Questions you want answered.

MaxShrek wrote:

Which group has the worst aim:
GI Joe and Cobra (cartoon version)
The A-Team
Star Wars Stormtroopers
3rd grade boys

I was going to say GI Joe and Cobra but when Cobra added robot soldiers (BATs) the Joes suddenly became great shots.

The A-Team are lousy with guns but are marksmen when they build an armored tractor that fires cabbages or 2x4s.

Going with Storm Troopers.

But Obi Wan said the Jawa sandcrawler was shot with laser blasts too precise to be random.

Obi Wan was getting up there in years, if ya know what I mean.

Spoiler:

JEDI DEMENTIA

MaxShrek wrote:

But Obi Wan said the Jawa sandcrawler was shot with laser blasts too precise to be random.

And this has lead to conspiracy theories that the stormtroopers were later ordered to miss Luke and his friends so they could follow them to the rebel base. Of course that doesn't explain the other movies.

I do like that they gave this a nod in The Mandalorian:

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Obi Wan was getting up there in years, if ya know what I mean.

Spoiler:

JEDI DEMENTIA

or was that actually

Spoiler:

Obi Waan...

ThatGuy42 wrote:

Oh man, I have SOOO much to say about Pokemon TCG!

The only thing I would add to ThatGuy42's excellent post is this: if you're buying pre-constructed decks, it's best to get ones that are in the same series. Like, you'll see decks that are branded as Sun/Moon or Steel Series or Mega Machines or whatever. These decks are built to play well against each other, but they're less fun against decks from other series. The moves and counters and types don't match up, and they can lead to complete face rolls or long, boring slogs.

Obi Wane?

fangblackbone wrote:

Obi Wane?

When he visits Mandalore:

Spoiler:

Obi Have

Just popping back in to thank ThatGuy for his Pokemon advice. I picked up a Trainer deck and another pre-built for when the boys are ready to play each other with 60-card decks. We've played through the instruction set twice, flipping "sides" between the game. The Trainer Deck was a really good suggestion.

Related: I am constantly astonished at how fast 5-year-olds learn things.

They seem to have completely grasped the core concepts of the game after the first playthrough, and the second playthrough all I had to do was gently redirect once or twice to keep them "on script." Tomorrow, we'll mix the decks and see how it goes from there.

Is there a Stan graphic or gif for GWJ that can be downloaded or copied, either by himself or with the logo? (Not for financial reasons )

Are Norse rune tattoos synonymous with white supremacy or does it depend on what is written?

I don’t read Norse rune.

Norse code?

MaxShrek wrote:

Is there a Stan graphic or gif for GWJ that can be downloaded or copied, either by himself or with the logo? (Not for financial reasons )

You could probably just ask Amoebic directly, perhaps? Odds are they have something that might suit your purposes as long as you've assured them it's on the up and up.

I found this "design a hockey jersey" site and I just wanted to see what it would look like. Just to satisfy curiosity.

RawkGWJ wrote:

Are Norse rune tattoos synonymous with white supremacy or does it depend on what is written?

I don’t read Norse rune.

IMO, it's not exactly an indication of white supremacy outright, but those groups have been known to appropriate Viking culture as some sort of indication of support for racial purity.

At the same time, the show Vikings is pretty popular so it may just be someone into them from a pure superficial standpoint. So, it's possible they just thought the idea was cool for a tattoo and nothing more.

Long story short, I wouldn't necessarily assume someone with Viking tattoos is an outright white supremacist at the start, but I'm definitely giving them the side eye.

Some historical recreationists for that period have period tattoos, but they tend to be the lifestyle ones so there are usually other indicators (beards, long hair corralled with natural materials, hand-made pieces of clothing/jewelry (brooches are common), carrying around a Penguin Viking saga, that sort of thing. You can usually sort them from the White Supremacists because the latter will usually have other tattoos that are not related to Viking culture. I've seen "discreet" 88 and 14 tattoos, HH in runes, skulls, teardrops (def not a historical reference lol), twin lightning bolts, and other Nazi-adjacent tattoos paired with Runes. These are indicators that you want to check there is no one between you and the convenience store doors...

Also be mindful of the long-suffering Minnesota football fans and their cosplay.

Some conscripts and soldiers from other nations fighting for the Nazis in WW2 thought they were true Aryans or Norsemen and fighting for their culture of true northern Europeans. I didn't know that their were Hungarian and Romanian Nazi divisions and soldiers among other nationalities. Even some French.

There may be some nutty white nationalists who think they are the same way? Dunno.

Guy Sajer wrote his recollections (not 100% accurate in details, but focused on emotions and experiences) of his service in the SS as a French citizen. It's called "The Forgotten Soldier" and it's on the US Army's list of recommended reading about WW2.

This might be more appropriate for the PS4 or even the Tech thread, but I figure this one gets a bit more visibility, so why not try here.

I have an external hard drive hooked up to my PS4. It's been great since I can just dump a bunch of my digital games on there with no worry about it taking up all the space. However every so often I seem to get caught in a loop where the PS4 puts up a blinking hard drive icon in the upper right whenever I start it up. I know that it's just double checking either the licenses or the hard drive itself, but it takes a good 5-10 minutes to do before I can even start a game.

The weird thing is that some times when I turn on the PS4 it doesn't happen at all. This is a relatively new hard drive, I'm not disconnecting it or jiggling the USB wire, and basically just leaving the hardware alone.

So, is there something that I can check or any anything that might help fix this issue? Or am I just stuck living with it whenever it happens?

I assume you've done the "rebuild the database" rigamarole?

Yeah, I've done that too. Doesn't seem to fix it, either. The funny thing is that there's nothing inherently wrong with the games or the system itself. I'm not getting any errors, crashes, or messages that the hard drive was unplugged or anything. It just decides for a couple days that it's going to check the hard drive every time I start the PS4. And really, it's not as if I can't play any games at all, I just have to wait for the system to do this random check before I can.

Also worth mentioning is that this happens regardless of if I start from a cold boot or from rest mode, so that also doesn't seem to be something that triggers the check.

I've used a couple of different external hard drives over the years with PS4's and you can definitely see the difference in "spin up times" with different brands/speeds of drives. Getting the fastest possible external drive, preferably an SSD absolutely makes a huge difference. YMMV, etc.

CptDomano wrote:

So, is there something that I can check or any anything that might help fix this issue?

I checked Sony's knowledgebase, and they said to buy a PS5.

...You have a license for that scalpel, ClockworkHouse?

If it were windows, I'd say that it is doing a bad sector check on start up. This indicates that the drive is failing but still working. Again on windows, you could backup the important files and reformat so that the drive essentially overlooks the troubling sectors. You would probably be better off getting an external SSD though. They are cheap and fast and trouble free (no moving parts...)

ClockworkHouse wrote:
CptDomano wrote:

So, is there something that I can check or any anything that might help fix this issue?

I checked Sony's knowledgebase, and they said to buy a PS5.

Oh, good! Let me just hop onto BestBuy...

Oh. I could probably just get one direct from Sony, let me pull up the site...

I want a robust (read: PC or Console) game that is the game they advertise State of Survival to be in those misleading Facebook ads. A sandbox base-builder in a post-apocalypse with zombies or mutants, with missions and characters that have backstory and depth, instead of a Clash of Clans ripoff Pay-to-win.

Does such a game exist?

They Are Billions, maybe, or Project Zomboid? The latter is great but unforgiving. The tutorial has you overwhelmed and eaten by zombies at the end lol.

Dysmantle maybe? Also Endzone is a not zombie but post-apocalyptic version of Banished sort of.