This doesn’t belong in Not The Onion, the Betoota Advocate is extremely satirical. OP ate the onion and then posted it on Not The Onion.

“It really tied the room together.”

There’s already several comments saying “depends on the beliefs and how important they are,” and obviously there’s that.

I’ll add that there are beliefs people don’t immediately think of when talking about religion. There’s religious humanism, which is a secular religion based around behaving ethically which also has a bunch of traditions similar to spiritually-based religions, minus the spirituality. Adherents (can) attend church and hear sermons on ways to be a better person, etc.

I’m not a religious humanist but they sound like they’re probably decent enough people. They’re quite different to my generic fediverse atheist/irreligious views, in the sense that I don’t have any desire to attend congregations of people who identify as religiously ethical, but I don’t harbor any strong objections to their beliefs.

Personally, I understand it more as something that might be nice for people who have left spiritual religion but still want the trappings of a place to go and be with a community of like-minded people, but that’s not my experience. Ultimately, that’s probably about as far as I’d be comfortable, where we have roughly equivalent spiritual views but highly divergent religious views.

This is a tough question because it’s like asking “What’s the most forgettable game you’ve ever played?” I can remember some of the best and worst games I’ve ever played, but mediocre games are explicitly not interesting.

That said, the first one that came to mind for me was Starshot: Space Circus Fever for N64. It’s just a very generic late-'90s collectathon platformer. It’s hard to be mad at it, because it’s not terrible or anything, there’s just no reason to play it. If you’ve got an N64, there’s Mario, Banjo, Rayman, even B- and C-tier stuff like Gex and Chameleon Twist. There’s hidden gems like Space Station Silicon Valley or Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

That last one is the only reason I played Starshot, I saw it clearanced at a used game store and was like “Oh yeah, I remember hearing this game was good,” but it turned out I was thinking of Rocket. That game actually is good, while Starshot is just fine.

I did read it. The Tumblr blog is what was reported to police, leading to his arrest in 2018, roughly a year after the offending began. The original commenter was under the mistaken impression that his offenses went undetected until 2025, or roughly eight years. I corrected a misunderstanding about years.

Walmart frantically distancing themselves from her is another decent indicator that the company at least doesn’t think this is good for their bottom line, especially when a large segment of customers are already boycotting them for caving to the current administration. If the other side starts boycotting them for not caving to the current administration, that’s a) bad for business and b) very funny.

Actually reading the link, he was arrested in 2018. It’s not very exculpatory to say “His CSAM collection wasn’t eight years old, it was only one year old,” but it’s true I guess.

Not trying to discourage anybody from switching to Linux, but Nook is also available for Windows and Mac if that’s not an option for you.

A bastard.

This is a person with the joke user name quentin.quarantino, as a pun on quarantine and Tarantino. I don’t believe they are claiming to be the director.

Yeah, exactly. The goal is to preserve the reveal of Darth Vader’s real identity. If you just watch them in number order, the prequels spoiler the original trilogy. With the Machete order, you get the Vader reveal in Empire, then a “flashback” that explains how it happened.

Skipping Phantom Menace is just because the guy who came up with the Machete order didn’t like it and felt you got enough context from 2-3. But you can do roughly the same thing without skipping it by just going 4-5-1-2-3-6.

It’s true.

The 4K trilogy (4K77, 4K80 and 4K83) are original theatrical film scans by enthusiasts. Where Despecialized manually recreated the originals by using multiple sources to restore changed scenes, the scans are just that. The results are ultimately very similar.

The main advantage to Despecialized is that it uses the official 4K Blu-Rays as its source for anything that doesn’t need restoring, so it’s mostly a professional quality transfer, while the 4K trilogy were scanned and cleaned up by fans. The main disadvantage is obviously that Despecialized is not a “real” theatrical cut while 4K is.

Either will probably satisfy somebody who wants to watch the unmodified orig trig.

There’s a couple of things people who don’t like it criticize. For one, the Christensen footage is from an early test for Revenge of the Sith, so he’s just weirdly glowering at the camera because he wasn’t thinking about this moment when it was filmed. That’s also why it’s just Hayden’s head comped onto Sebastian Shaw’s body.

Then there’s obviously the question of … why Hayden Christensen at all? The implication is that the “real” Anakin Skywalker died decades ago and was replaced by Darth Vader, which kind of runs counter to the idea that he was ultimately redeemed by his love for his son as presented in the original cut.

Then you’ve got the fact that it kind of makes the original trilogy nonsensical in standalone. If you come to Star Wars and watch 4-5-6 first, there’s some random guy you don’t know at the end. It forces you to watch at least 1-2 and probably 3 first, or do something wacky like the Machete order (4-5-2-3-6), just so that the ending makes sense.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t like it myself. But I don’t care because I’ve got the Despecialized editions, so Maclunkey it up.

tfw boston thinks you’re being racist

I think what you’re identifying as the groundhog is Gimli from Lord of the Rings.

I know this is the least bad part of the story, but it stuck out anyway:

After a lengthy drive to the bar, Strobel said he stepped inside to use the men’s room. However, there were no stalls—only urinals, rendering it inaccessible to him as a trans man.

Precisely where are men supposed to shit in this establishment?

But if they were just re-using old recordings of her as Peach saying “Yeah!”, there’s every chance she wouldn’t get a call for that at all. Not getting a call back for the new Mario Kart doesn’t immediately mean “I’m not Peach any more,” until the game comes out and it becomes clear they haven’t used archive recordings and somebody else is Peach in it.

On the day before launch, she was basically Schrodinger’s Peach: “I haven’t recorded any new lines for this one, so I’m either in this game via archive recordings or I’ve been replaced.” She doesn’t need a phone call for either of those to be true.

I feel like Mario Kart is a bit ambiguous, there’s always the potential they could just re-use voice work from a previous entry rather than bringing all the actors in to go “Whoa! Ha-ha-ha. Luigi number one!” I don’t know if they still do this, but in the N64 era a lot of the same samples were used for Mario Kart, Mario Party, maybe other stuff, so the actors wouldn’t have been involved after the original recording sessions.

FIVE CANS?!