It always sucks to have to cut off or go no contact/ghost absurd family members… but after a long pattern of concerning, manipulative and/or abusive behavior… that’d you really only put up with because they’re family… after a while, that reason/excuse becomes worthless.

Everything Mel Brooks.

Airplane!

The Producers

Blazing Saddles… etc.

So many of his movies have such memorable lines and jokes that still hold up today.

Hope that lake doesn’t have any breezes or gusts.

… Also, assuming you just did the calc for neutralizing the weight of said person…

Even if there was no wind… they could not walk.

Walking requires weight to work.

A surface you can push off of.

It seems like the picture shows one guy with walking sticks, which I guess might kinda work if the lake is less than about 2 or 3 feet, or under a meter deep… not too many lakes like that.

Maybe something like stilts… or … huge snowshoe/flipper type things… might work?

Reading the main post and other comments you’ve made giving more context, IMO you are correct, your aunt is a narcissistic sociopath.

Honestly, this takes more effort and is more creative than making a profile on a dating app.

It is also pretty honest.

… I don’t think this is likely to actually work, due to the obvious red flags, but it is probably more likely to actually work than doing this same thing on an app.

I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

To torture a metaphor:

Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.

np! =]

My only income is Social Security Disability Income.

I am quite literally having a call with a pro bono lawyer from a non profit law firm that specializes in Social Security matters in a few hours, after having gone through their application process last week.

I am just trying to pre emptively set myself for at least some kind of legal counsel… as it now seems inevitable that I will need one, given the insanity going at Social Security, thanks to Musk and DOGE not being able to understand how any of their databases work, and taking a hatchet to staff headcount and shutting down Soc Sec physical locations.

Aw, been a while since someone’s complimented me, thank you!

Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually… it clicked.

It isn’t the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don’t even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot… will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of ‘well obviously i do this in this situation’ decisions…

and yeah, then get slapped with ‘nope, no workey’.

But… if you stick with it… just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.

You must empty your mind of false notions you didn’t even realize you had, before you can begin to fill it with correct ones, haha.

Its funny you bring up stellaris… i spent like a month just utterly failing until that ‘click’ moment.

Then, a few months of ‘i am actually decent at this’ and then a few more months till ‘actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses… and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball’.

I never played the demo, started with the full game… maybe a couple weeks after launch.

As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game’s systems would break, things wouldn’t actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.

But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these… and didn’t really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game… the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.

Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still ‘Mixed’ it did indeed have a rough launch… but Recent Reviews are ‘Very Positive’.

The people that bothered to stick with it… well they seem to very much like where the game is now.

So, I’d say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.

Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.

The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?

Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed … prior to Civ 7.

It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were ‘Mixed’: a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.

… And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind’s … well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.

Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.

But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives… and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.

Whew, yep, its a tough job, but Petey’s got a good head on 'im and rolls with the punches, somebody get that man a drink!

Err. Uh. I mean… Do we have O’Douls?

EDIT: Also, dear God, the sub headline:

Trump asked if hackers can break into Signal…

You might as well ask a dog what its favorite shade of red is.

Its hyperreality, as Adam Curtis shows in his documentary mostly focusing on Putin… but the Trump admin is actually too stupid to realize … that that is what it is, they fell for their own bs, sheltered and curated worldviews because they are so, so skilled at (really, privileged enough to be able to) surrounding themselves with yes men and sycophants and cult members.

I mean, a big element of it is falling for much of Putin’s actually intentionally constructed hyperreality… but the Trump admin and MAGA people are actually too stupid to even been correctly just… generally cynical, and the result is honestly more akin to a 1944/45 Nazi movement that has leaders and followers mostly just still in denial/cognitive dissonance and grandiose cult like faith at the same time.

But the MAGA hyperreality … isn’t centrally planned or directed. Its … basically an accidental consensus of a bunch of idiots screaming different kinds of idiocy into the void loud enough, and the kinda sorta generally agreed on hyperreality is whatever ends up echoing the loudest and most clearly.

They can’t even project stability or competency, even as hollow suits, even as a false but semi-convincing front.

Just go look at the last two weeks ish of public appearances of Trump and his cabinet and Elon.

Half of them are having emotional breakdowns, manic episodes live on air, Hohman, whatever, the DHS goon leading deportations… either he was fucking drunk, or his dentures were falling out of his mouth, a reporter/news host asks him a question and he gives like a 75 word rambling response, maybe 10 of the words actually intelligible.

The inmates are running the asylum.

… Oh well, at least I’ve personally passed through the intense despair and depression phase of knowing this was coming, and am now just laughing at how truly stupid and farsical this all is, and how it is honestly, precisely what Americans deserve for either being idiot cult members, apathetic, or placing their faith in an utterly incompetent Democratic party that just still thinks its 1992, or squabbling over inane idpol differences.

We are apparently actually so stupid, irresponsible and/or more concerned with petty nonsense issues that we are just actually going to have to go through the fire of either overthrowing these malevolent morons, or just acquiesce to all becoming true debt serfs and burn to a crisp.

Err… well, without any mentions of specific gripes or difficulties you are having… entirely seriously, actually play through with the tutorial enabled.

There are 3 different tutorial settings:

No tutorial

Moderate tutorial (ie, you’ve played some Civ games and want to mainly focus on what is different in Humankind)

Full tutorial (baby step you through everything like you’ve never played any kind of turn based 4x before)

The middle of the road tutorial does a pretty good job of highlighting and explaining systems and actions that work differently from Civ, or are just entirely not present in Civ, but doesn’t hold your hand through every single basic concept that you would already be familiar with as an experienced Civ player.

EDIT: Beyond that, I guess uh… a lot of the game sub systems kind of work… similarly to a lot of Civ game mechanics, but not quite the same, in some cases, significantly differently.

For starters, your civ progresses as you unlock new ages, but your leader stays the same. NPC leaders have a set of traits that affect their demeanor in diplomacy, as well as give them varying kinds of buffs for their gameplay.

These NPCs and their traits are actually classed by the total score of their cumulative traits, basically just a few minor traits are ‘easy’, up to a whole lot of powerful traits as ‘hard’. You can pick to play against easier or harder NPCs as you like.

You can also unlock traits for your own leader by basically doing in game achievements.

But uh yeah, get used to the idea of swapping civs situationally as your progress through ages… or you can sort of ‘prestige’ a civ beyond its roughly historically accurate age, if you want a buff to … i think its your renown or fame score generation the purple one lol. In some situations, it might make more sense to continue with the unique units, buildings, and sometimes civ specific gameplay mechanics through an age.

Other stuff uh…

City planning is pretty important, Humankind uses a multi tile approach to cities, where you can plop down varying kinds of districts and unique buildings according to the terrain around the actual city center. You may have to balance between urban design/zoning that is super efficient in the short run, but actually inefficient in the medium or longer run, as well as defensive structures, which you’ll may want to place on a choke point tile, even if it would be highly productive with a non military structure on it.

Human kind uses a heigh layered terrain approach, with I think 7 different heights. A height 6 tile right adjacent to a height 1 tile will have an impassable cliff on that border. I like to play with more extreme height variations so as to both make the world feel larger in that land traversal takes longer, things like mountain passes and terrain chokepoints become as relevant as they often are in the real world, and it offers more interesting battles.

Rivers are in tiles, not borders between them. This makes crossing rivers more time consuming and annoying… but plays well into the rest of the games combat systems… also, if you embark on a river tile early game, this is basically the representation of building small makeshift boats… and now you can move much faster up or down a river, which is very much in line with how many real world civilizations used rivers as basically logistics highways.

There’s also a system of regions, basically. You can assign a few cities to be connected to the same major city, and then basically micromanage the entire region of cities to coordinate their production to subsidize each other, in various ways. If you do this well, you can benefit greatly, but if you either screw it up or don’t take advantage of it, you can be at a comparative disadvantage to other players.

… theres a whole lot of stuff that is different than Civ games, I could type for hours lol.

Same, an actual good quality, properly made and assembled mechanical pencil will just keep going and going, and if you treat it well, you never need to replace it.

Kinda like a decent quality safety razor.

All you gotta do is treat it right and replace the razors/graphite, nets out to saving money after probably a month or two of decent use.

Civ peaked at Civ 4 and all its expansions for me.

Yes, doomstacks were a problem, but hard pivoting all the way over to Civ 5’s only one unit per tile led to a whole bunch of other bullshit in the opposite direction.

Humankind … just has better inter game system synergy, and those individual systems seem better thought out, more engaging and less… cheesable, exploitable, to a great extent due to how everything meshes together.

The first few months after launch absolutely were rough, with some pretty significant bugs in specific, but often crucial scenarios… but they got ironed out, and the result is great.

Also a lot of the initial backlash was from the pollution / global warming mechanic… they quickly added an option to just turn most of its effects off, but to me the entire thing read as a bunch of people being used to massively colonizing, industrializing and war mongering and then being angry that … that has consequences.

Guess those people have trouble grasping the concept of an externality.

Oh well, they’ve all been filtered, recent steam reviews are ‘very positive.’

Natively? I don’t think so.

But I’ve been running it via proton on my steam deck for… over a year now, only real problem is the HUD is a bit smallish.

puts on flame resistant hazmat suit

… Civ 7 is the Civ series shitty attempt at copying Humankind, Humankind is currently $12.50 USD, $25 for all DLC + base game, and is a way better deal than Civ 7 at $70, if not just actually a better game than Civ 5 or Civ 6 + all their existing DLC/expansions.

I’ve been saying that Trump and his ‘ideas’ on tariffs are just… completely, fundamentally broken and self contradictory, at every possible level.

He literally just doesn’t get it, he doesn’t grasp what you’d be taught in AP Macroecon or a first quarter of Macroecon at a college or uni.

Yes, of course, more competent oligarchs can profit from an engineered economic collapse…

But Trump and his immediate orbit are literally too stupid to understand why what they are doing won’t work the way they think it will.

These idiots are very largely at the peak of the dunning kruger confidence vs actual knowledge curve, right before you fall off into the abyss of ‘oh shit this is actually really conplicated and i am a moron.’

Of course, they’ll never admit they are morons or were ever wrong, they’ll just keep lying, misdirecting, and inventing new insane conspiracy theories with secret enemies thaf explain why they failed

Hey now, they also somewhat resemble a typical diagram of a vagina, utuerus, fallopian tubes and ovaries.

My guess (and this is a complete guess) is that they (Ubisoft) just assumed everyone has OLED TVs/Monitors.

Also, you’d want to re adjust the white balance level, or gamma levels/curve, probably not just the brightness.