Lurker > adjl

A little. I keep it on, but I do use the numpad for pretty much any numerical data entry) because it's so much easier to use blind than the top row of numbers. I also use lefty mouse typically, so that makes sense. It's pretty horribly positioned for righty mouse users (and is actually the reason righty mouse is ergonomically inferior to lefty), so I can understand why they wouldn't want to use it.

Revelation34 posted...

@adjl I started it last night. Had a hard time putting it down but had to since I needed sleep for work.

Great! I hope you enjoy it. It's a bit of a slow start, mechanically, but new arts roll in in due course so you don't spend as long autoattacking.

CynicalZealot posted...

Is that the standard we're using? Because you make more topics than I do. You filthy topic-whore you.

Do I actually? Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can think of a topic you've made in recent memory, but I also don't remember the last one I made, so that's a pretty low bar to limbo under.

CynicalZealot posted...

Full on comedy sci-fi is nearly impossible to pull off well. Even Red Dwarf couldn't manage it for its full run - and it only really succeeded in the first place because it started out with a creator pairing where one creator was focused on the sci-fi aspects and the other was focused on the comedy bits (and when the pairing split the show suffered).

I mean, hardly anything longer than a single episode manages to be 100% comedy, regardless of what other genres it works in there. Even sitcoms have to break things up with a bit of drama here and there to keep things from being too one-dimensional, no matter how funny they are, and that's become even more true in the modern world of direct-to-streaming series that people binge watch, as opposed to only watching one episode a week. By definition, sci-fi needs to spend some time on social commentary (specifically, exploring what a hypothetical future would mean for humanity), which is inevitably going to pull the mood down at times and is at odds with making people laugh, but at a fundamental level that's not that different from what other genres have to deal with.

Count_Drachma posted...

It's like watching a game of chess played by two people who have no fucking clue how to play chess.

I connected four pawns, so now you have to king me.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

How much money are they giving to the fetus?

It varies from pregnancy to pregnancy, but prenatal appointments aren't cheap, food budgets usually have to go up a bit because growing a human takes quite a bit of extra energy, and there are usually quite a few costs associated with preparing a household for a baby that happen before the baby is actually born. It is actually fairly sensible to treat a pregnancy as a financial dependent, even if this particular example is just a matter of Georgia virtue signalling for the pro-lifers and not genuinely trying to help anyone.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Can they provide receipts?

Receipts aren't needed to claim a child as a dependent, so I wouldn't expect them to be required to claim a fetus in the same way. There are specific tax credits that are related to children that might require receipts, and in the same vein there could be specific tax credits to help with complicated pregnancies that would require some sort of proof of those complications and associated costs, but the more general process of claiming a dependent wouldn't fall into that.

hera posted...

i dreamed that i was a fart.

That wasn't a dream, babe.

I haven't tried any of the "plant-based alternatives" that are growing in popularity, but I eat plenty of veggies and will sometimes use tofu or chickpeas as the protein component of a dish. By and large, I eat substantially less meat than is typical in the American (or Canadian) diet, generally not having more than ~4 oz per dinner. I still enjoy meat and tend to think of meal planning in terms of building them around whatever meat is on sale, but most of my diet is plant-based (also known as plain old eating healthily, before "plant-based" became a marketing buzzword).

I think I've seen Balor pop up occasionally on Steam as recently as a few months ago, but I don't see him on my friends list right now, so either he changed his name or he unfriended me.

You make more topics than I do.

DrPrimemaster posted...

You can claim the fetus as a dependency after you give birth, then you get a tax refund for those 9 months of pregnancy.

That would also work, while avoiding providing any sort of benefit to those that failed to bring a pregnancy to term for whatever reason (since these people don't value women beyond a hole to bone unless they're reproducing).

I'm pretty comfortable assuming that the answer is "however makes things worst for the victims," given how any laws around abortion tend to go.

Conceptually, I'd expect it to go how I believe claiming multicellular children works: If you claim a kid as a dependent, and that kid dies, you can only claim them up to the date of their death. Similarly, I'd guess this just moves the date on which you can start the claim back by 7-8 months, then if you miscarry, you can't claim anymore after the miscarriage date. That seems reasonable enough. In practice, because that effectively amounts to the government paying women to be pregnant for a couple months, I expect there will be extra scrutiny added to prevent people from intentionally miscarrying so they can get a few bucks from the government without having to deliver the kid. Given the extent to which people making this sort of law tend to think being pregnant is a trivial experience, I'd also expect they'd just want the money back because they don't think any parenting costs have been incurred (especially if fathers are also able to claim this credit).

To just copy my thoughts from where Lok shared this in a different topic (since this is an interesting enough subject that giving it its own discussion makes sense):

As that one lawyer [in Lok's link] mentioned, I 100% expect that to result in adding tax fraud charges to the criminal investigations associated with every miscarriage, which just makes the whole experience worse. That's just a performative gesture that will not only cost the state a pretty substantial amount of tax revenue, but a significant amount of additional costs associated with verifying the pregnancy, investigating miscarriages, and jailing people for the crime of not being able to prove that their miscarriage was accidental enough. Very few citizens are likely to see an appreciable net benefit from the extra 7-8 months of claiming a dependent, especially where doctors will have to charge them for the administrative costs of sending the state verification of the pregnancy. This purely amounts to "look at how logically consistent we are!"

Ironically, with a proper health care system that streamlined that administration (mostly with a unified electronic medical record system that could update the state on the mother's pregnancy status with a single click, if the mother consented to it) and ensured expectant mothers had regular prenatal appointments (so any changes were documented and could be reported promptly), as well as abortions being legal and not requiring a criminal investigation, this idea could be very helpful for those preparing for parenthood. Without decent health care and with restrictive anti-abortion laws, though, it's just going to be too many legal loopholes and additional costs for most of the parents that actually need that help to take advantage of it. Most of them are going to either slip through the cracks or end up in jail.

The PS4 is cheaper, easier to find, has ~9 years of games available to check out, and is still getting versions of most of the higher-profile new titles coming out. The PS5 is more powerful and has a handful of exclusives, but is more expensive, much harder to find, has more expensive games (because apparently monetizing the hell out of everything just wasn't enough money for the AAA industry) and most of its library is also available on the PS4.

Basically, unless you (or his kid, in this case) specifically want enough of those exclusives to justify hunting one down and paying the higher price, it'll probably be better to wait for more exclusives (presumably, at some point, the PS4 will stop getting new stuff) and a price drop/bundle that makes it more worthwhile.

captpackrat posted...

I'm laughing so hard at this site right now.

I know, right?

captpackrat posted...

And yes, he basically did.

So... he thinks "political" means "expressly supporting a political party" and not "making some manner of social commentary." Also known as not understanding what "political" means.

That's a lot for one egg.

... Did Shatner actually say that? Like, I know a lot of people have, and that's to be expected because the general public is stupid and contains lots of people that miss the point, but Shatner has literally no excuse.

There isn't one. Nature has no goal or purpose. It simply is.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

in CA, they fought tooth and nail against classes resuming, even with reasonable steps being taken

Were case numbers low enough for working with children to not carry a high risk of causing covid infection? Or does "reasonable steps" just mean "most of them will wear masks that aren't actually effective enough to prevent transmission over the course of five hours of continuous exposure"?

It's not that teachers don't want to teach. They just don't want to risk their lives to do so. That's not a terribly unreasonable standard.

My first thought is either dehydration or an asthma attack (or similar respiratory difficulties). Foam does tend to off-gas a bit, especially in those quantities, and often collects quite a lot of dust that gets thrown out when people disturb it. While that off-gassing and dust is rarely harmful, it can cause some respiratory irritation, and that on top of already being out of breath and dehydrated could have made your breathing even more difficult and cascaded into what you felt (probably also including a bit of a panic response, as is pretty normal when you feel like you can't breathe and don't know why).

The allergy angle might be worth exploring the next time you go (while well-hydrated and before doing any other exercise, go sit in the pit near one of the edges to see if you start to feel off again and climb out if you do), but I'm guessing it was just a combination of the other factors. Trampoline parks can be deceptive in how much physical fitness they actually require. I visited one with my now-girlfriend a few years back, and because I'd done gymnastics for ~10 years as a kid, I just dove right into bouncing around as though it weren't my first time in over a decade. We bounced around for ~10 minutes before I had an asthma attack and she threw her back out and we both spent the next half hour lying down on a bench, which wasn't exactly the most efficient use of our one-hour time slot. If you go again, make sure you're hydrated and pace yourself more than you think you need to.

That would have considerable beneficial effects on the quantity of Chugirl porn available.

Lokarin posted...

To be fair, at least the embryo can file taxes

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/02/georgia-embyros-tax-dependents-fetus

As that one lawyer mentioned, I 100% expect that to result in adding tax fraud charges to the criminal investigations associated with every miscarriage, which just makes the whole experience worse. That's just a performative gesture that will not only cost the state a pretty substantial amount of tax revenue, but a significant amount of additional costs associated with verifying the pregnancy, investigating miscarriages, and jailing people for the crime of not being able to prove that their miscarriage was accidental enough. Very few citizens are likely to see an appreciable net benefit from the extra 7-8 months of claiming a dependent, especially where doctors will have to charge them for the administrative costs of sending the state verification of the pregnancy. This purely amounts to "look at how logically consistent we are!"

Ironically, with a proper health care system that streamlined that administration (mostly with a unified electronic medical record system that could update the state on the mother's pregnancy status with a single click, if the mother consented to it) and ensured expectant mothers had regular prenatal appointments (so any changes were documented and could be reported promptly), as well as abortions being legal and not requiring a criminal investigation, this idea could be very helpful for those preparing for parenthood. Without decent health care and with restrictive anti-abortion laws, though, it's just going to be too many legal loopholes and additional costs for most of the parents that actually need that help to take advantage of it. Most of them are going to either slip through the cracks or end up in jail.

Ferron posted...

The benefit is it gives more control over women which is what these room temp IQ right leaning voters want

But even then, it's not a particularly meaningful amount of control. It just delays divorce by a few months, and even then doesn't prohibit separating until the final paperwork can be signed. Even if they try to take it that far, there are so many ways around any would-be laws to prevent that that unless they outright ban couples from leaving the house if the woman is pregnant (which I can't imagine would ever stand up to any challenges in higher court, even with the fascism-loving suite of judges currently filling it), it would be immediately loopholed into obsolescence. And for those that don't resort to loopholes to separate prematurely, it's still just a few months.

Like, I get that these are people who routinely whack it to the idea of abuse victims not being able to escape, and that's an inevitable consequence of a law like this, but even in that regard this isn't going to achieve much because the victims can still flee.

VampireCoyote posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/7/0/AAfSRzAADhSS.jpg

Also you're uninvited to my birthday party and you can't sit with me at lunch anymore.

papercup posted...

There were talking Zora in ALttP

And there were talking Moblins in LoZ. In either case, that was an example of a creature that would normally be an enemy acting as an NPC, which is distinct from establishing them as a race of NPC's with story significance.

Whatever the details of the situation, the bottom line is that modern Zoras are clearly much more inspired by OoT's Zoras than any previous games', except possibly ALBW's (I don't actually remember if/how they showed up there, but that was also an explicit spiritual successor to LttP and would therefore be expected to base its canon off of LttP over OoT).

wpot posted...

Sure, it depends upon how broad of a statement is being made. If we're considering only the statement "all entertainers should stick to their entertainment", yes, that's overly broad...particularly if the statement is made in the context of trying to silence a particular individual. I was pointing out that a person saying that could actually mean "divisive politics is taking up too much space in our entertainment", however, which I believe is a fair point.

Potentially, but people making this complaint rarely take that approach. It's much more commonly people lashing out at an individual for "being too political."

wpot posted...

I'm not sure that intentionally shoving the issues in their faces during entertainment is doing any good anyways.

It works to normalize it. This is a major part of why you have the sense that modern media is so much more political than historical media: Many of the political stances in historical media that were once considered divisive are now completely ordinary, in large part due to the efforts of entertainers who decided to portray them and establish that basis for ultimately accepting them. When people have a problem with something that is in fact harmless (such as interracial or same-sex relationships, to use a historical example and a closely analogous modern one) exposing them to that thing and giving them a chance to see that no harm is coming of it is a critical part of getting them to accept it. The die-hard opponents aren't necessarily going to be swayed (and, in fact, them getting increasingly angry at the extent to which society has accepted things they don't like is a major reason why politics gets so divisive these days), but enough fence-sitters will to make acceptance the new norm for society as a whole.

wpot posted...

I would say that many people making that statement are exhausted by hearing the same divisive talking points and don't want to think about them yet again in the middle of entertainment they are trying to consume

Not really. When you hear a divisive talking point you already agree with, it doesn't make you think much. You already agree with it, after all. It's either going to provide you with new insights and ideas that you can incorporate into your position (which is generally not very cognitively demanding), or it's going to be immediately accepted without any further consideration. It's things you disagree with that make you think: Why would they say this? Why don't I agree with them? How do their justifications align with the basis for my world view? Should I be considering their position? How can I convince somebody that thinks that way to agree with me?

It is true that people get tired of being reminded how terrible the world is (which is what actually happens when media expresses a political view you agree with: It reminds you that this change that you feel is necessary still hasn't come to pass), but framing that as "media is too political" isn't accurate because the actual issue is "I need to take a break from worrying about the world" (I mean, the actual issue is that people keep doing horrible things that make the world terrible, but we aren't looking that broadly at the matter), and most people who are in that position do express something akin to the latter instead of the former. "Media is too political" is much more commonly the anthem of people who just don't want to have to think about problems or viewpoints on which they haven't already made up their minds.

wpot posted...

Certainly, and it's more and more true every year.

It's never not been roughly as true as it is today. The only thing that's changing is that communities that want to push back against "woke media" have enough of a voice now that you hear them complaining more often, plus historical media generally doesn't seem as politically charged because it aligns well enough with modern culture to seem like it's not calling for change.

As a challenge, see if you can name five different pieces of media from the last 20 years with absolutely zero political connotations. I'll suggest taking that a step further and making sure that whatever you pick does actually try to tell some sort of compelling story, to rule out picks like Tetris or Mario that are devoid of any sort of meaning, but I feel like that should go without saying.

hera posted...

how are there 200 plus sonic characters

Mania offered people the option to create OC's, but Sega retains all rights to those characters, which means they got a bunch of new characters from the ~220 people that still buy Sonic games.

(This is not actually what happened in any way)

wpot posted...

I didn't say anything of the sort. People can talk about what they want when they want. Anyone else can listen when they want to.

While that's all true, that's also not what the topic is about. This topic is about people demanding that entertainers don't say anything political for the sake of maintaining their escapism. Tuning out of political discussions is generally fine (though doing that all the time is harmful and self-centred), but demanding that political discussions stop because you don't want to participate in people trying to make the world a better place is not.

wpot posted...

It is fair to want some entertainment that creates a safe, politics-free zone.

Here's the other thing: What is "politics-free entertainment"? Because 99% of the time, when people complain about media being "too political," it's not that they regularly consume media with no political message whatsoever, it's that they disagree with that particular political message and want to shut it down without thinking about why the disagreement exists and how to argue in favour of their own position (often because their position is pretty indefensible and coming to terms with that requires them to reconcile some considerable cognitive dissonance). The vast majority of media does carry some manner of political message. Finding examples of truly apolitical media is quite difficult.

Revelation34 posted...

"People who play video games professionally know more about politics than actual politicians"

Quite possibly. The only expertise politicians need is knowing how to get elected and how the government works. They're not inherently more qualified than anyone else to discuss any given matter of social significance.

HarbingerofHope posted...

Zoras have been part of the series since the first game though.

They've been very much fleshed out as a race of NPC's instead of just another enemy, though, and that started with OoT.

Wow. Make Pay-to-win PvP, then make it so that players who pay too much can't play PvP. What a great business model.

Gaawa_chan posted...

The pacing in this one is absolutely atrocious to the point where I feel like I've sat through 2 movies already, and the game keeps putting up invisible walls to keep me on rails, but I am just starting so hopefully that problem does not continue.

It remains very cutscene-heavy (at least through to Chapter 3, where I am now), but it ditches the invisible walls thing pretty quickly outside of some story sequences where it just makes sense (like if you're literally running away from a giant tank, you can't go backwards until you finish that sequence). You're still limited in where you can go by enemy levels, but you can still explore about as freely as you could in either of the others.

Gaawa_chan posted...

Literally over half the party has all or most of their important attacks pierce all that anyway (Shulk, Melia, Riki, Seven).

I wouldn't necessarily recommend using Riki against Mechon because his autoattacks (which his AI will try to use) will bounce and tank his tension level, but yeah, there are quite a few ways around it that don't have to rely on anti-mechon weapons.

That said, if she was just getting to Sword Valley, Seven wasn't an option yet.

Gaawa_chan posted...

I didn't even use the tanks most of the time in XC1, tbh.

You can get away with eschewing a dedicated healer pretty comfortably, but ditching a tank generally means you've either managed to build one of your attackers to be tanky enough to fill the role or you've built all of your attackers to be so strong that the enemy dies before they can kill you. Both are very possible, but neither are really what you'd expect from somebody on their first trip through the game, pre-Sword Valley (which also means pre-Monado Armour, which is a particularly useful tool for setting up beefy attackers).

Gaawa_chan posted...

That absolutely was not the weakest part of XCX. X is my favorite of the -blade games that I've finished, but its story is absolute trash because it's not complete.

Eeyup. It's blatant sequel bait, but there's been no sequel, and the story really had no excuse for being that limited.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Xenoblade Chronicles is in a weird spot for me. The premise of each of the games is exactly what I look for. But the most interest part for me is the concept that ties the games together with XenoGears and XenoSaga. From what I understand there's a scientist doing something that divided him and makes him several Gods in different universes (or something like that). The problem is I don't see myself playing the games to see how much of that gets explained.

Massive spoilers for both Xenoblade 1 and 2, along with how those relate to information about 3 that was available pre-launch:

There haven't been any explicit tie-ins to previous Xeno games, but 1 and 2 were connected by way of a cutscene that occurs at/near the end of both games. In that scene, a scientist named Klaus makes use of an artifact called the Conduit (not explicit shown in 1, but retconned in 2. This bears considerable physical resemblance to the Zohar and may end up being a tie-in to Gears as the series plot develops) to try creating a new universe. The results are apocalyptic. Most life on Earth is wiped out, the handful of human survivors are mutated into twisted creatures roaming the shattered remnants of their former world (which is visited in 2 as the Land of Morytha), Klaus himself is granted the power of a god, but has half of his body transported to another dimension. In this initial world, Klaus takes on the role of The Architect and creates what comes to be known as the world of Alrest, in which all of Xenoblade 2 is set, including establishing the circle of life that ultimately results in Titans being born to act as landmasses for smaller creatures.

The other half of Klaus, along with the colleague that tried to stop him (Galea, only named in 2) end up in a completely new, parallel dimension, consisting of a world that's just an endless sea (at least, that's all we ever see of it). In this world, the two create the Bionis and Mechonis and respectively become Zanza and Meyneth, gods of their respective titans. The events of that game all follow the conflict between the titans, ultimately culminating in the death of both gods and Shulk using the power of the Monado (his magic sword, to grossly oversimplify matters) to create a new world with no need for gods. This new world is briefly explored in 1's epilogue cutscene and in Future Connected (the epilogue campaign included with the Definitive Edition), and as far as we see there, consists mostly of locations from Bionis and Mechonis laid out as part of a more traditional landscape that expands beyond that and explicitly exists as just one planet in an otherwise normal universe.

At the end of Xenoblade 2, just before the party is fights the big bad guy to prevent Alrest from being destroyed, Klaus warns them that his time is nearly up and the Conduit will be leaving the world soon, taking all of his power and the power of anything else that depends on it with it. During the final cutscene, we see Klaus performing one final act of divine intervention to preserve all of Alrest's existing Titans and life in the new world that is forming, all of which happens at the same time as Xenoblade 1's ending (we hear Shulk's voice from that ending cutscene echo through the dimensional vortex that forms Klaus' left half, and there's a considerable chance that the Conduit left because Shulk wanted to create a world without gods). Once the final boss is defeated and the party returns to Alrest, they see the Cloud Sea retreating and find themselves looking at a new, more traditional landscape. The old titans all make their way to the shores of this new continent and crash into it to become part of the land, forming a new world for everyone to live in.

It was implied that this new land and the new world formed at the end of 1 were the same place, and that 1's world had merged back into the dimension from which it came, but that wasn't explicitly confirmed until 3 was announced. 3 includes many elements from both worlds, from landscape elements (the Mechonis' Sword and Urayan titan are both pictured on the game's cover art, title screen, and seen in the landscape of the game very early on) to creatures, to the people that live there (the two warring nations seem to consist of people that resemble the inhabitants of 1's world and people that resemble the inhabitants of 2's). I can't speak to exactly how 3 shows this connection beyond that, since I'm still pretty early in the game, but it definitely seems to be set in this combined world, many years later.

There's more nuance to it than that, but that's the gist of it all. There's also Xenoblade X in there somewhere, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the other games yet. People have half-joked that the title might be a roman numeral and that Takahashi opted to release #10 before #2, which may yet prove to be true, but as of now (again, speaking without knowing how 3 ends), there doesn't seem to be a connection. If you want to see how it's all actually portrayed without playing through multiple 100+ hour games to do so (though they are excellent games and I quite recommend them), compilations of all of their cutscenes are available on Youtube (1 is ~10.5 hours long, 2 is 14) and there's a substantial number of analysis and lore videos that explore/explain things further, so it may be worth your time to dive into those if you're interested. There still isn't any definite connection to Gears/Saga, but a lot of those lore videos explore potential connections, and depending on what comes out of 3, that may change.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Okay... though I'm not even sure how accurate it is.

It's not unheard of for speculation - even inaccurate speculation - about spoiler content to be modded as spoilers. Bear in mind that a lot of the time, the mods haven't actually played/seen whatever's being allegedly spoiled, so they can't verify the accuracy of a spoiler (and might not even want to read it for the sake of avoiding spoilers themselves) and instead have to take the word of whoever marked it at face value.

shipwreckers posted...

The western censorship didn't help XCX either.

I don't think too many people actually based their purchasing decision off of what percentage of a 12-year-old girl's buttcheeks you could see in half a dozen optional costumes. As much as a handful of people got really upset over the censorship for the principle of the matter, I'd be very, very surprised if it had a measurable impact on the game's sales. The WiiU's low install base was pretty much entirely responsible for limiting the game's sales.

Though, that said, X sold almost as many copies as XC1 did on Wii (840k vs 913k). 1 has since eclipsed that (560k on 3DS, 1.52 million on Switch), but as far as the initial releases went, they saw similar sales. Now, that's despite NoA doing everything they could to pretend 1 didn't exist (DE really was the first release where they actually made an effort to sell it to people), while X was actually promoted, but again, the WiiU's install base held it back. Quite a few people wanted to buy it, but didn't want to buy a WiiU just for it.

shipwreckers posted...

Somehow that "filler" was bearable to me

It really only bothered me leading into the chapter where Skells were unlocked and the chapter where the flight module became available. X really wasn't story-driven so much as the game was about exploring and building up the world of Mira, so most of the time I was pretty happy to just explore and do side quests and fit the story missions into that as felt natural. The affinity missions were a bit more of an issue because grinding affinity sucked (especially where swapping party members to do so was such a pain, so cycling through everyone regularly wasn't overly attractive), but overall, it wasn't too bad.

With Torna, though, I wanted to do all the sidequests and stuff (and eventually did), but when I wanted to get the story first out of the way in case I ran out of time, that got really annoying. I liked the sidequesting well enough, and I understand the push for "Look at all the friends you made and then murdered!" to help flesh out the world and drive home just how tragic the whole situation was, but the community level requirements were just a bit too high to flow naturally with my approach to sidequesting. At the same time, though, they didn't take that long, so the padding wasn't a huge problem even with my desire to rush through the story.

shipwreckers posted...

The story hit hard indeed. IMO, it gave some much needed context as to why Mythra was the way she was (as opposed to her simply being another distant / emo JRPG trope girl).

I'd say that context was already there, since it was pretty well explained what happened in the Aegis War and they were pretty clear about why Pyra existed (namely, as Mythra's dissociative trauma response), but it was cool to see it happen, build attachments to all of the characters that were affected, and watch them and the world develop into their future selves. Most of XC2's story progression (once it finally starts progressing for real) consists of building up the world to explain the motivations of the characters involved, and that world/character-building gets really quite interesting once it gets rolling, so more of that was great. Hugo's death hit me particularly hard. Despite only seeing the character for a short time, they did a really good job of communicating just how important a person he was in everyone's life. Between Addam sobbing as he held his body and the Special Inquisitor trembling silently as he accepted the core crystals, it was made heart-breakingly clear how much of a loss his death was for the people around him, and that's just good world-building.

streamofthesky posted...

It has the gameplay that XC2 main game should've had.

Eh, I don't think I'd say that. Stacking up orbs for a big chain attack was much, much smoother than in the base game (although Orb Master is a thing if that's the route you want to take), but in turn, that meant things revolved a little too much around doing that, unlike the much larger array of options the base game gives. Driver combos were kind of awkward, especially with such high Break resist on most of the enemies you'd actually want a Fusion bonus on, so relatively few Art Recharge pouch items (and the ones that are available are very lategame, unlike being able to buy Narcipear Jelly 20 seconds after taking control of Rex), and the combos being tied to Switch Arts for so many. It was still a great time, but I wouldn't say it was unilaterally better than the base game (though I say this not having done a particularly deep dive into endgame combat like I did with the base game, so my experience may be lacking).

I like that we're reporting the names of employees that have problems, but not the names of the supervisors that are stopping them from solving those problems.

11110111011 posted...

Using your example, I just want to watch people play a game and hear about the game - not some political opinion. I don't care about politics and if you are on one side or the other you are probably a horrible person.

I don't watch people plumbing or being a doctor and if either were trying to talk politics with me I would just nod and smile until the subject changes.

Translation: "The status quo generally benefits me and I don't want to have to think about how it's hurting other people."

But even then, it's not like loosening divorce laws is a particularly prominent left-wing position. This isn't something the libs are asking for and they're refusing, this is something they've come up with all on their own and said "I bet the libs will call this stupid lol pwnt."

I don't have much sympathy for TERFs. They weren't trying to change anything about the right, they just allied with them for the sake of furthering their transphobic agenda and it bit them in the ass exactly the way everyone expected it to.

Cacciato posted...

The guy that admitted to selling cars at a place that sells cars, for the guy that owns the place that sells cars isnt a car salesman.

Yes, now we're getting somewhere. Simply performing a job - even with all the context that would normally be present when somebody does that job as a career - does not mean a person has to identify that job as part of their professional identity. That's entirely a matter of what role that job plays in the person's life. It's not even necessarily a time/money thing, the classic example of which being an actor who works full-time at Starbucks because acting can't pay all the bills: They still identify as an actor and not a barista because that's what they're focusing their professional aspirations on. Similarly, identifying as a student and not a fast food worker, even though fast food work accounts for literally 100% of their labour hours and income.

Again, this is going to differ from what's counted for tax purposes. The IRS needs to fit everybody and all of their incomes into boxes for statistical analysis purposes, so that's what they do. In our colloquial conversations, however, we're capable of more nuance than the IRS can muster in trying to fit 300 million people into a drop-down list. We don't need to think in terms of "if you make money doing X then you are an X'er" and can instead just listen to people when they tell us what their vocation is/is not.

And, of course, not a single word of any of this changes the fact that "he's a car salesman so of course he can't be trusted" is a textbook logical fallacy, which is a more salient point than the question of whether or not you got the details of your ad hominem correct.

In all likelihood, that is indeed what his taxes will probably say (unless he's doing it for free, as mentioned), but for colloquial conversation purposes I'd still be inclined to defer to how he identifies his career instead of insisting on my own identification. Whether side hustles need to be declared on tax forms or not, they're still just side hustles and people don't consider them to be their actual job. There are cases where you can point out that somebody's spending more time on and making more money from their side hustle than their "real job" and should maybe consider pivoting into focusing more on it, but it's still going to be a matter of people deciding for themselves how to identify their career.

shadowsword87 posted...

there was a big migration away from teaching during the pandemic because it's s*** and doesn't pay well

That, and being in a classroom full of germ factories that haven't quite figured out when it is and is not appropriate to sneeze into somebody's mouth isn't the most appealing idea during the worst public health crisis in a century, especially with the government actively suppressing efforts to keep it under control.

Cacciato posted...

It covered the knowledge of declaring all income for the year, and turns out that I sell is a pretty declarative phrase.

So... everyone that sells a car in a given year should declare themselves to be a car salesperson for that year? Or is there a threshold that must be exceeded before identifying it as an occupation?

Cacciato posted...

but heres the part where you can say maybe hes working for free, so theres your out.

Also an option.

Cacciato posted...

Thats definitely true. He couldve also gotten an accounting degree and had to study tax law like I did.

Did your accounting degree cover the importance of making sure you have actual numbers before drawing conclusions from those numbers?

Cacciato posted...

Okay adjl. The guy helping to sell cars for a dealership isnt a car salesman. Got it. Jesus fucking Christ

If he doesn't consider it to be his job, then identifying him as a car salesman is indeed incorrect. At some point, depending on just how much he's making from it, he may officially have to change that stance for tax reasons, but regardless of how that pans out I expect he's still going to be in a better position to assess that than you are.

None of which, of course, changes the fact that your point was never anything more than flimsy ad hominem and can safely be completely disregarded by pretty much every sensible person.

Far-Queue posted...

I think maybe adjl got tired of absolutely dunking on the conservatrolls of the board, and now that Link is in purg he's picked up the mantle of Devil's Advocate, driven by a healthy dose of boredom, and spite for those who are not his intellectual equal

Nah, nothing's really changed. You've each just said more things lately that I think are incorrect. I understand that being on the receiving end of such unbridled intellectual ferocity for a change may come as enough of a shock that you might think there's been a larger change than that, but there hasn't really.

Revelation34 posted...

They can't get rid of people who are on public property. Not even the cops can.

Physically get rid of? Perhaps not. Make a point of explicitly stating how unwelcome they are? Explicitly criticize their positions? Pause the entire event so everyone can uncomfortably stare down the unwanted Nazi filth until they slink back to their hovels? All perfectly fair game, and just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how literal goddamn Nazis should be treated.

There are many, many options for chasing away unwanted Nazis. They're not particularly polite, of course, but Turning Point hasn't exactly cultivated an image of being polite to people they don't like (see: "My pronouns are 'kiss my ass'" from the linked video), and Nazis should be pretty close to the top of the list of people any decent person doesn't like. Instead, we get "Oh well the cops couldn't remove them so what could we do?" only after they get called out for tolerating Nazis. They're more polite to their Nazi cheerleaders than they are to trans people as a concept, and I see no reason not to hold them accountable for being such miserable pieces of shit as to behave like that.

Jen0125 posted...

Do you think it matters if it's illegal? You said it doesn't happen. It does happen. It happens all the time.

Also that. Yeah, it's illegal to remove them, but I can almost guarantee that if a couple of homeless people were sitting there instead of Nazis, the cops would have chased them off (physically, if needed) hours before the event even started, with Turning Point's full blessing. So I guess we can add homeless people to the list of people that Turning Point thinks are worse than literal goddamn Nazis, which again is pretty damning.

Cacciato posted...

Selling a car and then going into a topic about car prices and describing yourself as someone who sells cars are two different things.

Which, in turn, are different things from being identifiable as a car salesman (read: somebody whose primary job it is to sell cars).

In that case, "already own it" is one of the best prices ever. I strongly recommend it, it's one of my favourite games ever.

Again with the flimsy ad hominem in lieu of saying anything constructive. You should really work on that temper of yours.

I don't understand what benefit they think this could have. At best, it's just going to delay amicable divorces by a few months, since it doesn't stop postpartum divorces. In practice, a couple that wants to separate can still do so regardless of pregnancy, just waiting until the kid is born to sign the papers and make it official. It's going to do nothing to stop kids from having divorced parents, which is about the only potential benefit I could believe they're fishing for (though even then, being raised by parents that should divorce but don't/can't is generally worse for kids than being raised by parents that divorced when they should have).

The only time it'll actually have an impact is when only one party wants out (abusive situations being the most obvious example), and then the impact is overwhelmingly negative because it means that person is trapped in a relationship they don't want (which may even be outright dangerous). Nothing about this makes sense.

The only thing I know of is that Mojang formally banned anything NFT-based from Minecraft and cryptobros are moderately pissed about it, but that doesn't really affect most people (or if it does, it affects them for the better, because anything to limit NFT integration in games is a good thing).

Just for that, I'm posting in this thread.