It is actually getting better, it just takes time.

In fact, according to the above Wikipedia article it was in a great spot in 2019 and then a volcano erupted:

In 2019, the ozone hole was at its smallest in the previous thirty years, due to the warmer polar stratosphere weakening the polar vortex. In September 2023, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the largest on record, at 26 million square kilometers. The anomalously large ozone loss may have been a result of the 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption.

Apparently, a volcano eruption. The last paragraph of this section states:

In September 2023, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the largest on record, at 26 million square kilometers. The anomalously large ozone loss may have been a result of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption.

.....is this a canary in the coalmine joke?

Not excusing drunk driving, but based on the shape of the road I see how this happened. From Google maps, if the driver was coming from blanchett street there is a bend in the road right in front of the building. Here is what it looks like from street view. The driver was probably drunk and/or lost control of the vehicle and went speeding forward into the side of the building.

Drunk at 3pm? Jesus.

This is awesome, thank you!

I always love recap threads like this. It's an easy way for me to catch up the next day and make sure I didn't miss anything.

So, the Alaska Airlines door plug incident is more than likely Boeing's fault(we don't have the footage or a record of who did the repair because Boeing deleted/lost it....which makes me even more suspicious tbh), but this was a 25yr old 737-800 Boeing hasn't seen in decades. This looks like a united maintenance issue as do all the other united 737 issues.

Now, don't get me wrong, Boeing definitely has a plethora of issues going on, but I think the FAA might want to also look into United's maintenance department as well cause they're also having a plethora of issues.

I am very hype for this patch! One friend I play with has been very annoyed at how hard it is to handle chargers. Now that they are going to spawn less AND are easier to kill (1 EAT or Recoilless directly to the face) he should be much more interested.

We were also gone this weekend (learned how to ski, fun times!) so we haven't had much time to try the mechs yet. I played a level 4 mission with one last night and they seem to be in a good spot. They are very powerful as long as they have ammo and the amount of ammo they have is a good amount to where you can clear a few waves/bugs before they run out (of course, this was at level 4. The experience may differ at higher levels, will try that out later this week.....).

I love that this comic about Octopi/Squids is posted by Flying Squid

When I used to manage people (for a call center) I would do that but via text. I didn't wanna catch anyone off guard with a phonecall where they agree to it without realizing they already had plans or something.

I also always tried to stress that this is optional, if there aren't enough people, that's on us, and we should have prepared better.

I've got 14hrs played so far and I am enjoying it still. I am currently level 21 and have beaten the first story boss.

TL;DR Jack of all trades, master of none, but does a good job of mixing things together. 8.5/10 so far.

Palworld is kind of like fortnite imo: it didn't invent the monster capturing, exploration, crafting, or building, but it is one of the first games to mix them and it doesn't run like complete ass. The building is kind of basic, the exploration isn't too in depth but there is always something going on( you can find fast travel beacons, area 'boss' monsters, story bosses, dungeons, and there are pokemon throughout all of this), the monsters have some variety but they all feel like a mix of different asset grabs, and the crafting is simple (BUT, you can use your monsters to craft for you and take care of your base).

I'd say individually each of these things are rated 7/10 or 8/10, but when you put them all together it's pretty great. The crafting and the base building are there, but I just come back, build some things up, and then the monsters do all that for me while I go back to exploring. Last week I went through and beat Raft and Palworld is a breath of fresh air: I'm not spending hours grinding resources and crafting shit, instead I'm wandering around finding new monsters and locations and I come back and stuff is built. The crafting and resource finding isn't the entire game but it's a nice accessory. Similar to fortnites building + battle Royale, I didn't think monster capturing + base building would be that fun, but they have done a great job of mixing the 2. I find myself looking for certain monsters so that I can have them do certain tasks at base, and that's a win-win in a way.

The game is kind of janky in parts: I've had monsters fall through floors, some areas feel like they were ripped right out of other games (I swear some of the old, broken down churches look like they were stolen from elden ring), and the climbing mechanic isn't fully polished, but unlike other early access games it runs pretty well so far performance wise. I've gotten so used to games like valheim, cyberpunk, and starfield where the game comes out and just runs like complete ass (30fps or less) for the first few weeks. Hell, we were playing Raft last week and our host told us to stop building the boat more b/c he was scared the game would crash. I'm not running Palworld like I ran CS:GO, but it feels like a steady 60fps+ at all times which is really great. As a counter to that though, hosting a dedicated server is okay at best so far. There is a memory leak that has the game go from taking 2-4gb of ram up to 8gb+. After 8gb gets used the computer I have hosting it tends to crash and then I have to manually turn it off and on again to get things going.

In the end, I know I'm going to get my money's worth out of it (30+ hrs), maybe even double that(we'll see) and I'm happy with that. I'm not expecting this to be the next Skyrim/baldurs gate/fallout, I don't expect to play this for thousands of hours non-stop, and that's fine b/c there is other stuff out there I'd like to play anyways. Similar to Valheim (I have 58.2hrs of playtime as of writing this), I expect to play through palworld, shelve it, and if there are any updates in the future I might come back to it.

I think he's having a flashback to his literal "first rodeo", which I imagine didn't go that well.