Lurker > adjl

*Accordion intensifies*

bachewychomp posted...

I think Duckbear was leaning into the bit on some level, but I also think he was a genuine weirdo with a poor grasp of communicating like a normal human who got off on reading stupid tabloid stories

More than reading the tabloids himself, I got the impression that he wanted to observe how people responded to them. He revealed on a couple of occasions that he'd been collecting data on users wherever he could, and provoking discussion of current events was part of that (hence the poll in every topic he made).

Revelation34 posted...

There's no reason to defend the change therefore you want to support greed.

This conversation might work better if you share the definition you're using for "greed" so it can be corrected.

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

this may sound really mean...

but do the Hades games ever get a big discount?

https://steamdb.info/app/1145360/

The first one gets discounted by 60-66% a few times a year, and is currently tied for its lowest historical price.

https://steamdb.info/app/1145350/

The second occasionally gets discounted by 10%, but isn't out of Early Access yet and therefore I wouldn't expect to see more than that until several months after the full release.

Either with the original systems hooked up to an LED TV or through the Switch's VC (or Wii/WiiU VC, as applicable). I've never really been one to worry about optimizing the experience with CRTs or anything like that.

Revelation34 posted...

It's always greed related when people defend companies doing a shitty thing for no reason.

How is making less money a matter of "greed"? Are you just using words without understanding what they mean?

RJP_X posted...

How would you know if the fans or something broke?

If you hear them running and the system doesn't end up obviously overheating (like shutting itself off, not just feeling warm), they're fine. If you don't and/or it does, they broke.

There's a non-zero chance that the fall may have jiggled a fan or something such that it'll wear out a bit faster, but there's no way to identify that now and you won't be able to do anything to fix it anyway. All you can really do is keep using it normally. If it fails, get it repaired. If it doesn't fail, don't. You have nothing to gain from worrying about that potential future now.

Salrite posted...

so many of his films have those issues of characters becoming unbelievably close so quickly and with little incentive.

Honestly, it's not that unbelievable, for people that are more extroverted. Stick two compatible extroverts in a room together (bearing in mind that, by virtue of being an artificial creation, characters in movies that are meant to end up in relationships are predefined to be compatible with each other), and they'll be best friends within the hour, let alone over the course of several days or weeks of being thrust together by whatever fantastic circumstance forms the movie's setting. That just stands out in anime in particular because so much anime is targeted toward a more introverted audience that can resonate better with more gradual relationships that take a long time to go anywhere because one or both parties are too shy/insecure to move forward.

Even outside of anime et al, so many romance stories feature a more outgoing person breaking through the shell of somebody more withdrawn specifically because you kind of need that to make the story last long enough to be worth telling. With two introverts, nothing ever goes anywhere unless you bring in a couple of extroverted wingmen to give them a push (which is also a common structure). With two extroverts, they hit it off after the first date and the only way to keep the story going is to throw some kind of dramatic wrench into their relationship (which isn't always what people want from a feel-good romance story).

Miyazaki's approach to relationships in his movies is to avoid "will-they/won't-they" situations and other tropes that pad relationships out with dramatic ambiguity. That can make them seem kind of abrupt compared to other media, but it is actually a fairly realistic portrayal of how relationships form when they aren't serving some kind of dramatic purpose (read: when actual people are having them), and it's a good fit for movies where those relationships aren't the main point.

It's also worth noting that when developing a relationship is the main point, Miyazaki does tend to draw it out longer. In Howl's Moving Castle, for example, it takes most of the movie for Sophie and Howl to end up properly together, thanks to Sophie taking a while to realize her feelings and then a while past that to overcome the insecurities that keep her bound by the curse. That's a case where the main point of the story is the development of their relationship and Sophie growing as a character to the point where she can have it, and as a result, she's not conveniently extroverted and self-assured enough to skip that gradual development for the sake of moving on with the real story. It's only the movies where the friendships/romance are secondary that they develop without any particular fanfare.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's almost as if everyone goes ooooh at the pretty moving pictures. It's not an American thing, it's a human thing.

Are you suggesting that Kyuubi's "Hail Britannia master race" schtick is actually a bunch of nonsense with no particular basis in reality?

Revelation34 posted...

So greed.

If they hand out fewer cards, they make less money. Framing that as "greed" is pretty silly.

If it still works, it's fine. If it doesn't, it isn't.

Nothing this time. My backlog's big enough and there's nothing I'm desperate enough to get to push it to the front of the line.

Revelation34 posted...

They got greedy and removed free cards too.

Valve gets a cut of every card sold in the marketplace, regardless of how they were distributed. Handing out fewer cards isn't a matter of "getting greedy," it's a matter of free card distribution not doing enough to drive sales to be worth handing them out.

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

I'm tried of people defending this game.

"How dare people like something I don't!"

I have DX and don't have any other versions, so I guess that one.

For eating, yes. For pyrotechnics, no.

Revelation34 posted...

That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it isn't real chocolate for disliking it. Only if you don't like the taste of it.

It matters for whether or not it should be called "chocolate," though. "Confectionery mass" doesn't have quite the same appeal, though.

It's okay. It works well when paired with a sour fruit, but otherwise it can be a bit tricky to use because it's so cloyingly sweet.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

With the current state of the industry, another crash would probably do us all good.

There won't be another crash like '83. The industry is just too diversified now. We may see the collapse of some of the giants like EA or Ubisoft, and that will have a significant impact on the market, but there's no version of this where anyone will have to be re-convinced that selling video games is worthwhile. The corporate investment side of things is the only one that stands to suffer, and even then a couple of the major players collapsing won't necessarily undermine confidence in the ones that are still doing fine, it'll just reinforce that kowtowing to shareholders at the expense of making games that are actually worth buying isn't a sustainable business model.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

From the state of the industry today, a lot of people in game dev right now (from the low-level coders and QA testers all the way up to the exec level) pretty clearly aren't qualified to hold the jobs they do as-is.

In the AAA space, it's pretty much just the management level that's the problem. Lower-level devs are all perfectly competent, their projects are just being mismanaged and meddled with in ways that undermine the quality of the product. It's not QA testers' fault that their teams are chronically understaffed and subjected to brutal crunch periods because their producer doesn't understand enough about game development to set a deadline, or decided halfway through the development process that the game should be pivoted to a more popular genre.

In the indie space, you do indeed get devs that just plain suck at coding, but they aren't particularly noticeable.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

While it might be sad for them if they lose their jobs, clearing a lot of the bloat out of the industry increases the odds that we might actually get more games worth playing, for cheaper, and potentially even faster.

There isn't really a shortage of worthwhile games coming out at reasonable prices, for anyone that actually tries to like things. If anything, the opposite is becoming a problem: There are too many good games coming out and many of them struggle to be noticed because everyone only has a finite amount of attention to pay to marketing (formal or otherwise). Hoping that people lose their jobs so you'd have more choices is almost as out of touch as it is misanthropic.

Things like the Virtual Console are emulators.

Shadowbird_RH posted...

By simple logic, there's probably a lot more indie games of any level of quality than there are AAA games of the same. If we were to instead compare them based on percentages of the wholes, I'd still give indies the advantages.

The percentages are probably about the same, but I'd expect to see higher highs and lower lows with indie games. That's to be expected, given that the AAA industry is pressured by shareholders to be more consistent and the higher budgets enforce at least some kind of minimum quality expectations.

Remember that for every Re-logic and Poncle there are a dozen Digital Homicides. The "indie" umbrella encompasses a massive range of studios, some of which take advantage of the freedom from executive meddling to put genuine passion, creativity, and talent into creating amazing games, and some of which take advantage of that freedom to churn out hundreds of low-effort asset flips that turn a profit because five people buy them for the memes/trading cards. There are a lot of indie games out there that make even the worst AAA games look like masterpieces by comparison.

I will concede, though, that the AAA sphere has a lot more high-profile bad games. Bad indie games tend to just get ignored unless somebody decides to highlight what new nonsense has been shovelled onto Steam in the past week.

Salrite posted...

Even if they're right, good. AAA studios should be hurting with how trash they've been. Serves them right.

Actually reading the article (or at least TC's copypasta), it's less about the studios themselves being hurt and more about how larger studios can afford to keep "auxiliary" staff like writers, artists, and composers on staff as permanent employees because at any given time they can task them with multiple projects, but smaller ones tend to contract those roles out because they don't have those resources. As the industry shifts toward a greater share of the market being held by indie studios, that's leaving fewer stable jobs for those professionals and pushing them more into freelancing, made even worse by the fact that many smaller studios are just choosing to rely on AI for those roles instead of hiring people.

That's not really a new issue, though. Even in the AAA sphere, composers in particular are almost always brought in for projects and not kept around full-time, and writers and artists below the lead/director level tend to be contracted as well. That's just the nature of any project-based industry; it's pretty rare for any company to have so many projects going simultaneously that they always need a full complement of workers in every role. A huge chunk of even what the article says are considered the "essential" staff (programmers et al) are brought in on a contract basis, and those contracts are terminated during lulls in development. A more indie-dominated market may make for fewer opportunities for stability for professionals whose work lends itself to freelancing, but there honestly have never been all that many opportunities there. If anything, the fact that more games are being made makes freelancing easier, because there are just more gigs available across the board (though, again, AI's cutting that back quite a bit).

There's a part of me that wants to adjust that quote to "euphonic" and photoshop a euphonium in place of the dude's head, but every other part of me is far too lazy to actually do anything like that.

We've come full circle.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/donkey-kong-country-returns-hd-switch/

i've just been informed that this game is not a remake of the first game and is, in fact, it's own thing and essentially country 4

And the original was a Wii game, so it makes sense that they'd bring it to modern audiences with a remake instead of taking a VC approach (not that it'd be strange to have Wii games on a VC now, given that the N64 was only 10 years old when the Wii launched and the Wii is now pushing 20).

Revelation34 posted...

I wonder if they would ever remake [the DKC games].

They've generally been content to port them to various VC services. I don't know that they'd really benefit from much more of a remake than that (which is to say, no actual remaking). There isn't a ton of room to modernize most SNES-era platformers except to polish up the graphics a bit; most of the modern conventions of the genre were pretty well established even back then. The only thing that's really changed is wall jumping becoming a common staple of platformers, but to incorporate that into the old DKC games would require such a substantial overhaul that they wouldn't really be the same games anymore.

Revelation34 posted...

It's definitely far safer than microwaving metal or plastic.

Contrary to popular belief, metal's only dangerous in certain shapes, specifically ones that facilitate arcing between different parts of the object. A fork would be a terrible idea, but a spoon is usually okay.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Let's face it, anime heroes are just better than superheroes and superheroes haven't been able to adjust since anime became popular in the west

... When do you think anime "became popular in the west"?

deoxxys posted...

Then that's because the suits rubbing their palms together with money for pupils learned that stuff like the Avengers movies made them lots of money! But they didn't realize that there was first building blocks of those individual heroes.

Pretty much. Pre-/Peri-Avengers MCU movies were tangentially related, but effectively standlone. It was then really cool that they got woven into a meta-narrative because it was crossing over those standalone properties, eventually culminating in Endgame as a huge climactic moment.

Post-Endgame, though, they've been trying to make lightning strike again and launched into a meta-narrative right out of the gate. I want to watch a bunch of the post-Endgame stuff, because I have every reason to believe plenty of it is worth watching (plenty more isn't, but I'm not one of those people that gets so caught up whining about the existence of bad stuff that I can't enjoy related good stuff), but it pretty much all has prerequisites and/or commits to following a longer-term story, and having that commitment staring me in the face kills any motivation I might have had to start.

It's actually exactly the same reason I've never gotten into comics: I'm sure I'd have a great time with some, but knowing that I'll be missing big chunks of any given franchise's history regardless of where I choose to start unless I go all-in on reading the enormous back-catalog of content makes the idea too unappealing to try.

Though, saying this, we can't pin all the blame on studios. Whenever a meta-narrative exists (or even just might exist), audiences love to try fitting things into it. We've got people trying to figure out where DK Bananza fits in the overall Mario canon, just because having a young Pauline positions it as a chronological prequel to Odyssey. The Mario canon. That kind of franchise analysis is fun, and it can be exciting to find connections/crossovers and to have that speculation rewarded with some canon fanservice, regardless of whether or not things actually need to be connected (the Mario canon). Studios are obviously taking that too far by connecting everything (<syndrome>when everything's connected, nothing will be</syndrome>), but that they're trying is answering a very real demand from audiences. It's just another one of those cases where giving audiences exactly what they ask for doesn't actually work out so well, and studios need to learn when to stop.

GanglyKhan posted...

Because it is more than just the food. It's the branding, the experience, the social and cultural aspect of it.

It's a McDonalds. There isn't much by way of noteworthy cultural experiences to take in, regardless of where the franchise is.

A tea infuser is generally going to be your best bet, but you can also get reusable tea bags or just use a sieve to pour it (though most sieves aren't going to be fine enough to strain out everything).

What makes McDs special in that regard, though? McDonalds' teriyaki sauce recipe is just one of thousands that you could try, depending on which restaurant you go to, which brand of pre-made sauce you buy, or how you prepare it from scratch. Why would McD's be so worth trying that you'd count that as a worthwhile effort to try local Japanese cuisine?

That mostly exists to shut down smartasses who would go looking for loopholes and other things not clearly covered by the rules, saving the effort required to make sure the rules cover every possible thing and the inevitable hassle of having to deal with somebody insisting that they technically aren't doing anything wrong. It opens the door to that moderator discretion being abused, but for the most part it isn't an issue in most communities and the people complaining most about it are exactly the sort of troublemaker it's meant to solve.

Today's actually not too bad, but the last 3 days were brutal. Humidexes of ~45C.

SinisterSlay posted...

Remove the don't ask don't tell policy here.

Uhh, what?

While I get the novelty of wanting to try some of the things McD's (and similar restaurants) only offer in other regions, most of them aren't exactly hard to make at home. Like if you want an egg on a cheeseburger, just fry an egg and put it on a cheeseburger (if you specifically want that shape, you can buy silicone rings that will achieve it, or use a microwave poacher, but you can also just fold up the egg with a spatula as it fries). If you want a teriyaki burger, just add teriyaki sauce to your burger. In many cases, you could just get the burger from McD's and add a couple things to it at home to get roughly the same experience, even if you don't feel like making the burger from scratch.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is the main problem with Death of the Author as a concept though. Analyzing themes, concepts, and ideas in stories can be fun and interesting, and looking for underlying messages or deliberate allusions and allegory can definitely give you a deeper appreciation for the work. It can even make a work more meaningful to you than it otherwise might have been if you can relate it to your own personal views and experiences.

But once you start insisting that authorial intent is absolutely meaningless, because what the reader takes away from a work is automatically objectively more meaningful than what the author actually meant, you're kind of an a******. And most of your own interpretations just become the equivalent of masturbation.

I would argue that in the case of music, there is a legitimate argument to be made for overruling the composer's intent in some cases, just because there are so many facets to music theory and many composers don't have the formal training needed to have the vocabulary to describe why they felt like a given motif was the right one to use in a given moment. You're obviously skating on very thin ice if you start saying "my interpretation is better than the composer's because I have more music education than they do" but I wouldn't categorically say that you're never going to find a legitimate instance where the composer made a musical choice just because they vaguely liked the vibe, and somebody who understands music theory better deciphers that to reveal an more concrete intent that they didn't realize they had.

Of course, music is heckin' subjective and even the most sophisticated analyses of theory boil down to "doing X generally invokes feelings of Y" and not anything more definite, so even that can be a bit of a crapshoot. Even so, if a composer says "I've written a happy song about walking a silly little dog on a sunny beach" and whips out something with all the hallmarks of a funeral dirge, people aren't wrong to say that the song conveys sadness and infer that the composer at least subconsciously injected such an intent into the work. Even if you can't necessarily assume the intent, you can say that they failed so spectacularly at communicating that intent that there's no point in considering it in analyzing the piece.

VioletZer0 posted...

Isn't that just boredom?

Yep.

If you can't handle reading two whole sentences to get the information you need, it's probably best for you to drop this particular line of belligerence. Discussing artistic subtext is quite a bit more nuanced than that.

SinisterSlay posted...

technically A&W,

As a Canadian, it used to be that A&W was my go-to for fast food burgers that were a bit on the pricier side, but were dramatically better than other fast food options. Now, other fast food options cost the same amount as A&W always has, are still lower-quality, and A&W's prices haven't really changed. It's kind of a no-brainer where to go when I want fast food now, assuming an A&W is handy.

Revelation34 posted...

No that just means people saw something that wasn't there and made a message up.

I take it you're not much of a believer in the concept of subtext.

Revelation34 posted...

It also applies to "racism" with Harry Potter.

There are people who will wholeheartedly argue that it's not racist to say "I think we should kill all the *n-word*". People saying "I didn't write anything racist in my books" means absolutely nothing.

Revelation34 posted...

I wish they would shut the site down

Nobody's keeping you here.

Revelation34 posted...

That just leads to the weirdos who say the artist is wrong about their own work.

They can be. They might not be wrong about their intent, but they can be wrong about the message that they end up communicating. That's just the nature of any form of communication: Audience interpretation is just as important as the speaker's intent.

One of the best-known examples of this wold be Tolkein's objection to the concept of allegory, and insistence that nothing he wrote in LotR was meant to be allegorical. Whether he intended it or not, so much of LotR expresses Tolkein's longing for the idyllic countryside of his youth, his resentment for the war and industrialization that took that idyll from him, and the trauma he experienced in the war. There's room to debate whether or not it truly qualifies as allegory for an artist's ideal of the perfect escape to shine through in their efforts to create escapist art, but regardless of where that argument settles the fact remains that Tolkein's opinions on the real world are reflect in Middle Earth, and that means LotR is at least a little bit allegorical.

keyblader1985 posted...

Ideas like that certainly sound plausible, but I often wonder whether they're actually accurate and that was truly the intent when the music was written. But I suppose that's probably why they call it music theory.

That applies to a lot of artistic analysis. People often find thematic parallels in art that might not have been intended by the artist, or sometimes even which the artist explicitly denies including.

Where music is almost always pretty abstract (especially non-vocal stuff), there's a lot of room to speculate about what feelings are evoked by a given motif, often going well beyond what the composer themselves consciosuly thought about. Even if the composer didn't try to represent any particular idea, though, they likely made the choice to include that motif because it evoked the feeling they wanted to express, and subsequent analysis of that feeling may find that it's representative of/represented by a more concrete idea.

In this case, I would guess that Kondo didn't specifically think "I want all of these arpeggios to land on the same high root because it's like a lighthouse." However, he probably was aware that consistently landing on the root makes pieces feel more stable and grounded and liked the vibe of working that into a piece that was meant to accompany water levels (which specifically are not grounded) and otherwise felt kind of floaty and ethereal (with the reverb, sustain, dynamic ebb and flow, and syncopation). From there, the abstract idea of something stable and grounded existing amid something floaty and ethereal is well-represented by a lighthouse, so the analysis effectively picks up on the correct themes and vibes, regardless of whether or not that was actually Kondo's intent.

For something like checking out, whichever seems like it'll be fastest/easiest. At grocery stores, I usually do self-check because I can get through quickly enough and the lines are often slower for cashier lanes, but at Costco I'll go to a cashier because those lines generally move faster and I've got enough stuff that self-check would be slower/more awkward than their approach of having one person scan and another load the cart.

For finding an item, I generally prefer to either look it up using an in-store search or on my phone, rather than hunting somebody down to ask them for it.

For ordering food, I don't really have a preference.

More like King SILLY mirite?

I've seen that one before, but "the dying gasp of wasps" will never not impress me.

I'll be sure to pass that on to the President of AI.

Muscles posted...

The problem is I don't know what I want now, I was in the mindset that we're mutually friends, like usual. It never crossed my mind that a beautiful girl like could be interested in me.

So tell her that. A mix of options 1 and 2: ask where she stands, and if she's interested, let her know that you're not entirely sure how you feel. If she's fine to keep up the status quo for a bit longer while you sort yourself out, great. If she doesn't want to be strung along for however long that takes you, you being up-front about where you stand gives her the ability to make that choice.

If she is interested, your best bet may be to just go on a couple of dates and see where your feelings end up. That is, after all, the purpose of first dates.

It is the way of things.

SinisterSlay posted...

Yeah I was going to say the same. Unless your a teenager, the quickest way to find out is to just ask. Don't play games.

It works even if you are a teenager, though in that case a certain degree of emotional immaturity is to be expected and doesn't necessarily immediately push them into "not worth dating" territory. Even if they end up thinking it's a stupid question, you can always play it off by just apologizing for being oblivious and laughing at yourself. Just be sincere about what you want and currently don't understand. Anyone worth your time will appreciate that.

It essentially boils down to "this is familiar and predictable so I don't have to think about finding something I'll like." It definitely wastes the opportunity to try more local cuisine options, but if you're treating food more as a maintenance task than something you specifically try to enjoy and therefore aren't overly concerned about getting to try local cuisine, that's not an opportunity you really need to worry about wasting.

Is it "tacky"? Probably, given that caring about food is considered to be the "cultured" mindset, but that's largely arbitrary. It's your trip. All you need to worry about is making sure you enjoy it overall.

If you want to date her, find a chance to talk to her alone and explicitly ask what kind of relationship she wants with you.

If you don't want to date her, but have no issues with the current state of things, explicitly ask what kind of relationship she wants with you, then clarify where you stand so she can make an informed decision about whether or not she wants to keep acting like this.

If you don't want to date her/you try option 1 and she doesn't want to date you, and you're uncomfortable with how she's been acting and would like her to stop, tell her this and lay out some boundaries.

That's pretty much it. There's a chance that explicitly asking her will kill the mood and make her not want to date you, but honestly, if she can't handle talking about her feelings at such a basic level as this, she's probably not worth dating anyway.

Blue_Thunder posted...

Holding hands, surely.

Whoa there. This is a family-friendly message board. Don't come in here peddling your hardcore erotica.

Moderately.

Revelation34 posted...

Everything is a waste of money if you don't need it. Not being able to afford something is far different.

People generally only identify things as wastes of of money if they can't afford to waste the money in question. Spending $10,000 on a rubber chicken would be a waste for somebody that would have to work for a couple months to make that kind of money, but for somebody with hundreds of millions at their disposal, it's fine.

Similarly, genuinely being unable to afford a shirt is pretty rare, especially for somebody that's employed full-time. You can grab a cheap shirt from a thrift store for a couple bucks, which isn't particularly hard to save up if you cut a few corners elsewhere. Whether or not that shirt is worth saving up for, however, is a question of whether or not you value it enough to feel that it's not a waste of the money, which in turn depends just how much those couple dollars mean to you.