Lurker > adjl

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd argue it might be, honestly.

Even if you're gay, the idea of heterosexual couples is utterly normalized in nearly every form of media. It's almost a given that no matter what genre of movie you're watching, there's going to be a romance subplot somewhere in there (unless the genre IS Romance, in which case it's going to be a romance superplot). And those romances are almost always going to be straight male-female pairings.

After a while, you're going to grow somewhere desensitized to the idea of male-female relationships in entertainment media. You may not relate to the relationship as much as you would one that more accurately reflects your own preferences, but you can more easily accept it as just another example of what you constantly see in films, on TV, and in pretty much everything else.

For straight people, most media is constantly reinforcing their own world-view, so gay relationships in media can feel much more transgressive (or at least unusual). It's something they're not used to at all, and in some cases, may feel uncomfortable with.

This is one of the ideas behind why there needs to be more representation in media in general. The more you normalize a behavior, the more people become accepting of it.

Not incorrect, though I was sort of speaking in the sense of a hypothetical future scenario where gay relationships have been normalized. There's no reason role-playing a gay relationship should feel any more uncomfortable for a straight person than role-playing a straight relationship does for a gay person. That it does is more a consequence of broader social and cultural issues than it is anything that's inherent in the media itself.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The problem is, a lot of the time when the pandering argument gets brought out, it's because a game (or movie, or TV show, etc) feels like it's cashing in on exceptionalism for the sake of "progressive credit" or are otherwise treating it more as exploitation than a sincere attempt to represent other races, preferences, cultures, or world-views.

There is a fine line, and pandering definitely does happen. There is still a lot of demand for artists to justify using any characters other than the "default" of a white male, though, as opposed to just accepting "that's just the character I felt like making." At least part of that issue is that there's no way for a single character to represent a demographic. Hypothetically, ~5-10% of main characters should be homosexual, if media were to accurately represent the general population, but if a game's main character is gay, that's a rate of 100%. No single game can (without taking ridiculous measures to ensure diverse representation that would definitely qualify as deliberate pandering/marketing) accurately represent the general population's demographics, simply due to the bias inherent in small sample sizes.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

There's a yardstick for this (similar to how some people use the "Bechdel Test" to gauge female representation). Simply ask yourself, "Is this character black/Asian/gay/trans/etc because it is intrinsic to the character's arc, or does it feel like it was simply tacked on after the fact to seem progressive or for the sake of identity politics? Is this an interesting character because of/in spite of/regardless of their established identity, or does it feel like the creator simply wanted a [INSERT MINORITY HERE] character, and they come across as a shallow, one-note character whose identity revolves almost entirely around their minority status?"

I generally just look at how much attention is called to it. Borderlands 2 did quite well there: There were several instances where minor characters referenced their same-sex relationship, but it was never treated any differently than if it had been a heterosexual one. Just casually mentioned as part of their experiences, and the game continued as normal. That, I think, is the way to do it: If it's relevant, don't shy away from mentioning it as much as is relevant, but also don't harp on it any longer than that. Treat it as though it's normal.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

I mean, it's not unreasonable to say that it's unfair to single out Rhode Island for taking too long to fix a problem that everyone else is also taking too long to fix. It's just also not unreasonable to say that Rhode Island (like everyone else) should have done this decades ago.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Cheddar's the default, but I'll often put multiple cheeses on if I have other options available.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

The problem is generally not so much with the age at which people are allowed to get married, it's with the fact that people can get married particularly young if they have parental permission. More often than not, that means parents forcibly marrying off their kids, not kids wanting to get married and seeking parental permission to work around the rules. Locking marriage at 18 and ignoring parental objections to that seems reasonable (and applying trafficking charges to anyone marrying off their kids). Even if that's above the local AoC, the lowest AoC in the country is 16, so that just means a couple can legally be together for two years before getting married, and if having to date for a couple years before getting married is the worst consequence of this, I'd say it's a worthwhile change.

streamofthesky posted...

Also, once again I'm calling you out for your misguided "slam" on the state:

I think it's still reasonable. Being above average is largely meaningless if the average is far lower than it ought to be. 45 more states should indeed amend their laws to be more consistent with reasonable standards for a developed country in 2021.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

I never got that mindset. There are many games I like, with interesting characters, where I do not identify with the main character at all. It kinda feels in the same ball park as videogames cause violence arguments to me.

Eeyup. It's mostly brought out whenever a protagonist is anything other than a white guy, as a means of attacking what they feel is "pandering to SJW's." Never mind that none of these people resemble video game protagonists beyond their race and gender, given that video game characters tend to be just plain better at everything than real people are.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

CoorsLight posted...

I've always found it kind of weird how virtually every game has the same ice mechanics. Slow to gain momentum to run, then hard to stop. I guess it's just weird cause that isn't really what running on ice is like in real life, though that might not make for a fun game mechanic

The biggest issue there is that running in video games is treated more or less like driving a car, rather than actual running. In a car, you rely solely on friction between the tires and the roads to accelerate, stop, and turn, so if you reduce that traction, it takes longer to effect the same acceleration or deceleration, and you have to take turns more slowly to avoid overshooting them. Obviously, that's a bit of an oversimplification, because there's more nuance than that to driving in slippery conditions, but it's a close enough parallel that you can easily say that video game running is a simplified version of that.

Actual running, though, is substantially more complex. You're still relying on friction between your feet and the ground to accelerate (the force has to come from somewhere), but you accelerate on every step to counteract the deceleration between steps, and it really doesn't take long to reach your top speed. Reducing traction therefore reduces your top speed more than it reduces your ability to accelerate, particularly taking into account that trying to run on ice is probably just going to result in falling over because you'll be pushing harder than friction can push back. You can counteract that by increasing the angle of attack so you're pushing off of the ground at closer to 90 degrees, but that's still going to reduce top speed dramatically (and that has its limits before you just fall down).

As far as the physics go, though, treating running like simplified driving is a lot easier to work simulate, and given that this standard for ice physics dates back to the NES era (if not sooner), I understand going for simplicity over accuracy.

LinkPizza posted...

I hate water levels, though... Like 3D water levels.

The problem with water levels (or swimming mechanics in general) is that they introduce a new style of movement into the game that isn't used otherwise, which the game's controls often are not designed around. Most 3D games are designed to only allow free movement in two dimensions (which is all a stick can do), with movement in the third dimension being dictated by terrain, gravity, and the very limited active movement option of jumping. Sometimes you'll get flying mechanics, but those often come with some caveats that make them not completely free (most commonly constant movement forward, so you're still just controlling two dimensions of movement). Swimming, however, is completely unrestricted 3D movement (or at least, feels like it should be), which is often kind of awkward to implement while still feeling consistent with the land controls.

A notable exception there is Subnautica: The vast majority of the game is underwater, so controls are designed around that, and it generally feels really good. The land parts actually end up being what feels awkward. Even air management ends up feeling like a reasonable mechanic because you're given so many tools to improve it and gradually work toward being able to travel further away from air sources. But then that's a game that's been designed fully around swimming, so it makes sense that swimming would feel good.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Cruddy_horse posted...

I think it's pretty sad there are very few games that have LGBT protagonists, sure there are some like Bioware games and Fallout/Skyrim that let you choose but barely any that have set-in-stone sexuality characters.

The usual excuse that gets trotted out is that it's "harder for most players to identify with the protagonist" if the protagonist is gay, but I don't think there's much merit to that. Video game protagonists very frequently have nothing in common with their players besides gender and presumed sexual orientation, and that really doesn't hamper enjoyment. One particularly hilarious example of this was people whining that GTAVI adding a female protagonist (option) "ruined the game" because players couldn't identify with a female, as though they actually thought they could identify with any of the male protagonists.

That said, if a protagonist being gay is actually going to manifest meaningfully in the game, that's going to mean same-sex romance plots and scenes. I can see participating in those being uncomfortable for straight players, which do still make up the overwhelming majority of gamers (if slightly less than for the general population), so putting that in non-optionally is going to alienate a large chunk of the game's potential audience. The reverse is no less true (not, for that matter is it less true for straight women playing games made with straight men in mind), but the unfortunate reality of sales is that catering to more people is generally going to be more beneficial than catering to smaller markets. To that end, if a protagonist is going to be gay, that's generally going to be either an option (so straight audiences can avoid it), or it's not going to have any impact on the game (in which case there's no point in proclaiming them to be gay).

Now, a trans protagonist? That has more potential, since being trans is more of a journey than a sexual preference would be, and can form the basis of its own story that players can work through. Even if it's not something players can personally identify with, that's within the realm of reasonable role-playing and can be used to tell an interesting story. Unfortunately, such a game would be pretty widely seen as "pandering," such that it's only likely to be indie studios taking on the idea and ending up with a fairly niche audience.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Mead posted...

so all they gotta do is acknowledge that gay people exist and not be mean about it? Sad that the bar is that low

I mean, that is basically all Pride is looking for in a general sense. The bar really is not high for "stop mistreating LGBTQ people."

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Aesthetically (both in terms of visuals and music) ice levels are often really cool (pun not intended), but the slipping mechanic can often be more annoying than anything else. I can understand wanting to mix up the physics a bit so people don't get totally complacent with them, but ultimately it just slows everything down in a way that's more frustrating than genuinely challenging.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

It's got a couple homosexual romances in it, in addition to generally being a very "let's all get along despite our differences" sort of story.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

It's like they couldn't decide what genre to make, so they just made all of them.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

My mom also just kinda complained about that. She works in an elderly home, she, other nurses and other employees are vaccinated. Interns are early 20's and have to be there, but are not vaccinated yet and are not not considered part of the healthcare priority group.

They absolutely should be. Regardless of whether or not essential workers in a general sense are prioritized for vaccines, anyone working in a health care setting in any capacity (ESPECIALLY a care home) should be prioritized along with more formal "Health Care Workers."

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Final Fantasy2389 posted...

A canadian streamer I watch finally got an appointment for the vaccine like 2 weeks ago and she cried on stream because she could finally get it and potentially see her family again soon.

I follow many more canadians and they all said within the last 2 weeks they finally got appointments.

Yeah, here, 30+ opened up on May 17th, then I think it was the 20th that 25+ opened up, and the 24th for 20+. It's really just very recently that the younger demographic has become eligible, which is actually kind of questionable given how over-represented they are in essential customer-facing jobs, and how much people in those jobs have been driving outbreaks (by virtue of not having the option to stay home).

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Nothing substantial in that closed environment and lack of proper oxygenation.

Well yeah, that's a given. Suffocating any yeast will kill it before it can produce a decent amount of alcohol. You didn't say "you can't make an alcoholic beverage with bread yeast in an airtight container," though, you said "you can't make an alcoholic beverage with bread yeast," which is just plain wrong.

shadowsword87 posted...

Soooooo what you're saying is.... squeeze bread dough and drink the liquids that come out to get drunk

Not so much. Bread generally doesn't have enough readily-available sugars to allow a significant amount of alcohol to be produced, nor is enough yeast used. Given enough fermentation time, you might get something, but that's going to be much, much longer than bread dough would normally ferment for, and the dough will probably go bad before you get anything meaningful. There is alcohol produced by fermenting the bread, but it boils off during baking (ethanol boils at 78C, 22 degrees below water's BP and way below all bread-baking temperatures).

That said, you can produce a fermented beverage surprisingly easily. The most common theory for how people first started making alcoholic beverages is that some stored grain (which would have been eaten primarily by mixing it with water to create a porridge; bread came later) got wet and started fermenting because that was enough to make wild yeasts happy with it. Those wouldn't have been particularly strong alcoholic beverages, nor would I expect them to taste very good, but replicating that accident was enough to make something that was safer to drink than most water supplies. The process was then refined from there to produce more enjoyable stuff, though again, deliberately using specific yeasts has been a thing for less than 200 years.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

SunWuKung420 posted...

And with bread yeast, you can't make an alcoholic beverage.

All yeast produces alcohol to some extent or another. That's just the nature of their metabolism. Bread yeast produces less alcohol and more CO2 than brewer's yeast (as well as differing in what byproducts are created), so you probably won't end up with a great product, but you can certainly make something alcoholic regardless of what yeast you use.

Heck, for the vast majority of bread and alcohol's history, yeast wasn't consciously used at all. Fermentation happened - seemingly spontaneously - because of yeasts that were naturally present in the air and on the hands of the people brewing the beverages and mixing the doughs. Yeast itself wasn't discovered until the invention of the microscope in the 17th century. Even then, it wasn't until the mid-19th century that commercial yeast became a thing and people could actually start choosing which yeasts to use for which products. People did just fine without dedicated brewing yeast for thousands of years; there's no reason to think you couldn't use a different strain to make something alcoholic today. Heck, there are many breweries that still just rely on wild yeasts (typically called "Lambic" beers).

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Zeus posted...

I thought Canada was on track ahead of the US? The US opened it in everybody in most (if not all states) around April. We've been vaxxing minors for maybe a month now.

We're leading on first doses now (US has 51.7%, Canada has 60.7%, as of yesterday), but still way behind on second doses (41.9% vs. 6.8%). We got off to a much slower start because we've got basically no domestic manufacturing capacity these days (closed down a couple years ago, which has turned out to be less than ideal), but with the US' rates dwindling because of anti-vaxxers and the resultant surplus of doses, we've been able to catch up. Nova Scotia has now (as of some time this past week) opened first doses up to everyone 12+, and we've been one of the slower provinces (also one of the provinces with the best case rates). I (at 32) became eligible to book my appointment on May 17. Currently, my second appointment isn't until September 17 (105 days later), but the one who gave me my shot yesterday was saying that I'll likely get an email about opportunities to move that up because the supply has generally been good enough to not have to wait that long.

As an aside, those numbers really show how ridiculous the Canadians are that have been clamouring for mask mandates to be lifted because of what the CDC said. Not even 7% of Canadians are even eligible to go maskless under those recommendations, and the vast majority of those are health care workers (who should generally be extra cautious anyway) and long-term care residents (who should also be cautious and also often aren't going much of anywhere anyway). The people saying mask mandates should be lifted for them are, by and large, full of crap, because there's very little chance they're actually fully vaccinated.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Like the BLM bundle, I feel like that's just too overwhelming a number of games for me to want to buy it, especially where so many of them are things I know for a fact I'll never play. I'm sure there are also some gems in there, even among the more obscure ones, but the notion of wading through over 1000 games to find them is just daunting.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Whatever you're doing, feeding yeast in a sealed container will result in the container exploding unless you have a ton of spare air space in it. If you're trying to ferment something, you should either make sure the lid is on loosely (if it's a screw cap, just set it on top without screwing it) or use an airlock of some sort to allow the CO2 to escape.

Also, fleischmann's active dry yeast is meant to be a bread yeast. You can ferment with it, but depending on what you're doing, you may not get the same results, and it may influence the amount you should be putting in.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Zeus posted...

1) Why'd you get it so late?

Depending on where he is in Canada, that may have been the earliest he could. I just got mine on Friday, which was the first available appointment.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

we get temperature checked at work, 40 degree weather and my temp was 97/98.

That is indeed how body temperature works. Dropping below ~95-96 in above-freezing weather would be a sign of extreme metabolic issues.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

I've been on the temp check. people don't have high temps at 3am in the winter.

If you're taking people's temperatures so soon after they come in that they're slightly hypothermic in mildly wintry weather, you're taking their temperatures wrong. Presuming you're using an IR thermometer, people will often show lower temperatures than normal due to reduced peripheral circulation after coming in from the cold, so you need to give them a chance to warm back up in order to get an accurate read of their body temperature. Otherwise, you risk having the cold weather mask an actual fever, defeating the whole point of the temp check.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

says the guy who thinks rushed vaccines will have nothing wrong,

At no point have I ever said that there's no chance of something being wrong with them. Only that the data that has emerged from the testing that has been conducted (testing which, to remind you yet again, has been no less rigorous than the standards applied to every other drug approved for use in the US) indicates that they do not pose a greater risk than Covid does. That belief is quite well-supported by science, thanks to all of the scientific data supporting it.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

and obviously somehow had years of research.

It is a fact that people have been researching mRNA therapies since the early 90's. I don't know why you're taking issue with that, but you're not going to make it any less true by attempting to deny it. Obviously the Covid vaccine itself hasn't been in development for longer than Covid has existed, but there's also literally nobody claiming that it has been. If you think people are claiming that, you're grossly misunderstanding what's being said.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Revelation34 posted...

I don't know what that means exactly.

He's saying that his resting temp is in the 90's as though that's a particularly unusual thing. That rather succinctly demonstrates his tendency to spout off the occasional bit of sciency knowledge he's got without considering or understanding the context or implications of it, often using it to arrive at completely ridiculous conclusions.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Unbridled9 posted...

I don't drink coke in the firstplace so my boycott or lack of it means nothing here.

That being said, this is extremely concerning. It's a government organization banning a private company for its political beliefs. That should be raising a ton of red flags regardless. That said, I won't be shedding a tear if private citizens refuse to buy (especially after finding out what was IN those training manuals); but a private citizen and the government are two entirely different things.

Fortunately, as often happens, Duckbear is hideously exaggerating the reality of the situation. They haven't banned the sale/consumption of Coca-Cola products in the country, they're just removing all Coca-Cola vending machines from the county's government offices (a total of 12 machines). It doesn't sound like they're even going so far as to prohibit employees from drinking Coke products at work (and I doubt that would stand up to any sort of constitutional scrutiny if they tried).

It's still a government acting to influence a corporation's activity based on political beliefs, which is questionable, but it's happening on the scale of a handful of offices. In terms of impact, this is comparable to a successful small business choosing not to stock Coke products anymore, and I think that's an acceptable amount of political activism.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Mead posted...

this tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Krazy_Kirby

It really does.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Coca Cola also has the buying power to purchase a brand previously not owned by them at any moment. So one day, it's not a Coke brand and the next, it is.

I honestly have no idea how often this happens, but yeah, that's also true.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

I've been driving my dad's 2010 Ford Flex since he died in 2014. It's needed several part replacements, as is expected, and it's got some corrosion problems in the fuse box that can't truly be fixed because that part is now obsolete (I really think car companies should be required to make schematics for their parts public domain when they stop manufacturing them, but that's another discussion), but for the most part it's served me well. I expect to replace it in the next year or two, largely because of that corrosion issue (it caused the whole car to outright stop running mid-drive and refuse to start back in December, which is pretty bad).

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

LinkPizza posted...

Also, Im not sure everyone knows which products are coke products. They own a lot of brands, dont they?

They do indeed. Literally all processed food brands in the world are owned by something like 7 parent companies, one of which is Coca-Cola. It's quite challenging to actually boycott these companies in their entirety.

SunWuKung420 posted...

It worth noting that none of the labeling for the 2 products even mention Coca Cola.

This makes it even more difficult. It takes active research to figure out what a true boycott means you shouldn't be buying. Unless you outright avoid every processed product (which isn't an invalid approach, given how much healthier non-processed stuff is, but it is exceedingly inconvenient), you're going to end up supporting one of those 7 parent companies, and it takes some actual work to figure out which. Heck, I used to buy Nestle kitty litter (they own Purina), so it's not even limited to food products.

Joe_Biden posted...

you mean like when trump said to boycott coke and then was later seen drinking coke afterwards

Not only that, he was recorded making a statement saying Coke should be boycotted while a bottle of diet coke was hiding behind a picture (or similar object) on his desk in a failed effort to keep the camera from capturing it. It was pretty hilarious.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

OhhhJa posted...

The very first one that comes to mind though is fauci proclaiming that nobody needs to worry about covid and then it wasn't a threat at all. Even if knowledge of covid was limited then, it's not really a responsible public statement to make about an unknown virus that's going around.

I'd agree, though depending on when exactly that was, I could see it being a legitimate tactic for trying to prevent panic before the thing had cemented itself as a threat that actually required a public response.

OhhhJa posted...

I think it was a few months later he claimed that cruises were totally cool.

Also pretty questionable, though not really a significant enough issue to call that "handling the pandemic poorly." By and large, cruises result in isolated outbreaks, particularly where the ships tend to be kept from docking if the virus is making its rounds on them.

OhhhJa posted...

Then there was telling people that masks are useless only to turn around and claim that they are absolutely mandatory when leaving your house.

This has already been covered in considerable detail. Citing this as hypocrisy or mismanagement is a gross misunderstanding of science and a failure to comprehend just how much one is benefiting from hindsight.

OhhhJa posted...

Then there was the random suggestion (based clearly on some senile thought he had on the s***ter rather than any kind of scientific study) to double mask early this year

https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/ppih/if-ppih-covid-19-sag-double-masking-improved-fit-rapid-review.pdf

First google result for "Scientific basis for double masking," from mid-March (which I believe was shortly after the recommendation started being made). Skimming the summary, it looks like the CDC had some experimental data that suggested it could help, though it wasn't conclusive that it would reduce transmission rates. As such, I'm guessing the logic was that it was a trivial additional precaution to take (most people already had more than one mask available), so if there was any chance of it helping, it was worth recommending.

I know you're eager to put the guy down and you just kind of latched on to that as seeming silly, but you really should have done some actual research before assuming there was no research-based reason for the suggestion. It literally took me longer to type that paragraph than to find something concrete.

OhhhJa posted...

Oh, not to mention fauci initially stated travel bans were completely off the table before doing one of many 180s. Nothing wrong with making changes when new data becomes available but a lot of this was beyond mere incompetence.

Yeah, pretty much everyone screwed up the travel ban thing. I get not wanting to make knee-jerk xenophobic reactions, especially where anti-Asian racism was already ramping up quite terribly even before the virus started to seriously spread beyond China's borders and travel bans would be seen as vindicating that hatred, but the delays in implementing bans have made things worse. I'd blame that more on the racism than anything else (don't need to act to prevent racism if there's no racism in the first place, after all), but regardless, it could have been handled better.

That said, I think a lot of people overestimate both the simplicity and effectiveness of travel bans. It's not remotely possible to just say "nobody comes here from this country." That would have more dire economic consequences than a decade of lockdowns like the ones we've seen over the past year, due to how inextricably commerce depends on international travel. That means any travel ban needs to include a litany of exceptions, the nuances of which were very much not clear at the beginning of 2020. As soon as you start making exceptions, though, you get cases slipping through the cracks, and unless you have already have precautions in place to keep those cases from spreading (and given how reluctant the US citizenry has been to adopt such precautions with the virus already running rampant, good luck implementing them before there are any cases), those are going to turn into outbreaks that continue to spread.

Shutting the borders earlier would have helped, but at best, I wouldn't expect it to do much more than delay the first wave by a couple months. In a country that had embraced precautions instead of fighting them at every turn (such as New Zealand), that would have made a world of difference because the added time to prepare would have ensured that would-be seed cases wouldn't turn into anything uncontrollable. In the US, though? It'd likely just have shifted the timeline forward a bit.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The main idea is that, if a license is expired, the actual person may have gotten rid of it, and someone else may have taken it and used it to make a fake ID for themselves.

Being a current/valid ID makes it far more likely that it's actually your ID.

You can argue over whether or not that's a realistic concern (especially with more advanced forms of ID these days), but that was the original logic behind the law. It's not petty or random, or designed solely to annoy you.

This. A non-expired ID has some record somewhere of it being valid. Once it expires, that's no longer the case, which dramatically increases the risk of it being fraudulent.

MICHALECOLE posted...

But he wouldnt get in trouble. And he knows that.

Not necessarily. If a store isn't doing their due diligence to check IDs, they can have their license to sell liquor revoked, especially if they've recently been caught slacking on that duty. To that end, it's in managers' best interests to make sure their employees are following the rules, up to and including firing them if there's a pattern of non-compliance. Stores stand to lose far more by being penalized for failing to check ID than they do by checking ID, especially where the vast majority of people shopping there are going to have a valid driver's license on them (since that's also a requirement for driving, plus most people keep their ID in the same place as their money).

Is it inconvenient? A little. But it's not like you didn't know there was a chance it'd be needed, and you failed to prepare for that possibility.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Kind of whatever I have on-hand at the time. Onions, peppers (raw/sauteed or roasted, if I've got them, mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic, cheese, salt & pepper, any easily-fried meat (usually bacon or ham, but sometimes something like salami or turkey)... They're really quite versatile. If I'm feeling fancy, I'll shred up some potatoes and make hashbrowns to mix in with them, but that tends to be more a matter of scrambling the eggs than making an omelette. I'll often throw in some spices, depending on what I feel like (lately, it's been garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, and a small pinch of cayenne), but that's generally optional. Tabasco also goes well in there.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

This is both ridiculous and really cool. I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Zeus posted...

And considering that roughly half of homeless have substance abuse issues (some of which is concurrent with mental health issues?), that's a pretty good reason why people should stay the f*** away from alcohol and recreational drugs.

Which came first: The chicken, or the egg?

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

I really only replaced my flip phone because a piece broke off the hinge due to sheer age and I had to carefully open/close it with both hands to keep it from literally breaking in half. It had its share of tumbles, but those things were built to last.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

adjl posted...

You seem rather attached to this position. Out of respect, I'll ask you to elaborate on how, exactly, Fauci handled it so poorly. Given that you've been pushing some form of "we should just stop trying to do anything to stop Covid and hope we get herd immunity before too many people die" for most of the past year, I have some suspicions about where you're going to be taking this, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

I replaced my 8-year-old flip phone ~2 years ago. As expected, I've made use of the smartphone's smartiness, but I do kind of miss the simplicity of my old one. Though texting is much faster now than with multitap (never bothered learning T9), and the camera is much better on my new one.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Full Throttle posted...

they will remove the county's 12 vending machinse

That'll teach 'em!

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this."

Translation: "This was only supposed to happen in China whoopsie."

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

OhhhJa posted...

If anything resembles drinking the koolaid, it's the idol worship of him that many on the left seem to exhibit. Dude is 80 and handled this whole thing quite poorly. Let's replace him with someone in like their 40s or 50s. We have too many dinosaurs in politics and the alphabet corporations that rule everyone

You seem rather attached to this position. Out of respect, I'll ask you to elaborate on how, exactly, Fauci handled it so poorly. Given that you've been pushing some form of "we should just stop trying to do anything to stop Covid and hope we get herd immunity before too many people die" for most of the past year, I have some suspicions about where you're going to be taking this, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Krazy_Kirby posted... there also isn't a reason to think there couldn't be long term effects, especially since it's applied to something new at a rushed pace

It's always going to be impossible to prove a negative, especially looking forward like that. You can test something for 40 years and still not be able to say that there's no chance of a 1-in-a-billion problem arising after 41. Instead, you have to rely on predictions made using existing data that can be extrapolated. I can't prove that the apple I ate this morning won't give me cancer in 20 years without actually waiting 20 years, but without a reason to believe that it might, there's no sense worrying about such a baseless possibility.

If it helps, the primary issue researchers have run into with mRNA therapies (including vaccines) in past studies has been an immune response to the foreign RNA. Finding the balance between having too small a dose to have any effect and a dose large enough to trigger a dangerous immune reaction has proven very tricky, but there haven't been any other major negative effects found. That means that, if mRNA vaccines were to have serious negative side effects, they would have emerged almost immediately (due to the immune response). There's been no reason to suspect more long-term issues.

SunWuKung420 posted...

30 years of research without producing a viable vaccine against known pathogens. 1 year after a novel virus emerges, WE GOT IT! Yea right.

There's not a lot of demand for new vaccines against stuff for which vaccines already exist, and as much as mRNA therapies have been being researched since the early 90's, it's only within the last 5-10 years that they've really made significant ground and cemented themselves as a viable option. In this particular case, they also had the added benefit of only needing the genetic sequence of the virus to start working on a vaccine. Covid was fully sequenced by Chinese labs in early January, months before actual virus samples were available to labs around the world, which gave the mRNA candidates a major head start.

mRNA vaccines have been coming for a while. Covid was just the push they needed to get out the door, and given their success, you can expect more to emerge in the years to come.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Given that it's London, it honestly doesn't even surprise me that they feel this is warranted >.>

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Except none of the previous vaccines are mRNA type vaccines. This is novel type, never previously used in long term human populations that was rushed through development.

Is there reason to believe that these particular mRNA vaccines would have long-term side effects not seen in the three decades of research on the subject?

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

First shot done, and may I say, this 5G reception is magnificent! I can't wait for the second shot to improve it even more. I hope this never fades, because I don't know how I could ever go back to my pre-antenna life.

hungrymike posted...

With such a new vaccine I'm more comfortable waiting until it has had enough time to be tested and gain fda approval.

It has. All of the typical standards have been met, and the data for that is available if you want to verify it for yourself. It has indeed been a very accelerated timeline compared to how long it usually takes to get a new drug approved, but that timeline isn't because it actually takes that long to complete the necessary studies. Most of that is delays in securing trial funding, finding trial participants, and waiting to have the application processed by the FDA (and other similar agencies). Here, because it's such a high-profile problem, funding's readily available, tons of people have been volunteering for studies, and vaccine candidates have been rushed to the front of the line to cut down on how long approval takes.

Streamline the administrative side of things, and the actual science really doesn't take that long. That's what's happened here.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

darkknight109 posted...

It was the same as when morons were hoarding toilet paper even though coronavirus wasn't a GI disease

To be fair, catastrophic explosive diarrhea is one of the symptoms of particularly bad cases, so in some ways, it is a GI disease. That wasn't why people were hoarding toilet paper, though. That was just a matter of people freaking out about the possibility that toilet paper would be hard to get (entirely because people freaked out about that and hoarded it). Same reason we had that gas shortage a couple weeks ago, actually.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

same people also say the vaccine has been around for years

The vaccine *technology* has been around for years. Vaccines specific to Covid, not so much, for extremely obvious reasons (namely the linear passage of time).

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

I believe it was a popular way to describe Whirlwind Barbarian builds in Diablo 2 (possibly 1 as well), but I doubt that was the first instance of the phrase.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

combining all of the game boards into one is a great idea tbh

Indeed. There'll be the occasional hiccup discussing some system-specific feature or issue that may get confusing or turn into a flame war, but for the most part, all versions of a game are going to warrant the same discussion. Keeping them separate is largely unnecessary and really a relic of a time when most games weren't multiplat. That change is one of the few things that was actually good about this.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Joe_Biden posted...

and his clear disdain for left of post

That just seems to silly to me. Why do people love having to scroll through a mostly-empty box between each post?

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

There's nothing inherently wrong with incest between consenting adults that warrants keeping it illegal, but unfortunately, it very often comes with a whole bunch of other problems that mean it isn't actually between consenting adults (namely grooming, but even without deliberate grooming the power dynamic can get weird). That's hard to prevent without a blanket ban, which isn't ideal because it lumps in genuinely consensual cases, but I really don't have an answer for how to solve that problem.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Sahuagin posted...

does this make sense? of course it travels via water droplets... who thinks that you spew dry virus particles from your mouth and nose? is that a thing?

It's the difference between being airborne and being transmitted by aerosol. Some viruses (mostly naked ones, as opposed to enveloped ones) are reasonably stable in dry air, such that they don't rely on droplets to be transmitted. They're still emitted primarily in droplet form, since there's so much water vapour in our breath (and especially when sneezing/coughing), but airborne viruses can linger for a while after the droplets dry up, rather than relying entirely on them.

SunWuKung420 posted...

And once the virus-laden water droplet lands on the mask, the virus can still travel through the mask, right into your mouth or nose.

There were concerns early on that that was a risk, which was a major factor in not recommending masks immediately despite it seeming like common sense now that they work. Subsequent research, however, has found that wearing masks does in fact reduce transmission (primarily if the infectious person wears one, which makes sense because of how much they reduce the velocity of air coming out of their mouth/nose and therefore their aerosol dispersal radius, but it also helps to keep it away from healthy people), so the recommendations were updated accordingly.

Reigning_King posted...

What about the double masking thing then? Didn't he say it was "common sense" if one mask helped two would help more? At the point they figured out masks help at all (which as pointed out above is rather silly that it took them so long to come to that conclusion) why didn't he push for double masks then?

That, I couldn't tell you. It is quite common in science to take a while to arrive at conclusions that, in retrospect, seem like simple common sense, but that does seem particularly common. There may have been some questions about how much of the protective effect was because of filtration versus air speed reduction, particularly where virtually any face covering was found to be effective (albeit to varying degrees). If it's just about reducing the speed of air, doubling up wouldn't change all that much. If filtration does play a significant role, it would make a bigger difference.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Judgmenl posted...

I think I remember that conversation. I mixed up Prison Architect and Factorio. I have Prison Architect (and tried it for a whole 5 minutes...), but never played Factorio.

Ah, so I'm not insane. I also played Prison Architect for like 5 minutes (86, but who's counting?). Conceptually, I'm interested, but it just wasn't what I was looking for at the time, so it didn't really hook me. I should give it another shot some time.

In that case, I would recommend Factorio. That's a whole game about automating the game to do your work for you, complete with actual opportunities for programming (which aren't at all necessary to finish it, but there's huge potential there, up to and including one dude building a ray casting engine that ran a simple FPS), which seems like something you'd enjoy. There's a demo, if you want to try before you buy, though it's worth noting that it never goes on sale, so it'll only ever be $30.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.

Judgmenl posted...

Requires me to actually buy the game. I admit I know very little about it.

I thought you already had it and tried it. Did I misinterpret you and you actually just said that you tried the demo? Or did I just completely misunderstand everything?

Revelation34 posted...

How is farming something going to have an effect on other people?

If it's a limited resource (which most things worth farming in multiplayer games are, in some capacity or another), by limiting its availability to legitimate players. Even if it's not, it still stands to affect the game's economy and/or player balance. Heck, if the game is popular enough, simply having the bot online takes away a spot on the server that a legitimate player could use.

It's not inconceivable that the bot in question could have been so completely isolated from other players as to have no effect, but that'd be quite the niche botting exercise.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.