Lurker > adjl

His hearing didn't start going until he was 30ish, and wasn't completely gone until he was in his mid-40's. He had enough musical experience by then to know what notes sounded like without actually having to play them. I've also seen it claimed in some places that he attached a metal bar to the piano and bit down on it while playing because he could still hear by conduction, but I haven't verified that.

BlackScythe0 posted...

The butt hole is not a reproduction organ.

Never heard of a cloaca party, I take it?

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

If they actually suspect illegal-activity, they can contact the police, instead of sleuthing around themselves.

And they would, at least as far as police are actually involved in the exchanges of documents surrounding civil cases.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

i never hid that that was the point of the topic

That's silly.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

The distribution contract is between the retailer and the distributor.

In which case the distributor is going to want to know which retailer broke their contract, which means contacting the person with the illegally-distributed copy.

Yellow posted...

If anything, the word "female" is useful a trap by society to catch these men and make them easier to spot.

I'd argue that it's less that using the word inappropriately is a useful identifier for socially awkward men and more that using the word inappropriately is itself part of being socially awkward. Calling people "females" in colloquial conversation already comes across as being weirdly clinical/formal for a casual interaction and makes the whole situation feel kind of awkward. You don't really need to treat it as a warning sign that you're dealing with somebody awkward because it is itself awkward.

It's in a similar vein to saying "Greetings, humans" instead of "Hi everyone." It's not wrong, speaking in terms of how those words are defined, but it is weird, and people are going to think you're weird if you say that as anything other than an ironic joke. Calling that a "red flag" might be exaggerating the issue a bit (with "females" in particular, it's associated with incel subculture due to that particular bit of weirdness being fairly common there, and that's not an association people typically like), but people are still likely to find it a bit off-putting.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

because this topic is literally just about what it says at face value

You made a topic just to take something at literal face value that very obviously shouldn't be taken at literal face value?

Revelation34 posted...

How did they not realize that was a joke?

Given that he is no longer affiliated with Nintendo, Reggie's tweet is just a joke.

Yeah...

Trialia posted...

What do you think the boards one can't access without registering - which are numerous - would count as, public or private?

Those would be private, but distributing copyrighted material among a private community also isn't legal. If it were, ROM sites could operate with impunity by just requiring people to create an account before downloading them.

Trialia posted...

And if the mods actually wanted to go the CYA route, why not simply make the TotK board private until the release date?

Because there's plenty of discussion that can be had without risking Nintendo's ire in any capacity, based on officially released information.

Trialia posted...

And it's in no way illegal to play a game prior to its release date, or else official reviewers everywhere, who have been handed copies to review in advance of said release date, would be 100% f---ed.

Being given a review copy constitutes explicit permission to play and comment on said copy, usually with guidelines around what can/can't be said/done with it (like not sharing the copy with others or spoiling major story points). The issue is not simply playing it before the release date, it's acquiring a copy without permission and/or using a legal copy in a way that's not permitted under the distribution contract. There's no legal way to acquire the leaked ROM, so even if playing it isn't illegal, you can't have it in the first place without some manner of copyright infringement or breach of distribution contract.

Now, as it happens, I think Nintendo's being more than a little ridiculous in their efforts to prevent leaks around TotK. Cracking down on piracy is one thing, but this draconian insistence on controlling absolutely all of the information that's allowed to reach the public is largely pointless. Trying to avoid spoilers is one thing, but certain industry members (Nintendo included) seem convinced that letting people see parts of the game that the official marketing plan didn't show them will hurt the game's sales, to the point where they're willing to destroy people's livelihoods to prevent that (demonetizing Youtube/Twitch channels, getting that dude fired from Gamestop for leaking evidence that a TotK Switch might be coming, etc.). That's not reasonable at all, and in fact I'm thinking I'll make a point of not buying TotK from Gamestop in response to them throwing that employee under the bus like that. But as far as GameFAQs is concerned, given the choice between potentially having to deal with Nintendo demanding helly's personal information so they can go after him for getting a copy and sharing information illegally, and just delaying whatever discussion helly was trying to have by 10 days, it's easy to see why the topic was deleted.

bsp77 posted...

Why would the day with the most sunlight be the start of the warmest season?

In practice, the warmest period does tend to fall between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox, simply because of how long it takes the earth's temperature to catch up to the amount of sunlight it's getting.

bsp77 posted...

Actually, the winter solstrice was also called midwinter and hence was the middle. More recently it culturally shifted to the beginning.

Not having studied anthropology enough to be able to confirm this, I would hazard a guess that that's a function of how culturally significant the amount of daylight was, rather than anything to do with weather or temperature. For a very significant part of humanity's history (including the period in which the pagan traditions off of which we base our recognition of the solstice were developed) daylight dictated much of what people were able to do and when they could do it. In that regard, the solstice marked the end of the period in which the amount of daylight was declining and was celebrated as looking forward hopefully to longer days and greater potential for productivity. It's not necessarily the middle of "winter" in the sense of the cold season, but it is the middle of "winter" in the sense of the period in which there isn't much daylight to work with.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

As others have pointed out, it's technically both, since the official start of summer is the 20th/21st. But people usually round that off so that June/July/August is summer, Sep/Oct/Nov is autumn, Dec/Jan/Feb is winter, and March/April/May is spring.

Pretty much this, though in practice Spring weather often extends well into June, Summer weather often extends well into Sept/Oct, and Winter weather usually takes over part of November and often lasts until early April. Those three-month divisions make intuitive sense and are how I tend to think of the seasons falling, but the reality of the matter is that seasonal weather patterns vary quite wildly from place to place and even year to year.

bsp77 posted...

This is actually the correct answer in terms of meteorology. The seasons we typically use are based on astronomy and not weather. Why would summer begin on the longest day of the year? It makes no sense.

Because astronomy is consistent and weather is not. Were seasons based entirely on weather, the start date would vary wildly and you'd really only be able to pin it down a couple weeks after the fact when you confirmed that that was the first day that the 7-day average temperature exceeded whatever arbitrary threshold you decided on. That's not really conducive to throwing a party to celebrate the start of the season/end of the previous one, so people chose something a little more concrete, even if they still had to make some adjustments to their seasonal behaviours based on what the current weather was doing..

wolfy42 posted...

At least I had school lunches, which before 11 was often the only food I got. I heard recently they are trying to get rid of those as well.

But remember: Republicans are pro-life!

Look into a clover lawn. Looks similar, flowers occasionally (and therefore benefits pollinators), never needs mowing unless you want to remove the flowers, outcompetes most weeds, uses less water, needs no fertilizer, and is still durable enough to stand up to most everyday use.

In a context where a normal person would instead say "girl," "woman," "lady," or any other more colloquial term? I'd say so, unless it's being used ironically.

HornedLion posted...

You thought conservative Utah residents were cranky before when they could secretly watch their trans hotties how much more crankier will they be now without it?

This is the future liberals want.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

"You are not allowed to discuss a game before it has officially come out."

this is what you are defending.

Revelation34 posted...

The moderator note says otherwise which your original post had no reason to even defend it which you were doing.

No, I'm defending the moderation and trying to teach you how to read beyond literal text to help you understand instances where the literal text doesn't align with obvious empirical reality. That latter element is... not going very well.

Zareth posted...

Do people even still use Pornhub after the content wipe?

As much as people freaked out about losing some of their old favourites, it's not like there's a dearth of content that does comply with the new restrictions. Unless you're actually searching for non-consensual or copyrighted stuff, you're not at any particular risk of coming up empty-handed.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

it would if it wasn't a privately owned forum

It's publicly accessible with zero access control whatsoever for viewing. Any content that is displayed here is visible to literally the entire Internet (except in regions where the site is banned, which I'm sure exist).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

uh huh, which leads back into post #34

Which I've already addressed. The potential harms of leaving the topic up outweighed the potential harm of taking it down, so it was taken down as part of a broader strategy of discouraging discussion of the leaked ROM. It's quite simple and a very understandable bit of risk analysis.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

did you even look at what the moderator gave me for the reason

I did. I just also understand how to incorporate a sentence's context to understand what the person actually means in cases where they've obviously worded their point poorly. Obviously discussion of unreleased games is allowed. Entire boards exist for that purpose. Discussion of one's experience playing a leaked ROM of an unreleased game, however, is not. It's very obvious from the context that that's what the mod meant, even if he did a poor job of explicitly saying that (though it's not even that poor, since mentally inserting the words "like this" after "game" fixes it completely).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

you interpreted it as something different that what it actually says.

Welcome to the concept of subtext and interpreting the broader picture to identify and correct people's mistakes for them. I'm still waiting for somebody to identify and correct the mistake that they believe I made that subtextually implied that I do believe it's illegal to discuss unreleased games (despite explicitly stating precisely the opposite of that several times).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

if you must agree to a terms of service before being able to use said website puts it, in the eyes of the law, not public

You only have to agree to a ToS before posting here. If you're just viewing, there are no such restrictions.

Of course, even then, being a private community doesn't give anyone carte blanche to distribute copyrighted material to members. If it did, any ROM site could indefinitely escape being taken down by just having people create accounts before downloading anything. Distribution rights are still retained by the copyright holder and anyone to whom they have issued a license.

Sounds like they're basically saying "we don't want to have to handle people's IDs because that gives us a whole bunch of privacy concerns that we aren't equipped to deal with," which is pretty fair. These laws also generally aren't great ideas because, as PH's rep is saying, rather than stopping minors from accessing porn, they tend to result in minors (or anyone else that doesn't want to verify their ID) digging deeper to find the sites that manage to escape regulation, which tend to be worse in terms of policing non-consensual and other harmful content (increasing the potential harm of minors accessing it).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

not only is this not a public forum,

This would definitely qualify as a public forum for the purpose of displaying copyrighted content.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

Nintendo has already done that, and the single image i posted was one they showed in a trailer

when asked if there was dungeons, i only ever said that i couldn't answer that

of you paid any attention, i very specifically said or showed nothing Nintendo didn't show themselves

Then that gets back to modding the topic as a CYA measure. Sifting through the topic and comparing it against everything officially released is more work than is worthwhile when the absolute worst possible outcome of modding the topic is that you have to wait a week and a half to have the discussion you want.

Revelation34 posted...

All of it since you clearly missed the point of his post.

My entire post very obviously did not say that it's illegal to discuss unreleased games. If that's how you interpreted it, then you need to try again, preferably actually reading what I say instead of deciding what I must be saying if I seem to disagree with the rigidly-defined position you've decided to adopt.

LinkPizza posted...

But could you even get in trouble in that case what would they get you for? I still havent seen the law where you cant own the game ahead of time. And if youre just talking about it and not displaying it, that should be fine, too, right?

Depends what damages they can conceivably pin on you for discussing it ahead of street date. That's mostly why I say you'll never actually face any consequences for it: If all you're doing is talking about it with a couple buddies, the absolute worst case scenario for Nintendo is that something you say convinces both of them not to buy it, meaning they're out $140. They'd pay ten times that just to call a lawyer and ask them to draft the suit, let alone actual court costs, which is obviously hideously impractical. They're only going to consider going after more public cases where there's the potential for greater damages.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

number 5 especially

that just means that they can play something they own publicly if they were to so choose

It means they have the *exclusive* right. The word's right there. Nobody else has that right, unless it's granted to them by the owner.

LinkPizza posted...

What about playing it privately, but telling others youre playing it?

Depends what you tell them. If you recount any part of the story (beyond what's been shown in trailers and other previews), that could be construed as publicly displaying the game's narrative and fall under copyright infringement. Just talking about the gameplay, maybe not.

In practice, of course, unless you're posting it in a public space or the person you're telling it to is secretly one of Nintendo's lawyers, it's astronomically unlikely that you'll face any consequences for going that. By and large, though, Nintendo's approach to their games is to control as much of what the public gets to know and see as possible, seemingly under the belief that letting any of it be revealed out of turn could hurt sales. With TotK in particular, they've been extremely uppity about any pre-release leaks, and I expect they'll ramp up their rather draconian attitude toward streaming and other video content post-release. Maybe there's some giant spoiler they're trying to keep under wraps, maybe there's something about the game that they're worried will turn people off of buying it if it gets out, or maybe they're just being control freaks for no reason, but either way, that's the reality of the situation.

Realistically, if you play it privately and don't tell anyone about it, it doesn't really matter if it's legal or not. Nobody's ever going to know.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

you don't have to explicitly say things now since you are arguing that that gamefaqs mod didn't mean what he explicitly said

I'm saying that the way he said it oversimplifies the actual issue he's trying to express (which is, specifically, "don't make topics like this about games that aren't out yet"). It's a bit of a silly way to say that, certainly, but the intent is obvious to anyone with a modicum of interpretive ability and the only error is speaking so generally. Nothing I said, however, could possibly be construed as trying to express "it's illegal to talk about games before they come out." If it can, then I've erred in my word choice and I'd appreciate having my error pointed out to me so I can correct it.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

there wasn't one single mention in that topic about how the game was being played, not one. punishing someone for an implication that isn't even mentioned is dumb and you know it

"Punishing," in this case, meaning "deleting your topic and telling you not to have this discussion for another week and a half." Not exactly a violation of the Geneva convention. As I said, absolute worst case scenario, that minor inconvenience isn't actually warranted, but it covers them from having to worry about Nintendo getting uppity (which there's ample precedent for because they're really butthurt about anything to do with leaking TotK). That's a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis to perform, and the conclusion they arrived at is the obvious best course of action.

Revelation34 posted...

Because it's apparently illegal to talk about unreleased games.

Please quote the part of my post where I said that.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

you can neither confirm or deny that i don't actually own it.

adjl posted...

Given that TotK's ROM has been leaked, it is considerably more likely that anyone discussing playing it at this point is playing the ROM than that they happened to find a store that broke street date for them, so it's easier to issue a blanket moratorium on discussing playing the game pre-launch than to try and figure out which posts are and are not discussing illegal activities (especially with Nintendo on the warpath when it comes to punishing TotK-related leaks).

Can't definitively confirm anything, but you can assume the more likely explanation and act accordingly. Absolute worst case scenario, you have to wait another week and a half to talk about your legitimate experiences. Weighed against the possibility of Nintendo coming after them for facilitating discussion of a leaked copy, that's not a hard choice.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

however, it's still not illegal to talk about playing a game before it releases either, nor is it actually against the rules.

Discussing ROMs is textbook Illegal Activities, per the ToU. Always has been, always will be. The discussion itself may not be illegal, but that's the basis for modding it.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

but i don't care about that, i care about that ridiculous statement from the mod lol, it's funny

It's an oversimplified way of saying that you shouldn't be discussing games you most likely don't legally own as though you own them. Obviously you won't be modded for discussing a trailer or speculating about the game; you know exactly what they're actually talking about.

sveksii posted...

?

Goat cheese comes in multiple styles/textures.

I'm mostly thinking of chevre, which is what usually just gets called "goat cheese" with no other name in my experience. Feta is great, though most of the time feta is made with more of other milks than goat milk (if it even includes goat at all).

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Street dates are legally enforceable now?

Obtaining a legitimate copy of a game before its street date is not illegal (though it may constitute a breach of contract for the distributor). Obtaining a copy of a leaked ROM, however, is, for the same reason that obtaining a copy of the ROM post-launch would also be illegal. Given that TotK's ROM has been leaked, it is considerably more likely that anyone discussing playing it at this point is playing the ROM than that they happened to find a store that broke street date for them, so it's easier to issue a blanket moratorium on discussing playing the game pre-launch than to try and figure out which posts are and are not discussing illegal activities (especially with Nintendo on the warpath when it comes to punishing TotK-related leaks).

Revelation34 posted...

Starfield should be a decent game.

Why do you think that's analogous to anything I said?

Honestly, given that Nintendo pressured Gamestop into firing a dude for "leaking" evidence that there would be a TotK-themed Switch and is currently trying to subpoena Discord for the identities of those involved in leaking the artbook, GameFAQs is probably protecting you more than anything (not to mention not wanting to deal with the legal hassle). Discussing a game that you are playing despite not being able to legally own it definitely falls into the Illegal Activities category, though, so this shouldn't come as a surprise.

It's a nice flavour, but I'm not a huge fan of the texture

Monopoman posted...

That kinda proves my point though the port was s*** but people knew the game was good so they worked on it.

Ah, but then we get to the heart of the question: If it needs modding to be good, is it actually a good game? That ends up in a weird place when it only applies to one version of the game and there are other ways to experience it without those crippling problems, since saying "the game is good" about one version and "the game is not good" about another version of the same game isn't a great way to express that, but the question remains of whether or not having the potential to be a good game with help from modders actually qualifies as being a good game.

Mostly, though, I'd just like to see more publishers held accountable for releasing inexcusably bad PC ports. We can philosophize about what mods mean in the context of appraising games all we want, but when an amateur can fix a near-broken port with an amount of work that would cost the publisher maybe $500 tops, that's a very real issue that gets a free pass all too often. Unfortunately, I don't think there really is an avenue to do that, since enough people want to play these games that having to install a mod to get them running isn't enough of a barrier to really hurt sales, and if ever it did come to a point where a publisher couldn't sell a PC port because no modders were willing to make it playable, I suspect their first reaction would be to drop the port altogether and not to spend a little bit of extra time and money solving the problem.

Sufferedphoneix posted...

You have to do next to nothing for that though. That's the appeal of consoles In a nutshell. Convinence

You don't exactly have to do much to update things on PC, either. Unless you deliberately disable automatic updates to have more control over your PC (which is entirely a personal choice that isn't at all necessary), most updates are downloaded and installed without any actual interaction. The worst you'll have to deal with is a system update that takes several minutes to install, in which case you just set it to install overnight or while you make dinner or poop or something and you can mostly avoid that inconvenience.

OhhhJa posted...

People like to argue on the internet and the algorithm is built around that

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


These. This is also the basis for Twitter's (among other social media platforms') algorithms having a bias toward showing people extreme right-wing content: it tends to be objectionable in ways that provoke objectors into commenting on it. Social media algorithms show you content they expect you'll interact with (and sell data indicating that you're more likely to interact with such content to other companies who can capitalize on that tendency), which is related to but doesn't necessarily overlap with content you like.

Monopoman posted...

Also most s*** games don't get mods in the first place, because people are spending their free time making these mods. Not many are willing to drop 50-100 hours developing a mod for a game no one cares about that sucked.

Eh, that's debatable. Usually people don't put the effort in for games that just aren't good, certainly, but there are countless examples of modders taking it upon themselves to fix games that have critical issues that make them borderline unenjoyable without mods. Dark Souls' PC port is one of the more notorious examples of this, where everyone knew the game was good and worth playing, but the PC port was such hot garbage that you pretty much had to install DSFix to make it work. Bonus points where DSFix took less than 24 hours to generate, so it's not like the problems were anything other than laziness on From's part.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

it's only nonsense because you need to use external modifications for your enjoyment of the game

if you need mods to play the game, you're playing a bad game

this extends to random steam asset flip #999278493 to minecraft.

If you need mods to enjoy a game, then it's a bad game. If mods enhance the enjoyment of the game beyond what the base game can provide, however, any version with access to mods is objectively superior to any version without. Vanilla Minecraft is the same game regardless of platform (putting aside questions of playing with friends); if Minecraft is good on one platform then it's good on all platforms. Modding Minecraft makes it even better, therefore the best platforms for Minecraft are ones that enable mods.

Monopoman posted...

The day I can mod games on console as easily as PC is the day I consider them both closer to equal even then PC would win due to performance. Mods have made so many great games even better, and many games feel much weaker without them.

In the past, helly has insisted that mods shouldn't be included in comparing PC versions of games to their console versions, as they aren't "part of the game" (specifically, in comparing the PC and console versions of Minecraft, though presumably the logic would apply to others). This is, of course, nonsense.

Cruddy_horse posted...

That's deafeatist mentality, there's almost always a chance to comeback, too many people start to lose and give up when there's room to comeback, never stop fighting for victory.

The problem is that making that comeback often requires the entire team to start playing significantly better than they have up to that point. It's still possible, and it's awesome if you can pull it off, but especially if you're playing with randoms or otherwise don't know what potential your teammates have to put in the necessary skill to turn things around, it can be a significant gamble and not necessarily a fun time.

blu posted...

While the subject matter itself may not be used in the day to day job for some, most are in positions that wanted physics/math/engineering degrees.

That's the thing: The information taught by the degree isn't what's useful. What's useful are the mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills practiced over the course of the degree, which can be learned pretty generally by getting a BSc in any somewhat-related field.

joemodda posted...

Conversely, we want to steer students away from degrees that don't have a prospective future if it means they will end up saddled with large amounts of debt with no clear path for paying it off.

And the best way to do that is to ensure that no degree will mean that students end up saddled with large amounts of debt with no clear path for paying it off. Then you don't have to steer anything.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Extra granularity isn't necessary, but it's still an improvement on the alternative.

How so? What value does it add? Especially considering that adding half-degree increments to thermostats is very easy for those that are so picky about room temperature (not that you can even tell on an analog thermostat), and you definitely can't tell the difference between an adjustment of 0.5C and an adjustment of 1F.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Celsius is based on scientific applications (more specifically, the temperature of water), which is why it tends to work better for scientific contexts. But it doesn't scale to real world temperatures as well, because you're basically locked into to a scale between -18 and 38 (give or take).

That's largely arbitrary, though. Whatever the scale, people will come to develop their own understandings about what feels comfortable, what doesn't, and what they need to do to become comfortable when outside of their comfort zone. It's pretty much never going to be "I feel comfortable between 0 and 100F," it's going to be "I feel comfortable in the temperatures to which I'm exposed most often, with a few degrees of personal preference." Whether room temperature is 70 or 20, that's going to be the temperature most people want to keep their rooms.

I'd argue that the only non-arbitrary point is 0C, since the freezing point of water has practical applications for understanding what a given weather report means: If it's below 0, you need to be concerned about ice and it's possible that any forecast rain will end up being snow. Of course, in practice, it's usually anywhere under about 3-4 that you need to start watching out for ice, and there's pretty much no functional difference between remembering that threshold as 0 and remembering it as 32, but it's still a matter of using an important threshold with real-world significance as 0. That said, 0F is also useful because it's the rough point below which you shouldn't expect salt to help with ice, since it's the freezing point of a saturated solution of ammonium chloride, but that's not exactly common knowledge.

chelsea___wtf posted...

yeah the only context that would make this acceptable is them agreeing to do some kind of weird abusive husband ERP scene

I will say that I didn't consider that, and that would indeed make it acceptable.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Technically Kelvin is objectively better, but c centres on factors we actually use in life, so is contextually more useful.

I'd say it's objectively worse for colloquial use, purely for the fact that it requires more syllables than Celsius in most circumstances. A similar principle can be applied to defend using Imperial colloquially in some contexts ("inch" is significantly shorter than "centimetre," though "litre" and "gallon" are the same).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

if you can't tell the difference between 11c and 12c then you must be a pretty wide guy.

Unless you're comparing them side by side, the only way you're going to notice an appreciable difference between them is if you make a conscious effort to appreciate the difference, at which point that's on you and not the temperature scale. It's not significant at all.

joemodda posted...

This IS only a three minute clip of what their relationship really was, so I'll wait until more evidence comes up

While there's a case to be made against taking isolated incidents out of context, especially in cases where emotions might be running high and tempers might be lost, absolutely none of the behaviour he displayed in that video is ever acceptable in any amount or context. That video is more than enough to judge him to be an abusive dickwad, with them only possible defense on his part being "I recognize the harm I'm doing and I've been working to become a better person through therapy" (which is not "I'm not an abusive dickwad," it's "I am an abusive dickwad and I'm trying to change that").

Yellow posted...

But I'm glad his audience is... maybe, going to be exposed to the reality of the "traditional family values" mentality.

The "traditional family values" crowd elected a serial philanderer who's on his third trophy wife, and when it came out that he bribed a porn star not to talk about their affair, that same crowd blamed the porn star for saying anything and not the serial philanderer for serially philandering. The only "traditional family value" that crowd actually cares about is dunking on gay people. Everything else, they're willing to look past and/or make excuses for.

798, by what my bank app says (which uses Transunion).