Lurker > adjl

ReturnOfFa posted...

I hate sounding like a boomer dad, but quite honestly, I don't think there would be a ceasefire even if every single other country supported that.

Israel's military is very heavily funded by Western nations. Cutting that funding off entirely without jeopardizing the safety of Israeli citizens would be tricky (Hamas is a legitimate threat, after all, even if that doesn't justify any of this), but money still talks loudly enough for even a lunatic like Netenyahu to listen.

Lokarin posted...

well, their update packages i guess

Particularly relevant for Xenoblade X, since the extra data you can download improves the loading times quite significantly.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

It's biggest "failure" was not playing DVDs, which is the entire reason the PS2 got such a footing.

As much as people kind of handwave this issue now because of how ubiquitous DVD players are, it was actually a pretty big deal in 2000. I know quite a few people that had a PS2 as their only DVD player for several years after it first came out, simply because a standalone player in 2000 cost almost as much as a PS2 did and didn't include a game system on top of it. By the end of the generation, DVD players were dirt cheap and it wasn't a big deal, which is why the Wii not playing DVD's wasn't a problem, but combined with the PS2's 1-year head start it definitely gave it a substantial competitive edge at the beginning.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I haven't heard any major criticism of the switch? I thought people were generally happy with the gimmick of swapping between portable and tv based.

It gets some flak for being underpowered, which does mean it misses out on a number of high-profile multiplats (though Microsoft supposedly intends to bring CoD to it moving forward, so we'll see how that plays out), but otherwise the only major criticisms I know of are the joycon drift (which they repair for free) and the appallingly bad eShop design (which... is really bad). By and large, popular opinion of it is indeed pretty good, and the sales reflect that.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

the gamecube is the only console that has the pleasure of saying it was beaten by an xbox

The Xbone outsold the WiiU like 4:1, but I guess that isn't really an accomplishment.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

The goal is not to eliminate Palestinians but to defeat Hamas.

The quoted passage explicitly states a goal of eliminating Palestinians. Like he doesn't even stop short of saying "I want to kill them all." This isn't an inference, this is literally what he said. What is the difficulty you're having accepting that?

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Those comparing them to Germany in WW2 are tone deaf

The Holocaust is neither the only historical example of genocide nor a bar that must be reached to define any future genocides. I don't think anyone's comparing them to WWII Germany, but even if they are, writing that comparison off because it's "tone deaf" to compare the targets of the Holocaust to its perpetrators is pretty short-sighted because there's no reason to believe that Israel can't or won't ever do the same thing. Heck, if anything, I'd say some of the Israeli government's rhetoric around Palestinians is more overtly genocidal than the Nazi party's rhetoric around Jews was, given that the Nazis at least tried to be sneaky about the Holocaust (which is why they got away with it and why the rest of the West felt really bad when it came to light that their lower-grade antisemitism had let it happen).

Devil_May_Cry posted...

If Hitler was in a crowd of 500 you would not drop a bomb to kill him?

Depends. Am I absolutely certain he's in there? Is there a very significant likelihood that, despite my omniscient surveillance abilities, I will not be able to find him again for a safer attack later on, or assassinate him with less collateral damage than a bomb would cause? Can I be reasonably certain that killing Hitler would actually stop the Nazis, instead of turning him into a martyr that his next-in-command would use to rally them to even greater atrocities? Am I committed to helping any civilians harmed by my attack, including rebuilding damaged infrastructure and providing medical care?

It's very, very rare that you can clearly say "killing this many people now is the least damaging way to prevent more people from being killed later." Even if you are as certain as anyone can be that that is the lesser of two evils, though, you still have a responsibility to mitigate the impact that lesser evil has on the innocents affected by it.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

I would drop a bomb to kill the greater evil no matter how many innocent men, women, and children are in the way to secure a better future.
You are in theory preventing more death and the collateral as tragic as it is is worth it

Let's say you time travel to 1938 and manage to bring one nuke with you. You know roughly where Hitler is, but he's in the middle of an area that's dense enough that launching your nuke at him can be expected to kill 80 million people (not altogether plausible, but this is a hypothetical situation and that's the estimated total death toll of WWII). Would you still do it? Or would that make you the greater evil?

"The end justifies the means" is not carte blanche to do whatever you want. If you end up killing more people stopping "the bad guy" than "the bad guy" would have killed, you're actually the bad guy. Again, let's look at this infographic:
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16516.jpeg

Between 2008 and 2020, 5590 Palestinians were killed under the pretense of stopping a terrorist group that killed 251 Israelis in that same time frame, a process which did not actually stop Hamas from killing any future Israelis (hence the current situation). In the current conflict, the last counts I saw were 13 Hamas militants killed out of ~8200 innocent Palestinian civilians. I'm very confident saying that those 13 militants would not have managed to kill an average of 650 innocent Israeli civilians each if they'd been left alive or killed in a less indiscriminate offensive later.

Those numbers do not support "Israel had to kill these civilians to stop the greater evil." Those numbers support "Israel is the greater evil."

Count_Drachma posted...

This, pretty much. Although usually college professors tended to rely on dog whistles instead of outright cheering on livestreams of attacks on Jews. And their level of supports makes it unsurprising that Yale and other campuses had students release thinly-veiled anti-Semitic statements.

And although it's nothing new, it's still shocking how open the celebrations have been in the US over the murder of Israeli women and children.

An interesting comment from somebody who's previously insisted that people marching around wearing swastikas don't indicate a Nazi problem and that Jewish students don't need to be alarmed by dorm-mates hanging swastikas on their doors. Very interesting indeed.

I'm curious, what are your thoughts on Israel killing over 8000 Palestinian civilians in their retaliation? I don't actually have to ask, because I know your response is going to be something along the lines of "you didn't have a problem when Obama did it" while conspicuously never actually taking a stance of your own, but I figure that'll be entertaining to watch.

iT's nOt gEnOcIdE GuYs!

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/89bfc30e.jpg

Is it bad that I kind of want to see a mini-golf course carpeted with that pattern?

Most people are pretty happy with the Switch now, actually. It's sold extremely well and has an excellent library, including quite a bit of third-party support. It's not perfect, by any means, but the popular opinion around it is generally quite good.

Precisely. Civilian deaths can sometimes be acceptable as collateral damage pursing a greater good, but that's not at all what's happening here.

EvilResident posted...

I guess, why would anyone think its a bad thing?

There was a lot of opposition to it when it was first adopted as a new standard, which seemed to be a combination of "this isn't how I learned math" and "Obama's behind this and I categorically hate everything he does." The former is actually a somewhat legitimate issue, since it interferes with parents' ability to help kids with their homework, but the latter is just conservatives being whiny.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

It is a lot more morally gray than Palestinians bad or Israelis bad

i side with Israel but not all Israel or Palestine bad/good

I wouldn't say it's morally grey. The Israeli government is bad and Hamas is bad. The supporters that encourage them and keep them in power are also bad. Everyone else is either a victim or irrelevant.

faramir77 posted...

Bingo. I'm a high school math teacher.

When students ask "when am I going to use this", I typically have a possible career connection to share but I mostly just say something along the lines of "we learn math in high school to train your brain to logically tackle problems that you didn't even know existed yesterday using both information you've previously obtained and brand new information. In that sense, you'll use the skills you learn here almost every day of your life".

Students generally are happy with that answer. Math gets a lot of scrutiny from students because of how abstract it can be, without understanding that it being abstract is the entire point.

I think it was actually a post you made a while ago that clued me into that value. It seems kind of obvious once you actually think about it, but so much of how math is taught and experienced fixates on memorizing minutiae and specific procedures that everyone knows won't be useful for the vast majority of people, and it's no wonder people lose interest in that.

Judgmenl posted...

You know what, I change my mind.
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-statement-on-israel-and-gaza-a6c397f09a30
Don't let sensationalist garbage control your world view. I trust Obama's take on this a hell of a lot more than the media.

Obama's take is pretty unremarkable. It's the same tepid admonishment of Israel's disproportionate retaliation seen from most Western leaders, which roughly amounts to "we like Israel better than Arab nations, but we should probably say something bad about murdering 8000 civilians." The rest is little more than "thoughts and prayers that they find reconciliation," without actually taking any steps to force a ceasefire (which Obama has no authority to do, obviously, but many other leaders saying similar things do).

Dehydration also increases the viscosity of your blood, so it's harder to push it around. Generally, being mildly dehydrated will lower your blood pressure because the volume is down, but as it gets more severe pressure will climb as your body tries to offset that drop to keep you conscious.

Just stay hydrated. It's important.

"Trust us, we're the good guys because we told you that we were going to burn the only home you've ever known to the ground before we did it so you could save yourself and I guess your cat or something."

ReturnOfFa posted...

I think it'd be great if they continued reviewing basic math up through highschool for 15-20 minutes. It's easy to forget and just needs a little maintenance. A lot of young people struggle with higher math, but could really benefit from keeping their basics solid.

Math is in a weird place in education. Far, far too few teachers recognize and explain its value as effectively running laps for your brain, which in turn leads to many students (especially those who don't inherently "get it") viewing it as pointless. Because of that, it's pretty common to just accept that some kids "aren't good at math" and letting them stagnate on the basics because the value of being able to learn and practice higher stuff isn't appreciated. In practice, though, almost everyone can learn basic math well enough to be able to practice the higher stuff, it just takes a different approach.

Callmege posted...

Ah so the "Palestinians" who are really just colonisers from the Ottoman Empire are entitled to a state but the Jews who can trace their roots there back over 3500 years aren't. Hmmm. I wonder why you think the Jews shouldn't have a state of their own. Tough one that.

When there are no living Jews that can remember a time before Ottoman colonization (and Roman colonisation before that; Judea has actually been out of Jewish control for longer than it was in it), but plenty of living Palestinians that can remember a time before British and subsequently Israeli colonization, I'm generally going to be more concerned with the latter than the former because it's significantly more disruptive and harmful to living people.

Now, while I think plopping Israel on top of an existing territory and telling the current citizens of that territory to just deal with it was a bad decision, with the benefit of hindsight, I also recognize that reversing that decision would be hideously messy. That does not mean, however, that I'm okay with Israeli's aggressive expansionism and apartheid oppression of Palestine. None of that is okay, nor can you even begin to honestly characterize that as Israel being satisfied with a two-state solution. Israel wants the whole region. Everything about their behaviour throughout this conflict indicates that, including directly financing Hamas to ensure that Palestine has a government that makes them unsympathetic as possible.

Callmege posted...

Also, gotta say you should drop the whole "genocide" lie.

Multiple Israeli officials have made comments to the effect of "we won't be satisfied until every Palestinian is dead," "there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian," and "it doesn't count as genocide if they aren't human." Paired with policies that are clearly harmful to Palestinian survival (limiting access to medical care, clean water, and education), a long history of documented human rights violations, funding a militant Palestinian dictator to keep them in power so the violence continues, and routinely retaliating to Hamas' violence by killing vastly more civilians than can be considered a reasonable, measured response, calling it "genocide" is absolutely appropriate.

Callmege posted...

Genociders don't tell their victims where to evacuate from and where they will be safer when the genocider conducts military operations.

Leaving out the part where Israel then proceeded to bomb places they said were going to be safe kind of reveals the agenda you're pushing (not that there was any doubt). Moreover, if I told you and 600,000 of your neighbours to leave your city before I razed the entire thing, destroying all of your homes and critical infrastructure in the process, would you actually say "well, at least they're not technically genocidal because they didn't kill us!"? Or would you and many of your neighbours be facing an immediate humanitarian crisis that will leave many of you dead before it can be resolved due to the indirect effects of that destruction?

Genocide doesn't stop being genocide just because you don't have the balls to pull the trigger yourself.

Callmege posted...

Also a population that has grown consistently for decades, as the "Palestinian" population has, isn't one that's being genocided

And what do those population demographics look like? Palestinian life expectancy is *35*. 40% of the population is under 14. An age distribution like that should be resulting in rapid growth, but instead you're seeing growth at roughly the same rate as Israel's despite Israel having a significantly more stable age distribution (life expectancy of 83, 28% under 14). That Palestine's population isn't growing significantly faster than Israel's means Palestinians are dying at a far greater rate than Israelis, a fact which is entirely consistent with Israel blowing them up regularly and restricting access to medical care, education, and clean water. And that would be genocide.

Callmege posted...

This is what a population looks like when it's being genocided.

The Holocaust was not the only genocide in history, nor is it the minimum need to call something a genocide. Israel has been systematically killing Palestinians - both directly and indirectly - for decades. That they haven't directly killed 6 million (*yet*) does not mean that's not genocide.

Callmege posted...

Fighting and killing terrorists that keep doing terrorism to you isn't genocide. It's self defense.

Fighting and killing terrorists to protect yourself is indeed self defense. Killing 600 civilians for every militant you kill, however (the IDF has reported 13 Hamas militants killed by this offensive, current civilian death estimates are upwards of 8000), is not. At best, that's a callous disregard for human life, and given that Israel has been funding Hamas to perpetuate their excuse for bombing the shit out of Palestine, calling it anything other than deliberate genocide is hopelessly naive.

Even without having been taught it, I use elements of it in doing mental math/estimation myself all the time. It definitely has merit, as much as people like to freak out over anyone suggesting that the way they learned things 50 years ago isn't the One True Curriculum, but I also get that it isn't going to work for some people and that having to spell it out that way every time is a problem (though I was way ahead of the curve in math ability throughout all of my primary schooling, so "show your work" was always an issue for me because there wasn't conscious work in many cases).

Yeah, drink more water than that. It doesn't have to be water, but that sounds like some major dehydration and you should avoid letting that happen.

Seems like a bold move, but they've got Microsoft bankrolling them now, so I guess they can lean on that.

Judgmenl posted...

Chris believes the game should have friction

There is some merit in that, I'll concede. As tempting as it is to say "it's annoying to not be able to do X, so we should just be able to do it," if you change the game to accommodate all such suggestions, there often isn't much actual game left. Drop rates are a good example of that: Not getting drops is annoying, but if drop rates were high enough that you could reliably get every unique by playing for an hour, the game would lose its appeal pretty quickly. There's a middle ground where you do have to provide some resistance to players reaching their goals to make those goals actually feel worthwhile to reach, and it's not always easy to differentiate between sensible quality of life fixes and changes that will nerf the sense of progression.

PoE's trade system is absolutely a quality of life problem, though. Yes, people would progress faster if trading for the gear they need didn't involve messaging fifteen different people before finding somebody willing to leave their map, but that method of slowing people down is just not enjoyable gameplay. Pacing can and should be balanced in ways that don't involve pretending it's 1998 and online gaming was just invented.

Judgmenl posted...

lol, this is how entrenced harvest gambling is in PoE.

To be clear, I don't actually think that's a good idea for anything except a streaming stunt. Harvest has been quite useful for SSF, though. I'm a big fan of the conversion options, particularly the essence one for getting Essences of Horror (though the Random Number Gods have not blessed my attempts to roll a Fire Trap helmet and I've burned through far more of those than statistics would suggest is likely trying to get +30% DoT and Burn Damage support).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It was rising even before the current shit. People barely contain their antisemitism even at the best of times.

This is also true, particularly with how many politicians are outright courting neo-Nazis. As much as it's been memed, MTG's "Jewish Space Lasers" comment was a symptom of it.

And you didn't gamble for a full set with Harvest? Where's your hopeless RNG addiction?

What baffles me is their justification for not having one. Maybe they've changed their philosophy since I heard them say this a few years ago, but they insisted that Diablo 3's shortcomings were because trade was too easy and that over-centralized the game around trading. While D3 was over-centralized around trading because that's what made the most money, that over-centralization was a consequence of exactly the same loot philosophy that PoE uses, which is to have large amounts of stuff drop that's good for other builds but probably not the one you're playing. Trade being "too easy" just provided a way to work around that problem that didn't suck (except for the money part, which is why it sucked). Taking that same philosophy and making trade annoying and inconvenient doesn't solve the problem, it just forces the whole game to hinge around an annoying and inconvenient process. If the game worked properly without trading, having a trade system that sucks would be fine (see: Grim Dawn), but they've gone with the worst of both worlds and it's a real shame because it would be a phenomenal game if they would actually pick a lane.

Of course, a big part of it is making you go to other people's hideouts so you can see all the cool microtransactions you could be buying (plus the effective paywall on serious trading in the form of premium stash tabs), and they're not about to give that up.

Mostly, I just really don't enjoy trading the way PoE does it. If there were an auction house or similar thing, I'd be fine with it, but having to personally contact people every time I want to buy stuff and hope that they actually answer, plus how awkward it is to list stuff to sell myself (though at least they have their own trade website now instead of a third-party one carrying the whole system), I find it's just a miserable experience that I'd rather avoid altogether.

I played Torchlight Infinite very briefly before Ancestor League started, which is what prompted me to get back into PoE because TL:I is such a shameless ripoff of it, and there are quite a few things from Torchlight that I think PoE would benefit from. Namely, there's actually an auction house, and most of the crafting system hinges around being able to lock 1 affix for a reasonable price (or 2 for a much less affordable one), with relatively few currencies used for multiple different crafting operations. Easy trading makes the whole experience so much better, and the core crafting philosophy of "This affix is the most important, let's see what else I can get" is so much more accessible than PoE's approach of having so many different currencies and so few deterministic crafts. I do like fractured items, but getting them is a pain (they're relatively rare and you need to identify every one that drops to find anything worthwhile) without just buying them, which is bothersome when playing self-found and trying to rely on crafting to improve gear.

ReturnOfFa posted...

yup, there's been a lot of gross hate crimes committed on jewish and arab people since the outbreak of the war.

The 6-year old that was stabbed in Illinois, Wadea al-Fayoume, is the saddest shit.

Indeed. Hating on people for being the same ethnicity as people involved in a war halfway around the world is such a horrible thing to do. Especially children.

Judgmenl posted...

I can't wrap my head around playing modern PoE with how little effort GGG Has put in over the past year and how they are killing it for a worse version of the game.

I've been liking it considerably more than the last time I played, actually, which was like early 2018ish (mid-Abyss League). There are significantly more options available for endgame content now than just "do the same few maps indefinitely," with the Atlas passive tree being a really cool way of manipulating the extra content that does show up in maps according to what I enjoy most or am trying to farm. It's added a lot of variety and lots of different avenues for progression, which has been fun.

The most critical flaws are still there, though, which are that the game is designed around the intention that people will trade for items and that the trading system would have been outdated 20 years ago, let alone now. The former wouldn't be the end of the world (it does over-centralize the metagame around farming currency to buy stuff instead of working toward stuff directly, which I'm not a huge fan of, but that's tolerable), but the latter strongly incentivizes playing self-found, and when you combine the two you just get a game that punishes you regardless of how you play. I've been playing SSF this league, and while I've been doing fine just focusing on my RF Inquisitor (I've had a couple of ridiculously lucky drops, actually, including Ashes on my first Eater kill), it's been more than a little frustrating wanting to branch out and try other builds but not being able to because I just haven't found critical uniques for them (uniques that would have been cheap to trade for). It just seems so needlessly limiting to have those uniques be such rare drops despite not actually being that valuable, especially with how much drop rates have been nerfed for div cards that drop uniques (even ones that you'd expect to be really common, given the low value of the uniques they give).

Still, though, it's been fun. I haven't actually played since posting that, though, so I guess my interest has run out. I didn't expect to stick around past the end of the league anyway.

Judgmenl posted...

Literally saw someone playing Ancestors with a 100 life build abusing knockback or something absurd and there are apparently people running CI with less than 500 ES.

Yeah, Tattoos have made for some pretty ridiculous builds. The amount of build variety out there right now is pretty wild, even by PoE standards, which is pretty cool.

peresman81 posted...

That is my question. Why it is not included in the larger icons? I'm just talking about a aesthetic thing that is missing from the website.

On desktop, the layout only has room for five icons because they're in a single row instead of being stacked. It looks like the mobile layout also only displays five icons, though it stacks them to accommodate the lower aspect ratio, which leaves a gap because 5 doesn't divide evenly by 2. I would guess they chose the 5 most popular to put there.

This is, however, largely irrelevant to pretty much everyone. The only time I've ever gone to that page is to look for a system so old/obscure that it doesn't show up in the "more systems" dropdown menu, and that goes back to the SNES, so that doesn't happen often. All current systems (plus the PS4 and Xbone) are already listed in the header, which is perfectly adequate for anyone looking to get to the system page for the Series.

Judgmenl posted...

There are people who don't have central heating?

I keep my thermostats turned all the way down (which puts them at like 5-10C) until it actually gets cold enough to need the furnace. If a comfortable room temperature experience can be attained with a blanket instead of actually heating the room up, why waste oil?

It's high, but hypertension is a chronic condition and you can't really diagnose it from a single reading, especially if that reading might have coincided with an anxiety episode or an unusual hydration state.

If you go to the actual Systems page (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/games/systems), it's not included in the larger icons, but it is listed in the text links underneath those icons. Why you'd go to that page to select a current system when the header includes it, though, I'm not sure.

Yeah, since yesterday. We had ~5 cm of snow and it's been hovering between 0 and 5, which is heater territory.

Yellow posted...

For some reason Biden decided to give our full unwavering support to Israel

A lot of Western support of Israel (including founding it in the first place) boils down to a combination of "the Holocaust sucked, so we should be nice to the Jews" and "We like Jews better than Arabs so we should take the Jewish side whenever there's a choice." This is especially true of people that were actually alive for the postwar period when the West was collectively reeling with guilt over allowing the Holocaust to happen, which just so happens to be true of a sizable chunk of the US government (Biden included). A lot of people are really hesitant to say anything bad about Jews because history has shown us where being too quick to do so can lead, and that leads to defaulting to taking Israel's side and being paranoid that anyone saying anything bad about Israel is doing so because they're secretly plotting a second Holocaust, which is where jumping to calling people antisemitic comes from. Israel, of course, is all too happy to exploit that, not because they're Jewish (that would actually be antisemitic), but because Netenyahu and much of the rest of the Israeli government are a bunch of imperialist cunglehoosers.

A big part of it is also religion. Christians broadly consider Judaism to be much closer to "one of them" than Islam is, and when the Bible and Torah say Israel is the land God gave to the Jews, many of them see that as being the final word on the matter and Palestinians as being an unfortunate complication that needs to be accommodated as the Jews take their "rightful place." I'm not sure where Biden personally stands in that regard, but that's a big part of the common attitude that we should default to siding with Jews over Arabs, and I'd be very surprised if that hasn't influenced his politics.

If you need an example of the difference between hating *a* Jew and hating Jews collectively, I suggest bringing up Bobby Kotick. Nobody outside of ABK's board and shareholders likes him, but that's entirely because he's an festering swongdingler of a person. Him being Jewish is totally ancillary to that, as much as he/his publicists have tried to frame the whole "drawing devil horns on him" thing as being antisemitic hate instead of anything more personally motivated.

Apparently explicitly identifying it as sarcastic mockery of racist dinglemuffins isn't enough for the mod team to leave my last post up, so let's try this again:

Jen0125 posted...

You believe that Palestinians deserve to live in diaspora and that's okay?

Perhaps this individual doesn't recognize that there are ethnic differences between different populations of Arabic people and therefore doesn't believe it would count as diaspora to make one Arabic population go live with a bunch of other Arabic populations. That would, of course, be racist and stupid, but there are many stupid racists in the world.

Clear enough?

Jen0125 posted...

You believe that Palestinians deserve to live in diaspora and that's okay?

Don't you know, Jen? That's not really diaspora because they can just go live with all the other brown people. Everyone knows brown people aren't ethnically distinct from each other, so it doesn't count.

/s, because there are enough people who actually feel this way that I need to clarify

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Israel that values life more than any other nation by dropping leaflets and making sure to only fire if a target is known to be there.

Their current track record is about 1 terrorist for every 100 civilians they've killed. That's not exactly something to boast about.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Never Again was worn but it flew over most these imbeciles at the UNs heads.

It's more that being victimized by the Holocaust isn't carte blanche to murder as many Palestinians as they want. Israel is not facing a second Holocaust. If anything, comparing any violence against Israel to the Holocaust is disrespectful to the victims of the actual Holocaust, given how completely different that was from this situation.

CashPrizes posted...

I wouldn't call any console that came in last place it's generation "Top Tier"

Depends on the generation. If every console in a given generation was better than most others throughout history, the whole generation could be top tier, regardless of how they rank within that tier.

The only people that actually deny those things are either crazy conspiracy theorists or neo-Nazis (often both).

Devil_May_Cry posted...

You all simplify and react just like Hamas wants.

By all means, please share the nuance that justifies Israel inflicting civilian casualties that outnumber those inflicted by Hamas by more than an order of magnitude, if you feel this is a "simplification." Moreover, "we all" also condemn Hamas for blowing up civilians. Blowing up civilians is bad, regardless of who's doing it.

Callmege posted...

"Palestine" has rejected a 2 state solution at every turn.

You mean people don't like having a new country plopped on top of theirs with no regard for how they've been living their lives for centuries? Who knew?

Callmege posted...

Israel has agreed to it since before Israel existed,

You mean people do like being given a free country? Who knew?

Whatever agreements they've made on paper, suggesting that Israel has "agreed" to a two-state solution misses most of the reality of the situation. They've "agreed" to let Palestine exist (though there are ample quotes from high-ranking Israeli officials that treat that as a considerable concession, many of which indicate a desire to simply wipe out all Palestinians), but do so through an oppressive apartheid government that treats Palestinians as second-class citizens and continuously erodes their rights, available land, services, and quality of life, all of which is before considering the number of Palestinians they've outright murdered and the laundry list of human rights violations that have been documented (which I expect is a tiny fraction of the actual number, given the kiddie gloves the West routinely uses in dealing with Israel). Israel has not agreed to let Palestine exist freely. Suggesting they have is either a deliberate lie or suggests that you've failed to put even the barest modicum of thought into understanding the situation and just latched on to the first piece of information you saw that lined up with your preconceived bias of "Jews>Arabs." Neither's a good look.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

They just want Jews to live in diaspora and be accused of things and eternally persecuted.

Antisemitism is a sickness

It's not antisemitism to want Israel to stop committing genocide. There's a significant number of Jewish civilians even within Israel that have nothing to do with this, let alone the Jews elsewhere in the world which there is absolutely zero justification for blaming. Those responding to this war with broader antisemitism are no better than those that responded to 9/11 by harassing random brown people (which is to say, they're shit), but just as it's not Islamophobic to have an issue with Saudi Arabia's government funding Al'Qaeda, it's not antisemitic to have an issue with Israel blowing up Palestinian schools, hospitals, and water treatment plants.

I had a little bag of Reese's Pieces once that had literally 3 pieces in it. I was displeased.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

In the ideal future a lot of people are pushing for, no one is going to know how to drive because all the driving services will be automated and personal car ownership will be either prohibitively expensive or outright banned.

The only people actually pushing for that are tech bros that are convinced that AI will solve all the world's problems and yet seem to keep suggesting "futuristic" solutions that most just reinvent trains (like "imagine a line of AI-powered cars that all starts and stops uniformly like they were a bunch of train cars"). Even the staunchest urbanists recognize that there is a place for personal cars, just not as the default mode of transportation within cities because that's a hideously inefficient use of valuable space and the required infrastructure for that default will never be sustainable. Public transit can be automated (and in many cases, trains already are), but self-driving personal-scale vehicles have very little value that can't already be provided by a combination of trains, buses, and bikes for far cheaper. The only remaining value would be the occasional case when people actually take advantage of the "go wherever you want" aspect of having a car, and in that case either personally owning a vehicle (if that aspect is frequently used) or relying on a car share is still almost always going to be significantly more cost-effective than something self-driving.

Revelation34 posted...

You still haven't explained how.

adjl posted...

I don't really have a preference

I'm just commenting on the claim that the writers want you to like Miles better than Peter and that you're therefore "gullible" for preferring Miles. I have no personal opinion on how they compare.

The nerve of some people.

Count_Drachma posted...

Peter Parker is objectively the better character, but you do you.

I don't really have a preference (having engaged in pretty much no Spider-man content in the last decade except Civil War-Endgame). I'm just pointing out the inherently flawed logic of suggesting that it's "gullible" to like something that was created to be better. The obvious conclusion, of course, is that said comment was thinly-veiled racism amounting to "the only reason you like the black guy better is that you let the writers trick you into betraying your race," but that's boring and I'd rather go after how ridiculous the logic is at a fundamental level than grab the low-hanging fruit.

Depends where you live. If you can reliably get around without driving, you're fine. Plenty of girls will be happy to be walked home instead of driven if it's a pleasant walk. If you pretty much need a car to get anywhere, that becomes more of an issue, though at the same time plenty of women drive these days and don't see any value in gendering basic transportation to such an extent as expecting the man to do all the driving for dates.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Because then games need to be designed specifically with that in mind.

Not really. Even without deliberately designing them as such, most games have either one face button that gets pressed more often than others, or one face button that needs to be readily accessible while pressing others (like B to dodge (on a Switch controller) while mashing X or Y to attack in Monster Hunter). The only specific design that's needed is to think about how the game controls to decide which action should be mapped to A, and that's a thought process developers already go through in figuring out the rest of the mapping for any controller style (usually mapping the most common action to A or B, on a Switch/Xbox controller).

The only issue that might actually limit the design process is that it's implausibly difficult to hit B at the same time as X or Y, though in practice button pairs that cross the face buttons (X+B and Y+A on a 360 controller) are already awkward to hit and most games avoid that anyway, so remapping those pairs to X+B and Y+B on a GC controller isn't hard.

It's also very, very common these days for even console games to at least offer multiple face button configuration options, if not full button remapping, and that takes a lot of pressure off of the devs to pick an optimal "main button" to assign to A. They can pick something that seems good, but let players reconfigure that if something else would work better for them.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

Im not spending money on something Im going to wear once

You frequently spend money on things you're only going to eat once. What's the harm in shaking up that verb now and then?

I really don't know why more controllers haven't adopted a button layout like the GC's. The layout suffers a bit when you have to press simultaneous button combos that don't include A, but for the many, many games where there's one button you press more than others, having that button squarely in the thumb's neutral position with everything else being a small deviation from that is significantly more comfortable than having all four buttons centred around that neutral point so you're always deviating from it (or if one button is centred under the neutral point, having a larger deviation to reach anything else and/or games prioritizing a button other than that one because it's not clear where the neutral point is meant to be). Having a proper pad on the C stick would be an improvement, as would a larger d-pad, second Z button, and L3/R3, but the button layout is something I really miss.

The street I grew up on would pretty routinely see 100-200+ each year. That was a relatively dense neighbourhood, though (again, that sweet spot of having a lot of single-family and townhouses packed relatively densely for lots of street-level access, with full sidewalks and low car traffic), plus it was a relatively well-off area very close (<20-minute walk) to a couple of public housing districts and other low-income neighbourhoods, including a lot of smaller apartment buildings that were denser. That meant there were plenty of kids in the neighbourhood, plus plenty more would come in from nearby neighbourhoods.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I don't really know exactly what gave rise to trunk or treating but it sounds pretty lame to me. Sounds like it's either a product of suburban safety paranoia or our on-the-go culture where everything needs to be done as efficiently as possible now. I'm sure most kids don't mind cause it's candy, especially if they start growing up where it's all they know, but to me a big part of the fun was walking around the neighborhood

It's a bit of both of the factors you identified, but also a significant part of it is that you can't really walk around many modern neighbourhoods. Most suburbs are too sprawling and often don't even have sidewalks because they've been so overwhelmingly designed around the expectation that people will just drive everywhere they want to go, and most neighbourhoods that aren't suburbs are mostly made up of apartment/condo buildings and the only one you can even access is your own. Even in more medium-density areas that are designed to be walkable, it's common for street-level properties to be commercial (with residential behind/above), so accessing homes from the street can be tricky.

Given the choice between having kids wander around streets that are fundamentally designed to be unsafe for pedestrians, wander the halls of an apartment building where it may or may not be the norm for kids to trick-or-treat, or get together with a bunch of your friends and your kids' friends and just exchange candy directly at a small costume party, I can actually understand why trunk-or-treating wins out there. The other options just aren't overly appealing. Traditional trick-or-treating really only works in neighbourhoods that mostly consist of single-family homes or townhouses/duplexes, but that are also relatively dense and therefore easy to get around on foot, and nobody really builds neighbourhoods like that anymore.