Lurker > adjl

slacker03150 posted...

The new argument is the girl could have got an abortion in state, the left was just trying to make them look bad or something like that. I saw it last week but didn't really pay attention.

Not that that would even make things much better. Even if abortions are technically legal under certain circumstances, if that's so obscure that those that need them don't know how to access them, that's not good enough.

Plus, regardless of any technicalities that might have allowed access, several politicians responded to the incident by defending her not being able to get one and saying things along the lines of "I'm sure she will come to cherish the baby if she is prevented from getting an abortion," and there's really no way to spin that to be anything other than monstrous.

There was always that time when that 10-year-old rape victim had to cross state lines to get an abortion and they all tried to deflect by pointing out that it was an illegal immigrant who raped her (though I vaguely recall that not actually being true). They didn't stay silent then, though it probably would have gone better for them if they had.

Lokarin posted...

lulz:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/politics/pence-classified-documents-fbi/index.html

That sounds a lot more analogous to Biden's situation, and to that end, I'm not too concerned about it. Based on what is currently known, it sounds like another honest mistake that his team acted to rectify as soon as it was realized. Sure, it's possible that it wasn't actually a mistake and he knew he had them and just went this route because he didn't think he'd be able to keep it hidden, but until further evidence emerges, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Purple has the same shape as the peanut ones, so presumably that.

Which, now that I think about it, raises some interesting implications given that she was added to the roster for the sake of inclusivity. At face value, that's just a matter of filling out the rainbow (sans indigo, to get that out of the way because I know you usually bring it up), but she's literally a woman with nuts on the inside. How delightfully subversive, and the snowflakes didn't even notice because they were too busy having a meltdown over the green one's shoes not being sexy enough.

AltOmega2 posted...

good thing that wasn't the argument I was making

And yet you made the claim that he lied in the first place. Is this your way of conceding that you were wrong to do so?

If anything, nobody owning a regular PS5 actually makes a mid-gen upgrade more plausible, since you don't have as large a player base to risk fragmenting.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Now I am wondering what flavour the purple one is.

The colours don't have different flavours. Any given bag of M&M's has the same colours in it (I believe), regardless of which variety you get. That said, purple ones aren't actually in circulation yet, to my knowledge, so perhaps it'll end up being exclusive to some new type that comes out later.

In a more general sense, purple candies are usually grape-flavoured, though I use the term "grape" very loosely.

AltOmega2 posted...

actually, he asked if I could name "any"
logically, I'd only have to name one to be sufficient

You only have to name one to sufficiently answer the question you were asked. You would, however, have to name considerably more than that to substantiate your initial claim that he was lying to say that few AAA games star women of colour. In truth, he should probably have asked "how many can you name?" to rebut your claim instead of "can you name any?", but the bottom line is that you have still failed to substantiate the claim that began this exchange. No amount of claiming a technical victory in this conversation microcosm is going to change that.

Blightzkrieg posted...

The reason Isekai is good is is due to the primal desire inside every human being to breed an exotic foreign princess

Which any video game can offer without needing to explicitly establish an isekai premise.

I'd watch a Shrek Star Trek parody episode. The novelty would likely have worn off after just one episode, but it'd be fun while it lasted.

Vampire Survivors is nice and mindless, for the most part.

Count_Drachma posted...

Or maybe you can stop running around with the goal posts while pretending that China's markets are comparable to the US's, or that free speech in China has the same characteristics as free speech in the US.

Your criterion for "capitalist" was "has an actual free market." You're the one who came in here with binary criteria, not me. I just called you out on it, and now you are moving the goalposts to try and pretend you were making a more nuanced comparison (while also bringing in a non sequitur strawman for even more fallacious goodness). You should know that you look terribly silly when you project like that.

Blightzkrieg posted...

The Isekai game genre should be more full than it is.

I can kind of understand why it isn't. The mere act of turning on a game is itself kind of an isekai-like experience in that you're immersing yourself in a fantasy world and all the shenanigans that come with it. That means having an explicit isekai step in the game feels kind of redundant and contrived because it usually just ends up being a non-gameplay prologue sequence. The FFT Advance games managed to incorporate gameplay to their prologues in the form of having a snowball fight that acted as a mechanical tutorial before being sucked into the actual game world, but that's about the extent of what you can actually do because the game's actual gameplay is going to depend on the setting of the other world and not the initial one (unless it's a walking simulator, in which case this stops being an issue). Even that just seemed kind of silly and contrived and there's no reason the game couldn't have simply started out in the actual game world and delivered a tutorial there.

Basically, if you're playing a game to be a fantasy hero fighting monsters and stuff, a prologue in which you are not a fantasy hero and cannot fight monsters and stuff until you travel to fantasy hero world is just an extra step before you get to the point.

Weird and not particularly aesthetically pleasing, but that's high fashion for you.

GanglyKhan posted...

Copyright makes so little sense to me as it pertains to media IPs. Imagine if the dude who invented shoes was able to go to court and won and he was the ONLY guy who could make shoes. That's what media copyright feels like to me.

Except they aren't copyrighting all media, they're copyrighting the specific media they created (with a few exceptions that do definitely overstep the bounds of reasonableness). Coming up with a shoe design and copyrighting that shoe design seems pretty reasonable to me, so long as it's confined to the unique aspects of that design and not anything too broad (though specific technologies will often be patented, and that's also often reasonable). This is, of course, not to say the concept isn't horribly abused at every possible turn, because that's just how the corporate world works, but fundamentally it's pretty sensible to ensure that people can continue to profit off of their own work instead of having to compete with people ripping it off.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

They already have. It's the only reason Mickey is still under copyright at all. They've been bribing people for decades now to keep pushing back the copyright expiration date.

The problem is, they've kind of pushed it to the limit of what they can get away with, and probably won't be able to do it again. So they're going to shift to entirely different tactics to make it difficult to ever really do anything with their properties.

Which is actually part of why they've been doing the live-action Disney movies - it's a way of exploiting copyright to keep those specific characters and their look under copyright even once the original cartoons expire (starting with Snow White in about 10 years).

The really annoying thing is that they aren't wrong to push for that. They've just gone about it in a way that does more harm than good. As they stand, copyright laws have not evolved the way that is needed to align with a digital world. When the 75-year limit was introduced, the idea of any company being able to make use of their media 75 years later was largely unfathomable, let alone reasonable. Releasing the content into public domain to ensure that interested parties could continue to use and distribute it worked better for everyone because it ensures the media is preserved.

We live in a world now, though, where Disney is still actively using Mickey and (their) Snow White, and they very easily could make all of that original media available. They should be able to do that and profit from it without having to compete with knock-offs. Pushing back the cutoff time for copyright expiry, though, has only delayed having to deal with that and will ultimately fail to solve the problem, while making it that much harder for abandoned media to be preserved because it takes longer for it to fall into public domain.

Instead, copyright expiry should be based on whether or not a given IP is still seeing commercial use. In a world of streaming and digital distribution, there's really no reason *not* to make a property available if a company is still interested in profiting from it. Because they can continue to profit from their creations, the law should continue to protect their ability to do so for as long as they wish. Conversely, though, if they choose not to make it available, that should be treated as a decision to abandon the property to public domain and the copyright should lapse. There of course needs to be some amount of grace period there, to account for the time spent producing remakes and the like, but even 5 years would be plenty. Certainly not 90 or whatever Disney's inflated it to by now.

BlackJackCat posted...

Unless somehow Square Enix's investors are collectively trying to do the least intuitive thing possible over and over until they go bankrupt, I don't think they are in in particular danger of going under.

Bear in mind that this is a company that sold off several major, successful IP's and studios to fund further investment into NFT's and other crypto applications in the middle of last year, by which point the NFT bubble had obviously burst. Their HD games division also turned a loss last year, purely because Avengers was such a train wreck, meaning they would have been profitable had they stuck to what they were good at instead of going balls deep chasing the live service bandwagon. Common sense may be beyond them.

BigOlePappy posted...

Why isn't Square as consistent as other companies? I have no idea, but it seems like they take really solid, full-proof ideas, and then they tinker with them until they ruin it.

Mostly, they've got a lot of development talent on board that knows what they're doing with established IP's and good ideas, but they've got an executive suite that understands pretty much nothing about the products they make and insists on cramming whatever get-rich-quick schemes they can think of into them regardless of how suitable it is. It's a lot of really incompetent executive meddling, propped up by some genuinely talented staff.

This is the first I'm hearing of it, so probably not any time soon.

pionear posted...

You see Switches everywhere due to the portability of it

Even more than that, I just know of more people with Switches. Part of that may just be that I know a lot of the sort of people who jumped on the Animal Crossing bandwagon at the start of the pandemic (that game really couldn't have come out at a better time), but even beyond that it seems to be more dominant among my circles of friends than any other system I can think of.

BADoglick posted...

I think Xbox isn't doing themselves any favors with how they name consoles. Regular people don't know the difference between a new console and an upgraded existing one

You'd think the WiiU's and 3DS's struggles would have taught them a lesson in that regard, but here we are.

I don't have any aunts/uncles at all. Both parents were only children.

More or less.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

No, still a dereliction of duty. Doctors have no requirement to reports things to the government, professional secrecy is a thing.

That was the original basis for the ruling in Roe v. Wade. The final verdict was that, because the government has no right to know what happens between a patient and their doctor unless the patient is willing to share it, the government has no right to prohibit doctors from providing abortions. Roe v. Wade, however, has been thrown out, so the official position of the US Supreme Court is that the principle of medical privacy does not prevent the government from requiring doctors to report things or prohibiting certain treatments.

As much as many people see it as simply letting states ban abortion, the consequences of throwing out Roe v. Wade reach far, far further than that. It's a very big deal.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

she should just take them to court.

Take who to court, and for what? Her healthcare providers? Their hands were tied by the state's laws. The state's legislature? Suing them is a very involved process, one which is likely to go all the way to the federal Supreme Court, who can be expected to rule in whatever way provides the least possible protection for access to abortions (i.e. not in her favour) because they're the root of this whole mess.

This is a problem that isn't going to go away until the SC justices responsible for it are dead. That's just how the US Supreme Court works and the consequence of such power resting in the hands of such evil people.

Monopoman posted...

This might get by because it's clearly a parody, Weird Al actually does not need to ask for permission to make his songs, he just does so because he feels it's better for him and the musician.

Where it's being used to promote a product, though, I'm not sure it can claim to just be a parody. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

I can say that I know more people with a Switch than I think I could ever say I knew with any other system, so if you feel that way I think the main issue might be that you're interpreting the current generation too narrowly.

Lokarin posted...

what if someone intentionally made a franchise of restaurants that catered specifically to foods people on SNAP could get... cheap fried tomatoes, nutritious sliced cantaloupe, etc etc etc

Then people would lobby to get those franchises shut down for attracting "too many" poor people.

Count_Drachma posted...

You can't pretend to have an actual free market when the state restricts how many foreign movies can be in theaters each year and other s***.

There's no such thing as an actual free market, so you might want to adjust your standards so you aren't measuring real countries against a fantasy.

MechaKirby posted...

When *THAT* song kicked in, ooh boy, s*** was hype. Its been on my mind ever since they revealed it.

Weight of Life? Yep, that's a fantastic one. Definitely underutilized compared to Engage the Enemy and Counterattack, but it's so good.

I love cats.

So was your butt.

Throwing a screen protector on would probably be a good idea to keep the crack from becoming worse, but otherwise there are no problems, and even that probably isn't necessarily unless you expect to be using the phone for a long time.

Calling it now: The lawmakers that proposed this will be buying stocks in local industries that supply the prohibited items when they drop in value over the next couple weeks, then will walk back the idea after "studying the potential impact further" and sell their stocks once they rebound.

Trevor_Belmont posted...

What does "two-spirit" mean?

A variant of being non-binary/gender fluid that has historical roots in a number of indigenous American cultures. I'm not 100% clear on the details, and I would advise educating yourself if you ever plan to discuss the matter in any depth, but for colloquial understanding "NB, but natives" is probably good enough.

MechaKirby posted...

I think the targeting system sucks so far, seems very inconsistent

There's an option in the menu to change it to that R automatically picks the enemy closest to you, while L cycles normally. I found that helped to make it more consistent.

MechaKirby posted...

- This isn't much of a complaint, but might only be tied to Noah's Swordmaster class and/ or time based cooldowns; Upon switching to Eunie and Mio, the game immediately got more fun since it was more involved

That gets better as the class system opens up, since you'll get more arts to work with. Zephyr tends to be one of the more enjoyable early-game classes because of its short cooldowns, but others will catch up as you unlock more slots and ways to speed up recharge.

3 was figured out pretty quickly. Enel had pretty detailed guides to the combat mechanics out within the first week or two and full-fledged characters guides within 2 months. The meta has evolved since then as people have found new ways to min/max, but that's not remotely necessary to play through the game, so it doesn't change a whole lot. Far more so than X or 2, 3 also has decent tutorials and you can view them at will, so the game isn't anywhere close to as obtuse as either of them were. The tutorials don't cover absolutely everything, but they're more or less enough to get you through the game without major issues.

papercup posted...

I didn't care for Fates and I never played Three Houses :X

By most accounts I've seen, Three Houses is excellent and much better than Fates. Personally, I don't feel I can really justify buying 3H until I finish Fates (at least the two I already own), but I just haven't had much drive to go through them, so here I sit, FE-less.

Have you considered trying nothing?

It's a very serious contender for my favourite game ever, but some aren't huge on it.

Judgmenl posted...

Bi-weekly = 14 days, 2 weeks=28 days = twice a month.

Except for the two months each year where you get three biweekly cheques.

What if I told you I was wearing underwear.

Right.

Now.

Depends how much he stole.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The show has healthy fans?

Well, no, but there's still a spectrum.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/6/3/AAQwHjAAEGvD.jpg

Well, at least he wasn't beforehand.

BlackScythe0 posted...

"How can they sell this stuff if they don't know about what their bosses are doing with my money?"

Man, wait until that guy learns about every other major company in the world.

I can kind of see the point, and there's a part of me that might prefer weekly or monthly cheques (either would line up better with most of my recurring expenses), but weekly cheques would double the workload for anyone in payroll and waiting a whole month for money is a terribly long time for many people, so I'm fine with biweekly as a happy medium and having to resort to the very complicated mathematics of dividing or multiplying that number by 2.

I walk or bike to work (mostly walk these days, after a few months off of biking after breaking my elbow, and now it's winter) when I can't work from home, but that's about it. It does the job.

Revelation34 posted...

You mean nobody innocent has ever been found guilty of a crime?

Do you not understand that there's a difference between "these allegations are credible" and "the target of these allegations is guilty of the alleged crime"?

ReturnOfFa posted...

yes, there are false convictions of various crimes. what're some of the most common examples of these that are statistically significant? usually black men on false drug charges, among many other minor crimes that other folks walk away from with lesser charges.

Indeed. Influential, well-off white men charged with domestic violence aren't tremendously likely to be falsely convicted on those charges, statistically speaking. That doesn't mean a false conviction isn't possible, but the fact that he can afford his own lawyer already puts him head and shoulders above the vast majority of those that do ultimately find themselves falsely convicted for DV (to say nothing of the power it gives him to sue for defamation if his reputation is damaged by charges that turn out to be false), so it's not a particularly significant risk in this case.

ForteEXE3850 posted...

The Bayonetta voice actor thing just happened, people have learned nothing (not that I expected anyone to).

I also want to come back to this, because I think you're grossly overstating the harm that came from Taylor's nonsense. When her allegations first came out, plenty of people sided with her, yes (for good reason: they were credible allegations consistent with typical industry shenanigans), and Bayonetta 3's sales might have suffered for it if nothing had changed (at least, as much as any game's sales suffer over such boycotts, since that rarely makes a meaningful difference). Most of those people, however, responded to subsequent reports showing that she lied by changing their minds, which is what sensible people do when presented with new information that invalidates what they previously believed, so any potential loss of sales was negated. A handful of people continued to hate on Platinum for doing nothing out of the ordinary ("wrong" is a more complex judgement, since there's loads of room to criticize industry standards for VA compensation, but Platinum did at least follow those standards and therefore shouldn't be singled out), because they refused to update their opinions with new information, but they're a tiny minority that likely had no significant impact on sales or the studio's reputation.

Jumping to conclusions can be harmful in two scenarios: If harm is immediately caused, and if those that have jumped refuse to change their minds when it turns out their first impression was wrong. If neither of those conditions are true, then jumping to the initial conclusions did not cause harm. You've fixated on "look at all these people that spent a few days being wrong" as though that's some kind of terrible evil, but that's just life, dude. You can't put off every decision you're ever faced with until you have a comprehensive understanding of the situation. Sometimes, you just have to base your decision off of the best information available to you and make corrections later if it turns out that was a mistake. All any of us can do is try to minimize the total harm caused by our decision-making processes.

Between uBlock Origin and NoScript, I haven't seen ads on GameFAQs in a very long time. They long ago killed any chance of me putting up with them by being as obnoxious as possible with their placement, format, and the risk of outright harming my computer some of them brought.

I've had a pretty good experience with CAA (the Canadian equivalent), but I can see it varying by area based on how well-equipped they are to handle the demand. Sounds like you should be looking at other options, since AAA doesn't seem to be doing well. Probably also demand a refund of your membership fee for the year, since waiting over 6 hours (it'll probably actually be 24+ by the time you call) is absolutely not within the service standards they advertise.

That's considered part of the groin/inguinal region. The groin is the whole area, not just the knobbly bits.

I've tried to find something of theirs that I really like, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

One crops up every couple years and hangs around for a few months before people lose interest. It's a nice idea on paper, but in practice there's rarely enough demand to be worth sustaining it indefinitely.