Lurker > adjl

darkknight109 posted...

That's a good thing.

Politics aren't supposed to be "fun" - they're supposed to be boring. Biden was the boring candidate in 2020, he'll be the boring candidate in 2024, and having seen what the alternative brought, I am 100% all-in on boring.

Indeed. By and large, the president *should* be boring. Most of the exciting things that are actually improvements happen at the state or municipal level, rather than being something the president really controls. When exciting stuff does happen at the federal level, it's usually either the SC responsible for it (and I don't trust the current court to do anything good-exciting), or it's something bad like going to war.

EvilResident posted...

I just want the facts. The unaltered, truthful facts. And I will form my own opinion from there.

Genuinely factual information is a lot rarer than people like to think it is. The information you take in always ends up being filtered and curated in some capacity based on what you think is relevant and the limitations of your observational methods, and in the case of anything you aren't personally observing, those biases get compounded for each additional person in the chain and further filtered by what they consider necessary to communicate.

Pretty much everything you know about the world and especially about history (there's actually no such thing as "historical fact") has been subjectively influenced in some capacity. We rely pretty much entirely on "true enough," rather than being able to verify any sort of absolute truth.

https://imgur.com/gvsCJB3

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I didn't even realize they let you into the building without a membership card.

I can't speak for every building, but the 3-4 I've been in all follow the basic layout of the lobby having two large doorways: one goes into the actual warehouse area and you need your membership to go through (though that's just flashing the card to a person, so an expired or borrowed card would work), the other goes behind the cash registers and mostly functions as an exit, but also leads to the membership desk and returns counter, and you can go through there without a card. In my experience, the food court has always been in that area behind the registers, so you can get there without having somebody check your card.

That said, since Covid hit they've switched to automated ordering kiosks instead of placing your orders with a person, and I would have already guessed that you'd need to scan a membership to start that process like you do with their other check outs (I can't actually remember the last time I bought food there, so I'm not sure if they do). To that end, adding a card requirement at the ordering stage is pretty trivial, if it isn't already there.

My oldest active post is from 2014, in a sticky topic on the RF4 board where I shared the Excel sheet I put together to simplify the crafting system. That was actually my first time using VLOOKUP. Good times...

Muscles posted...

You 2 are forgetting 1 very important thing. A vote for Trump in Illinois is a wasted vote, and a vote for Biden in Texas is a wasted vote, to an even bigger degree than a 3rd party. 3rd parties need to get to 5% of the total vote to be invited to next election's debates and s***, but the 2 big parties need to win the state to meet their goals, or at least get enough electoral votes in states that can split. I live in Illinois, my vote already doesn't matter because it'll go blue regardless of who I vote for, but I can help a 3rd party get to the debate stage next cycle.

I would actually say that Biden is more likely to be elected in Texas than any third party is to get 5% of the total vote. It's certainly safer to vote third-party in states where there's very little chance of your less-desired candidate winning, but it's still equivalent to throwing away your vote and helping along that less-desirable candidate.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Oh, he'll almost certainly win handily in most republican states. That's nothing he can personally take credit for, though. That's just because there'll be an R next to his name.

No strong preference. On the whole, I probably tend toward less realism simply because greater realism tends to mean movement has to feel semi-realistic to avoid jarring with the art style and that often conflicts with making it feel good to move around, but that's hardly absolute and there are times when clunkier movement works well (like horror games).

If you don't have and do need a coffee table, coffee table. I'm guessing you've already considered that, though, and otherwise it sounds like the liquor cabinet will be your best bet.

A Covid test from an actual doctor was likely a PCR test, rather than the rapid tests you can get for free (which also do cost money, but have been subsidized because of how significant a public health concern it is). The strep test would also have involved a lab, so that's more costs.

Lokarin posted...

Ok, there's an ad on reddit that's bugging me...

It's for a lottery and it goes "WIN the $2.6 Million Grand Prize and enjoy luxury living in the beautiful showhome, plus $100,000 cash!"

...

You just won $2.6 million!!!!.... but to sweeten the deal, here's $100k cash

wut

I'm guessing it's a $2.6 million house, plus a $100k cash prize. Though there's a fair chance you'll need to hang on to that $100k to cover your new, significantly higher property taxes.

Colonel_Lingus posted...

Depends on the outlet that's reporting. Some are more accurate/less biased than others.

Looking at your poll options, it's clear you have a very juvenile perception of the media, however.

Pretty much exactly this. Some outlets are extremely unreliable, others are pretty decent. It's also worth defining exactly what "trust" means in this context: Blindly trusting everything anyone says is pretty much never a good idea, regardless of who they are. Incorporating your own fact-checking to help shape your beliefs is always going to be a good idea when it's easy to do so or when those beliefs are likely to have significant consequences, even if you're hearing the report from a trustworthy source. To say "I trust *outlet*" is a statement that can have a wide range of meanings.

It's something you need to be deciding on a case by case basis, not distilling into a 1-10 scale with heavily loaded textual qualifiers. But then TC only ever makes topics to fish for reasons to think less of people based on rigid pre-existing biases, so we can't really expect such nuance.

crazyisgood posted...

A vote for a third party candidate does not work in favor of Trump or Biden. Unless maybe you are in a state that could go either way.

Voting third-party works in favour of whichever candidate has the fewest third-party alternatives to split the vote. Philosophically, that's more likely to favour conservative/regressive candidates over a progressive one, by simple virtue of there being more ways to progress and try new things than to stay the same/revert to a past state. In practice, of course, it really depends how many candidates there are and which main ones they most closely align with, since that affects whose votes they split.

In the US, the observed trend is that lower voter turnout favours the GOP, especially when looking at more politically educated demographics. Voting third-party is functionally comparable to not voting at all, and given that those voting third-party tend to be more politically educated (instead of just voting for whoever their parents/peers do like so many voters), it can be expected that a higher third-party turnout will favour the GOP.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I saw a video on youtube about it, but it doesn't even come up on steam so I don't know what the deal is.

PC's the only current platform it isn't on, which is unusual, but whatever.

SomeUsername529 posted...

I feel bad for all the people that hyped it up soooo hard and then like a month from release Netflix tripped over their own dick every time they said more about the series and then it finally came out and it seems like nobody gives a shit and its just barely passable. It really does feel like nobody is talking about this series outside of exactly the context of this thread.

Honestly, the ultimate reaction seems to be about what I expected, which is roughly what the better live action Disney movie remakes got: "It's okay, but there isn't much reason to watch this over the original." That's kind of inevitable with remakes like this: Either you do a frame-for-frame remake and end up with something totally redundant (if not strictly worse, as happened with the Lion King), or you try to make changes to take advantage of the different medium and end up losing some of the nostalgic appeal you were banking on to gamble on something new that may or may not actually improve anything.

If it's something where a big part of the appeal is the spectacle, then live-action remakes can add something meaningful with a different aesthetic without taking anything away from the rest of it (my impression is that the live action One Piece did pretty well, and shounen often puts a lot of emphasis on the spectacle of fight scenes, so that makes sense), but for something like Avatar that's mostly a character story, live-action doesn't inherently change much. The world-building does, however, lend itself to quite a bit of hype from preview material in that it's interesting to see the live-action takes on the setting, which I think is where a lot of the hype came from.

NeoSioType posted...

And believe it or not they're still playing with covid over in china. The last I heard about it, it attacks the brain in mice.

They're still playing with Covid in most places. It remains a considerable public health concern and it's still relatively poorly understood, especially as far as long Covid goes, so of course efforts are being made to research it.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

i love how its not racist to say Japanese games are better than western games but its cool to critique the diverse western games as woke

I take it you're unaware that most of us also consider those complaining about "wokeness" in games (or any other media) to be bigoted morons.

Krow_Incarnate posted...

My favorite is when the Google-sponsored links download malware on your machine.

There really needs to be legislation holding sites responsible for damages caused by ads they run. That companies will insist that it's not their fault that their advertisers distributed malware then turn around and whine about users blocking ads is really just pathetic.

darkknight109 posted...

Sure, Trump's got his base and they're as fanatical as ever... but he barely scraped out a win in 2016, he lost in 2020, and he's done nothing to expand his reach since that time. Like... what is he running on that would attract people not already in his cult? Immigrants "poisoning the blood of the nation"? That "Day 1 Dictator" nonsense? Pulling out of NATO? How are any of these supposed to be attractive to centrist voters on whom his election hinges?

The only thing that might tip things back in Trump's favour is nothing Trump's done to become more popular, but what Biden's done to become less popular. Biden's response to Israel has turned off a ton of would-be Democratic voters, and while there's zero reason to believe Trump wouldn't keep helping with the genocide (remembering that he moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in an overt display of taking sides in the conflict) and ample reason to believe he'd make things worse for Arabic/Muslim Americans (he didn't follow through with it, but I've never forgotten when he was campaigning in 14-15 and suggested registering all Muslims as a counter-terrorist measure), choosing not to vote at all because people don't want to vote for Biden is half as effective for electing Trump as voting for Trump over Biden.

The 2020 election was intense. Both Biden and Trump got significantly more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, entirely because people were so fired up about whether or not they wanted Trump in office. Trump has lost a lot of steam among moderates, and certainly his newest rhetoric isn't helping that, but that makes the stakes seem lower and Biden hasn't exactly excited anyone, so he's also lost a lot of steam. So... I'm not sure what to expect. It's going to come pretty much entirely down to voter turnout: If too many people stay home on election day because they don't care, Trump will win. If enough people get out and vote for who they think sucks the least despite being less than enthusiastic about the whole thing, Biden will.

BADoglick posted...

I remember coming out of school asking my dad why people were making a big deal of it and his response was 'screw the royalty we fought a war to get away from them'

In Canada, the anti-royal sentiment isn't quite as pronounced as it is for some Americans, but I similarly didn't really understand who she was or why it was a big deal. I also could have sworn I was in kindergarten at the time, but I would have been 8, so I guess I misremembered that.

https://imgur.com/yQzbC1w

Is this the same kid who knocked up his girlfriend and resulted in Boebert Sr. being proud that her kid would get to be a teen parent just like she was?

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to, but I'm pronouncing that "ass-loo-may" and nobody can stop me.

KingDavid posted...

I think most of them just don't care.

Why have sex when you can just play a video game and get instant dopamine or just jack off for 5 minutes and be done with it.

That's more voluntary celibacy than involuntary. Incels are also a specific subset of those who want to get laid but can't, characterized by particularly pronounced bitterness over getting less sex than they want and attacking society, women, the concept of sexual consent, and whatever else they see fit to blame for that deficiency instead of being willing to consider that they might themselves be doing something wrong.

Diana's death comes immediately to mind, though I might be able to think of something earlier if I tried harder.

Mostly because that requires somebody else to agree to have sex with them.

eli_loves_ddr posted...

Would be a tragedy to not get seasons 2 and 3.

Regardless of what the series in question is or how much you're enjoying it, it's generally very risky to let yourself feel this way about anything Netflix produces.

Lokarin posted...

hey, wait... ya!

I like the round up cuz it's easy, but why should I donate to charity via someone else when I can do it myself?

Eeyup. All of those "Would you like to donate $X to this charity?" prompts are just a way for corporations to make donations for tax breaks with your money instead of their own. If you want to be charitable, just do it yourself directly and let the billionaires pay for their own tax breaks (or even just pay their taxes).

It's even more egregious when it's something like Tim's running their own charities: They get all the tax breaks, but can keep a chunk of the donation for themselves as "administrative costs."

If you're in a relationship with somebody whose happiness doesn't make you happy, don't marry them.

Yeah, that's the other thing: To call this "collateral damage" assumes it's an accident, which is pretty hopelessly gullible when so many Israeli officials have gone on record to say they'd like to see all Palestinians eradicated. Hunting down Hamas militants is just an excuse they're hiding behind. Killing civilians is what they actually want, and they're doing as much of that as they can get away with before they lose the support of the rest of the world (which is precisely why people in the rest of the world who don't like genocide want to withdraw that support).

Devil_May_Cry posted...

if your family was in danger of being blown up by rockets and you had the opportunity to kill the ones targeting your family but there are innocent people around them would you take them out still?

Depends how many innocent people. One or two, and a fair chance that they wouldn't be hurt? I'd probably go for it. A dozen, and a high chance that I'd injure/kill at least 4-5? I might still go for it, but I'd expect to be held accountable for that recklessness by people who were able to view the situation more impartially. A crowd of thousands, with the only way to maybe get the handful bad guys being to indiscriminately open fire on the crowd and crush them with tanks? Absolutely not, and anyone that would is a mass-murdering psychopath who should be shot dead immediately before they have a chance to act further on their murderous impulses.

Collateral damage is not a binary concept. In every instance, the scope of the damage must be measured against whatever gain is being used to justify it. It's not something you can make blanket statements about (with the exception of "you can't make blanket statements about it," which is technically itself a blanket statement).

Of course, that's also irrelevant to this particular incident. This wasn't collateral damage. This was just plain old mass murder.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

just as you can condemn the actions of Hamas and Iran-backed proxies without condemning all Palestinians or Arabic people.

I think that's part of the issue: a great many people defending Israel's genocidal crusade don't make a distinction between Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian/Arabic people, and therefore presume the same generalization of those criticizing Israel. And when they blame all Arabic people for Hamas' actions, that makes them a lot more comfortable with Israel's genocidal crusade.

Of course, this makes them idiotic, racist pieces of shit, but this shouldn't surprise anyone.

https://imgur.com/e3zBxEf

BoomerKuwanger posted...

Imagine being able to draw the parallel between Israel now and America after 9/11 and still missing the point entirely lmao

Like does he not think there was anything wrong with America's post-9/11 response?

shadowsword87 posted...

For the record, if your check engine light is blinking, find somewhere to get it looked at immediately.
That's the "oh no" level.

Indeed. Everything else is just "there's something wrong we don't have a dedicated light for," which is generally worth getting checked out, but probably won't hurt to leave for a little while. Blinking, however, means you should pull over and get a tow unless the garage you're going to is like 20 feet away.

It won't necessarily replace going to a garage, but you can buy diagnostic code readers for cars pretty cheaply that will give you at least a partial answer for why the light is on. You'll still need a garage to actually fix the problem, but getting that answer and being able to research its implications may be more comforting for you than this vague idea that something is wrong and you don't know what. It might be worth looking into that, if you're the sort of person who feels less anxious with more information.

EclairReturns posted...

there was no way of telling how much there is going to be in two days when it would have come time for me to retrieve my car.

You could always have left it there for a day or two until it was safe to get there. Not going out in bad snow is pretty normal (and thoroughly sensible, if you can avoid it), but there's also no harm in not picking your car up immediately, especially if it's weather in which you aren't going to be driving anyway. But delaying this appointment by two weeks isn't a big deal either, and odds are the garage would have told you if they suspected it was.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Should Americans be crucified for what bush did after 9-11?

adjl posted...

I (and pretty much everyone else speaking on the matter) have made it pretty clear that when I say "Israel" in this context, I'm speaking of the country in terms of its government and actions on a national scale.

Again with the "not all Israelis" strawman. Being critical of the government and military does not mean "crucifying" Israeli citizens who are in no way responsible for the actions of the government and military.

As outlined in a previous post, the comparison to America's actions post-9/11 also doesn't particularly favour Israel. America killed orders of magnitude fewer civilians per unit of time and had significantly more enemy combatant kills to show for it, following an attack that killed more American civilians in a matter of hours than Hamas has killed Israeli citizens since the country came into existence. And America has been thoroughly criticized for the amount of collateral damage they caused, and in recognition of that damage they put ample resources into providing humanitarian aid and helping to rebuild damaged infrastructure. That's a far cry from insisting that there's nothing wrong with massacring civilians by the tens of thousands in search of a handful of alleged terrorists and destroying critical infrastructure without a hint of remorse or accountability, then turning around and begging the rest of the world for their allowance so they can afford to keep doing so.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

We all make mistakes is what I should have said.

Speak for yourself. I personally have never shot a thousand starving homeless people as they lined up to get food after I bombed their homes, jobs, fields, and medical facilities to ash, so I'm afraid I can't really sympathize with that particular brand of "mistake." Nor do I have any intention of doing so.

Collateral damage in the heat of battle is bad, but understandable and potentially justifiable. Mass murder in a non-combat situation that just wasn't calm enough for your liking? That's just plain old mass murder. Heck, even if it were just collateral damage, if it's even possible to accidentally shoot a thousand innocent civilians that possibility alone is reason not to engage because whatever you might accomplish with the assault does not justify collateral damage on that scale.

I'm interested, but I've still got Ogre Battle 64 in my backlog on the Wii VC, so I'll be playing that before I buy a spiritual successor to it.

More like Tiananmen Scared, mirite?

Nade_Duck posted...

haven't followed him since he ran but everything i've heard still sounds kinda douchey. he really better now?

The only thing I know of off-hand is that he was one of very few Republicans that actually voted to oust Trump in the post-Jan 6th impeachment process. I respect him for that, but I don't know enough about his other activities to be able to assess him in a broader sense.

Man, I really hate when I get startled and accidentally drive tanks over a hundred dying unarmed civilians.

Answering "where would they get the money?" with "why don't they just get money?" That's just disappointing. You should really think your troll topics through better than this. It's far more entertaining when there's actually some effort.

I believe Youtube actually requires people to stick that in there somehow if they want to survive as a channel and don't want to get snubbed by the algorithm. It's annoying, certainly, but blaming it on the creators is just ignorant and taking it out on them won't accomplish anything.

https://imgur.com/JRe4nJz

If I had to see it, you all do too.

https://imgur.com/0c6Cn6H

I feel like that's more likely to backfire than yield any actual benefit for McD's. They won't be able to apply the trademark retroactively, so they won't be able to claim anything from prior uses of WcD's, and moving forward artists will just shift to a new parody instead of having to pay any sort of royalties to use WcD's. In turn, that's just going to piss off people who are annoyed that McD's has destroyed the venerated tradition of WcD's, who will then be even less likely to buy McD's (and they're probably the main niche this is trying to attract).

Assuming they're strangers and it's not a case of playing against friends, like bots. Say nothing unless I have to, keep any frustration or excitement to myself, and just play the game.

I definitely plan to pick it up at some point, but I'm in no great rush. 3 months of PoE's Ancestor league satisfied my desire to play an ARPG for now. I'll probably grab it in a sale some time, depend on how that timing lines up with PoE2, Grim Dawn's next expansion getting a sale, and/or how I feel about getting into an ARPG at that point.

Yellow posted...

I find it kind of badly designed? Capacitors should discharge themselves on shutting off?

I think they do, it just takes a long time for a capacitor of that size to fully discharge, and that means there's a dangerous amount of energy left in it. It's not a design flaw so much as an inherent limitation of how the physics of electricity work. I expect that to discharge it faster than that (without going through the process of connecting a dozen heavily insulated things to various grounds before shorting it), the microwave would have to have a process you could activate to block it from charging while still being plugged in, then have the microwave run until it mostly drained. You'd have to do that before unplugging the microwave, but theoretically it would be safer.

In practice, though, I don't know that you could guarantee that such a process would actually discharge the capacitor enough to eliminate the risk, so for liability reasons it's probably better and definitely easier for manufacturers to just not offer the option and instead give a blanket advisory to have an electrician service your microwave instead of DIYing it. As it stands now, they say not to do it, so that puts the onus on anyone who does want to do it to research it themselves and figure out how to do it safely and absolves the manufacturer of the responsibility.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

what happens to Fortnite when it eventually dies?

It dies. The servers are taken down and you lose the ability to play it. It's still a live service, just a dead one.

By comparison, Palworld will persist in the state created by its final update. You'll be able to continue to play it as normal, if perhaps without multiplayer. It just won't get any more new content. At that point, there will be no basis to even consider calling it a "live service," despite nothing about the core gameplay structure or relationship with the players having changed. Therefore, there never was a basis to call it one.

Yellow posted...

On the back of one of the machines at my work is a big fat capacitor that could just kill you even if you unplug it. Your average person would think it's safe to touch.

Heck, the same is true of home microwaves. I had one die recently in a way that made me suspect a fuse blew, so I looked up how/if it was possible to change a microwave fuse. The first step was "This is super dangerous seriously just call an electrician but if you insist on doing it anyway here's how," followed by like 90% of the procedure being everything you have to set up to be able to safely discharge the capacitor. Needless to say, I opted to just get the landlord to replace it.

So what happens when new content stops being developed for Palworld? Does it stop being a live service, or does it persist as a live service that isn't live or servicing anymore?