🇺🇸🇺🇦 Kamala meets Zelensky and reads to his face all the things the U.S. has done for Ukraine, while Zelensky nods.

Seems an unnecessary… pic.twitter.com/BWMlZjQObI

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) June 15, 2024

Kamala: Biden wanted to say that he was very happy with time you two spend last couple of weeks.

And that's why he is now with George Clooney

Egg and pork bing on the streets of Chengdu. Street breakfast.
0.5Euro.🤤🤤🤤 pic.twitter.com/ph9mgM9jk1

— Sharing Travel (@TripInChina) June 15, 2024

I'd eat that daily if I could !bharatiya for 50 rupees can you imagine what trash we'd get here.

Bait idea: Make a post saying you run fans and filters all day, but you can no longer afford your electric bill so you're going to keep yourself safe. And everyone else in the sub should too.

Fr though, the first part could be funny. They're all leftoids who probably think climate change will kill us all in 2 weeks.

Sam, 26

Michael, 28

Rio Grande Valley

Personal Life/Career:

• Recently married, April 6th this year

  • Engaged for 4 months

  • Dating for 4 years

  • Never talked about finances before getting married?

• Assistant Manager (Her) timestamp

  • 2'100 a month roughly

• Truck Driver (Him) timestamp

  • 2'400 a month

• She is currently in school? timestamp

  • Studying Social Work? Doing a Masters

  • She has student loans but I did not catch what they were

Financials:

• Combined finances less than a month ago, she added him to her account

• "Different opinions" on spending timestamp

  • She says she's more frugal, he likes spending on electronics and vehicles

  • He Upgraded to new iPhone, FOMOS into newest thing

• How do their financial conversations go? timestamp

  • She says she wants to pay off debt quickly, "to zero as fast as possible" even if it's 0% apr

  • "He sees zero apr and he's like oh, we don't gotta pay anything at all"

• They have zero in their savings (paid off some cards recently)

• She paid off a few things that were at 0 instead of another 0 that was about just hit the interest period timestamp

  • "To be fair he signed up on a property without me knowing"

  • 120'000 property? He told her he was going to look and he ended up buying it on sight? "Owner to Owner financing"

    • Before marriage

    • Paid 117'000 with financing?

    • Applying to refinance "soon" timestamp

      • Currently at 12% over 30 years

      • they want a lower monthly and fewer years

  • Specifics timestamp

    • 6'000

    • There's another 6'000 that went to paying the parents?

      • Paying back parents for wedding?

• Built a 860 sq ft "frame house" on the property timestamp

  • Property is 3 acres

  • Building the house cost $37'000

• Score timestamp

  • He says - 8

  • She say - 4

• Credit Card 1 (Wells Fargo) ($4'120) tiemstamp

  • $42 minimum payment

  • 0% interest until October

  • 92 in new purchases

  • CC was opened because she wanted to start a business timestamp

    • Coffee cart selling expresso drinks outside markets

    • "Got busy" so she couldn't keep doing this, sold all equipment - didn't make money? timestamp

      • Awkward laugh when asked what she got from the sale? Got 2500 back?

      • Spent 10'000 on this?

      • Got a job because this wasn't working well?

• Credit Card 2 (4'028) timestamp

  • Interest about to start accruing

  • Paid 5'000 - claims she doesn't remember where she got this

    • Balance was 9'000

    • After getting pressed, says it was from a 20'000 personal loan

  • 92 in new purchases

• Personal Loan (21'749) timestamp

  • 21% interest

  • Gets pressed hard on why she traded 5'000 at 0% for a 21%

  • more info timestamp

    • In her name

    • They didn't know it was $21'749

    • Weren't able to make any minimum payments because of his motorcycle? timestamp

      • He doesn't even use it and now it's busted - front shock went out and it would be a 2'000 repair bill

  • Paid off the bike with this timestamp

    • 227 a month

    • 7'000 balance on it

    • 7% interest rate

    • Bike's used value is around $9'000

• She remembers why she paid off his credit cards timestamp

  • She did not like the monthly minimum payments?

  • "I don't know what I'm doing"

• Credit Card 3 (Lowe's) timestamp

  • Paid off, one of the things in that personal loan

  • Would have been interest free for another couple months?

  • Ate a late fee at some point

  • Was 2'000

  • Paid for a washer/dryer on here? timestmap

    • 0% financing at Lowe's

    • Her dad had given money for washer/dryer, he used it for the wedding and 0%'d the washer/dryer. She did not know about this and thought they were paid for in cash?

      • Her parents are divorced

• Credit Card 4 (Discover) ($10'656) timestamp

  • To build the house - he clarifies that it was finishing the interior of the house

  • "Because we didn't have the money for it"

  • He has never watched the show before - she has

  • Roughly 3000 a year in interest accruing on this?

• Credit Card 5 (City Simplicity) ($5'909) timestamp

  • His, she paid this one off as part of the personal loan

    • actually this was with the wedding gifts? 6'000 in wedding gifts? actually the wedding gifts and some savings?

    • Actually it was a different much smaller card she paid off

  • 0% interest

    • He thinks this ends by August

    • Actually it ended 3 weeks ago

  • $59 minimum payment

  • 29%

• Credit Card 6 (Home Depot)

  • Paid off

• Credit Card 7 (Capital One Savior One) (Paid off) timestamp

  • A bunch of Amazon purchases on this one - for the wedding?

    • Lights, table covers, etc?

• Credit scores -

  • His is 630

  • Her's is 695 (last she checked)

• "How did she convince you to come on this show?" timestmap

  • He didn't want to come on

  • He didn't watch the "on-boarding video" because "she didn't tell him about it"

  • they try to justify their financial opinions timestmap

• Purchased a water slide timestamp

  • He is trying to make money with this by renting it out?

  • $1'600 total

  • Hasn't been able to rent it yet?

• Bought some pc fans timestamp

  • He's been playing Helldivers 2

• Attempts to convince them not to be r-slurred timestamp

• He has 3 vehicles timestamp

  • 1 at his house

  • 1 at parent's garage

  • 1 his dad uses

• Checking Account ($31) timestamp

  • Disastrous amount of eating out

  • It's like they think credit cards are literally free money

  • 453 just on going out to eat

  • Phone bill is $185 (they both owe on their phones)

• An attempt to explain how interest works timestamp

• Budget time timestamp

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dfrv86/supreme_court_rules_gun_bump_stocks_ban_is/

The death of the dollar is eminent

Moscow Stock exchange halts trading in US dollars.

Russian warships and nuclear subs are right off the coast of Florida and Harvard in Cuba. This makes the Cuban missile crisis look like a tea party.

Interesting on the timing of this, as it…

— Ann Vandersteel (@annvandersteel) June 13, 2024

Petroguzzlers I don't feel so good:

Aliens be appearing:

Russia is groping America's gock:

Putler coming for those f16bussies:

!schizomaxxxers speculate wildly.

SHOW MORE

!boozers

Can't believe those Redditors:

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/14cjsma/putin_shows_off_what_he_claims_is_draft_peace/

Who were telling such deal didn't existed were Reddit iq

Bad guy doesn't need to lie

West goal is to make Ukraine look better than it is and has a lot of mind working how to keep support from regular citizens going:

https://ecfr.eu/publication/wars-and-elections-how-european-leaders-can-maintain-public-support-for-ukraine/?amp

But the point was 2022 deal was way better than 2024. Back then they weren't even going to lose on paper Crimea (Crimea was supposed to be just like it was, de jury Ukrainian de facto Russian) and lose tiny part of Donbas that wasn't in control of Ukraine since 2014. But obviously khohols were hyped back then believed they were going to win and that's why now the offer is to fully lose 4 regions and Crimea. And next offer 100% will include also losing Kharkiv since 99% Lugansk is already under Russia so pushing in that direction will enter more in Kharkiv. Khohols today ain't hyped they know things ain't going to get better but they want the line be frozen but freezing a line is a draw scenario and Ukraine is on losing scenario so they will need to give something that isn't under Russian control for peace. It's like they never played civilization game duh

But I still love those people saying Ukrainian need to continue fighting and hopping for miracles.

Ukrainian fighting:

This is a crazy story with a lot of twists and turns that starts in New York in the late 1950s

Our story starts with a lawyer named Burt Pugach becoming infatuated with a girl named Linda Riss. He takes her on dates, buys her fancy gifts , and gives her rides to work every morning. And this courtship works, and Linda and Burt start dating.

All goes well for about a year, until Burt drops news no gf wants to hear -- Burt is already married, and has a kid. Linda is pissed, but Burt tells her he's in the process of getting a divorce. Linda still is not happy. But Burt doesn't give up, and shows up at her house with divorce papers in hand to show he's serious. The problem? The divorce papers are FAKE.

Understandably, this is the last straw for Linda. It's bad enough to have a secret wife, but fake divorce papers? She breaks it off, and soon starts dating a new man, Larry Schwartz. After just a few months of courtship, they get engaged. Burt is not giving up, he sends letters and flowers and gifts and asks her friends to pass along messages. When that doesn't work he starts threatening her, throwing rocks at her window, tells her he'll have people kill her. As you might expect, this doesn't work either.

Furious at Linda, Burt hires 3 guys to go to Linda's house, ring her doorbell, and throw lye in her face. She's rushed to the hospital and spends 3 months there receiving surgeries and other medical care for the caustic burns caused by the lye. Ultimately, she is left totally blind in one eye and partially blind in the other eye.

Even worse, shortly after this, Larry and Linda call off their engagement, either because they fear Burt or because Larry doesn't want to deal with a blind wife. A few months later, the police track down Burt's hitmen, who immediately rat out Burt. Burt gets sentenced to 15 years in jail.

This is where a lot of these stories would end. But Burt is still madly in love with Linda and starts writing her love letters from prison, speaking fondly to her. And Linda, she's broke, living alone in Manhattan, she's lonely, so she starts writing him back and they become pen pals. And when Burt finds out about her financial struggles, he starts sending her money he's been getting from doing paralegal work in jail. This arrangement continues for 14 years, and eventually Burt gets out. And when he gets out, they start dating again!

Burt is kind of a celebrity for his criminal act and gets invited onto TV to do an interview, where he pulls out a ring, turns to the camera, and proposes to Linda on TV. And she says yes, and they get married just 8 months after Burt gets out of prison. They co-write a book cashing in on the drama called "A Very Different Love Story"

At some point over the next 20 years, Burt starts cheating on Linda with multiple women. In 1997 point one of his mistresses comes forward and claims that Burt has started harassing her and threatening her with violence, just like what happened with Linda. Unlike Linda, this mistress takes Burt to court. And poor Linda, she appears as a character witness in the trial for Burt! And Burt beats most of the charges.

Linda dies in 2013 of heart failure at 75. But the drama still isn't over! Burt must have felt some remorse for what he did for Linda, because he wrote his will to leave most of his $15 million inheritance to a foundation for the visually impaired he set up in her honor, with some longtime friends also getting some. But when Burt died in 2020, his updated will left most of his money to his caretaker Shamin Frawley, and nothing for the foundation. Shamin is accused of coercing him into changing his will after he had a stroke, and withholding food and medicine until he died. But that's still working its way through the court system.

Match 1:

Fricked up my schedule yesterday and passed out around noon due to saying goodbye to friends traveling international. I've been up about 12 hours so pretty sure being drunk is fair game.

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 autists 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.