One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn't throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn't need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.

...is this loss?

Reminds me of this bit from an interview with Jimmy Carr.

He was a raging alcoholic who hid his illness from the medical professionals who examined him as part of his Super Size Me "experiment." A lifetime of booze did way more damage than 30 days of McDs possibly could.

It's always been very difficult. It is possible to complete (I did one on Helldive with randoms a couple days ago), but you need to approach the mission in a very specific way. Have you noticed that the map is really large for a 15 minute mission? I think the extra space is there for a reason. If most of the team engages bots away from the main objective then the drops will be mostly off the main objective. One player can play ninja (Scout armor, smoke grenades/eagle/orbital) and run around pushing the buttons while the rest of the team draws heat from the main objective and kites around the reinforcements.

The other technique, which works when solo and may be better for duos, is to kite reinforcements away from the pad until aggro drops. Once it does you run back to the pad and push buttons as much as you can until you start to get overrun again. Then repeat. Edit: to be clear, even with a 4-man team it's likely that the button-pusher will start receiving drops at some point, in which case they'll need to kite off the pad too.

I still think the mission design is not good, mostly because it's not communicated to players that you have to approach the mission completely differently than any other mission type in the game. I have to imagine it's intentional though, why else make the map so large?

I'd definitely agree that it's a Pit Bull cross with a shepherd of some kind. The shape of the face definitely suggests Pit Bull to me, but I get more of a Belgian Malinois vibe from those ears:

Could explain why two hours at a dog park didn't crush his energy levels, Malinois are renowned and/or notorious for their exercise needs.

I haven't actually tried the new ones, I probably should do that before I slander them. The Harvest Cheddar ones were so good though. I haven't seen them in at least a few years, unfortunately.

I noticed that Miss Vickie's has a new sour cream something or other flavour in a bag that's the same colour, or nearly so. Every time I go through the chip aisle I get very excited for a second, then I realize it's not actually the Harvest Cheddar and my hopes are dashed. I'm developing an irrational hatred of those impostor chips.

Armor is medium with crouch bonus.

If you're willing to spend SC on armor, try to get the FS-38 Eradicator armor from the rotating shop. To my knowledge it's the only light armor with the Fortified mod ("Further reduces recoil when crouching or prone by 30%. Provides 50% resistance to explosive damage."). I think that's the armor mod you're already running, just in light armor. I don't find 50 armor makes much difference, but the extra mobility really does. The recoil bonus is whatever, with that armor mod vs. bots the explosive resist is the real juice.

For clarity, the Fortified bonus to explosive resist doesn't require you to crouch or go prone to get its effect, you only need to crouch to get the recoil bonus. With Fortified you can sprint around and get hit by a rocket, or run over a bot mine, and not die if you've got full health. There's a separate bonus vs. explosive damage from crouching or going prone, but that's universal and not tied to any armor mod.

everyone is getting there faster and killing things faster because they got there earlier

Could be because they were wearing light armor. Armor seems to provide a really poor rate of return in this game, but light armor's bonuses to speed and stamina regen pay sizable dividends.

Adjudicator

My go-to primary vs. bots used to be the pre-nerf Slugger (RIP sweet prince), now it's the JAR-5 Dominator. In both cases it was because the weapon could handle Devastators. If I run out of AC ammo while facing down Heavy and/or Rocket Devastators, being able to switch to a primary that can stagger and kill one can save me. JAR-5 does take some getting used to though. It's 3rd-person handling is poor, but it's tolerable in 1st-person so that's generally what I use with that gun. The JAR-5 also has relatively slow bullet travel time that you have to account for. Now that I'm used to it though, I don't find any other primary as effective vs. bots.

mortar sentry

I've never found the mortar sentry all that effective vs. bots, they don't seem to clump up as much as bugs do. EMS Mortar can be a pretty good option for crowd control though. Personally I run laser (for major objectives or Eye of Sauron towers), Eagle Strike (for small bases and patrols) and Eagle 500 (mostly for tanks, walking factories; AC can take out tanks but oftem it's just quicker to 500 it).

Naw, the guy on the left is real and has a net worth of ~$165 billion dollars. The guy on the right is a digital creation. If money could make Zuckerberg look like the guy on the right, he probably would have done it already.

He looks better in the right-hand photo because it's heavily altered. The hairstyle actually appears to be (mostly?) original, but the skin tone was definitely changed. Here it is side by side with the original image (source):

$$$

Total purchased counter on the right side of the Robotics Workshop section no longer displays 7 / 8 despite all stratagems being purchased

Finally. Game is playable again.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica

Looks like you can read the article, without a paywall, here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/am-radio-is-a-lifeline-lawmakers-say-tech-and-auto-industries-disagree/

Apparently some historians got so tired of keeping track of all the individual Ottoman genocides, massacres and pogroms that they've lumped them all together into the Late Ottoman genocides. To be fair though, that umbrella also includes plenty of Muslim populations getting much the same treatment in the Christian countries created as the Ottoman Empire contracted.

That was actually the rest of the comic:

"Victory is reserved for those who are willing to climb a Supply Pod."

• Sun Tzu, probably

Hey, leave Laura Palmer out of this, she's been through enough already.

"Pungent bouquet, with an earthy flavour."

Good for cheese, depending on your tastes. Almost certainly bad in other contexts.

Looks like it now takes two AC rounds to kill a strider from the front, up from one pre-patch, or four shots from the Scorcher, up from two. This was with shots to the hip/groin area of the walker. Tolerable change IMO, Striders were made really trivial due to the numbers of ACs and Scorchers players were often bringing vs. bots. The AC in particular staggers the Strider badly, so while the first shot no longer kills the strider it will prevent it from shooting back before the kill shot lands.