Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

minervo posted...

The amount of people cutting themselves out of the gene pool I've been reading about lately astounds me.

If we view the entirety of human existence as one long struggle to transcend our animal instincts and impulses, and to make decisions and act according to logic and morality rather than simple hormones and hardwired evolutionary behaviors, then those people are essentially the most human humans to ever live.

Behold the Ubermensch!

The idea of having to perpetuate the gene pool or leave behind a "legacy" in some way is very much our more primitive side speaking.


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GoldenSun3DS posted...

Did you forget that a lot of us here are in our 20s? Dumb thread.

That's obviously sort of the point.

For those of us in our late 30s/early 40s, there really isn't much of a choice at all - I know I'd rather date the 20 year old rather than the 120 year old (!) in my case. And anything younger than 20 or so creates similarly insane comparisons.

The question really only WORKS for people in their 20s.



Kazuma_Yagami posted...

Some of these responses show that all people think about in dating is sex

Congratulations, you now understand most of the human race and nearly all of its history on the planet.


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Eventually, it turns out The Commission is secretly being controlled by The Red Skull, who engineered Steve's getting ousted and replaced by an unstable thug as a way of sort of ruining the image of "Captain America". Steve finds out, beats the shit out of the Skull, and the whole thing ends with Steve getting the costume/shield/identity back while John Walker has sort of suffered a nervous breakdown and is probably going to be dealing with prolonged psychological therapy (though he does admit in the end that Steve IS the better Captain America, sort of putting closure on it all).

The whole overarching storyline ran for like 30 issues or so (nearly three years) back in the mid-80's (with occasional detours into other storylines, like when Steve had to deal with Viper taking over the Serpent Society, who eventually turned Ronald Reagan into a snake-man) - it was some of the first Captain America stories I ever read, because they were coming out around the time I first started getting into comics, and I still think of them (and stuff like the Armor Wars and early 80s X-Men) as some of the best stories Marvel has ever written.

But the upshot of all this is that, after Steve stopped being "The Captain" and went back to being Captain America, the government apparently kept that costume and the shield T'Challa gave him, and gave them to John Walker instead (presumably after he'd finished therapy and was more or less stable again, though it's implied they may actually have straight-up dicked with his memories to some degree, erasing some of the more traumatic elements, like his parents' murder). The assumption was that while he couldn't handle being Captain America, he COULD theoretically handle being a government super-agent who came with less baggage and expectations (and who would follow orders rather than being a rogue loose canon like most of the Avengers were), so he became US Agent (while wearing the old "The Captain" costume and using that shield).

Now, WHY Steve would let the government have that costume (which he had made for himself) or the shield (which was a personal gift from T'Challa) was never really explained at the time (and if it was ever explained later, I missed it), but US Agent showed up in West Cost Avengers later when John Byrne was writing it because he apparently wanted his own Captain America on the team, but he wrote him more like Guy Gardner (ie, the "asshole" Green Lantern) than he did the way Mark Gruenwald wrote him in Captain America. So I assume Byrne just ignored the continuity questions, because Byrne is apparently kind of an asshole and a prima donna IRL.


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Zeus posted...

Isn't that the outfit for US Agent?

Basically, yes.

In the mid-1980s, there was a storyline where Cap shot and killed a terrorist on a plane (using the terrorist's own gun), because there was a situation where it was the only way to save hostages. But it became a media hot button issue and opened the door to moral questions and all sorts of things in-universe, ultimately ending with "The Commission" (a government oversight group that basically had authority over the Captain America identity at the time) giving him an ultimatum - come work for the government exclusively and follow their specific orders, or give up the Captain America identity completely.

So Steve basically says "Nah, fuck you" and leaves.

At which point The Commission give the costume and the shield to John Walker - a hero who already existed and called himself "Super-Patriot" - who had already feuded with Steve in the past over who the more patriotic hero was. The Commission saw him as an improvement because he was willing to do what they told him, but pretty much everyone else who knew it was a new Cap kind of shat on him for not being as awesome and selfless and so on as the "real thing".

(And this wasn't even a new angle, storywise - there'd already been like 3-4 other Captain Americas other than Steve at various times, and Steve himself had given up the identity to become "Nomad" when he grew disillusioned with the government in the 70s, but it was actually relatively well done, in my opinion.)

As time goes on, Walker sort of starts to crack a bit under the pressure, getting more and more aggressive and unreliable (which gets way worse after former friends leak his secret identity and former enemies use that info to kill his parents).

But meanwhile, Steve is like, "I may not be Captain America anymore but I still believe in protecting people," so he comes up with an off-brand black costume that still looks a lot like his old costume and calls himself "The Captain". And the Commission is like "You're not fooling anyone dude," and he's like "Yeah, but you can't actually stop me, so fuck you."

When he first starts out he gets Tony Stark to make him a new shield (a solid silver-metal looking thing, made out of adamantium), but it's eventually revealed that Tony is in the middle of his own little personal crisis (the "Armor Wars"), where he's going to start hunting down anyone wearing armor and destroy it out of paranoia over who may have stolen his technology and the ethical considerations of whether or not he's responsible for the suffering of innocents who are hurt by criminals wearing technology derived from his designs. There's an implication that Tony only made the shield (and gave it to Steve as a free gift) as a sort of advance bribe to keep Steve from getting involved and trying to stop him, which doesn't work because Steve is like 110% ethics incarnate and refuses to accept the bribe, sending the shield back to Tony once he realizes the intent.

Then Steve gets his second shield (which is mostly vibranium, and has the concentric black/red/white circles) from T'Challa, and keeps it for the rest of his time as "The Captain".

(cont)


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usui88 posted...

How old were you when you started hearing this noise?

I never really heard it. I told my mom like 25 years ago that if she ever wanted grandkids, she was going to have to settle for the ones my brother had, because I was never having kids. Then when my brother actually had kids, I'd usually remind her of that. I'm basically the only one who ever brought it up, and she usually just sort of mumbled quietly to herself because she was fully aware even then that the surest way to guarantee that I will never, ever do anything is to try and pressure me into doing it.

I'm 40 now and still childless, so she's probably pretty-well resigned to the idea at this point. And she's got two grandkids so she doesn't need more anyway.

I have no idea what my father ever thought about the idea, but he's also dead now so he doesn't get to have opinions about it any more.


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mooreandrew58 posted...

while true, no one is ever concerned they may be in an abusive relationship though, I feel the point it.

More like, most people acknowledge that it IS an abusive relationship, only one where the abuse is entirely verbal/psychological, and then we shrug and say "Ehh, fuck that guy, he deserves it for not standing up for himself."


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SunWuKung420 posted...

Are you referring to end of the world scenarios?

No, those are expected emergencies. If one happens, I probably caused it.


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Blightzkrieg posted...

but I just want to know if America will have learned anything by then.

Well, if nothing else, if Hillary runs again it will at least prove that the Democrats haven't learned anything.

Pretty much every election they've lost over the last 20 years were ones they SHOULD have won, but where they fielded pretty much the worst possible candidate they had and handed the election over to the Republicans.


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1/2 tank. If it gets too low you can theoretically dredge up impurities from the bottom of your tank and clog your fuel injectors over time (or at least, that used to be a problem that could happen). So I generally keep my fuel topped up both to avoid that, and so that I always have fuel in case an unexpected emergency pops up.


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Came in to say Binary.


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keyblader1985 posted...

Every time I have a conversation with you, I walk away depressed.

Reality has a way of doing that to people.

Fantasy, escapism, illusions, delusions, and idealism make for far more pleasant company.


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Snuggletoof posted...

That's great, but Steed is where it's at... carry weight above all else.

Same here. Every character I've ever played, as soon as possible, gets The Steed. I've speed run blindly across the map before even going to Whiterun solely to get it as early as possible. I'm way too much of a "pick everything up, keep everything" packrat - without the extra capacity, I'll probably spend 90% of my time slow-walking (or Whirlwind Sprint shouting) my way through Skyrim.

The only time I ever even consider a different sign for any character is if/when I get the item that lets you have two active signs at once. Then, AND ONLY THEN, do I even bother thinking about anything else.

But honestly, the game is pathetically easy. For the most part you could go completely signless from beginning to end and barely notice a worthwhile difference, unless you're forcing ridiculous challenges on yourself and trying to beat way overpowered enemies while underleveled and fully munchkin min-max optimized, but I'd rather shoot myself than play that way.

I generally play ESO the same way, though. Almost ALL of my early-level income was spent on maxing out backpack space on each individual character and shared vault space ASAP.


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Red04 posted...

I think the film was based on a comic if Im not mistaken?

The film was based on this:




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Of those, and ONLY those, I'd probably go with "The last of the V8 Interceptors".

But most of that list wouldn't be in my all-time top 5 of fancy cars from movies, TV shows, games, books, and etc.

(I might not even include that particular car for Bond, because I always had a bit more fondness for the Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me.)



Also, I'm posting this now, because I can:




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They'll recover, and in the long run this won't effect them much at all.

They've absorbed similar hits in the past, and it never lasts long. Especially once the spin doctoring kicks in (and it already has).


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Metal_Mario99 posted...

Thank you, Lex Luthor.

Hey, once they stopped writing him as a generic "evil scientist" or "evil capitalist", Luthor is right more often than not in the comics (there's a reason why they eventually had him join the Justice League).

Modern Luthor's entire premise is basically that his ideology isn't necessarily wrong, but it's marred by his own selfishness and ego, and ultimately undone by his willingness to resort to non-ethical means to accomplish his goals. What he says is RIGHT - what's wrong is WHY he says it, and how he acts on it.

And realistically, the only reason Luthor comes across as being wrong at all most of the time is because we the audience implicitly know that Superman is an incredibly unrealistic ultra-noble hero god that is clearly better than humans, and thus, is not subject to the same flaws or darker nature as humans. Luthor's fears about what Superman is capable of are groundless, because Superman is basically Space Jesus (or Space Moses, if you prefer the original metaphor). But put almost any other alien in that same position (especially one that ACTS LIKE A HUMAN), and Luthor's fears become more realistic.

If anything, that's part of why so many people hated Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. Because the Superman in those movies basically validates Luthor's usual arguments. Why WOULD you ever trust that Superman?


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keyblader1985 posted...

You're not factoring basic morals into that.

You're assigning them more relative value than they actually have.

Most "morals" are just ingrained socialized behavior. It's the virtues and responsibilities we teach kids to prevent them from being feral animals, and most morality evolved over time as a sort of reciprocal altruism mechanic to allow larger groups of people to live in close proximity without killing each other. It's not our innate nature, as much as it is the necessary framework we've built up over thousands of years to prosper in SPITE of our innate nature.

And again, we believe in morality because we spend most of our early lives having it pounded into our heads, and then most of the rest of our lives having it reinforced by society as a whole. But the more capable you become of ignoring that reinforcement and escaping that initial conditioning, the more the real human being comes out.

And that human being is almost always an asshole.

As a species, most of our successes stem from the fact that we learned to lie to each other, and to believe in things that aren't concrete or even true in order to deny our basic nature. A gorilla never thinks about not being a gorilla or trying to define why a gorilla HAS to be separate and qualitatively different from all other animals, but humans do it as a matter of course, because we're ultimately ashamed of what we really are.


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Pikazard1 posted...

i'm 40, I don't ask for nor do I need anything (yeah, I have a job, and I have subscriptions to comixology, Netflix, and the wwe network), and yet I still get things for birthdays and Christmas's

kinda wish It'd stop though, that money spent on me could've made a difference for the giver

That's more or less why I told everyone I know to stop buying me things years ago (and vice versa).

I stopped caring about Christmas when I was still a teenager, and I'm 40 now. I'd much rather the people I know save their money rather than dealing with the hassle of trying to buy me something I probably won't like anyway, but will then have to pretend to like out of politeness. My gift to you is the time, money, and effort you save not buying me a gift, while your gift to me is not having to fake appreciation and having to reciprocate because "it's expected" (or to have to delay my own gratification because you bought me something for Christmas months ago and then told me you don't want me to buy it for myself until then, which is a phase I went through with my GF years ago, and one I know other people have had to deal with with their spouses now and then).

For people who say "But I just want to show my affection" or some other reason why they consider gift-giving "necessary", if you want to give me a gift, just try not to be a shit for the other 364 days in a given year.

Honestly, if I see something I think a friend would want/need and want to give it as a gift, I'd rather not wait until an arbitrary day to do it. I just pick stuff up for them or do them favors whenever, and they do the same for me. That way, it actually feels like an act of friendship and appreciation, and not a stupid social obligation rooted in a religion I stopped believing in before I went through puberty.

I'd probably feel differently if I had kids, but I don't, so I don't.


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keyblader1985 posted...

How hard is it to just not be an asshole.

Pretty damned hard, because "being an asshole" is more or less hardwired directly into our DNA. It's probably the one trait that actually defines our species more than anything else.



Mead posted...

Power corrupts.

Not really. Power frees.

Normal people spend their entire lives shackled. Shackled by expectations, societal guilt, laws, religion, tradition, thousands of years of culture distilled down into decades of socialization. But the more money or power (which are somewhat interchangeable) you have, the more capable you become of ignoring or bypassing most of those social controls, until the "real" you eventually comes spilling out like 10lbs of shit in a 5lb bag.

The average human is basically a monkey in a suit. Power just strips away the suit.


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Blightzkrieg posted...

Yo PO is that an approximation of a Nomad costume or is supposed to be something else.

In Wave's video?

Probably depends on what version of Nomad you're talking about.

Though if you mean Cap, it just looks like a super-dirty version of his normal costume (you can kind of see faint stripes on it in the last shot if you look close). If anything, I'd be more reminded of the time when he was "The Captain" for a while.

http://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/6/6a/Steven_Rogers_%28Earth-616%29_from_Captain_America_Vol_1_345_0001.jpg

Especially since the shield he used then was actually made for him by T'Challa, so you could sort of see the whole thing as a reference/easter egg.


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When one of my guy friends said that, the rest of us called him a pussy for weeks, and his brother told him he should ask his gf for his balls back for Christmas.


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No one should ever play Spore.


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helIy posted...

cap would also be canonical, too, so there's that

If you want to be canonical, the entire cast would die along with 50% of all life in the rest of the universe, only for Nebula to steal the Gauntlet and undo literally everything up to that point, and then Adam Warlock shows up and takes it from her.

Then Thanos sort of pouts and broods for a while, fakes his own death, and becomes a sort of anti-heroic semi-villain for a decade or so.


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Rockies posted...

porn is one of the least important things at stake.

To be fair, when you realize that almost every study done on Internet usage over the last few decades implies that porn is one of the main things (if not the #1 thing) most people use the Internet for (ie, when France first established the Minitel system, it was reported at one point that something like 80% of usage was porn related), it's actually a much stronger argument than a lot of the alternatives. Especially the more abstract ones that the average person either doesn't understand or doesn't care about at all. Porn might be the most important thing of all.

(And that's without getting into a discussion about how sex and porn have theoretically driven most major technological media advances in the last 50+ years or so.)

Even for stuff like "Well, it will hurt streaming video" or "It will harm online multiplayer video games", you'll get a LOT of "Ehh, I'll just go back to cable" or "I hate online multiplayer anyway, so you've just given me a reason to root FOR this" sort of replies.

But with porn, most people won't even want to admit that they look at it (in spite of the fact that most have and/or do), and very few people want to go back to a world where you risk embarrassment having to buy magazines or DVDs at a porn store, or worse, go to a theater to see it, so the availability, free-to-view, anonymity, and convenience of the Internet makes it the one form of media that really sells the idea of free unregulated Internet being a necessity.


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armandro posted...

this is a dying site

Fixed that for you.


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I'd own my own mysterious lost island, where I would hunt PotDers for sport.


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I_Abibde posted...

Got the whole series on DVD! ... I should not be as proud of that as I am.

I do as well.

Obviously, the only member of the group I identify with at all is Eric. It's a shame that the artificially enforced moral standards of the 1980s meant that he was never allowed to be right about anything.


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Entity13 posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The average human can walk 2 miles in about 15-20 minutes.

uhh... I'm fairly certain the average human is less than half as fast as that.

I started to write a pithy, borderline abusive retort to that, but you're actually right.

Normal human walking pace (for the average healthy adult, not the overall average including crawling infants or infirm elderly) is scientifically clocked at 3-4 miles per hour. That translates into a 15 minute mile (for people walking 4 miles per hour) or a 20 minute mile (for people walking 3 miles per hour).

I'm not actually sure why I wrote "2 miles" there. I meant 1 mile. I actually had to do a double-take back to my own post to make sure you didn't change what I'd typed in my quote, because I was like "I wouldn't have written 2 miles there. That makes no sense."

I was actually pretty sure of that info as well. Because track was my sport back in high school, and even recently I'd looked it up again because I was planning a 26-mile hike and I was wondering what sort of time it would take at a general walking pace.

I blame the mods. Clearly one of them secretly edited my post to sabotage me.



Raganork posted...

I think in high school my gym teacher timed one of the students that walked the entirety of our mile run. Took her 13 and a half minutes just walking at a casual pace.

Sounds about right. When I was in high school, the Presidential Fitness test required a mile run/jog around 7:30 for full points (it was a "run" for most people, it was a "jog" for most of the track team, especially the distance runners). In actual track practice, we were occasionally expected to run 6-minute miles as part of training (and I was a sprinter, not a distance runner, so it was solely for conditioning). And the fastest distance runner in the school at the time (who also held the overall school record time in the mile and who was the 5th fastest runner in the state at the time) would generally clock in around 4:10 or so.

13 1/2 minutes is actually slightly faster than a 4 mph pace, which would make it an above-average time.


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Mead posted...

Mulled wine is often served hot

Was going to mention that.

Was also going to throw cold cranberry sauce and hot apple cider into the mix. And desert pretty much flips the mix, since most good desert is cold and is often served with coffee.


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pipebomb_phil posted...

I don't consider it gambling

You are wrong, and that undercuts nearly every other aspect of the rest of your argument.



pipebomb_phil posted...

Lootboxes are no different than trading cards, mystery toy boxes, crane machines, etc. I guess all of that should be banned as well?

Even putting aside the fact that some people would indeed say that many of those things also exploit human addiction behaviors in malicious fashion and need to be regulated to at least some degree (which is why most of them ARE, to some extent or another), there's also the added wrinkle that most of those things provide you with physical items which can be traded or resold.

I bought Magic cards 20 years ago that I still own today. If I decided tomorrow that I no longer wanted them, I could sell them off (and if I owned Moxes or a Black Lotus, I could sell them for a great deal of money). Conversely, I could give them to my nephew to use, and he could keep or resell them at his leisure. If I drop dead tomorrow, my cards will still be there for my heirs to benefit from.

If I decide tomorrow that I don't want the Mechromancer skin I bought in Borderlands 2 anymore, or that I want to pass it on to my nephew because he's a huge Gaige fan, hey, tough shit. It's account bound and mine forever (or, at least, mine as long as I own that account. If I buy a new console and can't remember my old account password, I'm straight up fucked).

It's worse when you consider most microtransactions and DLC aren't just tied to accounts, but are also tied to online mechanisms that absolutely require online connectivity to maintain. I own millions of dollars worth of cars in GTA Online, but the moment Rockstar decides to shut their servers down those cars effectively cease to exist and I own jack shit.

Once you introduce lootbox mechanics, this problem is magnified. Now you aren't just paying real money for fictional non-items, you're paying real money for the chance to potentially win fictional non-items if you're lucky. Which you won't be, because most lootbox distribution mechanics are designed to ensure the things you want most will be almost impossible to acquire without spending extremely large amounts of money. With most games built entirely around making the lootbox mechanic as addictive and enticing as possible, and with the entire rest of the game hamstrung to effectively funnel you towards spending money to bypass artificial roadblocks.



pipebomb_phil posted...

People are saying games with lootboxes should be rated as Adults Only, but guess what? No retail stores carry AO games and console manufacturers don't license AO games

Maybe you should consider why that is, then consider why people are suggesting it, then put those two concepts together in your head until you come to an astonishing revelation.


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Lokarin posted...

I have time; run you into the dirt even if it costs far far more out of principal.

Then after you win the case, sexually harass the FUCK out of them.


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DirtBasedSoap posted...

this is a troll topic

This is PotD. Pretty much every topic is a troll topic.


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I know a few people. The story ends with bits of you mysteriously floating in the Atlantic Ocean.


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St_Kevin posted...

The world was a lot less PC 10 years ago

It's cyclic. PC was a pretty big thing in the 90s.

In fact, a large part of why "PC" became such a dirty word that current day social progressives refuse to use it for themselves was because of how poorly received the movement was in the 90s.

But yeah, Internet social culture in general revived the idea with a vengeance over the last decade or so. That's what happens when you put a bunch of children in a sandbox without any adults to watch over them or spank them when they're naughty.


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Zeus posted...

Not for nothing, but two miles isn't even that far to bike or walk. And it might be like a five-minute drive. That *is* within spitting distance. Hell, I have to drive almost ten minutes to reach anything in my area.

The average human can walk 2 miles in about 15-20 minutes.

That being said, I can absolutely understand why something might be so utterly apathetic about something that even a 5 minute walk feels "too long". There were places I wouldn't walk to when I was a car-less teenager in spite of being willing to walk about 5 miles every weekend to buy comic books. Something can be a 5 minute walk away and still not be worth the 5 minutes.

And honestly, how "far" away something is depends a lot on location. For some people, they basically have to drive a half-hour or more just to buy groceries, and "luxuries" like going to a hobby shop or the movies might be an hour or more away. Conversely, for me I can get to multiple grocery stores in about 5 minutes and nearly every store or service I can comprehend ever needing to use is within about 30 minutes tops (and I can get from one side of my state to the other in about an hour, or from top to bottom in about ). To me, a half-hour drive seems relatively long, but to other people, driving two hours to see a movie might seem normal (while to me it would seem insane).


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PK_Spam posted...

He's the type who always wants the last word, but what's the point of arguing with someone I don't really care for.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

tell him to fuck off

It's kind of hard to "win" an argument when the other person has already said "Dude, just fuck off" and is already walking away from you. You're basically left shouting lame comebacks at them as they go, and that just makes you look/feel like the needy loser of the equation.



PK_Spam posted...

And this is the type of guy who'll just speak over me.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

tell him to fuck off

It's kind of hard to talk over a middle finger. Flip him one while you're tossing out a succinct "Dude, fuck off", then walk away while ignoring everything he says afterward (or for bonus points, walk away while continuing to flip the bird over your shoulder back at him) and you pretty much win.

Unless it pisses him off so much that he runs over and jumps you, but then, hey, assault charges! Whee!



PK_Spam posted...

Nah, that's not it. If anything, I just don't care for conflict. What's the point? Why should I have to prove myself to him anyway?

Because apparently bending over, grabbing your ankles, and letting him shove his dick in your ass whenever you interact - and then going online to complain about it to strangers - isn't really all that conducive to emotional stability for you.

Wanting to avoid conflict is fine, but getting shit on until it actively starts bothering you isn't much better.

Being a doormat is never going to help you, because it'll just encourage him to shit on you even more, because he knows that no matter what he does you're just going to lay back and take it.

So again, best advice - don't be a doormat. You don't have to stand up, get in his face, and threaten to throw down, but actively avoiding and ignoring him (and for God's sake, not relying on him for things) is a strong step in the right direction.


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Every D&D topic here should open with this:




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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

At no point in my life have I ever gone on Twitter. And even if you forced me to, I'd probably have no idea how to tell what stupid hashtag or subject is trending at any given time anyway.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

PK_Spam posted...

I hope they break up

Or you could stop being a doormat and tell him to fuck off the next time he gives you shit.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

IceDragon77 posted...

You wanna know what classes I would have loved to have, now that I'm an adult?

- How to mortgage
- How to budget
- Basic car maintenance
- How to invest
- How to do taxes
- Basic home repairs
- All those numbers and words that come up in car commercials that mean literally nothing to me.
- How to maintain a balanced diet
Etc.

These are lessons I could use basically every single day

For what it's worth, my high school tried to have classes that touched on these sort of issues, but almost no one gave a shit, most of the class half-assed their way through it, and I guarantee not a single person there learned anything that they retained and used later in life. Like it or not, those are mostly lessons you have to learn by DOING, when you're at a point in your life when it actually MATTERS. Not when you're in high school and still convinced that you're immortal, invincible, and destined to grow up to be a celebrity rock star astronaut professor.

The average teenager doesn't give a shit about balancing their check book, investing in stocks, or carrying around a sack of flour/egg/crying doll to simulate parenthood. They're also (generally) not going to benefit from home economics classes, or sewing classes, or any of the other "lifestyle" classes some schools offer (like mine did). Ultimately, they're just going to be treated like a burden the student has to get through, not as something worth learning (like mine were).

As much as you can look back as an adult and say "Man, I wish someone would have taught me these things when I was younger," you almost certainly weren't ready to learn those things when you were younger, and wouldn't have gotten shit out of it anyway.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

green dragon posted...

DLC overall is great for gaming. Yeah, there is the terrible dlc, like you mentioned, but there is also amazing dlc that developers make after the game is released (or at least made at the end of the base game's development ).

The flip side of that coin is that DLC also opens the doors to predatory development, wherein a developer (often encouraged or ordered to by their publisher) doesn't create new content after a game is released to enhance the experience, as much as gouge out content that should have been in the core game in the first place and then sell it back to you bordering on extortion.

For every CD Projekt/Witcher 3 scenario where the DLC is great (and a lot of DLC is actually released free to players as a thank you for buying the game), there are far too many cases of DLC that feels like it exists solely to exploit players or otherwise milk consumers for everything they're worth.

Plus, DLC in general is what opened the door to loot boxes and microtransactions, which are slowly becoming more and more manipulative and borderline criminal in the AAA space.

And yes, lots of people love to say that "If you dislike what AAA publishers are doing just play indie games, but that's ignoring the fact that a) the vast majority of indie games are hot garbage, b) a lot of indie titles are PC-exclusive and console gamers don't really have that option, and c) the vast majority of really enjoyable games from the past few decades have been AAA titles - and with that development space removed from the equation, a proportionate degree of worthwhile titles go with it.

Sure, there's going to be the occasional indie game that excels and can provide hours of fun, but the landscape is going to be a lot bleaker for more casual gamers who don't have the time or the option to go trawling for those occasional pearls in an ocean of shit.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Oh - another good example of the "the past shapes our expectations of the future" as a reason why we tend to be harsher judges of newer games is Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's not actually a BAD game, and most people probably would have enjoyed it if it was a standalone game, but because it was attached to the Deus Ex franchise, and because the first Deus Ex game set such massively high standards for what the franchise COULD be, Invisible War basically wound up getting judged by higher standards than it could ever hope to live up to, and most people bashed it as a terrible game (which it really wasn't).

In a similar echo of that, Human Revolution managed to reap positive reaction when it came out years later, seemingly redeeming the series from the failure of Invisible War, but then Mankind Divided failed to build on that hype, and further engaged in some of the shadier AAA practices, which ultimately tanked it extremely hard. Being judged by the standards of its own time, it was a failure. But project it back in time a decade or two (and strip the microtransactions out of it), and it probably would have been much better received.

And on that note...



darcandkharg31 posted...

This is old person talk, " _____ was better back then"

As much as that is indeed "old person talk", the corollary of that might be that "young people" lack any of the necessary context to judge any older game by the standards of its time. Kids who grew up playing Call of Duty or Skyrim lack the capacity to appreciate just how innovative games like Wolfenstein 3D or Dragon Warrior were in their own time, and thus won't understand why anyone has nostalgic feelings for them, or view them as anything other than crap.

That isn't really a virtue, though. When I was younger most people I knew would dismiss a movie out of hand if it was in black and white, because we considered it "old garbage". In the same vein, young people today aren't likely to appreciate movies from the 1970s with their slower pacing and lack of flashy special effects. But as those same people grow older - and if they're willing to keep an open mind - they'll likely develop at least some appreciation for older artistic works, even if only in a second hand sense (ie, "I don't enjoy this myself, but I at least understand why other people might, and that it's a significant influence on the development of the art form as it currently exists").


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ssj4supervegeta posted...

gaming is largly better then it has ever been. whenever people talk about the past htey bring up the same games. they never wanna talk about all the garbage that was on old consoles.

Gaming is mostly like life. Some things are better now, some things are definitely worse now, the future absolutely looks bleak as fuck (and likely won't be as bad as it looks like it's going to be), and people are always going to remember earlier experiences more fondly because they felt them far more keenly the first time than they do when it's become more commonplace.

As an example, I can easily say that GTAV is probably the best game in the franchise so far, but in spite of the fact that I DID enjoy it, I probably didn't enjoy it as much as I did GTAIII at the time. In the same vein, as meh as I thought Dragon Age: Inquisition was (and it absofuckinglutely was), I can still acknowledge it's probably better in nearly every way than KotOR was - in spite of the fact that I enjoyed KotOR far, far more at the time (and even now, honestly). As games get better and our expectations rise accordingly, games which would have been phenomenal in the past are only mediocre now.

That being said, it's entirely possible that, on average, gaming now IS worse than ever before (at least in a signal-to-noise sense). Because there's a LOT of fucking shovelware out there on Steam and in the indie arcade sections of consoles, and AAA gaming is pulling some heinous shit. So for every stellar game that comes out and is absolutely awesome and groundbreaking, you have to wade through an ocean of feces to find them.

Fortunately, the Internet, YouTube, and social media being what they are, it's also easier than ever before to learn from other people's mistakes and hear which games are good and which are terrible long before you ever consider buying them, so sifting through that shit is easier than ever before as well.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

They have an idyllic agrarian lifestyle, although it's a wonder that they manage to exist undisturbed given that Middle-Earth has things like bandits and Hobbits aren't exactly able fighters, etc.

It's kind of mentioned in the books that a large part of that is the fact that the Shire doesn't really have to deal with things like bandits or orcs because the Rangers sort of patrol their borders and keep the nasty things out. They're sort of isolated from the darker side of the world.

Granted, hobbits who leave the Shire (even to travel as far as Bree) would be more forced to deal with those sorts of things, but it's also kind of established that hobbits leaving the Shire is an incredibly rare thing. There's a reason why everybody thinks Bilbo is a weirdo for going on his adventure.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Sahuagin posted...

"worth caring about" implies that you'll just refuse to care, so ignoring that, yes there is definitely a huge difference.

Not really. "worth caring about" means that I can see the difference, but that it doesn't seem extreme or functional enough for me to make an issue over it, or have it in any way impact my enjoyment of a given game which is well-designed/well-written and which is graphically acceptable (whether that means high-fidelity graphics or just well-done sprite animation - I'm not a bleeding edge graphics whore). As long as the FPS isn't so jaggy or lagging that it becomes a gameplay problem, it's a meaningless issue for me.

Whether or not a given new game is 30 FPS or 60 FPS means absolutely nothing to me in regards to whether or not I want to play that game. Nor would taking a game I already enjoy at 30 FPS and upgrading it to 60 FPS improve my opinion of it in any way.

In a similar yet more extreme vein, I'm one of the many, many people who prefer 24 FPS in movies over 48 FPS, no matter how hard Peter Jackson tried to push it as the future of movies. But I also tend to see diminishing returns when it comes to resolution as a whole - I can acknowledge the differences between standard def, HD, and 4k on a TV, but ultimately, I've never seen those differences as being meaningful enough for me to care. I'll just as happily watch something on a standard def CRT TV as I will a massive HD TV or expensive monitor.

And because it doesn't matter all that much to me as an issue, it means that when I hear other people screaming that 60 FPS is the most important part of any game and that any developer who dares to release a game at anything less is an absolute disgrace, I start to assume those people are batshit crazy and begin to dismiss or ignore their opinions in the future. In the same way that I tend to ignore people who scream about how important it is for games to have photorealistic graphics that strain a console or PC's processing power. I can play a fucking text-based adventure game and enjoy it if the writing and design are good (which is why I played Kingdom of Loathing for years, and paid more in "microtransactions" to them than I'll ever give EA or Ubisoft).

In other words, what I'm basically saying is that way too many people make framerate as it currently exists out to be a far more significant issue than it actually is.



Rockies posted...

PO thinks just about everything isn't "worth caring about"

I care about lots of things. I'm sorry that most of the things that YOU care about probably aren't on that list.

Maybe you should start caring about better things.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The Wave Master posted...

Justice League is tracking for less than stellar numbers this weekend.

It's because most ticket sales are a reaction to the last movie in the series, not the current one. At least at first (this CAN change over time, if word-of-mouth indicates that the current movie is radically different from the previous one, either for good or ill).

Batman vs Superman was a hot bowl of steaming turd soup, so a lot of people are hesitant about wasting money on this one. The fact that most of the reviews are kind of meh means that a lot of those on the fence types are more likely to skip it and just wait for it to hit cable/on demand/etc if they bother to watch it at all.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I don't understand how or why most people do most of the things that people do.

But then I remember how subjectivity works and that I developed the ability to understand that other people don't experience the world the same way I do sometime before puberty, and I just sort of shrug.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

helIy posted...

cats dont smell like anything

Cat owners believe this, yes.

They're blatantly wrong, of course, but they do indeed believe it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Modern audiences always assume or project that pipeweed is supposed to be marijuana, but it seems kind of obvious in context that it was actually supposed to be tobacco (and is actually referred to as such a couple times in the books). The personality of hobbits is generally based on old backwoods English farmer types (more specifically, the "up North" or Yorkshire type stereotypes), who would probably enjoy a pint or three and a nice pipe.

Tolkien was basically presenting the hobbits as his sort of idealized perfect culture, but he almost certainly would have hated hippies, so he never would have seen them that way (and probably would have been annoyed by people who do).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WarGreymon77 posted...

Higher framerate looks so much better.

Not once in my entire life have I ever really been able to see a difference worth caring about.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family