Lurker > adjl

Yellow posted...

That's a terrifying thought. It's all just code for privatization. You think it matters who hosts it? It's all private money controlled by a handful of rich people with no laws or oversight.

Pretty much. Does crypto have the potential to take some control of the country's finances away from the big banks? Yes. Is it going to prevent money (and therefore power) from concentrating in the hands of a small number of people that are wealthy enough to manipulate the system into making them even wealthier? No. Money naturally concentrates, regardless of the nature of the currency. Shaking up the currency just changes which ultra-wealthy hands it ends up in, and really, there are very few meaningful differences between the sort of people that treat our economy like an idle game.

captpackrat posted...

I prefer hydrogen hydroxide

Hydrogenol.

BEERandWEED posted...

I blame a lack of God and caring about others.

It's not exactly a particularly insightful take to suggest that mass murderers don't care about others.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

If you're not a consumer, no, it doesn't.

Sure it can. Bad PR is bad PR. Its entire audience doesn't necessarily need to be a potential customer to see an impact from it.

And here I just (well, 2-3 months ago) spent a whole $6 on a month of Humble Choice to get it. How bothersome. At least I got a few other games in that bundle, though the only one I'm remembering off-hand is Everhood because it's the only other one I was interested in picking up.

keyblader1985 posted...

It kills me when people say games, comic books, or scifi aren't political, as if they've literally never seen a second of it before. But to be fair, I doubt the people saying it now actually believe it. They just need something to redirect the base's rage.

By and large, "X is too political!" actually means "X is critical of something I do or like!" or "X makes me feel bad for not doing anything about a problem I like ignoring!", with a smattering of "X's main character doesn't look enough like me!"

Revelation34 posted...

FF15 is not better than FF6.

I don't particularly have an opinion on the matter, having played neither. That's just how I'm interpreting Judg's "series never peaked" comment, knowing that he's generally had good things to say about later entries in the past.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Unfortunately, racism still is a thing, and Kotaku is a business. If pandering to that is profitable, that is their prerogative. Everybody eats food, so it's in a businesses prerogative to use food to make money, and companies will leverage that; see Costco hotdogs.

For businesses to not reference something, it has to not be beneficial to them.

And criticizing them and holding them accountable for their decisions helps to prevent it from being beneficial.

LinkPizza posted...

Theyre fine. I feed them sometimes. And that way, they hunt mice around my house so none gets in

They're fine to keep around, but they should probably be TNR'd to keep their population under control.

Racist? I wouldn't say so. Capitalizing on his race for the sake of scoring bonus points for covering this "poor, oppressed black developer who wouldn't have a voice if not for us"? Pretty obviously.

Yeah mead, lrn2inclusive language. The term is "lipids."

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Probably around the same time the lunatic fringe of the Left decided that any time someone dares to mention someone's weight or suggest that being massively obese is generally unhealthy that it's fat shaming/body shaming/etc and is thus unacceptable prejudice. WOMG triggered.

Pretty much this, in less polarizing terms. Vocal conservatives tend to get off on "owning the libs" in lieu of developing a personality of their own, and these days, "the libs" tend to object to fat shaming. Therefore, vocal conservatives like fat shaming.

I have to wonder how much those microtransactions actually made them. Usually, making money off of microtransactions relies on engineering the game to manipulate players into wanting to spend money to solve what they perceive as a problem (which, of course, was deliberately put there). Tacking them on after not building the game around them at all, however, doesn't do that.

I'm not surprised that they didn't have high hopes for sales, though. Squenix is pretty notorious for having extremely unrealistic expectations for their games and then being disappointed when they don't reach them. I think it was one of the Tomb Raider games that sold 5-6 million copies, and that was still "below expectations" despite the fact that it was by far the best-selling game in the series to date. Some of their executives seem to have trouble differentiating between "expectations" and "wildest dreams."

Dikitain posted...

I left Deus Ex out of it because those were still good, albeit with micro-transactions for no reason.

I like how review copies of MD didn't have microtransactions in them, but it wasn't so much because they were deliberately excluded to hide them from reviewers as it was that they were tacked on so late in development that review copies were genuinely too early a build to have them.

AltOmega2 posted...

Of course, you might disagree that peak is equivalent to maxima. You probably could define it as a point where the rate of change goes from positive to negative. Looks like Wikipedia calls it a stationary point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_point

Yeah that. In this context, "peaked" means the series has yet to do better than its previous best. While it can still technically be correct to say that is true when the best game is the most recent one, the fact that there's been no opportunity to surpass that record means that's not really the most meaningful comparison.

AltOmega2 posted...

Mathematically impossible unless every game in the series was exactly the same

If the series has been steadily improving and the most recent game is the best, that isn't really a peak. Defining a peak requires a decrease on the other side of the high point; without that, all you have is an upward trend.

They might actually be liable for that. I'm guessing the settings to control amber alert volume aren't exactly obvious, so expecting the user to find them in order to reduce the alert volume below dangerous levels isn't altogether reasonable. The default volume for the alerts also just should not be dangerous, period. If they've had that concern already raised and they haven't done anything (especially where "make this quieter by default" isn't exactly a prohibitively complicated fix), that leaves them with some responsibility for any harm caused by it.

papercup posted...

Its deeply concerning that Square Enix has spent the past year or so heavily investing into this shit. If this is what finally does Square in Im gonna be sad.

The fact that they sold a bunch of their major IP's so they could invest harder into crypto nonsense that nobody wants (and they openly acknowledged that most people don't want it in the president's letter at the beginning of the year, which roughly amounted to "none of you like this, but we know what's better for you so just watch") is honestly pretty hilarious. It'd be sad to lose some of their franchises, like what happened when Konami abandoned making actual games, but at a corporate level Squenix has been really very awful for quite some time now, and I'm kind of enjoying watching them screw up this badly (especially when the IP's they've sold off will continue to survive).

Wombs of mass destruction

VampireCoyote posted...

They both seem awful. Heard reminds me a lot of my ex.

That said there are a bunch of dudes acting WAY too gleeful about the whole thing, relishing in how bad she looks up on the stand or being caught in lies.

A lot of it followed by them going on and on about how good it feels to see a woman not get her way in court. Its gross. And it isnt even a remotely interesting trial. Theyre a couple of wealthy assholes fighting over reputation and money.

Pretty much. The sort of "men's rights" folk that tend to care more about ensuring that women suffer as much as men do instead of making things better for everyone has really latched on to Depp as a champion for male abuse victims and seems to care more about Heard getting her comeuppance than anything else. The reality is that they've both been abusive and they need to just walk away from this like adults.

BlackScythe0 posted...

That is actually exactly what that means.

Eeyup. Bigger audience=more people listening to the things you say=more potential to cause harm by saying those things.

Treating it mostly boils down to "be careful not to make it worse until it can heal." Depending on the extent of it, you may have permanent damage, or you may be able to recover. In general, I'd recommend taking it easy (minimal lifting, try to avoid sudden movements or awkward twists/bends) until you hear from your doctor to advise you further.

Depends how bad it is. A mild one might not even be noticeable, a bad one can incapacitate you. If you've been formally diagnosed with one, listen to your doctor's recommendations as far as letting it heal go.

Also it's movie armour, so it has the approximate durability of tissue paper unless the plot demands that it withstand a few blows.

It's because Epic paid Squenix for exclusivity. That's pretty much the only reason Epic gets any exclusives.

Alternatively, "Womb-bearer."

VampireCoyote posted...

I dont think that anyone should have any say in the matter unless they are the doctor or the Wielder of the Uterus. End of story.

They shouldn't have a say, but they should be involved in the decision-making process to enough of an extent to let them make an informed decision about whether or not they want to risk pregnancy with somebody that will/won't get an abortion if it happens. Like most aspects of relationships, open communication and informed consent are important.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

Children and birth control in general should be openly discussed by a couple. Just putting the attention on abortion is asking for knee-jerk reactions.

Indeed, but those discussions can generally come up fairly organically, without any immediate urgency. You might end up not having sex that night if you only realize on the way into bed that you aren't comfortable with the current birth control situation, but that's about the worst that will happen (unless you end up with a pregnancy because you decide to take the risk, but that's a failure of self-control rather than a failure of communication).

By contrast, a lot of couples tacitly assume they won't have to worry about abortion if they use birth control, so they just don't consider or discuss it until an accidental pregnancy actually happens. That's not a good time to discover you have fundamentally opposed opinions on abortion. It's a much better idea to discuss it early (ideally, before there's any risk of pregnancy at all) so everyone's on the same page if it happens. That discussion can indeed be emotionally charged, possibly even to the point of breaking up the couple, but I'd rather see couples with incompatible views on abortion break up before a pregnancy shows up than after.

VampireCoyote posted...

It should be between the woman who is pregnant and their doctor. No one else unless the woman wants them to be a part of the discussion.

Her body, her choice.

That said, a man shouldn't get a woman pregnant without first making sure they're on the same page regarding abortion. It's not unreasonable for a man to have an opinion on what happens to his child, but that opinion should be expressed long before it becomes an issue, such that the woman can decide well in advance whether or not that opinion is in line with what she wants for her own body.

GGuirao13 posted...

Children born as a product of rape or incest should still have a chance to live, even if it means adoption.

How noble of you to volunteer rape victims for a sacrifice you'll never have to consider for yourself.

Retroactively breaking the original game is my biggest issue. I wasn't particularly interested in the remake, so I didn't really care how it turned out, but they didn't just make a terrible game that I could simply not buy. They messed with a game I'd owned for 15 years, directly harming my enjoyment whether I bought the bad game or not. I actually swore off Blizzard entirely over it: Until they can regain my trust, they're not getting any more of my money. So far, they're off to a flying stop with the whole sex abuse thing, so it's gonna be a good long while before they get my business again.

Almost always. Unless you find a couple of isolated molecules, any water you encounter is going to have a liquid on it.

Zareth posted...

Telling someone there isn't a twist is a spoiler for an M Night Shamadanz movie

I'd argue that it's always a spoiler, since you're effectively saying "nothing about the story changes from your first impressions" and therefore indirectly telling them the entire plot. That said, having a story with no twists spoiled isn't overly meaningful, and if anything saves people from wasting their time if they don't like how it starts, so I wouldn't expect most people to mind that.

Dikitain posted...

I honestly have no clue why people pick up 3rd party games on Nintendo consoles, it is always going to be the worst version of the game.

For AAA titles, sure, but most indie games run just as well on the Switch as anywhere else. I actually prefer it for many Roguelikes because the portability is such a good fit for the short sessions they promote.

The_Viscount posted...

And why do you never b**** about all the shovelware on PC when it dwarfs all the consoles.

Adam_Savage posted...

the only thing that gets more shovelware s*** is steam

If we bust out a little bit of synecdoche, I'd say he covered that.

It's not so much that they get more than anyone else (with the possible exception of the Wii, since there was a rather aggressive movement to capitalize on the motion controls and high popularity among the casual market, though that was tempered by the more limited digital distribution abilities) as it is that they have no sweet clue how to make a digital storefront and you therefore end up seeing all of it whenever you try shopping unless you know exactly what you want to buy.

If you're vague enough about it for it to not be a spoiler, then you're being so vague that there isn't much point in saying anything (it basically amounts to "stuff happens in the plot," which is largely meaningless). If you're specific enough for there to actually be a point in saying it, then you start getting into the territory Tutoria described, where they're going to end up waiting specifically for something to happen (even if they don't know what), which is going to annoy some people. That's not necessarily a spoiler per se, but people are going to be bothered by it for a lot of the same reasons that they're bothered by spoilers.

By and large, I'd say that unless you're giving a broad review of the story ("Interesting story, a couple of great twists"), you're probably best off just not saying anything about it.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

People are allowed to disagree, that's normal.

People are allowed to disagree on which meat is best on pizza. People who disagree on whether or not certain people are legitimate humans, however, tend to be garbage and should be treated accordingly instead of having those opinions respected.

Ozmose posted...

or settle with never getting another raise.

Putting aside the question of inflation (in an ideal world, I would say wages should always try to keep up with inflation at every level for the sake of keeping purchasing power constant), is that really such a bad thing? Obviously, you want to keep getting raises until you achieve your desired quality of life/financial security, but once you reach that point, why is it necessary to keep growing indefinitely?

Jesserae posted...

Vaccine doesn't stop you from getting it, doesn't stop you from spreading it, so why are they running on a narrative of getting vaccinated to protect others?

Except it absolutely does reduce both of those risks, just not by enough of a margin to rely exclusively on them, and that's really only true for Omicron (and actually means "we should go back to locking everything down," not the "we should stop caring about vaccinations and also stop restricting anything" agenda people are trying to push with it). Delta is still around and isn't directly competing with Omicron because of how immunologically different it is, plus future variants may be more susceptible to vaccines and/or future vaccines may be more effective against Omicron. On top of that, the reduction in personal risk reduces the strain on the health care system (both from treating cases and from dealing with long Covid), so it's still strongly advisable from a public health perspective.

Jesserae posted...

For those already in a high risk category. why exactly would we want to reduce transmission in low risk groups when natural immunity has been proven so effective?

Because vaccination on top of natural immunity is even better.

Jesserae posted...

Still no acknowledgment or explanation to the reduced global mortality compared to the last decade?

Without researching that at all (since it's a very complex topic that would require pretty extensive research to come up with anything credible and reducing it to a single number captures basically none of the nuance that would make that effort worthwhile), I'd guess advances in HIV and Malaria treatment/prevention have been major factors (malaria being the leading cause of death globally), plus broader improvements in medicine overall. Perhaps more saliently, though, any comparisons you make using those figures should be done by looking at long-term trends, not picking two data points out of the air.

Jesserae posted...

$350 million in damages from far left "peaceful protests" in Minneapolis alone, 140 cities participated in these "peaceful protests", I think 25 people that died as a result wouldn't exactly call them peaceful. The far left in America is larger than the entire population of my country.

"Police should stop killing non-violent criminals for no reason" isn't exactly a far left position by the rest of the world's standards, even without getting into the fact that the vast majority of BLM protests caused no such damage and the efforts to characterize the entire movement as a bunch of violent riots are blatant propaganda circulated by the sort of people who don't see a problem with innocent black people being murdered.

The_Viscount posted...

The odds of a woman filing a false police report against you as part of a constructive eviction (or a retaliatory effort) are generally far higher than an unplanned pregnancy where precautions are actually being taken (rather than just claiming they're being taken). Especially because some police officers and other people within the system suggest it as a course of action

I gave you numbers, you gave me misogynistic fearmongering on an unrelated subject. Again, I'm not sure where your intense, blanket distrust of women comes from, but it really doesn't seem very healthy.

The_Viscount posted...

There are a lot of old X-Men games that need ports or to be continually available.

I'd take that a small leap further and say that every game needs to be continually available. The capability exists. The only thing stopping it is a desire to inflate prices with artificial scarcity.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It comes from being a highly advanced AI

adjl posted...

a single person

Oh yeah. I went there.

Teenagers get called children/kids all the time, dude, and not just speaking in legal terms.

rjsilverthorn posted...

So essentially "Here is a random number I pulled out of my ass."

Pretty much. I can say with complete certainty that not a single person on this board has access to the necessary data or training to make anything remotely resembling an educated guess on the matter. You might as well include a link to random.org and ask people to roll 1-100 and vote for the closest answer to their results.

Metalsonic66 posted...

If I had a partner who told me masturbation was cheating, that relationship would be over quickly

It'd depend a lot on how frequently we had sex, but that would still be at least a borderline dealbreaker for me as well, if not an absolute one. That's more controlling than I would say is healthy.

lihlih posted...

Bruh, we were at a trucking school. We didn't have the time.

What, because one of you was going to die after graduation? Was she a time traveller from the distant past, before they invented phones? Does the trucker code forbid you from fraternizing after school ends, so you only had those brief, sweet moments together before life would cruelly tear you apart?

No, you had time. What you lacked was patience, emotional maturity, and the decency to honour your commitment.

lihlih posted...

The single use of a doll of is to be used as a child's plaything.

There are a great many collectible/decorative dolls out there. The term "porcelain doll" isn't just a metaphor, and anything made of porcelain definitely isn't a child's plaything.

Revelation34 posted...

Masturbation is cheating.

If your partner doesn't want you to do it, yes. You, in turn, can decide whether that is something you're okay having in your relationship and leave accordingly if you don't like it. Agreeing, staying in the relationship, but masturbating in secret would indeed be cheating.

lihlih posted...

I still don't think it was cheating,

It was cheating.

lihlih posted...

but I could've been better to her. The thing is, what the f*** was I supposed to do? Call her from trucking school and tell her that I met someone so f*** you? I really didn't have the luxury of getting rid of her at the time.

You could have had the emotional maturity to recognize that any relationship worth breaking up a marriage over will be able to wait a few weeks or months for you to tie up loose ends, rather than whipping it out the first chance you got like an overexcited 14-year-old. It's not much of a "luxury" to just not have sex. It is, in fact, very easy to not have sex (rape aside, for obvious reasons, but you weren't raped). Waiting might have cost you the new relationship, but in that case, you're not missing much and you'd be able to find a comparable replacement pretty easily.

lihlih posted...

Why am I responsible for her getting feelings for me in a fakeass marriage my responsibility though.

Because that's how being a decent person works. When problems arise, regardless of whether or not they're your fault, you try to avoid making them worse. You especially don't knowingly and deliberately choose to make them worse, particularly when the solution is so easy.

lihlih posted...

Except the fact that you can't cheat on a fake wife.

Were you married? Yes.
Did your wife expect fidelity from you as part of that marriage? Yes.
Were you faithful? No.

That's the definition of cheating. Should your wife have expected fidelity from you? Maybe, maybe not, but she did. You knew that, yet you deliberately violated her trust instead of leaving the relationship or otherwise properly correcting that expectation. You made the decision to hurt her. Take responsibility for that decision.

lihlih posted...

As I've explained already in this topic, I posted that stuff because I felt genuinely bad about the situation. Once I realized that you can't cheat on a fakeass wife, I moved on.

You felt bad because you knew you'd done something wrong. Then you found a convenient excuse to avoid admitting that you did something wrong, so you latched on to that instead of accepting your guilt and growing as a person from it.

However you try to rationalize it, you hurt your ex-wife. You should feel bad for that. You should consider what weakness and cowardice led you to that outcome and try to grow past that to become a better person. Instead, you're doubling down on being a weak coward and trying to pretend you did nothing wrong. That makes you a terrible person. So stahp.

lihlih posted...

How the hell is her having feelings for me in a fakeass marriage my fault at all?

Her having feelings is not. You deliberately ignoring those feelings instead of dealing with them like a real man is.

lihlih posted...

Both marriages are fake, so what's so different between the 2?

The part where your wife was emotionally invested in the relationship. In TV marriages, neither partner is emotionally invested, so there's no obligation to respect that. In yours, she cared about it (and you knew she did, though I fully expect your story will change in a couple months to avoid explicitly admitting that because that's just how this half-baked effort to gaslight the board has gone), so you had an obligation to respect that by either consulting her before sleeping with other women or divorcing her. Heck, given that you already knew that she was more emotionally invested in the relationship than you, you should have divorced her long before your infidelity came into the picture at all instead of stringing her along in a relationship you had no intention of sticking with. That you didn't was cowardly. That you continue to rationalize it instead of admitting your mistakes/wrongdoing means you're still that same coward today.

That is why we continue to criticize you for it: You haven't learned. You haven't become a better person. You're still the same guy who cheated on his wife and is clinging to every excuse he can find to rationalize that and pretend it didn't happen instead of admitting to it.

If they aren't even "polished" by Bethesda standards, they must be in pretty horrible shape.

lihlih posted...

The marriage was fake though.

Still married, and the other half of the marriage consent to it, so still cheating.

lihlih posted...

That's like saying an actor that's playing a married person on a show can't have sex in real life.

It's not remotely like that.

It's very simple: Cheating is any sexual activity that your partner doesn't want you doing. Your wife didn't want you sleeping with anyone else. Therefore, sleeping with anyone else was cheating. That remained true for as long as she was your partner, which in this case was until you explicitly separated.