I can know when I played a game based on whether or not I had time to play the game. Right now, for example, I have time, my kids are older, so "Frostpunk" and "The Division" will be locked into their high school years. Before they were born I had time because my wife and I would devote whole weekends to binge-watching "24" (before streaming services, there was the outstanding Replay DVR, and it even let you skip commercials) or playing a game together.

Remember when people played games together? On a couch?

It still happens but both "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance" (2001) and "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II" (2004), while indifferent when it came to the actual story, were a blast playing with other people in the room on the same Playstation. 

How hard is it to get "organic" certified?

About as hard as you think it would be when the companies that do the "certification" only make their money certifying organic farms and collecting the fees. It has about as much legitimacy as buying a Ph.D. in Theoretical Phys Ed in the mail.

There is a good reason that about 25 percent of organic food is just overpriced regular food and that reason is - there are no surprise spot checks on farms in America and if you believe Russia or China are telling the truth about their organic process, they have a bat from Wuhan wet market they'd like to sell you.

If you are old enough to remember Baghdad Bob, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf was the spokesperson for Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein who, no matter how bad things were, insisted they were on the verge of winning against a United Nations that was going to dethrone him.

He's been dead for years but if he were still around, it's easy to imagine China would want to use him.

Environmentalists believe the Pacific Ocean needs more water, and also that no new water infrastructure can be built, which leads to one of the bizarrely counter-intuitive events that have made California famous across America.

Despite a drought, laws that environmental lawyers lobbied to get in place during politically sympathetic administrations mean that 1,500 cubic feet per second of water must be dumped by law from the New Melones Reservoir until...no one knows when. 

 

In March of 2020 The Lancet published an article claiming that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus variation that erupted in Wuhan in 2019 and set off the COVID-19 pandemic, could not have come from the world's largest coronavirus lab. In Wuhan. Where scientists had been working on "gain of function" experiments to create stronger coronaviruses.

Suggesting it might have come from one of only three labs in the world doing this research, near the Wuhan market, was the same as being a global warming denier, they said, which was codespeak for 'only Republicans who are racist will ask that question.'

If you read corporate news over the last year, it would be easy to believe that Republicans hate science. If someone didn't want to wear masks and needed to tell you about it, it was a right wing person being displayed on social media. 

Miami has a problem and a solution. The problem has happened throughout history; hurricanes. Yet that is magnified now because of the property values and population density. The solution is a seawall.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has it covered, with a six-mile seawall proposal, but lining up against them are the usual suspects; environmentalists. Joining them are real estate developers who want to sell views, make their profit, and then leave it to 49 other states to pay the costs when another hurricane hits.

At the end of "Marvel's The Avengers" we had some idea who the next film's big villain would be - we just didn't know they would build the entire MCU around him.

Bioware has released the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, with graphical modernization and some gameplay improvements, but at nearly $60 it's not cheap.

Is the story still great? Yes it is, one of the best ever (dream sequences in Mass Effect 3 aside). Are the characters still compelling? Sure.

But it already was, so is it worth spending nearly $60 again?

That's a little trickier. If you already have the games, maybe not. If you don't, the story and characters won't be compelling enough to feel like you got value. While ME and certainly Mass Effect 2 made great advances in decision-driven story telling, they are not exceptional now.