It’s looking like I’m going to have to dust off my CD burner.

This is the way. I believe one of the milestones gives you a prepackaged neutron cannon and one upgrade, and other upgrades are easy to find at space stations. The neutron cannon is stupidly overpowered once you have three S class upgrades on it, preferably with one of two of them in a supercharged slot. Sentinel combat is trivialized once you realize that you can collect the canisters they drop simply by shooting them, and your hopped up neutron cannon will crack those open with one shot, and half of them contain shield refills.

Your knife converting itself to iron filings like that probably is indeed due to one of the components being much softer steel than the other, and if I had to hazard a guess I’d say the blade steel is probably much harder than the backspacer. The latter may not even be hardened at all.

If you really gave a rat’s ass you could attack both of them with one of those graded hardness file sets and figure out which one is softer, but that’s probably putting pearls before swine given that even a knockoff set of one of those is around ten times the cost of this knife. Other than pure curiosity I don’t think there’d be much benefit, and nothing you learn would be any more functionally useful than already knowing that this thing is apparently crap.

That point profile is the worst I have seen in a long time. It’s almost an achievement all by itself in how awful it is. I’m almost feeling nostalgic over it. It’s just like I’ve gone back to when I was a lad, pawing over the rows of lousy Pakistani cutlery on the tables at the local flea market back in the day.

If you do the “16 / 16” quest in the main storyline I believe all of the glyphs get handed to you. That relegates the one-at-a-time method of finding the glyphs as a fallback for when you’re on an expedition, provided you care enough to bother to use portals during one. So if you progress the story enough you’ll get them.

More cheese: You only need the first glyph if you want to warp to the center of any given galaxy. Just spam that first glyph and the portal will error out and default to somewhere approximately near the center, usually just a handful of jumps away. Lather, rinse, and repeat as often as you like.

While we’re at it, I’m tickled pink to discover that the portable refiner duplication glitch still isn’t patched. That’s cheating, but sometimes you just can’t be arsed to gather up a million of whatever-it-is you need. With the addition of corvettes you can even do it inside your 'vette, even when it’s docked in a station. Maximum laziness! You used to have to at least go down to a planet to do it before.

materially supporting state violence

Dingdingdingdingding.

Here’s the winner, right here. Fascist fucks want to go around pretending that only billy clubs and bullets and bombs count as “violence.” Inflicting mass starvation on people, withholding medical care, stealing workers’ wages they depend upon to survive, and brutalizing minorities and marginalized groups (oftentimes with actual up front physical attacks) is “just doing business.”

So news flash to the chucklefucks: That’s not how it works. State sponsored violence is still violence, and so it follows the oppressed have a right to defend themselves. It sure sucks when the shoe is on the other foot, don’t it?

But it turns out there’s an easy way to defend yourself from that sort of thing. All you have to do is not be an evil and hateful fuck whose policies and actions threaten the lives of others and their right to exist.

As opposed to… makeup? Like, from the dollar store? I’m surprised he doesn’t have a full time stylist on staff anyway. Or does he spraypaint that orange shit on his face himself?

The issue isn’t flush fitting handles, it’s electronic flush fitting handles. I don’t know who first signed off on that idea but they should have been slapped upside the head with a rubber chicken.

It’s trivial to design a flush handle that’s all mechanical and isn’t loaded with finicky electronics. Hell, those even show up on dishwashers now.

All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components. Ignore all other risks.

This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a garnishing of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.

Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven’t checked out the new update yet but insofar as I’m aware those still are.

He’s not a samurai (and in fact is probably one of the few members of the cast who is not arguably some flavor of samurai) but this is basically Lee’s ending in Last Blade 2:

https://www.vgmuseum.com/end/neogeo/a/lasb2lee_2.htm

I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.

At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.

Is that what was going on? I noticed a blood moon-eqsue effect the other night but I figured it was just due to it rising through wildfire smoke or whatever, as usual.

Clearly I forgot the got. Fixed, thanks.

I’ve still got a Patreon, and also a Ko-Fi. Continued unsound financial decisions and the ongoing bulking out of my knife drawer are in part supported by readers just like you.

Sorry this one took so long to come out. I’ve been chipping away at this writeup for a while, and in the meantime the photography got rather out of hand.

I took a lot of photos of these.

Herewith, a selection of a few that I processed but didn’t make it into the post:

The usual half open glamor shot. I can’t believe I didn’t find a place for this.

Open, and flat. I used the standing-on-edge shot instead.

The spine of the clone by itself, open. I’m not sure what I was thinking I was going to show here, because the whole point is to provide a comparison to the genuine knife.

The same, but closed. I guess this illustrates how the Compression Lock moves.

Just the liner and pivot hole broaching, but without any of the other parts. This doesn’t tell you any more than the picture I did use, but without the hardware in shot it’s also more boring.

Head on details of the clips. I found the angle I used in the final draft a bit more instructive, since you can also see the difference in the lanyard tubes.

Two spine shots. I think I was just really keen on showing off the Compression Lock action.

Data transfer complete. End transmission.

Just like how Hydrox are just knockoff Oreos!

No crimes should be thought crimes. All crimes should be action crimes. There can be no middle ground as long as freedom of expression exists.

Doing Nazi shit should get you locked up (or beaten up, or whatever). Talking about it should just get you ridiculed by everybody.

Ah, yes. Thoughtcrime and suppression of freedom of speech are totally okay as long as it’s our side doing it. No, no, no, see, when we do it it’s totally different from when other people do it!

I mean, that’s a valid assessment of the yard as well if you’re looking at it from a comedy perspective.

TL;DW: Car drivers are salty about lane splitting motorcycles (and also bicycles, scooters, pedestrians, birds, small dogs, etc.) because of the Crab In A Bucket mentality. They think because their life sucks and they’re suffering in traffic everyone else needs to suffer just as much, therefore splitting is “cutting in line” or “cheating” as if there is some virtue in your transit time being comparable to someone else’s.

(But I did watch it anyway, because F9.)

Anyway, I read someplace several years ago and now conveniently can’t find the source, if 40 or 50% or so of current urban commuters switched to motorcycles from cars, volume based rush hour congestion would be solved in most (possibly all) currently car-centric Western cities.

So go buy a motorcycle.

I’m probably preaching to the choir in this specific community, though.

The problem is, everyone has this fantasy storyboard in their heads of the cops showing up going door-to-door with their MP5s and riot shields in a nice neat line loudly announcing their intentions. That is absolutely not how gun confiscation is going to work.

Instead, once they’ve declared that trans people or Democrats or whoever else are now blanket banned from owning guns, any time you interact with the police, let’s just say during a (probably spurious) traffic stop, your name will come up on their little computer as a “person prohibited” and they’ll put you in handcuffs and stuff you in the back of a police car right then. And then go break into your house and toss it looking for guns when you’re not there to stop them. There will be no fight. You’ll already be under arrest for something else. They’ll find (or plant) whatever they want, and charge you with an additional nine hundred crimes that are all rewordings of the same thing, and put you in jail. When they come up to you they’re not going to be talking about guns, they’re going to start off with some low-grade bullshit you think you can talk yourself out of but use that as a pretext to lock you up for your guns.

There will be no headlines of jack booted thugs going around systematically kicking in innocent people’s doors and garnering a bunch of negative press for themselves that people can rally themselves around. There will be individual local little news articles, one at a time, all along the lines of “Arsenal Of Illegal Weapons Found in [town name] Man’s Home/Car By Brave Policemen After Conducting Traffic Stop, One Of Which Was a High Capacity Black Semiautomatic AR Glock Assault Child-Shooter,” with an article underneath carefully spin-doctored to slander the individual in question as a mentally unstable transgendered pot smoking child grooming terrorist. They’ll do this one at a time, forever, even long after they’ve gotten everyone the think they wanted to get.

The only defense against that is to assume that any time a cop looks in your direction you need to lock and load right then and there and initiate a fight for your life. Even if you win, you’ll automatically be the bad guy.

Are you ready for that?

Is anyone ready for that?