Lurker > adjl

Poop or pee?

Yellow posted...

My credit score was 830, then I started paying off loans fully and it tanked. Total scam.

Yep. "We won't let you take on this debt unless you already have some debt but not too much debt just enough debt that somebody else already owns you but they aren't losing money on you and then we'll want a piece of that." It's not a measure of how well you can handle debt, it's a measure of how much profit a lender can make off of you while putting in zero effort.

LinkPizza posted...

Literally nightmare fuel

Yep. The endgame of AI replacing literally every job so nobody has to work is pretty nifty, but everything between here and there is going to get so much worse, and there's a good chance that those who end up with far too much power as a result of controlling the AI's that have replaced everyone else will actively shut down efforts to create AI's that will replace them and stall the whole process at the worst possible point for most of us.

chelsea___wtf posted...

AI isn't writing good fiction, it's helping spammers drown out good fiction with garbage

http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/

That's the other thing. AI waiting doesn't have to be good, it just has to be plentiful enough that it becomes near-impossible to find anything better and audiences lower their standards. Established authors will still be able to reach audiences to a certain extent because people will look for them, but publishers may drop them in favour of filling shelves with cheaper stuff, leaving them to self-publish (which will mostly limit them to digital distribution) and possibly not be able to support themselves.

LinkPizza posted...

I think it depends on the length of the break. At 10 minutes, I would say I agree many would take it, using the opportunity to use the bathroom, grab a snack and drink, and check social media (or something in their phone) If the break is like 30 minutes or longer, then I disagree and think most wouldnt mind playing another since they probably wont want to wait that long Which is why I mention the break length at the end of post

Yeah, it's hard to really assess it without actual numbers. I believe the official recommendation is a 10-minute break every hour, which is probably too short for switching games to be reasonable, but it could be just about anything with what's said there and how little those suggesting these ideas actually understand video games. If it's like half an hour every two hours, yeah, switching would be worthwhile.

papercup posted...

It's so weird to me that everyone wants to replace writers with ChatGPT. Like I've read some stuff it produced and it's so obviously mechanical and not completely like how a real human would write. Like a child learning how to write. It's weird.

Readers don't want to replace writers with ChatGPT. Publishers, on the other hand, see "push button, get book" without any of that pesky "food" and "sleep" nonsense actual writers want that drives up their costs and production time, and their eyes light up with dollar signs and start spinning like slot machine reels. It's not there yet, but within a decade AI-produced writing will be able to compete well enough with human writers that publishers won't be sacrificing any sales if they just stop paying humans.

I've seen some proponents of ChatGPT and the like making snide comments like "if you can't write better than an AI, maybe you should consider a career change," but that ignores that it's not simply about writing better. It's about writing in a manner that's commercially viable. When AI can write orders of magnitude faster than a human with near-negligible operating costs, it doesn't matter that what the human wrote is technically better. By the time the human finishes writing one book, the AI has written 25,000 books, another AI has curated the best 100 of them according to current market trends, and that one human sitting at the top of the publisher to collect revenue has picked ten of those to go to print, all for the cost of 1-2 MWh of electricity (which is much, much cheaper than several months' worth of food and rent) and with nobody skimming royalties off the top.

shadowsword87 posted...

But it's not just wholesale pasting a response, it's cutting up phrases together.
Which, unless you want to say all books are breaking the copyright of the dictionary, is not a strong argument.

On the flip side, we just saw Pantone break decades-old Photoshop projects for anyone that didn't want to pay for the collections of paint colours that Adobe no longer held the rights to, which isn't a far cry off of being analogous to copyrighting short phrases. There's precedent for such shenanigans.

Muscles posted...

It pisses me off that people are making AI do art, like don't they think that should be left to humans? They should use AI to get rid of the jobs people don't want to do. Keep AI out of Art, entertainment, and sports. The goal should be to get to a point where those are the only jobs for people.

People are making AI do whatever will make them more money. As nice as the fantasy of "AI does all the stuff people don't want to do so we can all just make art for a living" is, it's never going to be anything more than a fantasy. So long as developing an AI to do something better than a human will make money, somebody will develop that AI. When we get to the point that AI's are able to develop new AI's to do jobs that haven't been replaced yet, those AI's will have no reason to differentiate between art and other jobs. No matter what idealistic fantasies you'd like to cling to, the only jobs that are "above" being replaced by AI are those that have the power to prevent themselves from being replaced (and even that can't last forever). Nothing is sacred.

That, and the notion of art/entertainment being the only jobs for people is very obviously flawed. The vast, vast majority of people aren't talented enough to be able to make a career out of art. If those are the only jobs, that means artists are the only ones that can make money, and you just can't run an economy like that.

faramir77 posted...

We should be overjoyed with the fact that AI will be able to do our jobs for us. However, nobody is overjoyed by this because we all know it's going to kick us out of our jobs (and therefore our pay) while the rich just get richer. I'm a teacher and somehow I think even my job isn't totally safe from this.

As AI automates more and more of society, I honestly don't see any options aside from either a universal basic income or a revolution to seize the means of production.

Yep. It probably won't be this century, but AI is going to replace every job. In theory, that's great, since it eliminates the need for anyone to work and the entire concept of money beyond some kind of credit system to prevent any one person from taking too much of the shared resources the AI distributes (all the fun of communism, but none of the human nature screwing it up). In practice, however, because it's not going to happen overnight, a handful of people with the power to replace others with AI will use that AI to become even richer and more powerful, while those replaced by AI will be unable to work and just fall into poverty. UBI will become an absolute necessity within our lifetimes.

LinkPizza posted...

How long switching systems take would probably depend on the system, and how everything is set up. It might not actually take long. Especially since many people (at least, gamers that I know) will usually have multiple systems hooked-up to a tv at the same time Even faster if the system you are switching to is the switch I can turn that one and start playing faster than heating something up in the microwave As for why they would switch, there are people who dont mind playing more than one game at a time. So, it could just be an incentive to play the other game while one in forcing you to take a break (depending on the length of the break)

It's certainly possible, but it's still disruptive. As much as it's easy to think about it hypothetically and come up with ways that you could perfectly optimize your gaming time to minimize breaks, in reality, the vast majority of people faced with such a break are just going to take it. Even for those that don't mind playing multiple games at a time, the idea of having to plan that out ahead of a given session is just more forethought than most are willing to put into their leisure time. It'd be much more common to simply use the enforced break as a chance to go to the bathroom, grab a snack, check one's phone, or similar quick tasks that will fill the time.

When I posted, the post about deaths didn't even exist and the discussion had pivoted to talking about myocarditis, which somebody else had already pointed out is both less likely and less severe than death. The only thing I tried to comment on was your idea that anything based on VAERS should be ignored, which very obviously just isn't true. So obviously, in fact, that being so wrong legitimizes anti-vaxx rhetoric because the dingledorks will see that as pro-vaxxers ignoring science that doesn't agree with them.

If you want to educate people that are wrong, you need to understand and acknowledge why and how they're wrong. In this case, that means not shooting down VAERS reports of myocarditis just because it's VAERS, and instead pointing out why VAERS alone doesn't mean much, acknowledging subsequent research that has found the connection to be conclusive (which exists in spades regardless of how credible VAERS is), and outlining how that risk is less than that posed by Covid infections.

You forget that these are very stupid people, too stupid to even recognize the possibility that they're very stupid. You've gotta spell this out for them and stroke their ego a bit. Just saying "what you said is stupid" tends to result in them getting defensive and assuming that you're just ignoring facts you don't like.

Very good, but probably not as good as gay Superman's.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Did I say it did?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Well yeah. The bottom line is that even the most exaggerated, non-credible accounts of vaccine side effects show that they account for a tiny fraction of the real harm caused by Covid itself, as mathed out in post #40. VAERS itself shouldn't be completely discounted, it just shouldn't be treated as gospel until more credible studies can be conducted and its usefulness is mostly limited to those that are actually in a position to conduct real research.

I may have misunderstood. Still, myocarditis as a side effect of mRNA vaccines is pretty well-established at this point, so I wouldn't dispute the conclusion of that study (given its age, it's not a great study to reference anyway). It's just a really rare side effect (rarer than developing it as a result of Covid itself) and is still much safer than being infected by Covid.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


It's worth noting that VAERS and OpenVAERS are separate entities. VAERS is still very much just "we observed this apparent correlation and it needs proper study before any actual conclusions can be drawn, but it's at least limited to actual medical reports, as opposed to OpenVAERS being free for anyone to claim that the Covid vaccine turned their penis into a goose. For the purpose of what that study actually claimed (namely, "there's an apparent correlation here"), VAERS is good enough.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Only when they actually help increase immunity...

No, that's always true. How effectively they work with the immune system varies, but fundamentally they all work with the immune system and not in place of it. That's the core concept of vaccination.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If you're the kind of person who thinks modding Skyrim to turn all the dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage is a great idea, I feel like you'd going to see the same sort of thing with this game. I've already seen someone working on a mod to give the wizards guns, because meme.

I've also seen one with lightsabers.

I saw one that replaced brooms with Shrek.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

its a video game

not made by her

He didn't say it was made by her. He said you're giving money to her. Which is true, because she gets royalties on everything that uses the HP license.

teddy241 posted...

Yeah i dont get the flu shot. I gotta believe in my immune system until it shows signs of diminishing.

Vaccines work with your immune system, not in place of it.

T0ffee posted...

Oh hey my copy came a day early!

Just gonna pick up an eshop card for the expansion pass on my way home and I'll start playing tonight.

Incoming wild ride.

Lokarin posted...

there is nuance to economics - it doesn't have to be a greedy s***show

It doesn't have to be, but it is, and by its very nature those profiting most from being greedy shits have the power to make it an even greedier shitshow.

Far-Queue posted...

Studios live and die by sales figures. If a game flops and doesn't sell well it could have dire consequences for the developers, possibly including forcing them to close up shop. Add to this that there are often bonuses for meeting certain sales goals and/or netting a certain metacritic score.

So who is at greater risk if the game flops? The megamillionaire creator of the IP who is going to cash royalty checks from a dozen other sources regardless of Hogwarts Legacy performance? Or the dev studio employees who are making a fraction of a fraction of what Rowling makes in a year, trying to pay their rents and put food on the table?

I don't have it backwards at all.

My dude, these studios will lay staff off because their games are successful. When corporations have particularly strong quarters, they face a lot of shareholder pressure to keep that momentum, and one of the most common ways the game industry does that is by following up strong quarters with quarters in which they lay off a bunch of staff to slash their expenses so they can maintain the illusion of growth without having to produce anything that will generate additional revenue. On top of that, big projects like this usually entail bringing on a bunch of temporary contract workers (both to satisfy temporary demand and because temps are easier to treat like garbage) who get laid off when the game launches regardless of how well it does.

In extreme cases, if a game fails so catastrophically that it shuts down the entire company, sure, that's going to result in some lost jobs. That's quite exceptionally rare, though, especially when the company in question is goddamn Warner Bros. For corporations on that scale, a game's success tends to be largely unrelated to the job security or well-being of those responsible for actually making it, instead translating into bonuses and residuals for executives and other higher-ups. That's especially true with a game like this, where WB has been very aggressively marketing it (including a token trans character) and carefully curating who's allowed to review it because they know exactly what a PR minefield releasing anything HP-related is, meaning if it does fail, it's most likely because they failed to navigate that minefield and not anything that would lead them to shutter the studio.

NemesisOgreKing posted...

The critically online are just taking what Rollings said out of context.

Translation: "I've paid literally zero attention to any of this but still think I have a valid opinion on the matter."

Rowling's a transphobic piece of shit. If you don't realize that, you either haven't paid enough attention to the matter to be able to comment credibly on it, or you're so gullible that you actually fall for some of the most transparent dog whistles out there. Neither really reflect well on you.

Far-Queue posted...

But saying pooh-pooh to people buying Hogwarts while simultaneously making an argument for buying smartphones is absurd

It's a lot easier to defend buying something with some sort of utility than to defend buying a video game. There are tens of thousands of other video games one can buy to yield the same effect as buying Hogwarts (that is, "play game and have fun"), and countless alternatives beyond games if the goal is simply to be entertained. There are decidedly fewer alternatives available for anyone that needs to maintain phone/text contact with others, and even fewer for those that need portable internet browsing, email access, GPS use, or any of the other functions that smartphones offer.

That's not to say people shouldn't try to be more ethical about their smartphone purchases, but comparing something that is a near-essential utility for many people to a single piece of luxury entertainment isn't the most valid.

chelsea___wtf posted...

shes a product of the transphobic media culture in the uk, not the source of it.

The street's a bit more two-way than that. I don't doubt that she's been influenced by that culture, but she's also absolutely contributing to it in many ways, including funding transphobic organizations and endorsing/giving a platform to vocal transphobes. She's a non-trivial media figure, to the point where a lot of fascists are choosing to rally behind her, so even if she's not single-handedly responsible for the broader culture of transphobia, I'm not particularly inclined to do anything more to support her. If nothing else, she's explicitly stated that she considers the continued success of Harry Potter to be an endorsement of her views (to paraphrase, "I think 90% of Harry Potter fans agree with me"), and I'm just not going to be a part of that perceived endorsement.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

O-Ro-Bo-Ros

I'm definitely placing the R's before the next O and not after the last O. If that makes sense.

I imagine that anyone writing out pronunciations in a way that suggests they don't do that is just making a mistake, since that's just how consonants work. Glottal attacks mid-word (or even mid-phrase) are pretty rare in typical English speech.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

My argument is about why they would stick with something that has interruptions, when they have other options and can easily pick up something else that doesn't have interruptions. Then once engrossed in the new thing there's no point in interrupting that to go back to the fist thing.

Presumably, the intent would be to apply this universally enough that there wouldn't be alternatives that didn't have interruptions. The options, then, would be to switch between different games every hour or two hours or whatever the cutoff is, or just take the break and go back to the first thing (which is what they actually want to play) afterwards. Either way, they're getting interrupted, and there's no option that would allow them to avoid interruptions entirely.

In practice, of course, there's zero chance this could be implemented any further back than consoles that are currently on the market and receiving firmware updates (and even then, the wording seems to suggest designing games around the principle of only playing in sessions of a certain length, not simply forcing the game to pause for the breaks regardless of what's happening), so anyone with access to a PS3, 360, WiiU, 3DS, Vita, or earlier system could circumvent it with those. That said, with each passing year it becomes less and less likely that any given minor will have access to such older systems (and those that do, have access because of gamer parents who will have a better understanding of the industry anyway), so that option isn't going to be available for most. It's also not as significant a workaround as you might think, since many of the games that are designed to be addictive enough to cause problems are ones that stand to profit from that addiction, which really only applies to games with active servers, meaning older ones aren't as much of a concern anyway.

The problem with parental control options is that they're only effective if parents know about them. More significantly, they're only effective if parents know they're necessary. Neither point tends to be advertised, given how profitable having kids addicted to and spending money on these games tends to be, so both points of awareness tend to be lower than they need to be to solve the problem.

Having the controls on by default would help a lot, but that gets into questions of how to verify ages, which will almost certainly end up not stopping the kids that try to work around them. On the flip side, those kids that do comply and get their parents to disable them (along with adult players) have an extra hassle/privacy concern to deal with for little actual benefit because they've already got parents paying attention to their gaming and trying to make sure it's healthy. That's mostly where efforts like this are doomed to fail, since reliable age verification is hard and ultimately not worth the cost to the large majority of people that aren't doing anything wrong.

GanglyKhan posted...

The science does expressively say your sex is determined by chromosomes.

Which science? Genetics? Sure. Endocrinology? Not so much. Neurology? Not so much. Psychology? Not so much.

Those who understand very little about the subject will treat "biological sex" as this simple, immutable concept, but the fact of the matter is that it's a product of numerous factors: Hormones, primary sexual characteristics, secondary sexual characteristics, neuroanatomy, genes... It's very much not a simple binary: there are countless ways in which something can not line up typically to create an outcome beyond the simple "XX=female XY=male" understanding many people would like to believe is the entirety of it. As easy as it is to simply dismiss those exceptions as rare examples of things going wrong, some estimates suggest that as high as 1.7% of the population has one or more intersex traits, which is not small. For comparison, the incidence of natural red hair is somewhere between 1 and 2% globally. You're roughly as likely to encounter an intersex person as a natural ginger.

Beyond that, even if biological sex were simply a matter of chromosomes, transphobia still wouldn't be based in a valid understanding of science because gender dysphoria is not in any way invalidated by that. As I said, that's a matter of accepting one piece of science that affirms the transphobes' views (that sex is a simple matter of binary chromosomes) and ignoring everything else (namely, that gender is a complex psychological concept that doesn't always line up with apparent biological sex, and overall outcomes tend to improve dramatically when gender identity is given priority over apparent biological sex). Being transphobic is not at all inconsistent with being anti-science, because being transphobic is itself anti-science.

GanglyKhan posted...

I would simply call it "anti-logic" at that point.

Nobody's against all science. Even the most anti-vaxxers still believe in gravity and friction. "Anti-science" means that somebody is opposed to thinking scientifically about things, which is to say seeking evidence to answer questions and using that to form and update opinions as appropriate. There's no need to come up with a new term to describe what's happening here.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

None of that matters to kids today. They just want their face in a screen and constant engagement.

Riiiiight...

Ultimately, it's really not hard to powerlevel classes postgame, even if you barely levelled them at all going through, and you'll always have at least one character able to access each new class, so it's not like the game will be ruined by not trying to keep your level low enough to maximize CP gains. You just won't get to go through as many classes as you could by skipping most sidequests, which is unfortunate because the class system is really good for keeping the battle system fresh and varied.

It's also not at all necessary to actively avoid fighting to keep your level low, nor to avoid every single sidequest. You're just going to run into problems if you try to do every quest (though even then, there are still plenty of higher-levelled targets around that can give you CP, just not the story-required ones). It's an issue that probably shouldn't be there (just removing the level-based adjustment on CP would fix pretty much the whole problem), but it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I'd recommend putting off non-hero sidequests that seem like they're going to be more involved and not making a habit of going back to each area after completing new chapters to look for new sidequests (each area's sidequest list expands steadily throughout the game), and never using bonus exp to level up, but otherwise you shouldn't have to worry too much about it.

Zeus is Count_Drachma and Mead is Vampire Coyote. Both are still here and as active as ever.

GanglyKhan posted...

I agree it's predatory practice, but the push for self-discipline seems to not be there for a lot of people too. While they *shouldn't* be attempting to make this stuff so "attractive" and addicting, it's also up to people to make wise choices for themselves, too.

That's logically identical to blaming a person with no legs for not getting upstairs quickly enough. All of this is designed to prey on people with impaired impulse control. Expecting those with impaired impulse control to solve the problem by exercising better impulse control is no different from expecting those with impaired walking to solve the problem by walking faster. The problem can only be solved by restricting the extent to which companies are able to exploit such people.

It'd be one thing if this was a question of just outright banning games or something similarly catastrophic, but it's not. Things like designing games to have periodic breaks built into them or warnings that discourage ill-conceived impulse purchases benefit everyone, not just those whose gaming habits have become unhealthy/destructive. Questions of financial exploitation aside, games are actively being made worse for the sake of manipulating players into buying microtransactions and the like, focusing on gameplay loops that are more addictive than genuinely fun. Reversing that trend will result in better games, as publishers that have leaned on addiction to keep people playing their games have to instead focus on making them more enjoyable. The only people this actually hurts are billionaires that are butthurt because they can't steal from children anymore, and they really don't need or deserve your defense or sympathy (especially where "hurts" in this case actually means "results in their numbers going up slower with no appreciable impact on their overall quality of life").

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Hand held
Games on smart phone, or a 2nd, or a 3rd
They probably have access to PC less than 15 feet away

So... switching to a system that's at least 10 years old (and therefore likely a downgrade), switching to a system where the vast majority of games are little more than low-commitment time wasters (absolutely a downgrade), or switching to a system that involves getting up, getting comfortable in a new spot, logging in, and selecting a new game (not a downgrade, but pretty disruptive). All in the name of not having to take a break for a few minutes.

Again, your "solution" doesn't actually solve the problem of having the first game disrupted and is just a matter of getting around the restriction purely for the sake of getting around the restriction. There's no actual benefit to doing so.

GanglyKhan posted...

The usual argument against transgenderism is "it's not listening to the science, you are either male (XY) or female (XX)." "The science" as it were, tends to be the backbone of most arguments for there only being two genders. So someone wanting to use "the science" as an argument and then be "anti-science" elsewhere becomes contradictory. I'm not taking up that viewpoint, it's just what I've noticed that usually gets said.

Because "anti-science" doesn't actually mean opposing all science. It means picking and choosing whatever snippets of science one likes with no regard for context and a minimal understanding of the broader concepts and rejecting everything else that one doesn't like. Those clinging to "science" as the basis for transphobia ignore reams upon reams of studies and evidence around gender dysphoria and the various aspects of biological sex in favour of the understanding of genetic sexual dimorphism they got in grade 4. Despite claiming that their position is rooted in science, that's also a fundamentally anti-science position.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

So they'll stop playing that game and start playing another game.

It'd be easy enough to enforce the break at a console level instead of being confined to a game. That still doesn't rule out changing to a different console, but that's a non-trivial amount of effort for anyone that hasn't set up their entertainment system for easy swapping (which will at least draw parents' attention to the fact that their child is trying to circumvent the built-in protections, even if it doesn't actually result in them intervening).

That, and I don't know about you, but I'd consider playing an entirely different game far, far more disruptive to my enjoyment of a given game than taking a 10-minute break (or whatever it is). The only thing that suggestion accomplishes is spiting the restriction for spite's sake, rather than actually improving the situation at all.

RIP dog.

MrMelodramatic posted...

So its kind of surprising to me how sad I am. I guess I didnt realize how much I love the little guy. I havent even lived at home for the past 8 years. Still, he was always happy to sit with me and watch tv when I visited home for the holidays.

It can be kind of weird how intrinsically pets become part of our lives, even if we don't actively interact with them much. Unless they actively antagonize us (in which case it tends not to be so sad to see them go), they tend to just become this sort of background of positivity because they're friendly to us and the people around us enjoy them. Being so passive makes that easy to take for granted, which in turn makes it really shocking to lose.

I shouldn't be surprised that a topic like this would bring out the pedos, but I can't say I expected them to be this brazen.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Nope.

Whatever happened to "an antibody test showed that I had it and I was just too healthy for it to affect me because of all my meditation and good beer"?

SunWuKung420 posted...

Not sure what this has to do with a respiratory disease.

This may surprise you, but the respiratory and digestive tracts come pretty close to one another. Cross-contamination between them isn't tremendously uncommon. As it happened, further research as the pandemic has progressed has found that transfer from surfaces isn't as significant a transmission vector for Covid as was initially suspected, but as a broader concept food hygiene can help to prevent respiratory illnesses.

My city gets 63 for walking, 60 for transit, and 59 for biking. I feel like that's a bit generous, but I guess I would probably have said about 6/10 for walking, so that's not far off the mark. It likely gets points for being relatively dense (the municipality as a whole is MUCH less walkable, given the degree of car-dependent suburban sprawl) and having sidewalks pretty much everywhere, but it still leaves quite a lot to be desired in terms of overall pedestrian safety and comfort.

That's definitely inaccurate for transit, though. They've got a map of "how far you can travel in 30 minutes on public transit," which is ridiculously generous. Knowing people that have relied on buses to get to/from some of those places, it's usually more like 1-1.5 hours (for a <20-minute drive), thanks to infrequent buses, buses just plain not showing up sometimes, and awkward transfers. Most of our buses never run any more often than every 20 minutes, even at peak hours, and many are upwards of an hour.

That biking score is also pretty generous. We have a decent amount of bike lanes if you look at the total distance, but it's highly fragmented and there isn't really any sort of cohesive bike corridor through the city. There's one street that's officially one, but as I mentioned, it has to cross a busy road without lights, so it's largely useless if there's any traffic. The next-closest thing is a mixed-use trail that does actually run most of the length of the city (and will complete that route within the next few years when a certain bit of major road construction finishes), but it's got a 200-metre climb at one end that's not exactly realistic for anyone that isn't an avid cyclist to tackle. When I bike (which was quite a bit until breaking my elbow on the way into work a few months back, then winter hit before I got back into it), I'm mostly just on the roads because there isn't any bike infrastructure that will do the job for me.

Still, not bad by North American standards. It could be a lot worse.

Not that I've noticed, and given that I've been testing pretty much any time I showed any symptoms or after anything particularly high-risk, I'm pretty comfortable concluding that I haven't.

Honestly, that all sounds pretty reasonable. The hardest thing will be reliable age verification to enforce any of it.

Count_Drachma posted...

Even $60 has been ridiculous.

Not really. Compared to most forms of entertainment, even full-price games are quite cheap in terms of how much entertainment they provide (dollars/hour is a highly debatable metric to use for evaluating games, but it's the closest thing that exists to an objective assessment, so we have to give at least some consideration to it). Cheaper options exist, certainly, but to call $60 (or even $70, really) "ridiculous" just isn't a reasonable standard, especially when that's been more or less "normal" for video games' entire existence.

I wonder how they feel about gay superheroes.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

No, that's the opposite. Wanting it a negligible amount means you want it at least a little.

"Negligible" means you can ignore the amount without consequence. That's just the definition of the word: able to be neglected. In this case, it means that saying you have zero desire to stream is accurate enough, which is true.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Thus far you have exhibited these traits...
Has difficulty with abstract thinking.
Demands more of other people than is personally willing to do.

I am now adding these to the list...
Bad at characterizing own behavior.
Unimaginative.

Sounds like you're just making a bunch of excuses for being wrong. That's generally not a great idea if you want to actually improve yourself.

T0ffee posted...

Still on the 'wait until all dlc drops before getting it' train for Xeno 3.

All the DLC that affects the core game has now been released. The final wave is a separate story in the same vein as Future Connected or Torna, so barring minor patches/updates that are hard to predict, saying that all the DLC has dropped now is accurate enough that you should go for it.

Count_Drachma posted...

They should've kept the cuts for working-class Americans.

And not for the rich/corporations, because that's very obviously the opposite of what makes sense as far as who can comfortably shoulder more of the tax burden goes. Unfortunately, when it's rich people drafting the bills and other rich people/corporations lobbying for them, that tends to result in a teensy conflict of interest that prevents the most sensible approach from happening.

As far as North American neighbourhoods go, not bad, but there's a lot of room for improvement. There are a couple of grocery, hardware, and drug stores within a 10-minute walk, which I'd call the upper limit for walking for such things, but getting to them involves walking along some fairly busy, pedestrian-unfriendly streets that definitely push into stroad territory (though they do at least have sidewalks, at least when nearby construction projects don't take them over). In theory, I live near a designated bike route, but that bike route has to cross a very busy 4-lane street without a light and has zero actual infrastructure to make it bike-friendly aside from being a relatively narrow street (which discourages through traffic), so it's thoroughly useless except to travel on either side of that street. By and large, it ticks the boxes necessary to claim that it has the bare minimum pedestrian infrastructure, but it's got a long way to go to actually be really pedestrian-friendly, and it's very obviously been designed with cars in mind and everything else as an afterthought.

Realthuddydrums posted...

you'd need a f***ing crowbar to get me loose.

I guess a regular crowbar wouldn't really do the job in that scenario.

I mean, that was obviously a lie, given that you continue to respond to me. Why wouldn't I ignore it?

Moreover, this is a public discussion, not a personal conversation. You want to dip out of a discussion point you raised? Go for it. Other people can continue to discuss it among themselves for as long as they feel it continues to generate discussion. You're not needed for any of that.

Realthuddydrums posted...

You snipped off the most relevant part of that post where I stopped mid thought and realized that talking to you is boring

Did you expect me to comment on a sentence you chose not to finish?

Been wearing glasses since I was 11.

Realthuddydrums posted...

We changed the ways people have relationships without changing the ways we teach people to have relationships. Birth control pills started up in the 50s, right before the highest spike we ever saw in divorce rates during the 60s. Correlation doesnt prove causation, but you would have to be willfully blind not to see any connection.

Yes, you said that already. You continue to dance around what you're actually saying, while getting upset when people follow through to the obvious conclusion that you're saying "birth control made cheating easier." Why is that?

Realthuddydrums posted...

It must really suck having such a dim view of people that you automatically just to assume the worst of anything someone says that you don't understand.

Then how are you trying to relate the advent of effective birth control to the divorce rate? Specifically in the context of "this is a consequence that should have been properly considered before releasing the product."

BlackScythe0 posted...

It is always a problem since the entire basis of it is that you give money to stuff rigged against you.

All entertainment involves spending money on something that will most likely not yield a return. The healthiest way to look at gambling is as entertainment: However much you spend on it is the cost of that entertainment, and any winnings are just a bonus. The problem arises when you start treating it as a viable money-making endeavour (which is just plain misinformed) or you become addicted and lose your sense of how much you're spending (not entirely unlike developing a tolerance to a drug).

Realthuddydrums posted...

I mean shit, there is misinterpreting, and then there is willful misinterpreting.

Seems like you people wanted me to have a fucking draconian view that I didn't even come close to stating just so you'd have someone to spit some hate at.

Relax.

You answered "why is the divorce rate so high?" with "because birth control pills." Reading beyond that to guess that you're calling the concept of safe, non-reproductive sex a threat to marital stability (with an obvious focus on how women fit into that equation, given that the stakes for infidelity are so much higher for women than men without contraception) is pretty reasonable, especially where your efforts to clarify haven't done anything to suggest that that isn't what you mean.

This is, of course, without taking into account that any answer to "why is the divorce rate so high?" other than "it isn't" is factually incorrect, as demonstrated by post #2.

NickMullen posted...

>new account

99% sure it's Schmenette.

I don't think anyone disagrees that the two-party system carries plenty of problems, but do you really think you're providing any sort of insightful contribution to a topic about Republicans shooting down efforts to make it illegal to marry children by bringing it up here? Read the goddamn room, dude. Not every political topic is an appropriate place for you to wave around your enlightened centrism like a high school sophomore that just took his first poli-sci class and believes he has the answer to every political problem. Most of the time, you just look utterly clueless.