Lurker > VintageGin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_horn

I guess I'll tag this

I think the S23 and S24 are pretty similar from what I've seen

Not quite the same, but I have an S23 Ultra and I'm pretty happy with it

Less than 4,000 have been delivered...I figured it was low, but not that low

Crows should be separated out

Where are the oppossums

This seems like an ad rev/monetization decision. Advertisers tend to be a bit iffy about user-generated content, so this is the heavy-handed approach to appeal to them. It's easier to guarantee your advertisers won't risk their ads appearing next to a psychotic political post if you just don't allow politics at all (or "hornyposting" lol).

GameFAQs likely drives so little revenue compared to the rest of their content that it's more of a liability than anything else to Fandom.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/add6701c.jpg

As someone who might be visiting Albuquerque and Santa Fe in a few weeks, what should I do there

Besides Meow Wolf

Your loss; Valentina's was amazing

I have to say that paying mortgage for a portion of a building as your home definitely complicates things

But the standard deduction still ended up being better so not sure it even mattered in the end

Both the BBQ and Tex-Mex in Austin is very good

Especially Valentina's, which is both

I don't have any issues with Austin food-wise

I've only been to Austin but I was unimpressed

And it sounds like that was the "good" part of Texas

Just tried the infamous $22 birria burrito

It was very good, though so rich that I probably should have saved half for later. I'm not normally the sort of person who shares burritos but I actually think it would be warranted in this case.

foolm0r0n posted...

Those aren't the best examples. Wagyu sandwiches do typically get into the $30-40 range, same with lobster rolls. You should suspect ones that don't since they are probably fake and bad. Banh mi is supposed to be $4 for the same reason, since the $10-15 ones typically taste worse with a bunch of extra crap.

Complaining about a birria burrito for $22 is different though. Birria is a super premium food that should be expensive, but burritos and Mexican food in general are seen as cheap crap food in the US. So that one is more about racism than actual value judgment.

To be clear, I wasn't directly comparing the banh mi and a wagyu sandwich, but rather just sandwiches in general. I will say there's a lot of stuff that's advertised as "wagyu" without any real connection to Japanese wagyu.

Disagree with the idea that more expensive banh mis are necessarily worse, and this is kinda my point-- other sandwiches are allowed to experiment with more expensive ingredients (or alternatively claim cost of labor, but that's another thing), but if you do something similar with a banh mi then people object.

XIII_Rocks posted...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/21/harrods-28-sandwich-we-find-out-if-the-taste-matches-the-price-tag

Reminds me of this article I remember reading last year

Oh hey, that is pretty much exactly my hypothetical haha. Though apparently more expensive since that'd work out to a but over $35.

Something I find interesting is how people view different types of food and how much they "should" cost.

I keep seeing a bunch of posts about a $22 birria burrito in SF. When I see how many people are outraged about it, I wonder if they would be similarly outraged by a $22 sandwich that advertised itself as a wagyu brisket sandwich with an artisan bun baked in-house. I also wonder how many of those same people would say that a banh mi should be no more than $3.50, while not applying the same standards to other sandwiches.

Wanglicious posted...

this honestly doesn't surprise me. i mean i'm always down to try places and have had my share of 'good but not great' types. biggest issue i've found with any "top bar" is that there's always something they claim to be good at but aren't really. in the case of Dante, i wouldn't bother with the Negroni personally. the signature stuff is consistently great but that category of drinks, even the bartenders are aware isn't their best offering.

Well if you want to try some other cocktail bars in NYC:

Mace
Amor y Amargo
PDT

These are all pretty great cocktail bars that are among some of the best I've been to. Although that's also assuming none of them went downhill since I last was in NYC. I've also heard a lot of good things about Double Chicken Please, and Death & Co is a classic. People also love Attaboy, but I had a pretty underwhelming experience there.

iiaattgg posted...

I dont think theres ever been a time where I regret spending some absurd amount of money on a dish. Its always been worth the price. Of course, this only applies to when money was not a big factor. I would certainly have regrets it I bought a 200 dollar steak and I was late on rent or something

I don't know if regret is the right word, but I've definitely had some high-priced meals that were kinda forgettable overall (aside from like one or two dishes). Others were so good that I still think about them. I feel like it can kinda be hard to tell which of the two you're gonna get, and it's a little disappointing when a meal is closer to the former.

...I know what a Grasshopper is

But yeah 50 Best Bars tends to be very weird in their selections, and it seems like it is highly influenced by money/connections from I've heard (just like everything else, I guess).

I remember their top pick for SF was ABV, a bar that is just "fine". They also had the Camparino in Milan on a recent list, and that bar is pretty mediocre despite the fact that I really enjoy Campari.

I'll give it a try next time I'm in NYC, but I kinda doubt it's top 5 in Manhattan, let alone the country

Although this did get me curious about the prices of some of my favorite NYC cocktail bars since I haven't been there since 2019, and yeah they're all $18+ now

Sorry Wang but I looked at the menu of that place and

COSMOGRONI
grey goose l'citron. noilly dry luxardo. bitter bianco rose & cranberry 19

Yeah that's not worth $19, and I highly question their ability when I see "noilly dry luxardo".

Was it 50 Best Bars that nominated them? Because I've come to highly distrust their choices

Also I feel like most places that I've seen that have charged $20 for cocktails, it's either extremely touristy or extremely good. And it's pretty easy to differentiate.

foolm0r0n posted...

Even the niche reddit subs are ruined by the upvote system. It's such a bad system for actually running a community. It actively destroys conversation and incentivizes hivemind and interruption, even if there's only a handful of posts.

There's this phenomenon that I don't know what to call, where you'll have a "conversation" of 5-6 posts, where each post is from a different person. But each user speaks as if they were the previous poster, so it reads like a 1-on-1 conversation. It's a preview of our future AI-generated social structure, where individuality is completely forgotten. This is why it's ideal for bigotry-driven communities.

I don't know if that's "toxic" in the way most people use the term. But it definitely rots your brain. The positive is that it sorts information pretty well. But also like AI, there's a ton of hallucination which is optimized for sounding good rather than actually being true, so you can't trust anything there.

This is pretty well-stated. Although I wonder if any system can truly work at the scale Reddit operates for its larger communities.

Something I find incredible about Reddit is how you can have an article posted on an article-based subreddit, and all 500 of the comments will be doing some form of free association with the headline.

XIII_Rocks posted...

A standard-sized meal designed for one person

Does this include like...a tasting menu/prix fixe at a restaurant? Because that's more than one thing but it still just meant for one person.

For a drink, maybe $50 max? If it was something I really wanted to experience once, maybe higher.

Can't filibuster that

Kinda hate that "Live Service" is the accepted public term that everyone uses

Feels like it belongs in some internal PowerPoint deck

Come to think of it the only TMNT game I've played is Turtles in Time

Are any of the others good

After playing Pizza Tower and Betrayal at Club Low, both of which have strong pizza themes, I'm left wondering if there are any other pizza games out there I'm missing

Jesus, that's awful

Wow I would have thought you'd played this already

Yes, the dopamine from having sound on just hits different

I think I have a routine on my phone that puts it on vibrate, but I somehow accidentally deactivated it and never bothered to turn it back on

Damn, what an experience. I expected it to be emotional, but I was still unprepared

The thing about Outer Wilds though is that it guides your experience a lot better. "There's more to explore here" meant that I wasn't doubting whether I was wasting time or not on something.

While you can skip the hard mode portion, there's nothing in the game that suggests it's optional.

And the idea that it turns from a puzzle into terrain is sorta true, but it still requires more focus to navigate than OW, with likely more unique inputs and more thought in how to get to where you want. I definitely shot past a floor that I intended to visit, partly because I forgot where it was, and partly because I was using the shortcuts the game provided me without thinking about the fact that I'd miss a key floor.

Yeah, I kinda get that complaint. It's a little incongruous with the rest of the game that the boss battles just require you to get good at the combat rather than having more puzzle-y solutions. I didn't mind it too much, though I definitely could have done without the graveyard battle segment.

But the manual in that game resonates with me so much given I spent so much time as a child just looking at the manual for Zelda 1. It was such a cool way of presenting the game.

And yeah, I picked up Void Stranger precisely because I'd seen comparisons to the other games. Like you said, it seems like it almost gets there, but I feel like the game gets bogged down with how many sokoban puzzles there are and how hard some of them get. I almost feel like the second act should have been something else entirely. The larger, overarching puzzles were far more interesting than the 200th move-the-tile puzzles.

I also think the game doesn't really do a good job of respecting the player's time with regard to the forced repetition.

Honestly though I just really love Outer Wilds/The Witness/Tunic and I feel I've been chasing the same high I got from those games

Paratroopa1 posted...

I still have to go back and finish this game but I'm still feeling dissatisfied with the fact that I accidentally looked up the answer for how to kill Tail but absolutely no amount of exploring the game OR cheating and looking stuff up is telling me how I was supposed to figure out how? so I don't even know if I'm sequence breaking. I've done all three characters' normal endings and I know I need to kill everyone and then go to floor 000 for some reason

This game is extremely cool but also deeply frustrating, I really don't know how to evaluate it

If you get to the brand room and speak to the intact seal, it tells you to hit the statue guarding the first traitorous lord's weakness 23 times. You're supposed to infer that her tail is her weakness since that's the only new thing getting rid of that statue opens up.

I agree with you about the game being cool but frustrating. I feel like the game could have benefitted from much tighter design and less forced repetition.

Realized today that they never even bothered to reveal what the letter from Gray was all about. It got teased at the beginning and end of Lillie's route and so I assumed the true end would touch on it or something.

I did like some of the puzzles there, but I entered with only around 30 locusts, and watching them tick down while not really knowing if I'd be able to get through kinda killed my enjoyment. Feel like they should've just auto-voided you at that point--they definitely could have come up with a reason for it.

And yeah, I went for the left one too. I think Lavos hard conditioned me to do that.

Finally got around to finishing the game, mostly out of curiosity for how it would end.

After wasting time trying to get to Mon in Gray's playthrough, I just looked up what to do. Wound up looking up many of the answers in the DIS section, not because I think I couldn't have solved them, but rather because I wasn't sure if becoming voided would impact things negatively. At that point, I was pretty done with the game wasting my time. It ended up not mattering since Bee takes all your locusts anyway, and I didn't want to attempt a deathless run of that fight.

One thing I don't really get about the DIS fight...why is the weakness the right bit? Was there supposed to be a clue about this somewhere?

Overall, game does some cool shit, but it's so mired in forced repetition (made worse by the fact that the game is happy to force you to start over). And as far as puzzle games go, this feels closer to Fez than Outer Wilds/Tunic.

azuarc posted...

Not true thru-traffic. Nobody would go out of their way to take this road. But anyone moderately local will use this road rather than cutting straight out to the "bigger" roads.

But if the road no longer is as convenient for the local thru-traffic, won't drivers just use those larger roads? People obviously won't use the road if it's non-stop traffic because there wouldn't be any point

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

This will definitely bring me back.

I fucking love this game, but eventually the queues got soooooooooo fucking sweaty I had to take a break.

I can't say for certain, but I feel like there were a bunch of people abusing aim assist (in conjunction with programs that made the game think you were using a controller while you were actually playing with mouse and keyboard). Anecdotal, but after they released an update addressing this, I no longer felt like I was getting gunned down immediately.

Some details from the Steam page:

The Game Show Has Been Hacked!
Season 2 of THE FINALS launches on March 14, and strange things are happening in the arena. The game show has been compromised by the rogue hacking collective CNS, and showrunners are scrambling to decipher their cryptic messages but one thing is clear: the show must go on!

Throughout the jam-packed season of this free-to-play game, contestants can experience new weapons for each class, the hacked new map SYS$HORIZON, the all-new 5v5 game mode Power Shift, a new skill-based League System, rewarded weekly career progression, private matches for now in a feature-limited beta version and the new Hacker Playstyle, which adds several ways for contestants to alter the arena to their favor.

THE FINALS new Hacker Playstyle lets players step into the shoes of CNS, with a set of new gadgets and a new specialization that can be mixed and matched with players existing toolset. Remove walls, defy gravity, tunnel across the arena, and transform items become the glitch in the system, the ultimate cyber tactician, and bring a new dimension to the game.

• The Dematerializer for Mediums: a specialization that temporarily erases physical surfaces, like walls, ceilings, or goo allowing contestants to see, shoot, and pass through them. Create new passageways and close them back up again turn every obstacle into an open door.

• The Anti-Gravity Cube for Heavys: a deployable cube that manipulates gravity in its immediate area, lifting contestants and objects upwards! Is it a traversal tool? Or a defensive gadget? Its up to each contestant!

• The Gateway for Lights: a pair of limited-range deployable portals! When both are thrown and activated, contestants and objects can move between the two locations. Anyone can use a portal, but players cant see or shoot through them! Perfect for a quick getaway, when things get hairy.

• The Data Reshaper for Mediums: a gadget that changes enemy fortifications (or any random objects for that matter) into something else entirely like turning an enemy mine into a chair. Or an enemy turret into a table. Great for breaking through enemy defenses!

All builds are getting new weapons, with the Lights getting the 93R burst-fire machine pistol, Medium getting the new FAMAS burst assault rifle, and Heavys able to wield the new KS-23 slug shotgun.
With access to assets and source files, CNS has introduced its own Arena, SYS$HORIZON. This glitchy, neon-filled cityscape exists in the loading realm of the game show and features a mix of vertical and horizontal gameplay. Voxel bridges create pathways between buildings, and pieces of floating, glitched geometry allow contestants to parkour through the arena. Partially loaded and out-of-place, SYS$HORIZON is a sight to behold, especially at night.

Moreover, THE FINALS Season 2 comes with Power Shift an all-new, casual, 5v5 game mode where two teams compete to escort a platform through the arena. If interrupted by an enemy team, the platform grinds to a halt or will switch direction entirely. Watch out, the platform will tear through anything in its path and can be rocked by physics. Players can switch their contestants between respawns, allowing them to balance their teams on the fly and hone their skills to perfection.
In Season 2, contestants can compete in a revamped League System that improves the ranked play experience, with league rewards that up the stakes. A new Career Circuit system offers weekly rewards from Seasonal Sponsors, allowing contestants to move from Rookie to Master by completing contracts throughout the season.

Yeah, I could see that. I think the destructability of the terrain kept things pretty fresh for me.

I might be the only one here hyped for this

https://youtu.be/hVdKBnmvOLE?si=21XhmxxJ9pP2mYds

Paratroopa1 posted...

The voided ending was definitely my peak experience with this game so far

Yeah, kinda feel the same way

As a side note, I kinda wish they hadn't given Gray such comically large breasts

Well, finished with Cif and now I'm back to the beginning again.

I'm not really sure what to do now. I have some theories but I don't really want to spend time repeating things just to validate my theories. I suspect I need to kill Tail, Mon, and one other in a run with Gray, then return to B000, since there statue there depicts three things. I did get a shortcut hint from having the right number of locusts, but I don't yet know what to do with the glowing grids. Like, I think I know what they mean, but I'm not really sure where to apply them.

Forceful_Dragon posted...

I'm guessing it was people who couldn't believe price. People who wanted a high end experience but couldn't comprehend having to pay above Wal-Mart level prices for it.

Surprisingly no. There would be the occasional comment about price and some people would opt for a cheaper thing once they found out they were about to pay like $10 for a greeting card.

As for the bad customers, two of them were an entitled older couple that received a discount once and expected to receive it all the time (they'd also come in close to closing and the husband believed global warming was a hoax).

The other was a woman who didn't even acknowledge me when I asked if she needed help, then during checkout argued about a discount that she misread, then stormed out while were mid-sentence (and about to just give her the discount). Then we later found out that she called corporate to complain about our store so we had to explain our side to the district manager.

But honestly for the most part I consider myself lucky because I had some really sweet customers who brought me homemade cookies and stuff.

I worked at a greeting card store that sold slightly higher-end greeting cards

I think because of the specific niche that the store catered to, I only ever got two or three bad customers