Everybody clap for Seth here! Just read for the first time!

We’re going to Center City to play with the game pieces.(The only hint I’ll give ya is not the Checker pieces. Go Birds!)

Last time we parked on Pennsylvania Ave we saw a dude get stabbed on our way to Tropicana.

The WHOLE Lord of the Rings Extended Cut Trilogy.

I was born in the late 1900s, I can only go back so far.

Kronos Quartet and Pat Metheny - Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint - An instrumental record of train sounds. Pretty phenomenal record IMO. Though it’s not one you listen to over and over again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNY7JhPbYug

Yeah there was a post of couple ticks really up close. Totally skeeved me out. Last week I pulled one off my dog on every walk we took. Found a couple just crawling around my computer desk for the first time ever. This season has been horrible in my area. I’m totally over ticks.

Go Birds! Fuck AI!

Rather see this than the fucking ticks from earlier today.

Rain. Gasoline. This Vanilla Bean hand soap my brothers baby mama bought.

1. Completely different IRL.
2. Completely different IRL.
3. Completely different IRL.
4. Completely different IRL.
5. Do you not eat fish?

Are you currently plugged into the matrix? Or are you living bag of water taking in oxygen and emitting CO2 like the rest of us? Are you seriously trying to downplay the value of IRL experience in favor of a terminally online life? If so you’re proving why the adults in you’re own question are right.

Socializing with strangers.

Socializing within a group setting.

Self preservation skills.

Danger assessment skills.

Fishing.

There’s no way for me to time it out because I got it before Steam existed, but it has to be in the thousands of hours range. SimCity 4. I got the Deluxe Edition just after the Rush Hour expansion came out. Played it everyday for hours on end from then to college. Just over 12 years time. I didn’t stop until Cities Skylines 1 came out. I put 500 hours into that then dropped off because it’s just not the same.

It’s the one game that nobody has ever truly replicated. There’s attempts and successors out there, but none of them hit like SC4 did. The aesthetics, modding community, music, all make that game so fresh yet nostalgic. It really had everything you could want from a modern City Building game. It was so much more than a city painter too. The advisors, policies, taxation, abandoned buildings, all of it conveyed a living city way beyond imaginable. Every attempt of a modern city builder game is missing the soul that SC4 had.

According to the growth chart on that site there was ~3200 satellites up when I was out in 22. Now there’s 12K give or take 2k depending on the number you look at on the site. Kinda insane to see it visualized like that. It just seems unnecessary.

Yeah I figured it was processed to show off the trails. I’m more wondering about the number of satellites in the picture. Like I said you’re out in a dark sky zone you can see them with the naked eye. Last time I was out you’d always see one or two flying by but this picture looks like a hundred or so in a 10 minute stretch. That’s a lot more than I would have guessed.

Surely this is a bunch of trains right? If this is only 10 minutes of exposure and that’s just the random floaters, Astrophotography is kinda fucked. Last time I went out to shoot was 4 years ago and you could see the satellites with the naked eye. It was nowhere near this many in the sky at once.

Maybe try Transport Fever 2. You’re not building a singular city. You’re building a logistics chain. You gather resources from their nodes. Transport them to processors. Then transport them to cities. The cities grow when they get more goods. Then you transport people across cities to help them grow. That’s the simplified version of it.

The cities grow themselves but you can influence the way they grow. You can lay the roads, trains, planes, and boats out to help cities go a certain way. On the surface that may sound like what you don’t want, but that part of the game is so small compared to what you’ll be doing most of the time, which is connecting lines to gather resources. That’s the real puzzle of the game. Even on the big maps you’ll feel like there’s a limited amount of space. Then all of a sudden you have this spaghetti layout. You’ll want to optimize it. You’ll tinker with line options and layouts to maximize profits. Then you have to manage the whole fleet. Aging trucks and trains start losing money. Vehicles literally expire so you have to update them to newer models as time passes. Resource nodes and factories will go away and shift throughout a map. There’s an always changing nature to the map and it keeps you on your toes.

It’s a deep game. It’s a modernized version of Transport Tycoon. If you want to try the retro version there’s OpenTTD. I’ve sunk a good chunk of time into Transport Fever 2 and it’s a much better game than Cities Skylines ever was.

You can pan fry them? Imma have to try that. I just dry them off then throw them in the oven covered in seasoning.

LOL Thank you. That’s so funny. All these years later and this stupid song is getting me internet fame. HAAAAHAHAHAH!!!

I’m sorry. I warned you but I’m still sorry.

I’m a crusty metal head. It takes a lot, and I mean A LOT, to make me hate a song. Design the Skyline’s 2011 flaming pile of shit Surrounded by Silence is the single worst metal song I’ve ever listened to. At a time where we had major musical juggernauts like BTBAM, Periphery, Protest the Hero, After the Burial, and so many other great technically sound musicians just hitting their stride or deep in their prime, Design the Skyline said ‘this’ll do.’

I could rip into this thing a million different ways. Lets just start with the fucking aesthetics. It’s 2011. I’m a year into college. Hipsterism is on the rise. Scene kids are dying out. These guys are the last vestige of an embarrassingly low period of teenage subculture. You got two lead screamers. A gelfling, and Rhea Ripley 12 years before her time. The bassist is little brother Ethan after Mom said let your little brother be in the band. 3 nondescript other dudes wearing girls clothing who are too embarrassed to show their faces at all. And a drummer who is too good for this shit. They’re children of that time. The first thing I thought to my self as soon as they show up in the video even back then is, ‘we’re still doing this?’

The start of the song is the best part. It’s this techy synth stuff with great dynamics that fits the era. It’s long enough to make you think we’re in for a good ride. Then it drops out and the actual band starts and hooooo boy is it bad. It’s pure WHAT THE FUCK! The two screamers go back and forth unintelligibly. The guitars are playing fuck all. The bass drops out like fucking Hetfield was mixing And Justice For All. It’s just chaos.

Then you get to the chorus. It’s autotuned to shit. In the actual video the gelfling is battling snow that keeps falling into his mouth. The Rhea clone is dry heaving and singing at the same time. He legit looks like he’s gonna be sick the way he’s moving. Then little brother Ethan comes in. He’s the most awkward, no confidence looking mother fucker of the whole video. He looks like he spent the whole day getting yelled at to move like this and you’ll look cool, but it was really a joke and he just looks stupid. To the point there’s a shot of the Rhea clone staring off and rolling his eyes while little brother Ethan is singing, like why is he here? It’s just a fucking mess. The best part of the chorus is this is the only time in the whole song it happens.

Then it returns back to the chaos of nothingness musically and you feel shock. Why am I being bombarded by this? What is the point of this song? What is the point of my life? There are legit musicians at this period of time. Misha Mansoor is working hard on P2. The boys in BTBAM are working hard on P2. Everybody is waiting for the next Contortionist album. You got a whole new movement in Djent. Then this shit forces it’s way into the spotlight like a distraction from the Epstein Files.

And when I tell you the description I’m writing is nothing compared to the hate this song got at the time, I fucking mean it. They released their record then split up. The amount of hate they got broke the band up. There was no way anyone was taking any of this shit seriously. That’s how bad it was.

Here it is. Do not enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSZI6UJEUQ

The only other songs that makes me a fraction as upset as the above is Pause and Rib Woman on Frosting by Bent Knee. I can’t prove it but I really think those two songs caused a rift in the band that got Ben and Jess kicked out the band. Ben with out of control creativity that tanked a record on Pause. Whoever decided to have a high pitched alarm go off for a whole song deserves to be whipped. Nobody wants to listen to Jess moan for a whole song like Rib Woman. They’re lucky they had the cover of covid to leave, but man that record really upset a lot of people. None more than the band itself. They’ll never say it but it’s pretty obvious. The Hyperpop experiment was a failure.