u/unclellama

I don't think i'd like this as an explicit game system. But i'd love to see it done through writing - tell me that i'm about to sign up for 'the long haul' in a way that is reasonzbly transparent fir the player, but still in-world.

Like, i think the morrowind MQ could easily be more urgent in places, because caius does such a great job of setting our expectations.

• factions that have meaningfully conflicting interests
• limited and ambiguous exposition, unreliable narrators
• chance to fail at actions based on character skill
• a world that doesn't immediately center the player

Shellac could really play that country fuckin music. They used to play the same festival in barcelona every single year, it was a little slice of jambon heaven

I did a phd in astrophysics and then five years of postdocs. I'm now a high school math teacher in denmark, which is pretty nice.

I don't really regret any of it - i got to see the world, met fun people, had very flexible hours, and mostly enjoyed the work - but i came out of the postdocs with less money than when i started, and it hasn't really affected my job opportunities outside academia. So i wouldn't recommend it if you care about that kind of thing. It's arguably a waste of time unless you particularly enjoy the work itself.

France, famously not a country that ever protested or rioted before now

kill

You start walking, letting your stamina bar refill, when you have an idea that combat is imminent. If you don't do that, you are knowingly making the combat more difficult / annoying.

I really like that mechanic, adds to the feeling of needing to prepare for combat at low levels.

I'm not a huge fan based on what i've heard of his stuff - it sounds cool and 'epic' but the melody almost feels like an afterthought. I imagine him starting out with a particular sound and fitting the tune around that, i imagine soule doing the opposite.

Obviously you could, with a minimum of effort, find all the calls from israeli government and cabinet members to force the palestinians out of gaza. Obviously you are aware that that is definitionally genocide. Equally obviously, you will not.

Assuming you are a real person, i am happy that, by exclusion, you are pro-abortion.

The socially dominant position, pushed by party elites and openly pro-israel lobbies, is to excuse israel's crimes to the maximum extent possible. Has been for decades. What's changing is that it's now pretty much impossible to excuse what they are doing without looking like a plant or a fool.

Which is why there is now huge elite pressure on artists to 'just don't mention the genocide'. And some of them are pointing that out, and pointing out when other artists bend the knee. Maybe not bravery exactly - because you're probably right that a majority of music fans now despise israel - but certainly a choice of principles vs financial interests.

Sure, but at the same time, tucson residents are essentially locked out of living by the ocean, and all the experiences that go along with living in a real city (as opposed to scattered malls in a sea of suburbs). One is not necessarily better, or healthier, or whatever, than the other. I love the tucson surroundings but the city itself is mostly miles of vape shops and drive-thru.

(I'd guess this is, intentionally or not, designed in such a way that you can place cities anywhere on the y-axis by tweaking the weights.)

I guess that probably factors in. But i'd swap a 45-min subway ride to central park for tucson's many bland little parks surrounded by stroads.

(Sabino canyon is better than either! But i don't really think of that as a tucson amenity, more an advantage of living in a state with amazing nature..)

No idea what the y axis is here, but at a guess it's aggregate of things conservatives and rich liberals are scared of. In what world is nyc a 'low-quality' city?

For me (also a morrowind guy) it's because it limits interesting writing when the factions don't conflict. Sure, it would be ok if they somehow wrote them to have interesting conflicts but you could still 'unite' them. But that would require so much extra writing for something most players won't see, i doubt bethesda would come through on it. So i think the best option is to force the player to choose sides now and then.

Everything in skyrim apart from the civil war feels weirdly disconnected from the rest of the world, and i think the 'do everything on one playthrough' mentality is the main reason why. In morrowind the great houses felt like they were competing, it made the world feel more like a real place and less like a theme park.

I do kinda think shrooms have made me a more mellow and less selfish person. But i really think you need to aim to have fun while tripping + enjoy the aftereffects, don't fish for some deeper meaning. Psychedelics make your brain throw up - the effects of that are often beneficial, but that doesn't mean the patterns in the carrot chunks are particularly valuable.

I think a party that is one half of effectively a two party system should be able to get stuff done when in power. The republicans somehow manage to.

Are we to assume that the democrat elites are entirely incompetent? Or are they simply not interested in doing the stuff they make vague motions towards come voting season? Either option is awful, but the latter seems more likely.

I think you know this at some level, though. You are making excuses for a party that you know is compromised, because that feels like the least bad option. In the long run i don't think it is the least bad option. Frustration with obama's post-'hope and change' conservatism led directly to trump. Let them collapse if they can't evolve.

'Accessible' is a key word there. Accessible means, do not rock the boat. Obamacare was 'accessible', but the public option got scrapped. Democrats have never properly tried to fix healthcare, because they are owned by the donor class.

(I'm not american, i lived there for many years though. The frustration with do-nothing democrats is probably easier to understand when you see the country from the inside. Or, you know, continue your impotent seething, if that gives you some short-term pleasure.)

The US don't want the democratic party because they are basically republicans who use nicer words. The US wants a functioning healthcare system. The democrats have failed to reform healthcare in a sane way so many times now that it should be obvious they are bought and sold by donors.

There will always be losers who support what trump is doing, i'm explicitly not saying that all americans want a left-wing party. I'm saying that voter enthusiasm for the democrats is low, because they pretend to be a left-wing party while doing nothing of value for their base. Their only 'good' function is to slow down the decline that trump and his hogs represent. And that's not enough, so trump wins even while being historically unpopular outside his base.

Also totally agree that there's nothing wrong with bands keeping on going if they still enjoy it, even if they have 'peaked' in the popular imagination. 'Let's go make believe' and 'cigarettes in hell' are top 10 oasis songs for me, they still had a lot to offer even when the albums became more hit-and-miss.

Old bands charging exhorbiant prices to hear the hits can generally go fuck themselves, though...

I also love the first few songs on dig out your soul. They have an energy and confidence that their other 'late-period' albums never quite reached. And they were really getting into swing beats, which felt new and exciting for possibly the most 'staight 4/4' band ever. The back half of the album was shit imho, though.

I was a big fan as a kid, had an 'edgy' phase where i decided i was too cool for oasis, and now as an old guy i quite like them (especially first album, BHN, and that initial run of great songs on dig out your soul). Musically pretty bland, lyrically mostly empty, but they have tunes for miles and they really believe in the communal power of the rock'n'roll singalong. It just works.

I'd guess the point is to let the democratic party change or die. The US desperately needs a left-wing party instead of those genocidal ghouls.

There'll always be one shitty party for pathetic, frustrated, angry. impotent people to vote against their interests. That's table stakes. The US have had two shitty parties for decades now, which leads directly to the current situation.

I'd like to see the next great xcom-like move away from the 'pod' mechanic. In xcom2 you basically have to take advantage of the existence of discrete pods, which feels incredibly gamey (and counterintuitive for new players - why do i get punished for pushing forward to cover, etc.).

Have some way the enemies communicate with each other, coupled with some way of interfering with that. Recently i've enjoyed playing wotc with the yellow alert mod, but it can be rough because the whole game is balanced around pod management.

It's really not. I'm a math teacher and just used 95% shots in xcom legendary as an example of the binomial distribution.

You're going to miss quite a few during a playthrough, the rest is psychology.

For what it's worth, it goes the other way too. An embarrassing number of physicists suddenly decided they knew better than epidemologists during covid, etc. I think it's just misunderstood-genius syndrome. A lot of the guys that wrote in were retired engineers, they knew a bit of math, and if they had worked at some small firm for 40 years they were probably used to being the only 'numbers guy' in the building.