I did. Probably saw my last post about that one deportation story and just died on the spot thinking of anything going beyond that point.
So if things seem out of place that’s why. I’m still piecing things back together, need to redo my emoticons and other stuff, but the blog is now back at a point I can share it publicly. Oh yeah, and welcome to the new URL.
By the way, I’m aware that the Steam widget on the left isn’t displaying pictures. This is because I’ve switched the site from http to https, and anything linking non secured images (such as that Steam Widget) are affected by this. I’m leaving it for now, but if I can’t find a solution in the code I’ll have to retire it.
A Syrian family living in Allentown, Pennsylvania just watched their relatives get deported right in front of them by the administration they voted for.
Dr. Ghassan Assali and his wife, Sarmad, are originally from Syria but have been in the United States since the Clinton administration. Dr. Assali earned his degree from New York University and has a dentistry practice in Pennsylvania. Sarmad’s two brothers, their wives, and their two children have been trying to flee Syria since 2003, and were finally approved for residency in the United States in December of 2016.
I can only imagine the anguish that followed, over a decade of wanting to come to the US, to get out of Syria, only to be sent back thanks to the Executive Order signed by the very president your family voted for…
Assali said her vote for Donald Trump was done out of a desire to see secure borders, though she didn’t expect one of her candidate’s chief campaign promises to be applied to her relatives, who are all Orthodox Christians with green cards. Even though White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus recently stated that Trump’s order wouldn’t apply to green card holders, Assali’s relatives were nonetheless forced to board the next flight to Syria despite waiting over a decade to be with their family in the United States.
Oh, but he’s fulfilling your wish! For anyone who’s a scared white trash asshat. Your family members simply didn’t meet the status quo…
“I understand he wants to make America safe,” Assali said. “We’re all on with this. I definitely want to be in a safe place. But people need us and we need to be there for them.
Not according to the racists you voted for…
Ghassan Assali compared the U.S. government under the president he voted for to the Islamic State, expressing disappointment that the country he calls home now issues religious purity tests to immigrants,
“America is not America,” Dr. Assali said. “Like ISIS now, they ask, ‘Are you Christian? What do you believe?’ And if they are not saying what they believe, they kick you out and they cut your head off. So America, same thing. They ask you are you Muslim? You’ve got to change your religion. Thank you.”
Welcome to “Trump’s America!” The easiest way to be accepted is to just pretend you’re a Christian, you know… Like most republicans.
One of those deported was the mother of 21-year-old Tarwak Assali, who came to the United States three years ago.
“I was one hour away from hugging her,” he said. “Seeing her.”
As a consolation prize you did vote for the winning president… Hooray?
The timing of the Assali relatives being deported back to Syria couldn’t have been worse. Only six hours after they boarded a flight to Damascus, Syria through Doha, Qatar, federal judge Ann Donnelly issued an injunction on the order, allowing those detained by customs to be released onto U.S. soil.
Timing is everything and blah blah blah…
Don’t get me wrong, I do feel bad for the people that were deported and offer them my sympathies, at the same time though you get what you voted for. Right now I’d say they owe their family a YUGE apology for helping vote in an incompetent short fingered vulgarian.
I’m glad I don’t work at a gamestop… This new policy they’re enforcing is total bullshit that makes both the customer and employee suffer greatly.
The program, called “Circle of Life,” gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders; 2) reward card subscriptions; 3) used game sales; and 4) game trade-ins. Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward cards subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30%, and the store sells $1,000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned.
I could see this Circle of Life thing being about as effective as the red ring of death if they decide to keep this policy.
The more new games an employee sells, the more used games they’ll have to sell to make up for it. In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. GameStop staff say the company has threatened to fire people who don’t hit these quotas, which is leading to all sorts of scuzzy tactics.
If a customer wants a new console, or a new game, and an employee gives them what they want, they either have to make up for it by selling a certain percentage of used game wares, or be terminated. Or the employee has to lie to the customer to keep their job, forcing the customer to shop elsewhere. Which in this day and age with the internet isn’t very hard, is it? This will lead to pissed off customers and a high turnover rate for employees. I’m sure the gamestop execs aren’t too happy about the news circulating teh interwebz right now.
I feel sorry for anyone who works there, reading the comments to the article are quite illuminating.
Having worked at Gamestop for a short time, I am in no way surprised by any of this. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll never shop there again.
Worked for Gamestop for 3 years as a store manager. I was fired for paying my employees out of pocket to help me out off the clock because corporate pulled all my hours during Christmas time so I was soloing a fucking store by myself. I doubt none of this.
As one of the unfortunate Gamestop employess, my first reaction is ‘love my job, hate the company. Been working for the company since 2005 and the circle of life is the biggest crock of shit ive ever dealt with. My district Manager, sorry Leader (were not supposed to use the words Manager or customer any more) has directly told me to lie to customers about stock in the past. I would like to say more but this is already enough to get me fired.
I bought DooM during the last winter sale and decided to take it for a spin today, figured it would help me with my aggression. I was a little concerned with how DooM would turn out considering none of the original ID team was involved with it, but it’s a brilliant throwback to my childhood if I ever saw it, so far I’m really impressed! I’ve been running it using the Vulkan API with all eyecandy turned on and haven’t run into any issues. Everything is butter smooth and fun to play.
You had me at Vulkan
I’ve been playing the campaign and did a bit of arcade mode when I wanted to take a break. I figure with a bit more fragging and wandering around in campaign mode I’ll test my mettle in multiplayer. It’s been quite a rush, there’s a lot to go through and replay value seems rather high thus far thanks to hidden secrets, and wanting to play the game on higher difficulties overall. My only complaint is the inability to save whenever I want, and having to rely on checkpoints, but the checkpoints are rather frequent for my gripe to be a minimal one.
I do hope more games start using Vulkan, give DirectX a kick in the pants. 😛
A question I keep hearing lately online or from friends in general is “How are we going to get rid of Trump?”, we can’t. We can only resist, fight back by protesting, doing anything to kick Fuckface Von Clownstick’s ego in the balls, donate to places like the ACLU, and more importantly survive and help our friends and family who could be affected. Trust me, I’m an Overlord.
Right now the only people who can get rid of this gelatinous orange shit stain are the republicans, and they’re not gonna do it, not yet at least.
Not gonna do it!
They can impeach him now sure, but that would incur the wrath of their supporters who want Cheeto Benito as their glorious leader. That would make themselves look bad to the crazies they’ve cultivated over the years, which would potentially cause them to lose to someone with the level of crazy these fuckwagons desire. At least until they realize they’re setting themselves to be fucked over also, too, youbetchya.
This last week was exactly what I was expecting. With past presidents you didn’t hear about them every single day. Not with Obama, not with Bush, not with Clinton, etc etc. The Groper In Chief wants everyday to be like a reality show, that’s how he operates and that’s exactly what he’s getting. The more outrageous and over the top the more attention he’ll get.
So, continue to fight back, let yourself be heard, counter all the bullshit. It’ll drive him nuts. Grab him by the ego!
When I get home from work and read the political side of my RSS feed.
What a rollercoaster ride it’s been, downward… I’ve been wanting to post about these events but it’s just been too much to keep up on. Every time I read about something stupid the gelatinous orange shit stain that is President Fuckface Von Clownstick has done along with his cronies I feel exhausted just from reading it. There’s this combination of severe depression, dark humor, more depression, and then I get tired. I can assure you it isn’t from boredom. Something tells me I’ll be sleeping a lot more, and buying more popcorn while I can still afford it.
I don’t want to go into detail about it right now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much stupid take place within a single week. There’s so many things I could write about it and my head is spinning trying to process everything, reading multiple sites to confirm that this batshit craziness is real, I have no clue where to begin. If this goes on long enough I’d be okay with a nuke dropping on me, just as long as it’s while I’m sleeping.
This series is drawing me in like Skyrim… I thought I could put Bioshock down I got drawn into Bioshock 2, not the remaster but the original. It runs better than the first Bioshock and I look forward to comparing it to the remaster when I finally get around to it. At a glance I can already tell one difference, the original has more achievements than the remaster. Not entirely sure why as of yet.
One of the things I had to do throughout my gameplay was remap the keys constantly. I’m not sure why they switched it up compared to the original Bioshock apart from assigning different buttons to new abilities, but to me it would make more sense to leave them on their original buttons. Like E to use or T to listen to recordings. I had to make multiple trips to the control settings, but it’s far better now than when I started. Also the mouse sensitivity was set at 0.4… DaFuq? Who was the genius that decided the 0.4 would be a good start? I mean I know you play as a Big Daddy, and Big Daddies tend to be slow as fuck unless they’re charging directly at you, but seriously…
Who’s yo daddy?
As I stated above you play as a Big Daddy, an early prototype called “Subject Delta”. For those unaware of the Bioshock lore a Big Daddy is a genetically enhanced human being who has had their skin and organs grafted with a deep diving suit, like an underwater cyborg tweaker protector of spliced drug addict children kind of thing. You, the protagonist are an early build of a Big Daddy, probably the most horrifying one to imagine too considering unlike regular Big Daddies you can use Plasmids to wreak all kinds of chaos, like shooting lightning from your hands, and bees apparently. O_o
Big Daddies have a bond with little sisters, which are little girls who were also genetically altered and mentally conditioned to get ADAM from dead corpses, a drug of sorts. In the Bioshock games you use ADAM to enhance yourself and EVE to use the powers given to you by the ADAM usually. This has left me wondering one thing, is there a powerup called STEVE?
But anyway… You’re a Big Daddy, and you have your own little sister. At least you do until the new leader of rapture forces you to pull your helmet off, killing yourself with a pistol she gives you. I’m guessing some kind of hypnosis? You’re revived what I’m guessing is years later in a vita chamber. I’ve made it into the 2nd level, chasing a big sister. Like a Big Daddy but much more ninja like…
Why couldn’t there be a game where you play as a big sister too? That could actually be kinda fun running around doing ninja stuff with guns and drills…
Hacking got an overhaul from the previous game. No more fucking pipe dream, instead you have to wait for the needle to get into a green or blue area to successfully hack into something. Landing on blue gives you an item bonus.
I’m only a little over an hour in, it takes some getting used to but I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been fun drilling and electrocuting my enemies, though you have to find fuel constantly to use your drill. Makes sense I guess, and it’s a mechanic I’m familiar with in other games. Fuel, Food, Electrolytes, Blood. It all balances out. Different games call for different ammo and sustenance.
Ok, enough Bioshock… I’ll do something else tomorrow. I promise! Kinda…
