https://t.co/4H7VfX04rY

— _its_not_real_ (@_its_not_real_) July 24, 2024

like bro I get it the bureaucratic machine of state is an enormous terrifying apparatus that forces you to go to school and facilitates the capitalistic exploitation of human resources

but they will turn the ovens on and that's just objectively bad.

THREAD JANNIED, USE THIS LINK

https://archived.moe/v/thread/682765936

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you know what OP? I think I will click on your thread. What does one do with a Playstation 5 in the Year of Our Lord 2024?

Huh that's a weird first response, was something up with the OP image-

Oh. Oh no.

Put on your PPE lads, this thread is going to be a cesspit.

Oh btw the OP image does not apply to me because I'm a -3/10 truecel btw. I genuinely despise normgroids who go "uhh there really was someone for you, you just didn't notice!" It's like their soul is too shallow to comprehend that people may have different experiences in life than them.

These guys get it.

not going to bother to document this myself but there's a sideplot about cuckshit going on this whole thread

Video games are so wonderful. Even men with normie potential can end up sad and alone with Nintendo Power

oh wow, another normgroid who can't comprehend being undesirable!

These are the people who say they can't understand incels. Men who have literally push women away from them to avoid having relationships. "darn these incel neighbors are crazy, how can they be pushing women away every day like me and still think it's not their fault they're celibate?:

"just act confident bro, just be normal bro." I'm not confident and I'm not normal, pretending to be so to get relationships will only lead to relationships built on lies.

this was the last time @peepehands ever spoke to a woman face-to-face

it's called normies faking being incels to be more interesting than they really are

Because everybody's the underdog of their own story. Nobody wants to hear that somebody has it worse than them.

thank you Anon for answering my question. What do you do with a PS5 in 2024? Post about it to 4chan.

I actually am uglier than Ethan Ralph. Also stupidity is an asset in dating, women don't like intelligent men.

things like these are the worst. I like to imagine that I'm going to make it, that I really just haven't met the right girl yet. But I know too many guys (yes, in real life too) who were hurt really bad by the girl who gave them a chance.

I actually do believe personality plays a role because if Chad was spergy enough women would hate him, if Henry Cavil gets shit for playing Warhammer, what hope do the rest of us have? But yeah, normies and especially handsome men hate the thought of ever admitting they have pretty (or even just not-ugly) privilege.

best advice in the thread

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Thread is still kicking, maybe I'll collect more screenshots later.

Xbox fans were saying MS is rich and would overstay PlayStation store and etc

Exclusive: Meta just released Llama 3.1 405B — the first-ever open-sourced frontier AI model, beating top closed models like GPT-4o across several benchmarks.

I sat down with Mark Zuckerberg, diving into why this marks a major moment in AI history.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro… pic.twitter.com/wI0X86P0dM

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) July 23, 2024

https://twitter.com/ug_chelsea/status/1810273828720758919

There were a lot of hits and in cities that were supposed to be protected by patriot like Kiev and Khrivoi Rog

https://twitter.com/menchosint/status/1809861278917091768

This patriot system that was destroyed 2 days ago and obviously pro Ukrainian claimed it's fake. Was supposed to protect khruvoi rog.

Ukraine started campaign that Russia supposedly hit some hospital with x101 missile

It's a slowed down video so you can compare that missile with couple of x101 hitting same target

Ukraine also didn't mention that main strike was at night and only focused at that hospital.

Ukraine put a lot of effort in this campaign

https://twitter.com/mylordbebo/status/1810419215599620181

But question should been what do they expect from it ? US already rushed saying they won't let Ukraine use its weapons on Russian soil. There also wouldn't be any new weapons for Ukraine and Israel with Gaza made sure nobody would give a frick about this event.

But what's important to me is

I been telling for months patriots ain't going to do a shit. And now after Ukraine received more patriots than Germany has, and Zelenskyy promised it would stop Russian bombings. We are enjoying how effortless Russian is bombing a city that has most patriot defence on earth. As I mention in the past, patriots can stop around 100 missiles a year. It's probably less in reality because factories that build those often get caught in fire and storages etc in nato countries get blown up like this happened 2 days ago:

Only a year ago they were proudly claiming patriots are shooting down kinzhals

And now they have to beg Israel to give them ammo

>Could Turn the Tide

If Zelenskyy poo right now it could turn the tide, I mean everything is theoretically possible.

With new Orlan drones Ukraine is now constantly also losing Himars vehicles

https://twitter.com/dd_geopolitics/status/1810611257856213352

The targets Russian hit yesterday was some factories and some electricity generators but that's just propping since Russian main goal is to send Ukraine into blackout during the winter.

The winter part will be very interesting because with constant blackouts a lot of Ukrainian will move to the west.

But don't worry to Bloomberg Zelenskyy promised a new counteroffensive and that he end this conflict by end of this year. And yesterday signed some agreements with Poland and Poland promised to him they will shot Russian missiles that enter Polish air space. It's a good promise is will be as effective as:

Russian missiles are just couple seconds in Polish air space, shooting them in Polish air space + making sure it falls in Polish soil is kinda very hard to do. Russia has radars in that area so if Polish missile hits Russian missile in Ukrainian air space it will be a direct involvement.

Edit: seems later Poland did an back-steep

Tusk on the idea of shooting down missiles in Ukraine's skies: we need NATO cooperation for this

We need unequivocal cooperation within NATO for this, because this kind of action does require joint NATO responsibility.

So it was just some food for Ukrainian to feel good yesterday

Edit: Ukrainian twitter channel today flex that it got patriot from Germany on 5 June and something (probably ammo) from Romania on 20 June

https://twitter.com/ukrreview/status/1810618910154043565

They couldn't pick a better day to flex about it

Hi dramafrens!!

Have any of you heard of this obscure little indie game company called Valve? You may have heard of them from niche titles such as:

Half-Life

Portal

Only the biggest gaming platform of all time, Steam

But today we're talking about a game very close to my heart: Team Fortress 2! Valve's hit first person class-based team shooter is an iconic game, earning it a place of glory amongst all vidya and entrenching it in internet and meme culture, and even a somewhat recent meme trend depicting the TF2 characters as buff, totally heterosexual Wagnerite Ziggers has produced some of the shiniest gemeralds of all time

(video courtesy of @CREAMY_DOG_ORGASM_fan17)

It's really close to my all time favorite game and definitely my most played. Countless hours were sucked from my childhood as baby me learned to use my first slurs whenever I came across a particularly annoying enemy Demoman

Which is why it's all the sadder that I'm now talking about its spectacular fall from grace.

The Beginning of the End

Meet Your Match

TF2 had a reputation of being a quite regularly updated game, with a major content release happening around 3-5 times a year. Besides usual gripes from boomers these updates were pretty well received, and I certainly have held a positive view of almost all of them although that could just be me yearning for my teenage years.

However, on July 7th of 2016 the most controversial TF2 update to date released: Meet Your Match.

Before this update all TF2 players would play the game through a generic server browser. Valve ran their own public servers right alongside all the community made ones, and filtering for a server you wanted was incredibly easy and streamlined. You could filter by player count, full/empty, whether or not the server used the shitty Valve Anti-Cheat, whether custom decals were allowed, you name it. Everything was hosted on the server browser, it held everything from official Valve servers to servers run by the dregs of society. I fondly remember joining a server when I was about 11 running a map that had furry porn plastered all over the walls you never forget your first time, !furries.

So what did Meet Your Match change? Well, it didn't remove the server browser. Not outright. But it did take all official Valve-ran servers off the browser and move them into a shitty matchmaking system No longer could you filter for a specific Valve server running your favorite map, you now have to queue up for matchmaking in a party with up to five friends (no more just joining your friends through Steam or the server browser!), have a certain list of maps selected, and pray to god it lands you in a game within the next 15 minutes. Even worse, since the matchmaking system's job is to get you into a game by any means necessary, it could land you in a game with no players or a game about to end and switch maps to a shitty one you don't like. Additionally those official Valve servers got way shittier, due to the removal of the ability to switch teams, removal of sprays (basically the ability to plaster a custom image onto any surface you want ), and the increasingly outdated Valve Anti-Cheat system being easier to exploit by cheaters. Oh, and those five friends you get to party up with? They will only be on your team, meaning you can only have friendly competition with these friends if somebody gets auto-balanced (which remember is a necessity since you can't change teams manually to even the balance )

That server browser still exists, but it's been relegated to its own separate tab and no longer has any Valve-ran games on it. That would be fine if you don't like Valve servers, (and who would? ) but the average TF2 player is just going to hit “find game” and not bother with the server browser, leaving a bunch of half-empty, struggling community servers—not to mention that most of the community servers are shit themselves, but for other reasons; no way in heck am I downloading 13 trillion Touhou reskin mods just to play on a shitty weeb server!

The update understandably made a lot of people upset, me included! But we had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

Jungle Inferno, or, Pain of Neglect

Released on October 20th of 2017, Jungle Inferno was a pretty bog-standard update, as far as things go. A few new weapons, some balances, a few new maps which were mostly shitty, we've all heard it before. The problem? It was the last time Valve would do anything significant with the game. Any updates past Jungle Inferno were repeating seasonal events, and the last Saxxy Awards (the TF2 community's version of the Oscars, where people would create kino animations using Valve's Source Filmmaker) ever to be held to this date

“But Shelly,” you might ask, “you said there were still seasonal event updates! Surely stuff was being added then, right? ” Well, yes. But it wasn't Valve. Every Halloween and Christmas Valve would have some intern scour the top rated maps, cosmetics, weapon skins, and taunts from the community workshop. So surely game's health is in the community's hands, and doing alright, yes? Well…

All of this shit was just bad, frankly. Often times the skins had missing textures, the cosmetics were r-slurred and unwanted or even outright broken, the taunts didn't work, all things that could go weeks without being fixed. Besides, hats and skins don't affect the gameplay!

Well maps do affect the gameplay. But they were all shittier even than the skins! A prime example is Wutville, a community made Christmas map. I think I'll let this image of the first attacker spawn and the known bugs list speak for themselves.

So we have a map that is basically a long, sniper-heaven corridor with no flank routes, tons of bugs, and is a visual fricking mess to boot! And this is just one extreme example of many broken community maps; don't even get me started on Bread Space, which started the defending team out facing the wrong way, so half the team would obliviously walk the entire way back to their last point in the setup phase! It was obvious that Valve was not bothering to playtest anything they were putting into the game, let alone make it themselves.

Why was Valve refusing to work on such an influential title? Despite all their decisions the TF2 player counts were continuing to grow, almost suspiciously so… (more on that later ) surely if Valve put in the effort they could bring ever more players in and just get that much more money from anyone participating in its famous economy. It has a lot to do with their company work philosophy: on the outside, they claim to avoid “treadmill work” and prioritize employee freedom by letting them work on any projects they had passion for. Beneath this stupid pseudo-commie work structure however everyone knew Valve operated on the principle of “Do nothing and let Steam make us infinite money.” They didn't need to work on TF2 because it made them zero billions of dollars.

Attack of the Machines

The Sniperbots

In 2020, there was a source code leak, leading many people to fear the worst. A lot of rumors were in the air at this time, everything from exploits in the code being used to hack accounts to even in-game doxxing. While none of these ever really came true, there was certainly an opportunity for cheaters to exploit a vulnerability in the game. And exploit they did!

A bit of background is needed. Basically there are nine classes in TF2, but out of all of them none is more powerful than the Sniper. With two clicks he can instantly kill 5 out of those 9. In a game played by humans, the main barrier to playing Sniper is the human player's skill and ability to quickly land those instakill headshots. A good player can theoretically steamroll the entire enemy team only by playing Sniper, but nobody but the most turbovirgin neurodivergents could ever hope to reach the skill level needed.

A robot though…

With the game's guts on display for the world to see, people naturally quickly made programs that could run an account on TF2 playing sniper, which would proceed to walk straight into combat and land every headshot, wiping the entire enemy team but it wouldn't just be one, it would be five, ten, fifteen sniperbots with absolutely zero counterplay pooping up entire game servers. As expected, these bots were also equipped with the latest in slur technology and would frequently call votekicks on human players

It was a dark time, and still is. These bots are still running around, and the game is absolutely unplayable outside of peak hours. The bots don't stray outside of casual matchmaking so community servers are fine, but the same problems I already highlighted with those servers still exist today

Valve managed to “fix” the slur-spamming problem by removing chat permissions for all free to play players. I don't think I need to mention why this is a bad idea. In addition to that the bots aren't really fixed, they still flood casual servers and kick every human player out. To this day, it seems Valve has no intention of actually fixing this issue.

#SaveTF2

The problem eventually became Reddit's problem. /r/tf2 is the epitome of a modern day vidya subreddit, astroturfed to heck, filled with shitty memes and r-slurred redditors who think they can accomplish anything by making smug comments. Their solution to the bots, the content drought, and the general decline of the game? Be heckin' wholesome 100 about it, and start a hashtag

The SaveTF2 movement started with the general goal of getting Valve to fix their darn game. Get rid of the bots was the first priority, and after that people generally thought that Valve would notice TF2 as profitable with the surge of new players coming into a fresh, shiny, bot-free classic game! After all, TF2 was still reaching record numbers of concurrent player counts, () imagine what new heights it could reach from there!

It became fully Redditized incredibly quickly. Constant mentions of Valve and Valve developers on Xwitter, r-slurred “spread the word” posts all over reddit in unrelated subs, and getting the voice actors to go along with their shitty memes are just a few of the regular Keanu Chungus redditor actions you would expect from such a movement.

The Valve Response

In May of 2022, the TF2 Twitter account posted this:

https://twitter.com/TeamFortress/status/1529970640224018433

This lead many to rejoice in the triumph of the SaveTF2 movement. Honestly things were looking pretty… hopeful? Maybe the Reddit activism got to them? After years and years of total radio silence it looked like Valve might actually care about this ‘dead game' that continued to grow.

An update was promised and actually… delivered? In July of 2023, TF2 players got the Summer Update! What was in this update, you ask?

• Community-made cosmetics

• Community-made skins

• Community-made maps

Sound familiar? But hey, at least the wholesome reddit seal was added into the game! (No, I'm not joking)

This satisfied the redditors though, and the SaveTF2 movement gradually lost momentum, sputtered, and died. All the while, the bots still ran free.

The Coming of the VLTIMATE TRVTH NVKE

On April 30th of this year, a long time TF2 YouTuber by the name of ZestyJesus woke up and dropped the fattest trvthnvke ever made on the TF2 community:

For those of you who don't want to watch an hour long video, the TL;DR is that after scraping years of data from third party sites and even neurodivergentally collecting his own information, this guy came to a frightening conclusion… You know how I said that despite everything, in spite of the bots, the content drought, the shitty community made updates, in spite of all of it, TF2's player count continued to grow?

In the video, this guy provides pretty darning evidence that over 70% of TF2's reported players… are bots. But not those sniper bots I've been talking about previously! No, these bots exist specifically to sit in private servers with TF2 running in text-mode (no graphics to reduce RAM usage) and periodically receive item drops, courtesy of Valve's age old gacha system. These bots then sell these items for irl money, inflating both the in-game economy and the reported player counts. The actual player counts? Declining, and had been since Meet Your Match.

ZestyJesus took aim at the Redditors in his closing statements in the video, highlighting how much of a massive failure SaveTF2 was and what an embarrassment it was that the movement lost steam as soon as Valve threw them a bone that looked and tasted exactly like all the other bones they had been thrown for seven years.

So naturally, the redditors crawled out of the woodwork.

#FixTF2: The Redditor Strikes Back

Not taking any hints as to the actual point of the ZestyJesus, some clown by the name of WeezyTF2 releases this video:

Basically he's just saying the movement needs to start again with a different name. TF2 players, still stunned from the TRVTHNVKE fallout, have begun clinging onto this new movement as of late. It basically just involves a lot more whining, which at least does more than the reddit activism they were doing before.

Another YouTuber by the name of shounic, who mostly does explanations of the game's mechanics and code released this video a mere day ago, highlighting all the barriers to actually fixing the game and all the pitfalls this new movement could fall into:

And at around this time TF2 starts getting massively review bombed!!

At least reviews are an actual form of protest. But what about other Valve games? It appears that Half-Life 2 has also been the target of a few stinkers!

Surely this will go well.

Conclusion

Redditors suck and I hate them all. I hope Valve does something with my favorite childhood game but honestly I'm not holding my breath. I think Valve realizes they're probably going to make more money from their newest Overwatch-clone slop than they could ever make from fixing TF2.

And if they don't? They have the money. Steam will bail them out.

I'm wide screenshotting bc I don't have much time rn

used some css magic to remove the bottom row of each comment (karma is hidden rn because of recency anyway)

Lets look at the top comments:

"a trans shooter most likely..."

"no mexican"

leftoid redditors are leftoididly arguing about shooter ID in other places in the megathread too!

It's staged!

guys we can't become alex jones... that's not cool guys!

update

some more

@Redactor0 the redditor /u/Broblivious made the same pro wrestler connection that you did

totally isn't what would happen, but that's A GOOD THING!

I'm surprised counter jerk threads actually pops out against the neurodivergent anti-west commies of anime_tits

https://old.reddit.com/r/Ohio/comments/1duhzn2/is_jd_vance_considered_tall_in_ohio/

took @McCoxmaul's art here and made a template for ur use !marseyartists

Female POV OP picture? Check.

Horny OP question? Check.

"Oh yeah, the chuds are going to be so mad!"

"erm. if you want to feel like a girl, you should play Overwatch or Final Fantasy 14... not that I'm speaking from experience or anything."

This guy is taking the bait but he seems more confused than angry.

OP admits defeat

But wait! The /v/ermin are amused by the attempt and give actual advice on how to better troll /v/!

also this is pretty funny (it was posted in response to OP)

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The only thing funnier than epic trolls are epic troll fails.

And yes that is a whole forum for Transformers I appreciate it because it's one of those OG Internet forums that long predates any contemporary social media.

Apologies if this is a little less cerebral than what /h/lit is used to but my understanding is that the Eisner Awards are supposed to be prestigious or something. Interesting that it went to a licensed comic — a Hasbro property about action figures of all things.

I've always maintained that the Transformers comics are actually pretty dope sci-fi comics. Really they're the only Transformers stories that have ever been more than just toy advertisements and I've been meaning to do effortposts on the Dreamwave and IDW runs. Pat Lee easily deserves one all to himself

Anyway do our resident !comicshitters have any opinions?

!kino !anime

It won't flop but I'm hoping the audience reception is terrible enough for it to "underperform" .

Hotter than Ibiza baybeeeee

caption this

Knock on wood, so far this year, I haven't heard a single Skibbity Potty or Alpha Male nonsense. Today, I had one of my less focused students start blurting out, "What the Sigma? What the Sigma? What. The. Sigma?" You know the behavior. Say something you heard on TikTok and then look to see who responds. Say it again, doing your absolute personal best to get attention. More effort than you've ever given a single assignment or locating a pencil of any functionality.

A couple of kids chuckle and look to me for a response, so I ask the kid, "What does that mean?" This, of course, is his cue to repeat it two more times.

I ask him again, what does the Greek letter Sigma mean to you in this context. Again, "What the Sigma?" as if he's owning the room.

Naturally, I Google that crap, to the utter astonishment of all the dingbats. Perhaps they believe I've never heard of the Interwebs.

According to all of the reliable sources (I found them on the Internet, so they must be correct), a Sigma is equal to an Alpha, but living away from the pack. I shared this with the class and then clarified with my student, "So, you're a Sigma, on par with the Alpha, right?"

"Ummmmm..."

"If you're the Sigma, you're basically a pack leader, like an Alpha, right? You're the boss. Everybody follows you. You are the best at everything and everybody knows it."

"Ummmmmmm...." A couple of "Ooooohs" from the peanut gallery tell me that the burn has landed. My A kids are having a nice chuckle at the moment.

"Now, dear children, let's all appreciate this moment of irony." At this point, I resumed my normal teaching activities, but a bit more dramatically than usual. We're in a wood shop, so most of this is monitoring traffic, giving safety reminders and generally saying things like, "Next you're going to the table saw," or, "Before you jump into that could you pick up those three things." We have a well-oiled machine and kids were quick to respond to my requests and move on with whatever they were doing.

The irony was entirely lost on my poor Sigma, but everybody else in the room understood that the hierarchy had been quietly affirmed.