I am curious, the way the intestines signal distress is by releasing 5-HT, better known as serotonin. Typically it’s thought that this doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, in fact if the one part of your brain that “sticks through” the barrier— the chemoreceptor zone— starts detecting excess serotonin spilling out…

I am too, and criminal charges are absolutely appropriate. I am just very, very leery of the no-fly list. There’s just been too many abuses, from TSA members putting ex wives on the list out of spite to perfectly loyal US citizens with the same name as a terrorist having frightening encounters with TSA and being…

As attractive as the idea of no-fly lists is, I can’t agree. They’re meant for terrorists who might blow up a plane or hijack it, not karen that mixed ativan and a few glasses of wine and hit someone, even a flight attendant.

Tell that to the folks buying ship bundles for tens of thousands of dollars in Star Citizen.

That simply is not true. There are absolutely high-dollar in-game purchases in other games. Star Citizen has ships that are selling for tens of thousands of dollars, many mobile games have 100- and some even have 500-dollar purchase packs for their premium currency. Some counterstrike skins have sold for sums in the…

any in-game purchase is “worthless in real-life terms”, it’s an item in a video game it’s not gold bars. 

That’s fair, compared to an actual investment, it’s poor.  Compared to traditional in-game microtransactions it’s far better.  It’s not like people have never spent eye-popping amounts on counterstrike skins, and if counterstrike went under they’d just be shit out of luck.

no it’s not an investment, I don’t think you should ever see these that way.  But if I buy a gun in some other online game and the game shuts down I get nothing, at least here they’re porting you to a new game and retaining the value of your purchase.

You will be given an opportunity to find a lawyer, or if you don’t have one by when you appear before a judge for charging you will be asked if you have an attorney and if you don’t you’ll be put in the public defender queue.

no, this is BAD ADVICE. You must verbally invoke your right to speak to an attorney. You cannot simply remain silent, that CAN be used against you in some ways. You must tell them you want to speak to an attorney, it must be unequivocal and nonconditional (“should I speak to a lawyer, dog?” was found in the supreme…

this advice is most applicable to an arrest and questioning. If a policeman asks routine questions your best bet is to grey rock them— answer but give absolutely minimal details while keeping things polite. Tell the truth as long as it won’t incriminate you, if it will claim you were following the law. If they’ll find…

Hold on now, at the end of the article they describe exactly how they’re giving things to people in still-running games. That actually IS huge.

If I drop money on a +1000 sword of ultimate power in a mobile game, and the game shuts down, that sword is gone, forever, I get nothing. In this case you get ALL OF: a car…

if you read the later section of the article they explain how they’re doing exactly that.

Exactly, the cops showed up and did exactly what they should have-- de-escalated the situation and said no crimes has been committed so they’re not doing anything.

focusing on the wings, when they showed up to get guns, explosives, and chicken wings is really kind of burying the lede...

Absolutely, and that’s the part I agreed 100% with-- it’s asking for someone to take a three-step drop and boot you in the head

Not to mention the places most street fights happen tend to be grungy places, bars with sticky floors covered in god-knows-what, alleyways where you might go to plant your hand for leverage and end up with a needle stick for your trouble, not to mention all the bodily fluids in a typical bar row alleyway.

I disagree, it’s a great martial art for de-escalation and low-intensity conflict. Look at professional bouncers, the more skilled ones never throw a punch the most they need is a joint lock to get leverage to march someone out the door and get them out of the place, and then they call the cops if you try to come back…

in front of people who are hardcore insistent on the ‘soft g’ I will insist on pronouncing ‘.jpg’ as ‘jay-pehj’

While some of these, especially Battletech, are WELL worth your time, I think most of them miss the XCOM mark by a mile.

The unique thing that makes XCOM compelling can be summed up in two factors: first the complicated interplay of the two ‘levels’ of gameplay— the macro world map and the tactical battle map, things…