And here’s the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom’s jam – If this were ever Doom’s jam – it would be one thing. But it’s not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that’s just not how the rest of the game is structured.

The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that’s a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster’s-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren’t because of the tutorial popups.

I guess at least you can turn them off… If you know about them in advance.

Your same source also includes charts of reports versus clearance rates (i.e. arrests and prosecution) of all types of crime categories.

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend

Compare how high the grey line (prosecutions) is compared to the reports (blue line) for:

• Drugs
• Shoplifting
• Bribery
• Prostitution

Versus, say,

• Motor vehicle theft (just to name an example for no reason at all)
• Burglary
• Destruction of Property/Vandalism
• Credit Card Fraud
• Theft From Motor Vehicle
• Larceny
• Rape

The clearance rate for shoplifting is higher than rape.

More shoplifters. Get prosecuted. Than rapists. What does that tell you about priorities? Think about it.

It is always Friday.

basing this on not much more than your particular set of prejudice.

Wow, just like the police! What a coincidence.

Because this was many, many years ago and back then I was naive and thought contributing might have actually made the world a safer and better place. I know better now thanks to experience.

The issue is that it’s a case of the boy who cried wolf. Yes, there likely are “actual” crimes out there that need to be solved. But they are in the tiny minority of what the police pursue and prosecute overall compared to petty drug bullshit, harassing people for existing while black, writing speeding tickets, busting homeless people, and jailing people who need to steal to eat on behalf of megacorporations – crimes for which the police will show up for near instantly when called, whereas if someone victimizes you, Mr. private citizen, they generally can’t be bothered.

That’s how the cops operate here. I know how the cops work here because I live here. I don’t know what to tell you about where you might happen to live, but I’ll bet you if you look at it hard it isn’t that much different.

…And even if you are not the perpetrator, that doesn’t matter. The police are pressured to arrest somebody. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter to them who it is, and the perp got a way while in the meantime you’re standing right here. It’s much easier to harass you.

Do you have warrants? Are you sure? Do you have parking tickets? Is your name similar to someone else they want for something else? Do they smell weed? Are you black? Etc., etc., etc.

It’s not worth it. Don’t interact.

I did not testify because the accused took a plea deal, which the state kindly did not inform me of (although they wasted in total about $4 in postage threatening to arrest me for no reason) until the day of the trial after it had been rescheduled for the fourth time. The charges were indeed dumb shit. Nobody got murdered.

It has nothing to do with my busy life, it has to do with not enabling bad behavior from the police and state. The police demand respect but give none in return. You do you, but that doesn’t fly on my doorstep.

I will not be bullied. By anyone.

Do you know what? I helped the cops once with some security camera footage many years ago, for something that didn’t involve me.

You want to know what I got in return? I got subpoenaed, and this turned into the state jerking me around on the trial date when I was supposed to show up with the dates changing after the fact without them informing me, but every single letter they sent me started in its opening paragraph with a threat to prosecute me if I did not instantly comply.

So yeah, I don’t “help” the police anymore. They can fuck off and come back after they learn to do better.

If you want the footage, that’s different. But if they cops come to talk to me about it (or anything else) they ain’t getting nothing.

I don’t know that this has been revealed yet, but it is likely that it runs in id Tech 7, which is the same as Doom Eternal (and not Doom 2016).

I can beat the Marauders no problem, and I can even cheese them with the shotgun trick. That doesn’t magically make them good game design.

The cops should have thought of that before they started abusing their authority and needlessly victimizing people. If they didn’t act the way they do, people would trust them enough to talk to them.

Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

Pro tip: They’re not going to find your car anyway, and even if they do the only reason was because whoever stole it abandoned it somewhere after wrecking it. In my area they take about 4 to 24 hours to even show up for such calls, so for this example the chances of them actually catching the perp in the act and getting your car back before it’s trashed are zero.

In that scenario, my people have an ancient and traditional saying:

It is on, son.

You can be subpoenaed to testify in court. You cannot be compelled to talk to the police.

You are not required to identify yourself if you are not operating a motor vehicle (in which case you must supply your license if asked) and you have not been accused of any specific crime. “Being suspicious” or “fitting a description” or “we got a call” is not a specific crime. If there is not reasonable suspicion that you were the one who committed an articulable crime, you don’t have to provide your name.

Read up on your state’s laws. If your state is not a “stop and identify” state you don’t even have to identify yourself if you have been accused of a crime. That’s for the police to figure out themselves if they care so damn much. You invoke the 5th.

In this guy’s case (I don’t know what to make of the accents or the checkboard hats or the Astra, so I suspect this is not meant to be happening in the USA, but whatever) he is on his own property, has not been shown a warrant, and has not been accused of a crime. He doesn’t have to state anything. If he is not required to interact with these police at all. He’s not even obligated to open the door. If these cops had a single pinky toe to stand on, they’d have shown up with a warrant.

Maybe you want to go as far as “Were you shoplifting?” “What? No. That wasn’t me, man.” … do your best imitation of someone who just fell from the sky. “So you’ve NEVER MET your neighbor. Your neighbor across the hall.” “Nope.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I don’t know.”

Wrong.

Don’t tell the cops “I don’t know” or “I didn’t see anything,” or anything of that ilk. Don’t try to plead innocence. Don’t try to use logic. It will only ever work against you, and it will never work in your favor. Always always always always.

Just tell them you exercise your right to be silent. Over and over again, if necessary. That is all you say. Be a broken record. There is no situation where you are actually obligated (in the US) to answer any type of questions for any type of law enforcement, at any time, for any reason, ever. That’s all you need to tell them. You don’t answer questions. You don’t answer why you don’t answer questions.

This is because you can also be prosecuted for lying to them, and their grounds for accusing you of lying can be pretty shaky but you still might get convicted. You can’t be prosecuted for saying nothing.

Note that this will not prevent them from lying to you, which is legal, and making spurious threats of arrest or similar to attempt to intimidate you into complying. Be aware that this is automatically bullshit. At worst the can hold you for up to 48 hours (-ish, state laws vary on that point somewhat) without charging you with anything and even if they do, you still don’t have to say anything to them.

If this happens, lawyer up immediately. You can sue them afterwards if it comes about that they violated any of your civil rights in the process.

In light of all of the above, I don’t deal with the police at all.

Name and if necessary, driver’s license. That’s it. That’s all I’m legally obligated to provide in my state, and even then only in specific circumstances. If they’re on my actual property they can pack sand; No warrant, interaction. I won’t talk to them, I won’t even answer the door. If they want to try to bust in illegally, what happens after that is on them.

I will further never, ever call the police for any reason. They simply can’t be trusted. If I have a problem with someone or something, I will solve it myself. The cops in my area have near as makes no difference to a 0% clearance rate for nuisance crimes, assault/battery, thefts, and burglaries anyway. Unless you need a report for insurance purposes it’s useless, and at that rate I’ll have my attorney call them on my behalf. They are not in the business of helping you. So don’t even expect that they will.

TL;DR: Don’t talk to the police.

That recycled yank-the-keycard-off-the-corpse animation, though…

It doesn’t look like they learned much from Eternal. I think I’m going to give this one a miss. All I’m seeing is more mechanic overload, and a really annoying parry system that’s just going to result in about 1/3 of the monster roster being, “The only way to deal with this guy is to wait for his green attack and parry it, then you get to hit him once. Other than that he’s functionally invulnerable.” Yeah, because the Marauders were totally the highlight of Eternal, and absolutely didn’t grind the entire game to a tedious three minute halt every time you encountered one and played its silly song-and-dance.

I will happily don my asbestos underpants and declare that I really don’t like the direction the new Doom games are taking. Whatever this is isn’t Doom; they could have just as well slapped a new original IP over top of it without any difference.

The thing about possestion of fireams is not true, by the way. Unless specified explicitly as part of the pardoning, you get all of your civil rights back. All means all.

In fact, a presidential pardon is currently the only way to have your firearm rights restored if you have been convicted of a federal felony.

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/frequently-asked-questions

Edit: although to be clear this applies to federal convictions only. Even Trump can’t pardon state convictions which I presume the guy in question had, which would also bar him. He would need to get those convictions pardoned or overturned in whatever state they happened in.

I don’t want to treat phone numbers as an ID, but for some reason my customers will give their phone number to me online far more willingly than they’ll cough up their email address, which is baffling only until you realize:

• Most people are technologically incompetent and are intimidated by the avalanche of crap they get in their email, and
• They never answer their phones anyway, so who cares?

I actually offer the option, because I don’t give a rat’s ass how people ignore me when I try to contact them. But when they place an order I at least need to be able to prove that I tried.

It would probably work on Musk. I’ll bet you his ego is that fragile.

Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.

The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.