Lurker > adjl

Won't somebody think of the straight white cismen for a change?

funkyfritter posted...

Definitely Wikipedia. If youtube vanished, another video hosting site would take its place quickly. If wikipedia vanished, whatever took its place would almost certainly be profit-driven and terrible.

This feels like cheating, but definitely influenced my thought process. There are already alternatives to Youtube where pretty much all current content would be reuploaded shortly after Youtube shut down. Some content would be lost, certainly, and the content creation ecosystem would change a lot because I'm assuming those alternatives don't have Google money backing them up to compensate creators (though there's a very high chance Google would just buy the most successful one anyway, like they did when Youtube beat Google Video), but something like Youtube will always exist.

Wikipedia, though? There are no viable alternatives for that kind of general knowledge/reference, and I'd be extremely surprised if any attempts to recreate it weren't heavily capitalized on. Wikipedia is arguably the greatest thing to come out of the Internet as far as the free exchange of knowledge goes. Losing that would be pretty devastating.

fishy071 posted...

I think I use YouTube more, but Wikipedia seems more useful. However, I've heard that the information is not very reliable.

It's fine for general reference purposes, provided you're not looking at anything controversial enough to be embroiled in an edit war between conflicting opinions. Just follow up with the cited sources periodically to make sure they're credible and you'll generally be fine. Most of the "Wikipedia isn't reliable enough to use as a source!" you got in school was less a matter of it not having correct information on the subjects you were studying and more a matter of school trying to teach you research skills and not wanting you to use Wikipedia to skip learning them. Wikipedia's a fine source for everyday and early post-secondary levels of knowledge, but if you're going to go any further in academia, you need to be able to do your own research properly.

Zareth posted...

I wish other games would get broken as hard as SM64 has.

After watching Pannenkoek's 4-hour invisible wall video, it seems like a miracle that we were able to play it properly at all, though I get that that's an exhaustive breakdown of decades of research into the game and doesn't necessarily represent the typical play experience.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Yeah, I thought it was something on that level. LUE was basically GameFAQs 4chan, in a lot of ways, and that definitely got taken too far on a few occasions.

I use Youtube more, but if I had to choose one to keep I'd choose Wikipedia.

Sounds to me like the Youtube algorithm is just preferentially feeding you more videos of the same types you've already watched. When you watch those, that reinforces the algorithm's belief that that's what you want, so you get more like that. Mario Maker in particular is likely to be more restrictive than most other games because there are relatively few games like it out there, so that's probably also limiting what you see.

If you branch out into different sorts of games (particularly games that are less unique), the variety will increase.

They're good for other investors that profit from the artificial scarcity they create, but that's a pretty small number of people who generally don't need any help. In every other regard they're a bunch of parasites without whom the world would be genuinely better off.

CassandraCroft posted...

Is it still around anywhere?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/402-Life-the-universe-and-everything

Only mods and admins can even access it now. It's not technically deleted, but it might as well be.

CassandraCroft posted...

What happened in there to make the admins to close it off?

I can't speak to it personally because it was before my time (this was late 90's/early 00's, and while I was around in that I was using GameFAQs for game FAQs and occasionally posting on boards once I turned 13 in 2002, I wasn't exactly up to date on deeper community drama), but as I understand it was much of the same stuff that prompted them to kill Politics and CE: people trolling and being offensive on a scale that demanded more of the mods' time than they were willing to keep spending.

CassandraCroft posted...

I do not think CE will die. I post/lurk in there every day and I am always seeing new names I haven't seen before.

It won't die any time soon, but it will eventually. The site as a whole is already dwindling because more people are drifting away than are being replaced by new users, and now for CE in particular no new users will ever be joining the community. With CE no longer readily accessible through the board list, existing users stumbling across it is now less likely (they either have to really go looking for it or be linked to it), and anyone that's spent any time in Purg since the beginning of May will be locked out, all of which adds up to a significantly reduced chance that any departing users are replaced. That, in turn, fuels a death spiral: As the community shrinks, it becomes less active, which causes more people to drift away because it's not active enough to be interesting anymore, which shrinks it further. Fandom's already used "hardly anyone posted there anyway" to justify closing the Religion board altogether, so I expect there'll be some activity threshold below which they'll just close CE themselves.

Ultimately, though, I think that's kind of what Fandom is going for. Veteran users that mostly just hang out in the same community boards all day don't generate as much ad revenue as users that bounce between multiple game boards and info pages for those games (and while I have no actual stats to support this, I'd expect that long-time users are more likely to block ads than new ones because they experienced the site before the ads got so bad). Devoting bandwidth and mod resources to maintain those community boards isn't going to be as profitable as shifting the focus to attracting more users that just want to talk about games. Toss in that Fandom's executives seem to believe that new users are going to be turned away by controversial or offensive content on social boards (never mind how vanishingly rare it is for anyone that isn't already established as a GameFAQs user to accidentally stumble across any of the social boards), and you've got a move to push out social boards altogether.

CassandraCroft posted...

There is a thread over on CE using the term LUE can you someone please tell me what is/was this LUE and why did they get rid of it/close off access?

Life, the Universe, and Everything was a social board in GameFAQs' early days that was particularly rampant with trolling and other shenanigans. To solve this, the board was made private, making it so no new users could join and anyone who was banned would lose access permanently. As expected, this caused the board to die a slow death, instead of just removing the misbehaviour problems and allowing a healthy social community to remain.

Basically, it was exactly what's happened to CE. Somehow, Dtoast insists that he's both aware of LUE and yet also doesn't expect this to have the same effect, which is some pretty questionable logic.

It is surprisingly easy to fall for scams, sometimes, as much as we like to think it's only stupid people that do. The vast majority are obvious, but it only takes one particularly well-crafted one lining up with a momentary lapse of skepticism to get screwed over.

Health-adjacent. I'm involved in administering health program funding to Canada's First Nation communities.

CassandraCroft posted...

it was clear raising the Karma level to 50 to entre wasn't working so they did the next logical step they could in closing it off.

The actual next logical step would be to raise the karma limit to 300-500 or so and make more liberal use of usermap axes for repeat offenders (possibly modifying the penalties to include a 300 karma penalty for any suspension and applying that to all accounts on a given usermap). 50 karma's nothing, so it's trivial for trolls to just make a bunch of extra accounts and put a modicum of effort into getting their karma up so they have a backup. Maintaining multiple accounts like that for over a year while being careful never to use any of them on the same IP address, though? That's a level of dedication very few trolls are willing to put in, such that stamping them out on the rare occasions they crop up isn't hard.

But no, they just want to LUE the board.

Mostly, I'm guessing they're just looking at CE, recognizing that it's the one that's taking the most mod resources to manage, and trying to solve that problem in a manner that doesn't immediately destroy the site's user count (instead, slowly bleeding users while they try to promote other parts of the site to keep the total user base roughly the same).

In practice, there's a good chance the problem users from CE will just keep bothering other boards and require mods to pay attention to more places, so it's not necessarily the best plan.

Pretty sure that was him trying to frame it as not being a crime at all. I've seen quite a few people take that approach, insisting that Trump did nothing wrong because all he did was call a payment he made his lawyer a legal expense. Such people seem unfamiliar with both the concept and the limitations of plausible deniability.

Somebody asked "what if soup didn't have to be so soupy?"

I can't speak for how the remakes compare to each other, but going by the originals (or at least the Wii VC version, in SMRPG's case), SMRPG is just as good but more dated. You can see a lot of the ways in which the mechanics and ideas from SMRPG evolved into PM64 and TTYD, they just haven't evolved yet because it's several years older. Still very much worth playing and will likely scratch a similar itch.

faramir77 posted...

The biggest criticism I can give this game is that it clearly lacks polish in places where it really has no excuse.

The main excuse for that is that Miyamoto was being a little bitch about not being in charge of the game and only gave Aonuma a year to churn it out, insisting that it be released on its scheduled release date regardless of what state it was in (apparently "a delayed game can eventually be good" only applies to himself). That's a big part of why so many models were reused, since they just straight up didn't have time to make all-new ones. It's honestly a miracle we got a working game at all, let alone one that's legitimately comparable to OoT (and I'd actually say better, but that's mostly me loving the atmosphere and worldbuilding so much).

OhhhJa posted...

I always shake the pump just because I don't want it dripping all over the place when I pull it out

This. I doubt I've gained any meaningful amount of gas from it, but it helps keep things tidier.

Marcster1994 posted...

There was a juror that Trump's attorney was absolutely banking on. They said they got thier news from Truth Social.

Seems like their bubble popped when they saw the real Donald Trump.

I would have thought such a juror would have been screened out for being obviously biased, but I guess not. I guess it also wasn't really a problem if it didn't affect the outcome.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

I guess the Deku Tree is a decent choice for the first set. I hope they come out with smaller sets though, because $300 is steep.

I expect most of them to be at least $200+. They probably aren't going to be marketing many Zelda sets to kids the way they've done Mario, Sonic, and Minecraft (focusing on modular play sets that are individually cheaper), so I'd expect most of them to be more complex display pieces targeted at nostalgic adults with money. Lego's done some display pieces targeted at adults that are smaller (like the Bonsai or Tranquil Garden sets), but generally not many licensed ones.

fettster777 posted...

I'm looking forward to the Lego Barad-Dur set.

Barad Dur is really cool, but having already spent a small fortune on Rivendell back in February (which is an absolutely fantastic set and I have no regrets), I'm a little tapped out on expensive Lego sets for the time being and I'll probably skip it.

Quite a few people are above the law, but they're all a lot richer than Trump and a lot better at keeping a low enough profile to get away with it. Trump likes to think he's that rich, but he really isn't, and he can't keep his mouth shut to save his life.

Roachmeat posted...

A slippery slope in answering this, but you would have some people (at the top) say that is the point. It is more a lasting punishment/prosecution.

If you punish somebody for failing to be a productive member of society by preventing them from becoming a productive member of society, you've given up all pretense of trying to solve the problem and are just looking for meaningless catharsis. That's stupid and should never be the basis of a justice system.

You'll also notice that the half of the sentence you cropped out framed that outcome in terms of impact on society, not as an undue punishment for the criminal. Preventing somebody from becoming a productive member of society hurts society. It means they don't contribute taxes, have to rely more on social services (a tax drain), and are more likely to end up committing further crimes (with both direct costs to society and further tax drains responding to those crimes). Even without considering the morality of how a criminal is punished, considering the simple practical reality of the situation tells you that focusing on rehabilitation and reintegration is a better idea than focusing on punishment for punishment's sake.

Roachmeat posted...

In the case of shoplifters though, the 'overlooked' ones can be the ones that don't get blatantly caught (or the ones who don't open canisters up and then leave the stuff open on the shelf).

The ones that get blatantly caught are indeed marginally cheaper to prosecute than those that don't, but the bulk of the cost is still on the prosecution end, not in simply catching them. Unless they've stolen several hundred dollars worth of stuff, even sending a couple of emails between the lawyers handling the case costs more than would be lost by leaving them alone. This isn't a matter of "it's too expensive to prosecute every shoplifter," it's "the majority of shoplifters aren't enough of a problem to justify the expense of prosecuting any of them."

Again, collectively, shoplifting is a significant problem. In the example Mike gave of locking up toothpaste, that's generally a response to stores having hundreds or thousands of dollars of toothpaste stolen frequently enough to justify the cost, inconvenience, and lost business from locking them up, and that's really hard for businesses to deal with. But that's not one or two people stealing $1000 worth of toothpaste. That's 1-200 people each stealing 1-2 $5 tubes, and to prosecute any of them requires a minimum of a few hundred dollars in legal costs each (which you can try to recover from them, but odds are if they need to steal toothpaste, you're not getting that money any time soon). Whether that means you're spending $5000 to prosecute the ten you caught easily or catching all of them and spending $50-100,000, you're still spending far, far more than was lost (and, in turn, than can be mitigated by those efforts).

Higher-value theft? Sure, prosecute that. Serial cases? Go for it. But when it comes to smaller-scale petty theft, there are generally more cost-effective interventions than prosecution, like reimbursing businesses for their losses to keep insurance premiums down, community building efforts that help teenagers have more interesting things to do than steal random crap, and making sure support services have enough toothpaste to give out that nobody needs to steal it (noting that if toothpaste has become a high-theft item, that's almost entirely due to the cost of living crisis, not any sort of epidemic of people thinking it's fun to steal toothpaste).

Blightzkrieg posted...

I liked the taxi system where you actually got to see the world.

It was kind of cool, but some of the flight paths were just way too long. Even on the shorter ones, the novelty of getting to see the world kind of wears off after the first few times you do it, so for travelling to frequently-visited dungeons/farming spots or levelling alts it just became a pointless time sink (especially where you also have to wait for other party members to make the trek). I remember I installed Bejewelled and Peggle mods just so I'd have something to do on flight paths, and I'd still often end up alt-tabbing and doing something else.

There is something to be said for slow travel in what it does to create the sense that you're existing within an actual world and not just jumping between points of interest, but it's a very delicate balance between encouraging exploration and just forcing tedium on players. For single-player games, my preference is definitely to have the option of convenient fast travel, but then have a world that's designed well enough (both aesthetically and mechanically) that the player will want to explore on their own terms even once they unlock fast travel points that make that exploration unnecessary. For multiplayer games, it gets a bit trickier in that if 4/5 party members have already teleported to the dungeon and the fifth feels like spending an extra 10 minutes taking the scenic route, that fifth player is getting kicked for wasting everyone else's time, but I think the philosophy and core goals remain the same.

Nade_Duck posted...

it shouldn't last past the relevant expansion, but i like that you have to unlock flying for each new continent. it makes you actually explore the world and makes the game feel large and alive.

It also creates a sense of progression in the new zones. When you arrive, there are places you can't get to, not because you'll get massacred by the enemies, but because you physically can't reach them. You also have to deal with higher-levelled enemies blocking your path instead of flying over them. Over time, that lets you work toward getting to the new places by levelling up, gearing up, and eventually unlocking flying, and that all makes sense.

But yes, for old content that mostly just exists to provide a levelling bridge between previous expansions and the current one, automatically unlocking flying right out of the gate makes sense. I think there's also a case to be made for the unlock to be account-wide (at least on a given server), since forcing that sense of progression on players who have already experienced it isn't really necessary.

There's some concentrated kool-aid out there.

hungrymike posted...

Not prosecuting smaller crimes leads to the commission of more serious crimes.

This sounds like the sort of claim that's empirically verifiable enough that people feel comfortable saying it, but they feel so comfortable that they never bother to actually substantiate it. It's very similar to "weed is a gateway drug" in that regard. With that in mind, are you able to substantiate the claim that failing to adequately prosecute shoplifting increases the risk of shoplifters graduating to more serious crimes on an appreciable scale? Or are you just regurgitating the claim as a matter of feel-good dogma?

hungrymike posted...

While the cost of each individual shoplifter may not be much, collectively it leads to higher prices, lost tax revenue, store closures and businesses shutting down, and lost time and a more inconvienient shopping experience.

And what would the cost to taxpayers be if every shoplifter were prosecuted? How much would prices increase to cover that? How many stores would close because they couldn't afford the higher taxes? For that matter, what happens when more people end up with criminal convictions and can't find work (or are forced to settle for lower-paying jobs) as a result, reducing the tax revenue they can provide and placing more strain on taxpayer-funded support systems?

I'm not suggesting shoplifters should never be prosecuted, but it's a balancing act. You can't bring the full might of the judicial system to bear on every minor crime. Even putting aside the question of morality, it's just not practical. As you pointed out, resources are limited, and that means making decisions about what to overlook so more important things can be prioritized.

I'm ashamed to admit that I thought it was Corvid-19 for like a day or two when the official name was first announced. In my defense, that's an equally valid portmanteau of "coronavirus disease" as Covid is.

darkknight109 posted...

Like, this is the guy responsible for actually deciding if Jesus is a criminal or not saying, in not so many words, "Guys, he didn't do anything, what's your problem?" Part of the reason why Jesus getting crucified was painted as a travesty was because he was dragged in front of what passed for a court in ye olde Rome, was found to be innocent of wrongdoing, but they decided "f*** it", and executed him anyways.

Which, y'know, is kind of the polar opposite of what happened to Trump.

Of course, certain people probably see that as being more or less exactly what happened to Trump: He didn't really do anything wrong, but because the masses were calling for his head the courts decided to punish him despite his innocence. That is, of course, demonstrably nonsense, but that's never particularly stopped these people.

hungrymike posted...

Tell that to Bragg, who has down graded over half of felonies to misdemeanors and refuses to prosecute shoplifters.

How much do you think it costs to prosecute somebody (bearing in mind that, at a minimum, you're looking at two lawyers and a judge that each make a couple hundred an hour)? How much do you think any individual shoplifter actually costs society?

Collectively, shoplifting is certainly a problem, but it's a problem spread out across thousands of small-scale criminals, each of which is far more expensive to prosecute than to leave alone. If resources are limited, disregarding any but the most egregious examples of shoplifting is precisely what any given court system should be doing, allowing those limited resources to instead be focused on higher-value cases (like fraud that results in a $350 million fine or a presidential candidate using campaign funds to bribe people to not say bad things about them).

That's just too many adjectives/adverbs to use for one noun, and the alliteration makes it come off as being even more contrived than slapping half of the dictionary in there already does.

I'm not sorry for the PM.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Anything but the metric system.

A standard shot glass is 0.0007 football fields tall.

At the same time, though, you can generally get a good sense of a moveset without seriously committing to building around a weapon, and there are enough resources out there to look it up and be able to tell whether or not it scales well enough to be worth investing into so you don't over-commit to a Drake Sword. Then, yes, it can be a grind to pivot your build into using the new weapon, but that's just how action RPGs are meant to work. If you come up with a new build idea, the intent is generally to use that build idea for a new playthrough, not try to completely change the character you're already using.

Now, how well that works in ER, I can't speak to. It's great in Dark Souls because they're short enough games (once you know what you're doing) that replaying with a new build is easy and fun. My understanding (I still haven't played it) is that ER is longer, so new playthroughs are a bit more daunting and that philosophy might not be as appropriate.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

It's a game that vomits a ton of really cool weapons at you, with dramatically different play styles, but caps the ability to experiment and switch between them freely without a ridiculously tedious grinding of smithing stones, which are finite to begin with, until being able to buy them late game. It's a game that seems to want you to experiment with different weapons and play styles, but makes it unrealistic to do so without a massive time sink on the player's part, rendering the point mostly moot.

That's kind of soulslikes in general: Lots of weapon variety, but you need to commit to a build to really make it work and that means trying new things is gated behind either a grinding or starting a new playthrough.

Oh, I don't think I do. In fact, I know they don't. I'm just saying it's a massive dick move.

Dikitain posted...

I don't think in most cases they know. Usually it is the district manager that finds out first thing in the morning "Oh, by the way, we are closing 10 of your restaurants effective immediately. Do the needful.", which by the way is still 3 management levels above the employee who needs to know that they shouldn't bother driving in to start their shift in an hour.

Still, there's no reason they can't start that cascade soon enough to save employees the commute. For that matter, you don't even really need that chain of command because corporate could easily just automate sending out a mass text to all affected employees once there was no more opportunity for sabotage. That would likely leave them scrambling to contact their managers as needed until they went far enough up the chain to get an authoritative answer, but at least they'd save a commute.

I don't doubt that front-line managers are just as out of the loop as front-line staff are, but somebody knew this was coming at least a few days in advance. To do nothing to communicate it in a way that limits the inconvenience for front-line employees is just plain inconsiderate.

Susanowo posted...

This isn't politics.

I don't think it's possible for genocide to not be political, given that it's a matter of organized policy.

Susanowo posted...

Law enforcement against terrorism, kidnappings and hostage confinement is NOT genocide even if you paint it that way.

Provided that's all that's happening, sure.

Melody_JR posted...

Yes. They do it so people won't quit or stop caring. To get the most out of the employee they severely underpay before they fold.

That justifies not giving more than a day's notice for stores closing (it's still dickish an exploitative, but at least it makes some sense), but it's still no excuse to just lock the store and not tell employees anything until they show up and read a sign. Saying "we're closing, this is your last shift" and the end of all shifts the day before doesn't leave any opportunity to sabotage the business, nor does sending out a text overnight.

Probably not. I've still got the GC version and can play that whenever I want, so I don't really need another version. Admittedly, I haven't really paid enough attention to assess what kind of extra content there is, so maybe there might be enough to tempt me, but as far as I know now, I'm good without it.

It's exceedingly rare that I go to McD's, and even rarer that I feel like splurging on a milkshake instead of just drinking water with my meal (especially with how inflated fast food prices are getting). If those two stars ever align I might give it a shot just for the novelty, but that's probably never going to happen.

I think they took down the demo. At least, I'm not seeing it anymore. How vexing.

agesboy posted...

fuck's a chub helly

Ask ur mom ololol

Coincidentally, DA:I just went up as Epic's free game this week. I still haven't played any of them, though, despite having owned Origins for a while.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

assuming BioWare isn't capable of making great games anymore.

It's less that they aren't capable and more that they aren't allowed. EA's done its usual thing of taking a studio people like and forcing them to chase profitable trends regardless of how well the studio can be expected to handle that style of game, hoping to cash in on the combination of brand recognition and pandering to the flavour of the month. Toss in some unrealistic deadlines (both in general and because they're working in unfamiliar territory) that mean the devs are under unsustainable amounts of pressure and have to rush to cobble something together, and you've got a recipe for games that just aren't very good.

I've only been to Denny's once, that I can remember, and I wasn't overly impressed by it. I should probably give it another chance to see if it was just what I chose (it was a limited time bourbon-apple pancake thing, which just ended up being not as good as what I do for pancakes myself when I want to put apples and boozy caramel on them), but I'm in no rush.

I like bologna well enough and all, but I don't think it's ever given me a full chub.

Melody_JR posted...

Employees came up to the doors and found them locked with notes.

That's such a dick move. Like getting laid off is going to suck regardless of the circumstances, but at least have the decency to give people enough advance notice to not waste time and effort commuting in for their shifts. It costs virtually nothing for managers to send a mass text.

Have you visited any other cities that aren't bogged down by North American car dependence?

Jen0125 posted...

Also adjl doing gymnastics growing up makes a lot of sense

It kept me nice and limber, though I very much do not have the right body type to actually be any good at it (being lanky doesn't work so well).

Jen0125 posted...

Lol they got nuked for their weirdo opinion

Lol bye.

I got it as part of the Ukraine bundle itch.io did. I haven't gotten around to playing it, but it's definitely a priority now that I've put in the effort to actually become aware of what games I have.

Probably the truth, but also don't be surprised if she isn't overly eager about cashing that rain check because
DevilSummoner posted...

maybe don't give one word responses lol

You're not exactly coming across as being interested, and while that can be fine if you know somebody better and they can just chalk that up to your texting style, if most of your interactions to date have been through text, that's the main impression she's going to have of you. If you're interested in this girl, show a bit more enthusiasm.

Yellow posted...

The idea that the lottery ruins peoples lives is a total lie. By every metric people who win the lottery have their lives improved vastly. Medically, financially, socially, everything.

That's mostly just the fact that "local guy wins lottery, declares bankruptcy within two years!" makes for an interesting headline, whereas "local guy wins lottery, sees life improve" does not. In practice, most lottery winners do indeed see overall improvements.

ItIsSoOver posted...

Oh look. Adjl having 0 reading comprehension and still following me around for validation despite knowing I have him muted and am very much not interested in him lmao.

Weird.

It's a public discussion. You don't have to pay attention to what I post for me to participate in it, nor do I have to care about what you decide in that regard.

ItIsSoOver posted...

Yes, being attracted to men that look like men is predator unlike being attracted to men who look like children lmao.

Being attracted to *boys* that look like men is predatorial. When a major criterion for male attractiveness is something that's present in quite a few adolescent boys, that's a pretty major red flag for child predation.

What else do you consider being a prerequisite for a man to look like an adult? Beards? Had a full one of those when I was 16, and that was before they came back into fashion (so I'd expect them to be even more common now). Deep voice? Also 15-16. Body hair? 15-16 again. Muscles? Not so much myself (years of gymnastics as a kid gave me a more wiry build), but plenty of my peers. These are all things that many teenagers have, so identifying them as being what you're looking for in deciding whether or not a man looks "adult" enough for you is pretty sketchy.