Lurker > darkknight109

Totally normal. I occasionally skip a day's meals if I'm just not that hungry.

Your body can go a month without food. It's not healthy to do that, but it's possible. I put that to the test when I was a university student, because I got a mouth infection that basically rendered me unable to eat or drink anything other than water. I couldn't eat for almost two weeks and I have a pretty lean build to begin with, so I was absolutely gaunt at the end of it.

NightMareBunny posted...

That stigma wont change until the big companies start reinforcing it and telling people its true

That's easier said than done, though, because it's not just a matter of *telling* people there's animation for adults out there, it's a matter of making it and getting people to watch it. It's hard to get projects greenlit at studios (especially these days, where revenue is down significantly from where it was even just 10-20 years ago) if you're pitching an unproven idea for what looks to them like a niche market.

Western animation used to be truly all-ages, but we can largely thank Hanna-Barbera studios for changing it into something aimed for kids (since they learned pretty quickly that kids had the greatest tolerance for cheaply-made garbage that they could churn out quickly); Japan never suffered the development of the "animation age ghetto" and their view of animation as being something for everyone persisted into the modern era. I think that's ultimately why adult-oriented anime has enjoyed significant success there, while non-comedic adult-oriented western cartoons are both rare and generally not successful.

Weren't there talks in Congress a couple years ago about erasing DST?

Talks? No, not really. A couple of senators snuck the removal into another bill and no one noticed, so it passed the senate without debate. The House never bothered to debate it or bring it up for a vote, so it died there.

Because most of western animation is designed for kids/families, and the ones that aren't are nearly all parodical comedies (The Simpsons set the tone for this, and South Park, Family Guy, and the like followed). There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare.

By contrast, in anime you can quite easily find works designed for pretty much any demographic and genre. You are much less pigeonholed into the "kids show or Simpsons clone" box.

I've been a martial artist for over 30 years now. I teach classes 3x a week, and do my own practice/studies twice a week.

25 years ago was the first time someone said to me that consoles were about to become obsolete (because who needs a console when a PC with emulators can play everything?!).

I 've been hearing it every couple of years since. I'm sure they'll be right eventually, but probably not any time soon.

adjl posted...

You can collect a pint every 12 weeks from women, or every 8 weeks from men, starting at age 17. Now, there's certainly room to argue about the ethics of using that blood to prop up the textiles industry instead of saving lives, but some of the less common, non-universal types could be reasonably used outside of medicine. Most donors would eventually stop being eligible, but there are definitely enough adults out there who don't/can't have sex to maintain a reasonably stable supply.

Just ask Brian to do it while he's washing them. Problem solved!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yeah, but fuel consumption is exponential. Which means it's far more efficient to shuttle everything up into orbit in multiple smaller trips than it would be to load everything into a single ship that has to both reach orbit and then begin a longer trip outbound. The vast majority of its fuel would be consumed on launch. You'd use less fuel with smaller shuttles or rockets launching supplies into orbit.

Well... no, you wouldn't.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with "exponential", because that could be referring to multiple different things. I'm assuming you're referring to the fact that rocket efficiency decreases with mass (since each unit of fuel needs to propel not just the rocket, but all remaining fuel as well)... except, that doesn't really apply here, because your "mass" is static. If our hypothetical Mars ship is going to weigh, say, 10,000 tonnes, then all of that mass has to get up into space; whether you do it in one trip or several, the amount of mass you have to move is going to be the same.

Now, that doesn't guarantee that doing it all in a single trip is the most effective solution either. If you do it that way, you avoid having to ferry up tools and eventual waste materiel, but you deal with less efficient tools. If you ferry up the parts piecemeal, you get more efficient fuel, but you introduce additional inefficiencies (whatever vehicle you used to get up there has to either have the capacity to land and be re-used or be disposable, both of which introduce additional costs and materiel demands). Ultimately, a lot depends on the design of the Mars ship in question - it's not a simple statement to say, "It would make more sense to build it in space," since that's not guaranteed.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's the same reason why the shuttles used to have booster rockets and external fuel tanks. It takes a major effort to get up there. Once you're up there, though, it takes much less effort to head outward.

As a counterpoint, though, if you're launching from Earth you already have significant velocity which, depending on your escape vector, you can then simply redirect into heading for Mars. If you're building the ship in a dock in orbit, you'll need to burn some considerable fuel to get yourself out of orbit and headed towards Mars. Not as much as a launch from Earth, granted, but it is more fuel (that will need to be carried up to space).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's why most proposed scenarios for long-term space programs usually involve some sort of space-based drydock or other shipyard to build and maintain ships in space without having to constantly bring them through atmosphere.

Sure, for long-term design. I was assuming we were talking about a one-off ship. If you're planning on making a full program out of this and doing it more then once, then absolutely, a stardock of some sort quickly becomes much more sensible.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Larger structures will have more significant stress points and material fatigue risk.

So, I'm a materials engineer and I deal with fatigue on a daily basis. I can tell you quite confidently, fatigue is not going to be a dominant risk factor on these ships - not unless you're planning on using them for multiple trips (and even then, you'd presumably do maintenance on them in-between, which is what we've been doing for years with other reusable spaceships).

First off, fatigue is primarily associated with metals, as well as some ceramics. I can't claim extensive knowledge of the sorts of materials NASA is building their stuff out of, but given its material properties (lightweight, ductile, very high strength-to-weight ratio), I would not anticipate them being at elevated susceptibility to fatigue damage (many of the historical composites that NASA has helped pioneer are known for their excellent fatigue resistance, far above and beyond what we see out of metals). Now, anything can fatigue if subjected to cyclic load long enough, but then we get to our next issue: spaceflight generally doesn't induce cyclic loading; that's something we more typically see in aircraft. Helicopter rotors and airplane wings are constantly in motion, constantly being subjected to loading and unloading as they flex during flight. But in space, you're not dealing with air or gravity, so stress-cycling tends to be minimal and restricted mostly to when you're near/in a planetary atmosphere. Once you're actually out in space and moving, your stresses are relatively static and you don't have the stressors that tend to cause fatigue damage in aerial vehicles (flexing wings/rotors, gusts of air, etc.).

Not to mention, there's all sorts of things you can do from an engineering standpoint to mitigate fatigue risk, from design (e.g. avoid hard edges) to construction (molecularly bonding material components generally reduces fatigue risk).

Honestly, the biggest materials concerns I would have with space shuttle components are fretting (which has historically been an issue - the Galileo spacecraft's issue with the high-gain antenna was a result of fretting bonding part of the antenna to an abutting component), erosion (because of the sheer temperature involved, ceramics are really the only thing you can build a lot of the external portions of a spaceship out of, and they tend to have poor tribological properties; at the speeds spacecraft are travelling, the air itself can act as an erosive media, which has been a longstanding challenge for spacecraft), and delamination of composites.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Imagine driving your car down the freeway. Now imagine your check engine light comes on. Even with the most robust built-in diagnostic system to tell you exactly what the fault is, it would be somewhat difficult for you to crawl out of the sunroof, crawl down to the hood, then open the hood and change your alternator while the car is still driving.

This isn't really an accurate comparison.

In-situ repairs of spacecraft are quite viable and we know this because we do it constantly with the International Space Station. Unlike with a car, where you have to deal with gravity, wind, and the fact that you'd presumably want someone driving the car for you, with a spacecraft - even one moving to Mars at considerable speed - you can quite happily go strolling out the airlock onto the exterior of the ship (as long as you're tethered to something), because you're moving at the same speed the ship is and there's no air resistance to slow you down. Fixing the ship mid-flight isn't generally going to be any more difficult than fixing it (or building it) in orbit around Earth, so long as you have supplies on hand. On that note:

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And that's not even getting into external damage - a few micrometeors start punching holes through vital parts and you're screwed.

Micrometeors in the space between planets are rare (they tend to cluster around things with mass, like planets). More to the point, planning for repairs is, once again, a standard part of spacecraft design and has been for a long time. To pick one example, the final flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia was supposed to last two weeks (January 16 - February 1, 2003), but it was equipped with four months of additional supplies, in case something went wrong that rendered the ship unsafe to land.

shadowsword87 posted...

Texas has been pulling more and more high tech production towards them, that's where most of the jobs are for my field.
There's a nonzero chance that it flips with all of the moving.

People have been saying this every election cycle since at least 2016, and not only has Texas never flipped, it's never even really come close.

In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by 9 points statewide, and in 2020 he beat Biden by 6 points (notably dramatically outperforming the polls, which expected him to win by 1-2 points). Calling elections this far out is a mug's game, but thus far there's nothing in the polls that suggest that Trump is in any real danger of losing Texas in 2024.

And that's backed up down-ballot. Abbott thumped O'Rourke in the 2022 gubernatorial election by 11 points and in so doing, marked 30 years of Republican rule over the state (the last time a Democrat won the Texas Governor's mansion was in 1990). Texas's senators are both Republican, and have been since the 90s; the House reps are also roughly two-thirds Republican (though that, at least, is a bit misleading due to Texas having some pretty wild gerrymandering that favours the Republicans), and both the state house and state senate are controlled by Republicans.

Texas is slowly, slowly going more blue, but the odds that it actually flips this election are pretty negligible.

Aculo posted...

I'm not as worried as I was the last couple of elections, tbh. Incumbent presidents tend to get re-elected when the economy is strong and they're not wrapped up in any (real) enormous scandals.

The only caveat here is the US seems to be moving into a new era of politics, and a lot of the old "conventional wisdom" no longer applies.

By conventional wisdom, Donald Trump never should have gotten anywhere close to the Republican nomination, nevermind the actual presidency. To cherry-pick one example, Howard Dean's presidential ambitions ended because he screamed wrong; yet Trump survived scandals that would have sunk any politician from 10+ years ago. By conventional wisdom, the 2022 midterms - where the Democrats had the presidency, but were presiding over a somewhat moribund economy - should have been a landslide for the Republicans, but instead the Republicans held the senate and only barely lost the House. A lot of the polling in the last two election cycles has completely whiffed on their predictions (both Biden and Hillary were expected to cruise to easy victories; the former only barely squeaked out a win, coming perilously close to losing critical swing states, while the latter ultimately lost by similar margins; similarly, Texas and Florida in 2020 and Ohio in 2016 were supposed to be toss-ups, but the Republicans dominated in all three states).

"Conventional wisdom" appears to be failing us, and I think we still haven't fully figured out what the new normal for this era is.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It'd be way easier without needing to survive the landing.

This was my immediate thought.

Dying on Mars is actually pretty easy - certainly a lot easier than surviving on Mars.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Some of that can be offset if we built a ship in orbit and then launched it from there so you wouldn't need to bring the entire mass of the ship to escape velocity in atmosphere all at once (you'd basically need to ferry all the supplies up to space and launch from there, which would require much less fuel for the outward trip).

Debatable - you still need to ferry all the supplies up to orbit, but now you also need to ferry up the tools and equipment needed to construct the thing as well. Additionally, all construction produces waste - if we build the ship on Earth, the waste stays here, but if we build it in space, we're sending it up to space as well, which requires more energy.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Other problems would involve whether or not we could build a ship sturdy enough to even survive the trip

I don't think that's a pertinent issue. We've built plenty of (unmanned) ships that have not only made it to Mars, but have left our solar system still functional. Putting humans onboard does introduce additional demands on the ship, but it also introduces someone who can conduct repairs, if the damage is straightforward enough to address. In terms of landing on Mars, we built shuttles decades ago that could exit and re-enter Earth's atmosphere, so once again not something unprecedented.

Your biggest challenge would probably be designing a lander that can handle re-entry and landing on a surface that is neither water nor asphalt, while not producing forces that would injure or kill the people onboard. We've landed rovers on Mars before, so it's possible to land *stuff* there, I'm just unclear on whether that could be scaled up to a lander of sufficient size to support human habitation and colonization (if I had to design it, I'd probably make it two different landers: one whose sole job is to transport the humans, and a second to land supplies and materials, as the demands on that lander will be substantially lower than one for living beings).

keyblader1985 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/6e8b3771.jpg

This one's clever - I like it.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I mean, scummy though that is, it's really not going to affect the presidential election. Though starting to trend a lot more purple than in the past, Texas still isn't what anyone but the hopelessly overoptimistic would call a swing state. Regardless of Paxton's fuckery, Trump's not going to have any problems winning there.

Jkd91 posted...

Im not American so ive no real idea what he was like as president, but he seems like fun compared to biden, you never really hear anything about him compared to trump.

That's a good thing.

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

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Considering he spent his entire Presidency constantly having roadblocks thrown up by grandstanding political rivals and being torn down by media, it's not as if he could have accomplished much of value regardless of whether or not his intended policies or goals were worthwhile or not

I mean, welcome to every presidency of the last 20 years. Three of them managed to get shit done in spite of it (not necessarily good shit, but shit).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But that's a level of perspective most people are utterly incapable of these days, because lol orange man bad.

None of what you said is mutually exclusive with recognizing Trump as an awful president and an awful person in general. The facetious dismissal of complaints against Trump as "orange man bad" rings pretty hollow when you're talking about a man who:
a) Is facing down just shy of 100 criminal charges, making him the only former president of either party to be charged for crimes conducted while in office (with a big asterisk that Nixon probably should own that [dis-]honour, but Ford made sure he didn't).
b) Was found to have defrauded the government and investors to the tune of almost half a billion dollars
c) Is an adjudicated rapist (!!)
d) Was the only president to have been impeached twice, including for an incitement of insurrection over the single time in US history where the transfer of power between administrations did not happen peacefully.

None of that is subjective or debatable, or getting into a discussion on any of his other numerous misdeeds and what I'll call "politically dubious" actions.

If you think Trump didn't get a fair shake from the media and political opponents... well, judging by that rap sheet, they were probably right not to. He really was that bad.

papercup posted...

its a strategy RPG from Vanillaware

Sold.

I have yet to play a bad game from Vanillaware.

papercup posted...

Honestly, even if he somehow loses, hell probably find some way to steal the election. Whether it be the Supreme Court, fucking with the electoral college, or violence, hes going to worm his way back into the White House.

If he couldn't do it in 2020, when he still had the executive branch at his beck and call, what makes you think 2024 would be any different?

People seem to forget that Trump's a flaming moron. Even if he wanted to pull a coup, he lacks the brainpower to do so.

Link_of_time posted...

This thing really is Biden's to lose. A lot of ppl don't realize how much steam Trump lost last election.

This is where I'm at.

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

Trump hasn't even really articulated any real policies he has for once he's back in office. Last time he at least talked about "the wall", as dumb an idea as that was, but he's even drifted away from that now.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/0a8f39f2.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/2d9f4460.jpg

TomNook posted...

This could just mean that they lower prices during slower hours

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/8fda0e73.jpg

Monopoman posted...

Also some in NYC do support Trump so this notion that everyone in NYC thinks Trump is the worst is a fucking joke.

Honestly, the idea of populations being monoliths is hilariously ignorant. As Randall Munroe so adroitly put it: there are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Mein Kampf.

I don't think the book itself was all that influential; the prick behind it was, and I don't think he would have been any less so had he been unpublished.

Anyways, tough call. Lord of the Rings basically codified every sci-fi trope in existence today, so it's pretty much the most influential work in terms of how it shaped our views of fiction. To Kill a Mockingbird is the other big contender in my eyes - it basically dragged racial attitudes in the American South out into the open, talking about a lot of stuff that wasn't openly discussed at the time.

But this is where we get into whether we're talking about influential "today" or influential at the time of its release. Because To Kill a Mockingbird was colossally influential in the first few decades after its release, but I honestly don't think it's nearly as impactful today, because a lot of books have since followed and done everything it was trying to do, but better and more comprehensively (some of its literary flaws - like the fact that the black characters are all tremendously flat and underdeveloped, which comes across as odd in a story with racial prejudice as one of its core themes). It's no longer a contemporary look at the South, making it more of a history piece. As well, the further away from the US you get geographically, the less impact that book has.

So, yeah, I'd say LotR if we're asking the question from a modern day perspective.

hungrymike posted...

He didn't lie about what it was worth.

He objectively did, bro.

hungrymike posted...

Its worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If the banks evaluators accepted it as collateral than that's what it worth

If I claim that I own 10 tonnes of solid gold bullion and I use that as collateral for a loan, but it's actually just some cardboard cutouts painted to look like gold, I have committed fraud, regardless of if I pay the loan back or not. I claimed to have more value to my name in order to secure the loan than I actually did, thereby exposing the bank to substantially higher risk than they were willing to take on; that they ultimately didn't suffer for taking on that risk doesn't mean that I acted honestly or ethically, nor does it mean I didn't commit a crime.

And this is doubly true if, for instance, my local government passed a law that adjusted taxes based on your personal wealth and I stated in my claim, "Oh, I don't have any gold, just cardboard", which shows that I am knowingly and willfully deceiving the bank (and if, hypothetically, a couple of those bullion *were* actually gold, I'm also defrauding the government, much like Trump did when he highballed his property evaluations when trying to secure loans, then lowballed them when the tax assessors came around).

hungrymike posted...

When I go take out a second mortgage on my house, the bank just doesn't take my word on it that its worth infinitibillion dollars. They do their own evaluation.

Which does not give you the right to deliberately try and deceive them. That the bank should have caught Trump out in his lies (and would have, had they done better due diligence) does not mean his attempts at defrauding them are A-OK.

This is like suggesting that it's not battery unless the other person fights back.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

this is wild to me because i can't even remember when their player didn't work this way

Yeah, this isn't new.

What browser are you guys using that this is just showing up now? I only ever watch it in Chrome on a PC and it's worked this way for as long as I can recall.

They have made other changes recently that irk me, though. Like now if you resume watching a video after your computer has resumed from sleep, when it reaches part of the video it doesn't have cached it will automatically rewind 15 seconds, which is really annoying.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

The Union never did a two state solution with the confederacy.

The Union also never forced all the confederates to leave the country after their victory, nor did they destroy their homes and build new settlements on land stolen from them, nor did they treat them as second-class citizens under the law.

Not to put too fine a point on it or anything.

Eventually, probably. Maybe.

I'll be honest, I didn't really like the first one. I'm curious enough to see what they do with the second one, but I'll probably wait until I can get it for cheap.

Evenings. I don't fascinate going to bed to marinate in my own grime.

A remake? None. Any game can be remade - the whole point of remaking them is to modernize them, and that involves redoing anything that doesn't fit with modern tastes in gaming. Take FF7R for an excellent example - all the things that made that game feel dated, from the cultural (somewhat dodgy translation, Barrett being a blatant Mr. T expy, everything to do with the Honeybee Inn) to the technical (getting rid of random encounters, changing it from a relatively simplistic menu-based combat system to a more action-RPG combat engine in line with more recent FF titles) were completely overhauled (and I say this as someone who vastly preferred the original to the remake). With that in mind, there is no game that could not be remade; it might lose a lot of faithfulness to the original (as FF7R did), but so long as you're OK with that, the sky's the limit.

A remaster? Now that's a different story. If you're keeping the core elements of the game, no matter how dated, you start getting into the territory of games that just don't work with modern game design. A few I can think of:
-Any of the oldschool Sierra games (King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, etc.). The idea that you not only *can*, but almost assuredly *will* lock yourself out of being able to complete the game because you didn't follow whatever fever-dream logic the game developers cooked up while on the acid trip that inspired the game and have to restart the entire game from scratch if you didn't keep multiple save files going is completely antithetical to modern adventure game design and modern game design in general.
-The Lunar games, particularly Silver Star Story. I love SSSC - it's one of my favourite games of all time - but all the things that made them unique and amazing back in the day have been overshadowed by what came since. In particular, there's no way an RPG would get by with a battle system as simplistic as Silver Star Story's in the modern era.
-The original Metroid. No map system, a confusing, maze-like layout, and simplistic bosses means that in order to bring it up to modern standards (as Zero Mission did), you basically need to ditch a lot of its unique features.

fettster777 posted...

As much as I don't agree with a lot of her policies she is definitely the better candidate.

Honestly, in some parallel universe where she actually had a shot at becoming the nominee, I don't seriously see a path for Biden to win. She's charismatic, she's intelligent, and she has enough conservative bonafides to rally the Republicans while still maintaining enough sanity to draw on soft-right and centrist voters. And given that she's a younger woman of colour running against an old white guy, the contrast between the two candidates couldn't be more stark (and not in Biden's favour).

But no, the Republicans have decided that their best bet for a return to power is a geriatric orange con-man who ended his last stint as president overseeing an insurrection while a biblical plague swept the land and who now barely knows what day it is or which of his many criminal trials he's supposed to be attending this week.

Depends on your definition.

A movie that most people think is bad but I unironically think is good? Matrix Revolutions. The battle scenes in that movie were a highlight of the entire series and no one will be able to convince me otherwise.

A movie that is bad but that I love for being bad? The closest I get to that is the original Mortal Kombat. I wouldn't call it a bad movie, but it's definitely campy and cheesy and I love the hell out of it for it. The movie doesn't take itself too seriously and it's a tonne of fun.

Ultimate is the best game for the fighting itself, Melee is the best game for literally everything else. Character unlocks, Adventure mode, the trophies - all were at their absolute best in Melee.

Muscles posted...

Brute force > money

Money means nothing if someone too powerful for you to stop takes it all

There is no one in the world who has sufficient brute force to straight-up take money who isn't already loaded. Those two go hand in hand.

Kind of hard to rally people to fight for your cause if you can't pay them.

ItIsSoOver posted...

You have to work to get it, and you have to work to maintain it.

I mean, that depends heavily on your genetics.

Like, I was lucky enough to be naturally very fit. I was always slim growing up, despite having an atrocious diet, I could run faster than ~80% of people in my class despite not having any hobbies that emphasized run speed, and when I started lifting weights as a teen I put on muscle pretty quickly. I would be lying if I said I "worked" for a fit body; I just got a good pull on the genetics lottery.

I also don't find it particularly difficult to stay fit these days. Granted, I'm a dedicated martial artist and I train a solid five nights a week, but not all of that training is geared towards physical fitness. I've seen people who put way more work into physical fitness than myself and wound up with way less to show for it. Genetics sucks sometimes.

Never seen fitness as a status symbol, though. Maybe that's the circles that I run in. Honestly, most of the time I find those who hyper-fixate on fitness as a status symbol to usually be masking some pretty deep insecurities.