Castle Magus

Wind Waker is still one of my favorite Zelda games, after Link's Awakening. I mean, for me, Link's Awakening (and I'm talking all the way back to the original Game Boy version, let alone any newer versions or remakes) is at the top, no contest, and then everything else is in kind of a jumble below that, but Wind Waker is definitely near the top of that jumble, probably roughly around the same position as A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. Anyway, from the very moment I first saw and heard about Wind Waker, well before it was ever released, I thought all the people shitting on it and dismissing it as "Cel-da" or whatever, based solely on how it looked (and, particularly, how it didn't look), were utter fucking dumbasses.

Haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 or Death Stranding yet, and never bothered to finish Resident Evil 4, and I don't and probably never will give the slightest fuck about Kendrick at all.

(And I guess "out of pocket" really does just mean whatever dumb bullshit now. *shrug*)

When people write either of those two phrases or some similar variation of them in an article or essay or blog post or whatever, when the whole point of whatever they're writing explicitly is to explain the thing they're writing about... I don't know if this is just the Baader Meinhof phenomenon or what, but I've seen it quite a lot in just the past month or two (though I've definitely seen it well before that, too), and it has bugged me every time. You really do not need to write "let me explain" in your thing when you make some assertion somewhere in the first paragraph or two of it. You really don't. I already assume you're going to explain, considering that I can clearly see that there are several more paragraphs after that in your thing.

The only thing I can think of is that it has somehow become shorthand for "I know I just made a potentially ever so slightly off kilter statement and I want you to know that I am fully aware that it may seem off kilter but that it may not be as off kilter as you think it is, and now I'm going to tell you why." Still don't think it needs a lampshade hung on it, though.

(I'm talking only about when those phrases are used in writing, not in verbal conversation.)

Republicans calling out Trumpublicans in other words.

Also this is yet another case where I feel the need to emphasize the difference between "misinformation" and "disinformation."

All of this shit is starting out as deliberate disinformation.

Perpetual dumbass Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming people are controlling the weather? Disinformation. (Then again, I don't know... maybe MTG really is a big enough moron to actually believe that people can control the weather, in which case it would indeed be "misinformation," at least in the context of her saying it. *shrug* But whatever source she's getting her claims from is most certainly disinformation.)

Pathological liar Donald Trump saying FEMA money meant for hurricane victims is instead being used on immigrants? Disinformation.

Sure, all this dumbfuckery might be later spread as misinformation, by people who don't know any better and who aren't (just) doing so maliciously, but it's absolutely starting life as disinformation, which is absolutely being spread maliciously by those doing so.

At least Mitt Romney used the correct word, for what it's worth.

That is all.

...is that stupid "If I had a nickel for every time <thing> happened, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's still weird that it happened twice."

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that banal meme, I'd probably have at least a dollar or two by this point in time, which isn't a lot, but it's still goddamned annoying that I've seen it at least 20 or 40 times now. -_-

If I had a dollar for every time over the past few years that I've seen some fluff piece on some "fandom news" website (video games or otherwise) use the phrase "in shambles" to describe the state of any given fandom after some dumb, silly thing happened in/to/around whatever thing said fandom was a fandom of (or perhaps in/to/around the fandom itself), I'd probably have at least $20 or $30 by this point. And while it'd be great to have an extra $30 out of the blue for nothing at all, I'd really rather have not seen "in shambles" being used so much, especially if the "shambles" that these fans were supposedly "in" happened to be "complete" or "utter" or "absolute."

Shit like this (only ever so slightly exaggerated): "This One Character Kissed This Other Character In Current-Flavor-Of-The-Month-Anime And All Fans Everywhere Are Just In Complete, Utter, Absolute, Total, Literal Shambles Over It!!!"

DeSantis "suspends"[1] (i.e. quits/ends/abandons/fails/loses) his presidential campaign?

Nothing of value was lost.

DeSantis endorses Trump?

Nothing of value was gained.

[1] - Seriously, the word "suspend" implies something that is temporary (which I hope to fuck isn't the case for Ron Desantis's presidential aspirations, because I would like nothing more than for Ron DeSantis to fade into obscurity forever, starting now), so I don't know why the fuck everyone seems to use that word in reference to an unsuccessful political campaign that has been stopped. I'm pretty sure one does not "temporarily" end their campaign for POTUS. Sure, they may try again, later, in a new campaign during the next election, but they're really not "resuming" their old, failed campaign from the previous election at that point. (Apparently, it's about money, like most other politics-related bullshit.)

It's "en masse."

It is not "on mass" or "in mass." It's not "en-masse," either (i.e. there should be no hyphen).

Context: the comments under this article. I saw four attempted uses of it. Only one of them got it right. The other three failed in the different ways noted above.

(I do not care about the actual subject of the article, at least not enough write a whole-ass post about it. It's just more typical "modern video game industry" dogshit about some supposed game that I never would've been interested in to start with.)

This argument is so fucking tiresome. If a game is developed by an independent (you know, where the term "indie" comes from in the first place) group that has no ties to giant corporations, then the game is an indie game. If it is not that, then it is not an indie game. Period. End of story. I don't care about "vibes" or "feels like" or any of that pointless shit.

If Dave the Diver (or any other game) had been developed and published by Electronic Arts or Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo or whoever, then we wouldn't be having this discussion, I don't care how much so-called "indie quality" the game may have. Just because apparently nobody has ever heard of "Nexon, an enormous game publisher" before doesn't mean they're not "an enormous game publisher," i.e. they ain't indie. Saying that a game "has indie quality," even though it's not actually an indie game, is like saying that a game "has Beta quality," even though the game is actually not at the point of being in Beta, and it's just as fucking useless, meaningless, and asinine a statement to make. And there are plenty of actual indie games out there which are not just "2D pixel art" or whatever the fuck, as well, so what the hell does "indie quality" even mean?

And talking about Larian/Baldur's Gate 3: "It's an independent developer, give or take some Tencent investment." (emphasis mine) So... what you're saying there, Mr. PC Gamer Article Writer, is that Larian is not an independent developer at all. Also, the fact that Larian is using the Dungeons and fucking Dragons license for their game would also disqualify them for the "indie" moniker. If you're licensing some massive property when making your game, be it D&D or LotR or Warhammer or Star Wars or whatever, you're not fucking indie. This also disqualifies CD Projekt Red and their Witcher and Cyberpunk games for the same reasons, since otherwise they'd technically be indie (unless they, too, have "some investment" by some gargantuan conglomerate like Tencent that I don't know about, in which case, no, actually, they wouldn't be indie at all, not even "technically").

Honestly, I think games should be judged on their actual merits or lack thereof. "Indie" is not (or, at least, shouldn't be) a video game genre. Whether an "indie game" is either complete shit or utterly orgasmic is mostly irrelevant to its status as an "indie game." As I've said many times in the past, I've played many indie games that would put AAA-developed-by-committee games to shame. But I've played some really crappy indie games, too. And, of course, I've played plenty of ginormous budget AAAAAAAA games that sucked greasy scrotum as well. How "big" or "small" a game may be (i.e. how big or small the amount of money was used to make it) has almost no bearing on how "good" or "bad" said game may be (or whether it's "indie" or not, for that matter).

With all that said, I couldn't give less of a shitting fuck if Dave the Diver was nominated for the "indie" category of some dumbfuck game awards show I don't care about in the slightest.

Full headline, thanks to Dreamwidth's perpetually subpar subject field length: "Gen Z workers are gently roasting their millennial colleagues for using the phrase 'out of pocket' because it has a different meaning for younger people"

I went into that article expecting it to be a "kids these days say the darndest things" type of situation, but no, it's not even that. Because I have never once heard the term "out of pocket" used in either of the ways it is described in that article, whether it's to mean "I'll be away for the day" as the "millennials and boomers" supposedly use it or to mean "acting chaotically or out of hand" as the "Gen Zers" supposedly use it.

The only times I personally have ever heard the term "out of pocket" used was in reference to someone having to pay for some kind of large bill (e.g. medical, home repair, car repair, etc.) "out of pocket," meaning to use their own money, because they had shitty/no insurance to cover it, or otherwise were going to pay for something "out of pocket," i.e. with their own money, as opposed to charging it or whatever. They do also mention this at the end of the above article, and I agree fully with that guy who said that both sides are using the term wrong. And most dictionaries agree.

The fact that the same series of words can come to mean entirely different things to different people, via shitty, fucked up slang usage or whatever, just goes to show how fucking stupid language is, in general.