I choose to secure all of North America.

Oh, don’t even pretend anyone cares about Afghanistan.

You know, I’m still struggling to believe the story I’ve been told about that. “The US bombed an elementary school.”

For my entire life, the US has demonstrated precision munitions. The AGM-114 Ginsu is an air-to-ground laser-guided rocket that can kill an individual passenger in a car. We can fly a Tomahawk cruise missile into a specific window of a building. I’ve seen a bridge in Iraq bombed seconds after the last car crossed. Not saying GI Joe is a paragon of virtue, I’ve seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, but…That shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.

Even in the “no kill like overkill” “We don’t target coordinates, we target grid squares” “enemy fire is coming from that way, destroy that way” United States, that shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.

We’re certainly attacking Iran because Israel wanted us to.

And as we all know, Taco Bell won the Franchise Wars.

The United States has a variant of the AGM-114 Hellfire missile that replaces the explosive warhead with six scimitar blades. Because fuck That Guy, the whole That Guy and nothing but the That Guy.

Because the article is about Subnautica, and the legal battle between private equity everything ruiner firm Krafton and Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the game dev studio best known for the Subnautica series.

First thing I remember hearing was Krafton announcing that Subnautica would be a live service multiplayer game, and then Unknown Worlds coming right in behind saying No the hellfuck it’s not! It’s going to be a cooperative multiplayer game that players host locally, and we’ll be doing an early access campaign with continuing updates after the 1.0 release just like we did with Subnautica 1.

It has spiraled from there.

The Japanese got in on it too; google Unit 731. Among the outright torture and biological warfare they did some genuine if extremely unethical experiments, learning a lot about several diseases. In a similar case to Werner Von Braun, the US granted the leaders immunity in exchange for their research data.

I’m comfortable working in both systems, I prefer standard for furniture building because I need to divide by 3 or 4 more often than by 5. I’m also going to fly in knots, nautical miles and feet of altitude.

If you’re the CEO of a company, like Unknown Worlds, it’s your job to steer the company around outright fraud, like offers to purchase the company for far, far more money than you’d hope to generate with every planned project.

Where was that half billion going to come from? Each of the previous Subnautica games sold around 5 million copies at $30 a pop, so their entire gross revenue was $300 million, tops. And that’s gross revenue, not net profit.

So, where’s that kind of money going to come from? 5 million people bought copies of Subnautica in better economic times than this, you planning on raising the price or selling the game to more people?

Flying the Stars and Stripes upside down is a distress call. And at least in my neck of the woods, authorities will respond to it; on occasion the students at high schools tasked with hoisting the flag in the morning will sometimes attach it upside down, and police or fire show up to ask what’s wrong.

The closest it came to being used as a slur in the US is to accuse someone of clumsiness. We never called people suffering from nervous system diseases “spastics.” Don’t put that evil on me, Ricky Bobby.

“Spastic” and even “spaz” is used in the US but isn’t considered an ablest slur here. My understanding is the British used it as a slur for cerebral palsy or parkinson’s disease patients, where in the US it simply means an uncoordinated jerky motion and/or clumsiness. Let’s not mince words, the United States of America is perfectly capable of generating slurs; but this one isn’t ours.

And the act of traveling on said highway was…surfing. For some reason. The 90’s were stupid, and I’m from there.

Syke. Or psych. Early 90’s kid slang, had a definition akin to just kidding or fooled you but more mean spirited. Said to mark the previous statement as intended purely to mess with the listener’s mind or psych them out. Similar in spirit to ending a sarcastically spoken sentence with “NOT!” though distinct.

“Yeah man, you can drive my car. Psych! You’re not touching my ride.”

The more I type about it, the less “psych” looks like a valid English word.

Limey detected. That’s a Bri’ish thing.

It wasn’t a TV show, it was a commercial. For acrylic nails.

So I was like 5, this would have been in 1991 or so, there was a commercial on daytime television among the blue star ointment and dirt devil vacuums for some brand of acrylic nails that were easy to put on and take off, and they contrasted this against the “other brand” that showed a woman peeling it off and it had this stringy yellow goo underneath. I didn’t understand what fake nails were, so I thought it was just a woman casually tearing her fingernail off.

To this day I compulsively trim my nails very short, I cannot stand the thought of bending my fingernails back.

Why do I remember that specific visual from that episode and basically nothing else? The…mall was in the pinball machine?

There was the episode with Gilbert Gottfried who was a radio announcer, there was an episode about a ghost monster thing in the pool that the kid turned orange with chemicals…some 30 year old neurons are firing over here folks, and they ain’t firing that bright.