Lurker > adjl

CinderLock posted...

Tina coming to terms with Rolands deathis the best writing in the series and I won't be convinced otherwise.

That whole DLC was amazing.

The_Viscount posted...

I do not. And is the WiiU's eshop still a thing?

For another year. They're shutting down the WiiU/3DS shops next March.

The_Viscount posted...

I loved what I played of the Starforce games. I know I beat the first one, I think I beat the second, and I regret not getting the third when it wasn't crazy expensive (but I hadn't wanted to buy it used). Granted, the prices probably aren't crazy now so maybe I should get it at some point.

If you've got a WiiU, I believe 3 is still on the eShop for like $10.

Unbridled9 posted...

It's not undefeatable. Watch. 'I don't care'.

adjl posted...

Nobody can actually argue that point. They can only admit that they don't care about it, and being backed into a corner like that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

You don't win arguments by refusing to have them.

Unbridled9 posted...

There is a false equivalency here. Namely that the suffering of an animal is inherently equal to the suffering of a human.

It doesn't rely on that equivalency at all. Just on the fact that animals' suffering is not actually necessary for humanity's survival and the fundamental belief that unnecessary suffering is wrong. And then there's the environmental and economic aspects...

Again, all you can do is say that you accept that suffering such that you don't care enough about it to make any changes to your diet, usually while actively trying to avoid thinking about it because it's pretty difficult to justify the truth of what happens in the meat/dairy industries with the fairly trivial benefit they provide. That's not defeating the argument, that's ignoring it because you don't want to have it.

It's surprising he got fired, given the industry's track record for doing diddly to diddlers.

Adam_Savage posted...

nope

i almost never go into it, because it's all the f***ing way to the right and it's not worth the effort to go over there. same issue the ps4, and probably 5, have. as a result, i don't even have any idea what's installed on my ps4 or switch.

Then you're not going to get to the rest of your library anyway and being able to organize it into folders doesn't make much of a difference.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Sounds like Nintendo

The very Nintendoest.

It's primarily harassment/assault, but lumping discrimination in under the same umbrella isn't unreasonable.

Also, important reminder that the US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world, by a very significant margin.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2020/nov/maternal-mortality-maternity-care-us-compared-10-countries

It's exceptionally dangerous to carry a pregnancy to term in the US, which makes it even more deplorable that so much of the US is hell-bent on forcing women to do so.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Wow adjl that preachy post made me laugh so hard I'm gonna shove bacon up my ass just to prove you wrong

Consider yourself another victim of toxic mascuWINity

I consider it my highest honour.

You've reminded me that I have bacon and turkey and lettuce but no tomato so I can't make a turkey BLT for lunch. How tragic.

keyblader1985 posted...

They're badly implemented though. They're not visible on the main screen; you have to go to your full library and then press a shoulder button, so there's little point. They already did better than this with the 3DS..

I mean, if you're looking for something that isn't already in the 3-4 most recently-played games (which you wouldn't want to sift through any sort of sub-structure to find in the first place) on your list, you're probably going to be using the full library view anyway. I think there should be an option to choose whether group view or full library view is the default when you go to your full library, but I can understand taking this approach instead of what the 3DS did. Especially so where it's not a folder structure so much as it is searching by tags that you add.

Is it a weird implementation of a feature that should have been there five years ago? Yep. But I can see why they did it this way.

Adam_Savage posted...

what's bullshit is they kept the shit assed soil quality level bullshit adjl taught me about

That's great, all games should have needlessly complicated sub-mechanics so turbonerds like me can spend way too much time min-maxing them.

And by that, I mean not all games, because non-turbonerds should be able to enjoy things as well even though they are unable to manage my galaxy brain level of soil management.

Unbridled9 posted...

Vegan's are way too often annoying to the point of being losers as well.

Not really. You get the occasional preachy vegan that insists that every non-vegan in the world is evil, but the vast majority treat it no differently from any other dietary choice.

Even with the preachy ones, the issue is less than they're trying to push an unreasonable viewpoint and more that they're trying to preach a viewpoint nobody can actually defeat. It's objectively true that veganism causes less suffering than omnivory, no matter how hard omnivores try to be responsible consumers and reduce the suffering they cause. Nobody can actually argue that point. They can only admit that they don't care about it, and being backed into a corner like that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


A last resort before what? Near-certain maternal death (such as ectopic pregnancies)? Or just an unwanted pregnancy?

I agree that it should not be treated as a first line of contraception, and that subsidies and education should be available to make birth control as accessible and widely-used as possible, but "last resort" is a pretty vague term that mostly amounts to "I feel very strongly about whatever line I'm drawing" while not actually indicating where that line is.

I also recognize, though, that while I believe my position is justified, incorporating that position into law by only allowing abortions for those that meet some arbitrary standard of due contraceptive diligence is a terrible idea. That adds processing delays (which will inevitably be used by the anti-abortion crowd to push the decision past gestational ages after which abortion is illegal) and ultimately just tries to use unwanted children to punish people (overwhelmingly women), and that's horrible for everyone involved. Implementing something to prevent "recreational abortions" might be reasonable, such as requiring some manner of counselling after reaching a certain number, and I think offering birth control consultations for those patients that are not already on something more effective is a good idea (especially when paired with subsidies that make those options accessible for everyone), but it needs to start from the philosophy of providing them to everyone that asks and adding a small number of exceptions, not from prohibiting everyone unless they qualify. The occasional "I'd rather get an abortion because I don't like how condoms feel" is bad, but that doesn't outweigh the potential harm of a more exclusive approach.

That or Switch, depending on your preferred platform. I'd wait for both a sale and for you to be in the mood to play it, though, rather than rushing out to grab it just for the sake of having it.

agesboy posted...

they released a patch that stabilized FPS and we're getting that patch day 1 apparently, but being 3d the load times are still gonna be way worse than rf4. the game does cache the previous zone you were in, but loading a new zone takes like 5 seconds or so

5 seconds isn't too bad. Some of the early impressions I was seeing sounded way worse than that. That's good to hear.

Adam_Savage posted...

it's a 3d game in the switch, it will have performance issues intrinsically

More than that, it's in Unity, which inherently doesn't work well with the Switch. That's a bit of a questionable design decision and I'm not sure why they did that, but it's a little late to change it.

I haven't been following it, did the performance issues seen in the Japanese version ever improve at all?

Pro choice, but on top of that, pro-making it as easy as possible for people to avoid unwanted pregnancies. In my ideal world, there would be no abortions, not because nobody was allowed to get them, but because nobody ever had an unwanted pregnancy. Subsidized birth control, comprehensive sex ed, better (and more affordable) prenatal care to ensure maternal safety... It's never going to be perfect, obviously, but there's a lot more that can be done to reduce unwanted pregnancy rates than is being done, especially in the areas with the strongest pushes to make abortion illegal (who seem averse to such solutions for some very mysterious reason).

Fam_Fam posted...

no, that's dumb. you should be punished, in general, based on the harm of what you are doing does to others/society, or the risk that it subjects people to

Different motivations can play a role in how likely somebody is to re-offend, so they should be considered in assessing the risk they present. Whether or not that applies to this specific case is up for debate, but there's nothing wrong with the idea in a general sense.

Hades doesn't have AAA graphics. It looks fantastic, but that's entirely a matter of good art direction, not graphical fidelity.

How could I not?

I'm basically Jesus but for public health.

Notschmendrake posted...

yall engaging the sunny alt as if it's going to give you a real answer

He doesn't matter, but staying quiet gives the things he says legitimacy they will never deserve. I don't want that to happen.

BEERandWEED posted...

Sensible people don't believe the media, the believe God.

So... You have no reasoning, you just believe something that you think sounds nice and hide behind faith to avoid having to justify believing it. This surprises nobody, and I'm very comfortable saying that every one of those moderations has been 100% deserved.

By no metric is Covid over. Case, hospitalization, and mortality rates remain quite significant, and while the current wave is declining, there is absolutely no reason to expect that we won't see new surges in cases in the future (and, in fact, another wave is starting in Europe as we speak that can be expected to spread worldwide in due course). That many governments are giving in to political pressure to give up trying to fight it does not in any way mean it's no longer a threat, it means elections are coming up and they want to do something popular. Abandoning restrictions entirely will kill a significant number of people for no reason. Any god whose will you consider that to be is a real dickbag that nobody should be worshipping, yourself included.

What does the poll have to do with sculpting?

BEERandWEED posted...

Every time I post them, somebody marks me for trolling.

A sensible person might treat that as cause to re-evaluate their reasoning.

BEERandWEED posted...

It's over, because of very obvious reasons.

And what are those "reasons," exactly?

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

So I mean, f*** a vaccine, right? The masks will do.

Masks won't do much of anything if nobody's wearing masks. Even then, the vaccine is an added layer of risk reduction; masks alone do not completely eliminate the risk. Being lucky enough to avoid it to date does not mean you'll never get it, and when you do, being vaccinated will dramatically reduce your risk of suffering serious harm from it. Given how trivial the cost of that extra protection is (a couple hours, a couple needles, no direct financial price), it's really a no-brainer to just get the jab.

Add large googly eyes to just about anything and you'll make it better.

LinkPizza posted...

It would probably be a little harder since states that would normally have the same time because they are in the same time zone might have different times just because the states chose differently

But it's largely arbitrary that they're currently in the time zone that they are.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

Look at some of those borders: You've got cities that are on the same longitude being one or even two hours apart. There are parts of Quebec that are east of me (in Halifax), yet are still one time zone west of me for the sake of having Quebec be entirely on Eastern time. If you look at the International Date Line, there are islands that are an entire day behind islands that are actually to the east of them, simply because the line is drawn outright horizontally in places.

There's a vague east-west progression of time zones, but the delineations have been drawn overwhelmingly based on whatever border is most convenient. It's arbitrary, which means remembering them in the first place is a matter of rote memorization, not learning any concept that allows you to re-synthesize details you've forgotten. That, in turn, means that remembering a new arrangement would be no harder to remember than the first one (neglecting differences in neuroplasticity due to age, though older people would indeed have a harder time remembering new patterns).

Also, in practice, people don't memorize most time zones outside of the ones they consider regularly. If I asked you which time zone Saskatchewan is in, you could guess it'd be either Mountain or Central, based on where it is, but I'm guessing you'd have to look it up (to complicate matters, Saskatchewan ignores DST, so they count as Central but are currently in line with Mountain). That's true for most people travelling anywhere unfamiliar: You memorize the handful of time changes you actually experience on a quasi-regular basis, but anything else, you look up only when it's immediately relevant to you. Any time zone changes, no matter how unintuitive, aren't going to change that.

Received. Many thanks.

I'd bongo that dodongo, if you know what I mean.

Johnny Eagle posted...

.........."could potentially" get a "bit" confusing if each state/county picked their own time zones? >_>

More accurately, it would definitely be confusing at first, but it wouldn't take that long to get used to. I'm talking about picking between two adjacent time zones (specifically, keeping or ditching DST permanently), not Wyoming randomly deciding to use Australian Central Time, so it'd mostly just be a matter of redrawing the existing lines and having to remember where the new changes are. It's not like time zones are currently straight lines anyway; people just have to remember which state lines require them to adjust their watches rather than being able to make any generalizations based on longitude. It'd take some time to re-learn the new ones, but they'd be no less arbitrary than the current ones and therefore no harder to remember.

I wouldn't say that's "making us smarter" so much as it is leading us to new information. Knowledge=/=intelligence, after all.

Huh. Nifty. PMing now, I guess.

Yes, and I go 1-2 times a month. There are a few things that are worth buying in bulk that make the membership worthwhile. If we had more freezer space, we'd probably get meat there, but we don't, so that's not practical.

Judgmenl posted...

No, I don't know why I single 32 year old would need a 10 gallon jug of milk.

Mine sells 2- and 4-litre jugs for less than I'd pay in a regular grocery store. I don't usually get milk there because it generally takes me a couple weeks to go through a 2-litre one and that rarely lines up with a Costco trip, but the volume they sell it in isn't really a problem.

faramir77 posted...

There's not even an excuse for it. It's all based around the corporate requirement to increase profits each year. The entire system is designed to milk more and more out of people until their service implodes. I think we're well overdue for an implosion.

Especially where streaming revenue is very much expected to be dropping now because Covid restrictions are relaxing and people are going to be spending less time at home binging Netflix. Profits have been up for the last two years not because of anything Netflix (et al) did to increase them, but because the state of the world was such that services like Netflix were bound to do exceptionally well. As the world gradually returns to something vaguely resembling normal, that exception is going away.

Cashier posted...

Hyperbole much? Hitler was far worse.

To date, Hitler has indeed done more harm than Putin. That doesn't mean Putin intends to stop any time soon, nor that his rhetoric here is disturbingly similar to the things Hitler was saying to drive the Nazis rise to power.

Remember: Hitler didn't start by murdering the Jews.

They've gotta keep up some pretense of being beholden to the law.

That's actually a decent selection of games I've been looking to grab. I'm never huge on these bundles because they're just too big, and I don't like buying so many games that I know I'll never have any interest in playing, but I might pick this one up for the ones I do want.

Remember: Insider trading is only legal if you're already rich.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd generally prefer dawn to come earlier in summer rather than later in winter, mainly because winter is already a cold dark miserable time when depression is soaring, so getting up early to go to work in total darkness sucks more than dawn just coming really early in summer.

Pretty much. The absolute worst was when I had an 8 am class on mondays and would start walking at ~7:15 to get there. All of January? Dark. February? Mostly dark, but starting to get a bit lighter as the month went on, which continued into the first week of March so I could actually say the sun was up by the time I arrived. And then DST hit and it became 100% dark again. It genuinely took me a month to recover from what that did to my circadian rhythm. It was so miserable.

Meanwhile, if the sun comes up early? Buy blackout curtains and the problem's solved. It's a lot easier to fix that issue than it is to fix the issue of my soul refusing to get out of bed with me because it's too dark. On the flip side, more daylight in the evening is nice, but given that it's too cold in the winter to do much outside anyway, I'm not too broken up by it getting dark earlier.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

or where it's so hot that it would mean the day would already be unbearably hot by like 8am

In practice, I think ditching the time change should entail each state (or possibly even county, for some of the larger states) choosing which time zone they want to join, in which case they can alleviate that issue by picking a time zone that puts "high noon" (in terms of solar position) later in the day. That could potentially get a bit confusing, since it'd make time zone lines even more erratic than they already are, but people would get used to it eventually.

On the 14th, my girlfriend and I had gone to visit her mother in Toronto, intending to go to a convention and concert that were happening that day. We ended up going to neither (the former was cancelled, the concert was small enough that it probably would have been fine, but we would have taken transit and that didn't seem like a good idea). On the 15th we drove back to London. The 16th, we were back to school/work, but there were starting to be talks of closing. By mid-week, the province had decided March Break would be extended by two weeks (to the 6th) for schools, and I believe it was Thursday that our college announced it would be following suit. Attendance was pretty sparse on Friday, and that was my last day in class. Work (a bakery cafe) continued for another week as take-out only before the owners made the decision to shut down, which happened a few days before the formal shut-down order came.

We never did make it back to class. I finished my program online (to no surprise, classes did not resume on the 6th) and my girlfriend dropped out (she hadn't liked her program up to that point, and really didn't like how poorly they handled the transition to online). Work started up delivery service from the production kitchen they'd just opened, gradually ramping up from being just the owners working until they brought me back on in June, then my girlfriend and I moved back to Nova Scotia in August.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


This is the main question. If you can't connect with anything in that spot (the specific location of your PC's antenna), it's a dead zone and you'll need to move (that, or reconfigure the pipes, wires, and structural elements that are creating the problem, but that's probably not practical). If you can connect with other devices in that spot, your PC's wireless antenna needs an upgrade.

Wanded posted...

when you bought a game in the 90's, you bought a whole complete game. period.

nowdays you buy half games with the other half being blocked behind dlcs, season passes etc
there isn't a healthy relationship between the consumer and the company anymore, you feel that one way or another the other side is doing underhanded things to squeeze your money, yes there were things like that in the 90's as well but it's a lot more mainstream to the point where a game not doing that is rare

Mostly, I think that just means you need to get out of the AAA space. There are plenty of games that either have no post-purchase monetization at all or for which DLC is more akin to the expansion packs that were not uncommon in the 90's (which I actually do like: being able to buy more of a game I really enjoy is a good thing, in my books). The AAA market just doesn't do much of that, because being beholden to shareholders and giant budgets mean there's a lot of incentive to squeeze every possible cent out of players. Focus on smaller studios that are making games for the love of making games, and there's lots of great stuff out there.

wpot posted...

It was pre-toxic internet, the US was at a high point, we were largely pre (open) culture wars, etc. The only good things added post-90s are phones/Amazon/etc technical conveniences. The 80-90s weren't perfect by any means, but if nothing else there were some fairly consistent values and a sense of "us".

Most of that roughly translates to "it was easier to ignore the world's problems and people that disagree with me." There's certainly merit in saying that that's better for one's mental health (see: the whole concept of "doomscrolling" that has grown out of social media providing a more comprehensive picture of all the terrible things that are happening at any given time), such that knowing when to disconnect is a valuable skill to develop, but calling it objectively better is definitely a stretch.

The_Viscount posted...

A project "due tonight" is highly sus.

Online submissions being due at midnight (or often 11:55 or 11:59, to avoid any potential confusion around "12 am" and clearly indicate the last day that you'll have to work on them) is pretty common.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

You know adults normally have shit they're doing like cooking where they can't jump to their phone at a moment's notice, right? It's normal to miss a call when you're busy, you're not so important you can't ring people back.

Sure, but that doesn't mean I'm going to give From a free pass for deliberately designing their game to be one of them. Cooking has to be, because stuff can burst into flames if you ignore it (in extreme cases). Single-player video games (which Soulslikes are at all times that you're not actively co-oping or PvPing) do not.

wolfy42 posted...

You all do realize you can basically pause right?

You just close the game, which is very fast to do (open menu, hit left, hit exit game).

The game saves you right where you are when you do that. When your ready to play again (even in a boss fight etc), just log back in.

Easy peasy.

I mean, in theory if you can copy your save game you could cheat that way I guess.

But yeah, if you need to pause, just log off.

If a game with an actual pause feature took 5-10 seconds to load whenever you unpaused, it would be universally panned for it. Why, then, do so many people treat quitting the game and waiting 5-10 seconds (at least) for it to load back up when you return as though it's a genuine alternative to pausing and not just a vaguely functional workaround to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place? Especially where it doesn't work for boss fights in any of the other games (though if it does in Elden Ring, that's mildly handy)?

Monopoman posted...

There are an absolute f*** ton of grace points and you have a horse so getting to one is very fast, s*** I have traveled for like 1-2 minutes from a grace site before and found another.

BRB, updating my voicemail message to say "please remain on the line for another 1-2 minutes because I'm just getting to a Grace Site and then I'll answer your call."

Even in the cases where you can respond to an interruption with "just a minute" (which very much does not apply to all potential interruptions), that still means you're walking away from whatever you were doing and giving up some or all of the progress you've made in those couple minutes to backtrack to the most recent safe point. That is, again, a vaguely functional workaround for a problem that doesn't need to exist, not a real solution.

Monopoman posted...

If you buy it on PC you can mod it for a pause feature problem solved.

Wow so complex!

Sure, but if I wanted to rely on mods to fix basic functional deficiencies, I'd go play a Bethesda game. From should be better than that, to which end I have no reservations about taking them to task for this mistake.

Again, I love me some Souls. They're fantastic games overall. The exclusion of a pause feature, however, was a really stupid decision that causes me more than a little frustration from time to time, and none of the proposed "solutions" actually fix that.

Mensis posted...

Sure, but lets stop pretending Im completely in the wrong. US oil in the supply would reduce the cost for everyone.

More supply would reduce the cost, yes. Would that reduction be enough to keep gas prices from being alarmingly high right now? Not unless the US increased its production several times over, and that's just not going to happen regardless of who's president (especially not when there's such a push to move away from oil dependency). You're not completely wrong, but you're grossly overestimating the significance of what you're right about.

Cruddy_horse posted...

Apperantly you can pause it if you go into the "Menu Explanation" section.

Which is weird, given how convoluted that is and the fact that it blatantly goes against their (totally dumb) deliberate design philosophy of excluding pausing, so I kinda wonder if it's somehow a bug rather than a deliberate decision.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I consider pause and save anywhere features to be more or less mandatory quality of life features for adults who actually have lives.

Losing a half-hour or more of progress because you didn't have time to waste slogging through another 10-20 minutes to get to the next save point or autosave is the sort of thing that can discourage people from wanting to play your game at all. If having to stop to answer your phone, answer your doorbell, or try and prevent your pet from s***ting on the rug or your kids from murdering each other or the like leads to you being punished in-game, you're probably going to assume whoever made that game is an a******.

Indeed. I don't generally mind save points, provided they aren't too far apart (unless there's an autosave feature that saves some of what happens between checkpoints), since consoles having sleep functions now makes it pretty easy to just pause and put the console to sleep, but not including pausing is just plain stupid. I don't care that pausing breaks the immersion; if I need (or even want) to pause, the immersion's already broken. If the game design calls for not being able to pause and use items, it's completely possible to engineer that. Monster Hunter has been doing it for a decade now (3U is the first time I know of it being there, after being absent from Tri), and if *Monster Hunter* has QoL functions your game doesn't, you're doing something very, very wrong.

Monster Hunter has also included it in a way that makes it impractical to abuse pausing to help react to attacks (it's buried 2-3 layers deep in a menu that doesn't interrupt the game, so it takes a second or two to get there and back), but I've always found that to be a particularly stupid argument against pausing. That's a thoroughly miserable way to play, such that the "temptation to cheat" that crowd is always going on about isn't going to be enough to convince anyone that doesn't already enjoy that playstyle to play that way, and for the odd few that do enjoy playing that way, there's no reason not to let them.

I've thoroughly enjoyed all three Dark Souls games, and expect to similarly enjoy Elden Ring when I get around to beefing up my computer enough to handle it, but I'm not going to pretend that they wouldn't be improved with a pause feature. Leaving it out was a dumb decision in some otherwise brilliant games.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

http://images4.fanpop.com/image/articles/106000/walt-disney-characters_106568_1_full.jpg

*Insert seductive Nala here*