Belgian beers in general can be so lovely. Of the three big brewing traditions, the Belgians seem to have the most variations. The Germans with their lagers and hefes, and the Brits with their various ales are both very strict with regard to rules for ingredients and methods. The Belgians, however, went crazy with their ingredients and adjuncts and methods. They are also the culture whose monasteries make some of the best beers in the world, the Trappist ales. Those are pretty tightly regulated, but so are any other culturally significant historical products like Parmigano Reggiano…

One of the best beers I’ve ever had, bar none, was a saison I brewed myself from an extract kit I got from Northern Brewer. It was amazing. It was unlike any beer I’d ever had before. It was malty, slightly hoppy, and I used some coriander seed during the boil. Absolutely lovely.

Try a Lambic.

There’s a reason they sell it, dude. The fact that a brewery sells rum and soda is because they realize if you don’t like beer, but your friends do, you might not tag along, and they wouldn’t get an opportunity to sell you anything!

Different people have different tastes, and some folks are just not going to like certain flavor profiles.

Within beer though, there is so much variety, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t at least one beer out there that you’d thoroughly enjoy. It’s just not likely worth the effort of finding that one.

It’s just not the same…

Halo CE Hang ‘em High on the original Xbox with Rockets and Grenades (we didn’t specify… frags were game too) will always be one of my favorites.

That, and Sidewinder CTF. Those were some of the most intense hours of my young adulthood in college.

This almost as bad as that international competition where when the Kazakh person won gold in their event, the organizers played the national anthem from Borat instead of the real national anthem of Kazakhstan…

They were pissed…

https://www.npr.org/2012/03/23/149244038/ceremony-plays-borat-kazakhstan-anthem-by-mistake

None of them strike me as parody…. Plenty of folks behave as though they believe this stuff heartily. Many of them are in Milwaukee right now.

I’d be totally down. I had gotten used to the Duke controller in its massiveness, so I hated the S controller when it came out.

I generally dislike change.

Hey… D stands for Diploma.

B stands for “Better than I thought I’d do.”

I live in the American South, and I’m happy to wear shorts outside at 10C (50 F), so long as it’s not windy…

Now, a jacket at 30C (86F)… that’s a bit warm for me…

F = C*(9/5)+32

If you don’t want the ratio, 9/5=1.8

To estimate the temperature conversion, multiply by 2 and add 32… then estimate a touch less… I eyeballed 10C to be 50ish before breaking out the calculator and finding it was 50 on the nose

https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/donald-trump-j6-prison-choir-justice-for-all-digital-song-sales-chart-1235289593/amp/

Well, it was from around the time the song released… it unfortunately seems true. It’d be interesting if there was a way to analyze the data to see how many of the downloads were unique…

I reflexively read that in Dwight’s voice.

Yes.

I just missed this gen entirely, and with the exception of the Switch’s successor, I don’t think I’m going to be buying another console for a very long time.

I used to be a dedicated console gamer… I had an NES growing up, then a Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast. Picked up a Game Cube somewhere along the way. Then I had the Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, WiiU, and finally the XBOne and Switch. I’ve had PCs mixed in there from time to time, but most gaming was done in the living room on console.

Then the Series X/S and PS5 come around… there were the massive supply issues, and everything was moving to 4K and I didn’t have 4K, and none of it seemed worth the upgrade. At this point my laptop was a dinosaur from 2011 and needed to be replaced anyway. So I built a desktop PC, which gets gamed on alongside my Switch, and my XBOne has been gathering dust.

You strike me as someone very close to people who don’t share your same views on a lot of topics.

Because that’s the way it is man…

I can live-stream myself performing a public execution in front of a crowded stadium full of people, and plead not-guilty. And the presumption of innocence before the court means I can do that as much as I want regardless how obviously guilty I may be.

And like it or not, that’s better than the alternative. A presumption of guilt before the court opens oneself to much more easily be wrongfully imprisoned for crimes you didn’t commit. Not accounting for obvious injustices that have occurred due to shortcomings and corruption in the system, these initial principals give us the best shot at having a system that’s less likely to fuck us than not.

So your manager, in a retail store, that presumably exclusively sold non-flat-earth items, caved to a whack-job who wanted you to be fired because you wouldn’t waste your productive work time listening to his whack-job bullshit (closing is almost always more than turning the lights off and locking up), and actually fired you?

Sounds like the manager did you a favor. He did have a choice… standing up for his employees agains unreasonable nonsense like that.