WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I wish I could still ask my parents this question. Because they bought a home in 1984, a year after I was born, for $124,000. Guessing off data, their mortgage would have been 13-14%. When I adjusted for inflation, their mortgage was nearly double mine in 2023 dollars. I bought a house for about $500,000 at a <3% interest. And that explains a lot of the hardship my family of 5 had growing up. Constant fights about money. Second mortgages to pay for necessary repairs. Praying the well pump or the water heater would make another season. It wasn't until the 90's that they finally refinanced, and then my teenage years felt like we were on easy street. Went from eating terrible, gristly cuts of steak strictly twice a year, to going out to eat at steak restaurants twice a month.
I'm not sure what delayed refinancing so long. I don't know if my parents simply never thought about it. I don't know if all the debt they had gotten themselves into kept them from qualifying. It's a total mystery to me, and I have no way to ask them.
Regardless, the "bad mortgage" was a boomer trope for ages. It reared it's ugly head in many 90's sitcoms. The Simpsons, Married with Children and Roseanne are all implied to be trapped in "bad mortgages" or otherwise house poor. And I remember in The Simpsons with the Flanders and Married with Children with the Darcys, they wind up with neighbors who bought later than them right next door and seem to be far better off, presumably with lower interest rates.
For years and years, the "bad mortgage" seemed like a bit of forgotten history. I knew a single poor schlub with an ARM or something who's mortgage doubled on him sometime around 2015 or so? Feels like he walked into that one. Only recently with 7-8% rates and prices virtually unchanged am I seeing people really groan under the weight of mortgages that eat up 50% of their income again. And if my childhood was any indicator, all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
What I do know is that when Trump was elected, I declined to invest my money in the stock market because I believed mainstream predictions that his election was clearly going to tank the economy, and then distinctly recall watching in some frustration as the stock market boomed and continued to boom.
Honestly, you have nobody to blame but yourself for this. I trusted my gut, that cutting corporate taxes would be great for corporate profits, and went all in on the Trump stock market. To say nothing of the deregulation and protectionist trade policies. Any expert claiming otherwise was a naked liar, and I cannot possibly conceive of how anyone could have believed that hokum if they thought critically about it for even a millisecond.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I can totally believe modern berries have more sugar. But I have wild blackberries on my property, and at most store bought blueberries are 5x sweeter. I don't know how quantity of sugar versus taste of sugar scales though. Maybe it's logarithmic for all I know. Or my taste buds are broken.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Have you had Lion Stout? It's from Sri Lanka if I'm remembering correctly. One of the best stouts I ever tasted. Like 10% alcohol too.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Well, I'm drinking whatever is good enough to be palatable in America I assume. Innis & Gunn, Boddingtons, Old Speckled Hen, even Trooper goofy as it is to have a British Ale from Iron Maiden.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
water alternatives
Why not drink water?
Never change SouthKraut, never change.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yeah, black tea doesn't bother my stomach one iota. Caffeinated lacks the raw punch of coffee, and caffeinated or not aren't really robust enough flavor wise to really satiate me. But, they are better than nothing, and closer than anything else. Especially if you are confining yourself to drinks without calories, which I am as well.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I've tried changing out coffee for black tea. Even decaf black tea, because honestly I just need something with flavor. It's ok. Still just doesn't quite hit the same. Might work better for you.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Honestly I'm not much of a wine person. I find nearly every wine I've ever had inoffensive. I guess I just don't get what makes wine good or not.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Supposedly IPA's have ruined the taste buds of brewers, and there is no way back. I can enjoy a good IPA. Stone Brewing always did good work. But it seems like every fucking microbrew just piled into making shitty IPAs the last 10 years. I can scarcely drink anything domestic anymore because of it.
Still enjoy a solid British pub ale when I'm not having Irish whiskey.
You know, my dad growing up used think butter was flavor. Period. Even into adulthood, if something wasn't slathered in butter, he thought it was flavorless.
These days, everyone seems to suffer from what my dad had, god rest his congested heart, except with sugar instead. That's all I can think of when I see people complaining about the taste of coffee sans sugar and cream.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yeah, this all happened in the months preceding my 40th birthday. I can confirm getting old sucks ass.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yeah, I also love coffee too much. It's not the caffeine that got me, at least not directly. It was the acidity. Started having more and more heartburn, until one night my stomach was just roiling and convulsing in pain. Could barely eat for days. Went to the ER, they didn't find anything that would kill me immediately, got forwarded to a GI specialist. They scoped me and didn't see anything either like ulcers or cancer. They basically just told me to lay off all the coffee. And wouldn't you know it, turns out that was it.
I mean, maybe. I was also put on a proton uptake inhibitor for a month, which kind of worked. I just felt like my stomach wasn't working anymore. Had very little appetite and little energy. Then I got off that and was on Pepcid AC at nights when my heartburn and pain was worst, while making lifestyle choices like less/no coffee. Eventually I weaned off of that, and was doing alright with just morning coffee. But the habit has been kicking in again with some afternoon coffee about an hour before I workout, along with some mild heartburn again.
Ah well. Just have to live with your vices.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
So some friends of mine finally talked me into playing Helldivers 2, all my skepticism about Games as a Service aside.
I enjoyed it for 3 days, and then wouldn't you know the networking completely fucking broke for no fucking reason, and I can't play with anybody anymore. Can't refund, can't play with my friends, nothing.
Got fucking GaaS-lit again. God damnit.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
This is a silly rule, and you should feel silly for citing it. I've over the years seen members melt down and rage quit over topics they wanted completely censored being allowed here. Like HBD. By even allowing anyone to mention HBD, they felt like they were not being included in the discussion. So all that rule really boils down to is the caprice of whoever receives it in the mod queue.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I can't speak for everyone, and I can't speak for all games. But I played a lot of video games as a kid. You learn a lot more than just how to press buttons in a pattern.
It taught me how not to get ruffled by failure, a skill that came in quite handy during my amateur martial arts career at tournaments. To say nothing of less intense situations like debugging frustrating code, or dealing with a cut in woodworking going wonky.
It taught me to be methodical, as a lot of success in difficult games comes from thinking about the problem you are stuck at, and working backwards. If you constantly die in a certain corner, don't get stuck in that corner. If you can only beat a boss with a certain item, make sure you've collected that item going in. And once again, this methodical approach to problem solving has paid dividends in my professional life, and my hobbies.
This last one, I donno. I want to say intense gaming sessions taught me to focus. But there is a fine line between compulsion and focus. I wouldn't say anyone is "focused" at the slot machine for 3 hours. But I'm willing to bet the kid who beat tetris was focuses as fuck.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
- The controls are better and thus the difficulty has gradually shifted from wrestling with controls to actually making the game hard.
- There's more competitive multiplayer. It is impossible for the average competitive multiplayer game to give the average player a win rate greater than 50% in the long run, making it inherently difficult compared to single-player games.
- Developers are free to add more difficulty because they know players have access to better online resources on how to overcome said difficulty.
- There are more layers of conventions that developers expect you to understand. Even relatively handholdy games often have broad swaths of unexplained mechanics due to being more complicated.
- You were just younger. Go back, play them, smash them over your knee.
Well, this challenges a lot of my preconceptions. I'm kind of 50/50 on it. Like, if I take Doom for instance, the original on standard difficulty, with modern ASWD and mouselook controls, is trivially easy. When I was a kid, playing with the default controls that practically had you moving like a tank, I think holding the alt key to strafe, it was borderline impossible. I exclusively played with cheats I found it so punishing at 10 years old.
With the original Warcraft, most of the difficulty IMHO came from the primitive controls. Warcraft II improved on them enough that I didn't find it too severe a challenge with respect to that at least. Starting with Starcraft, despite the group size being limited to 12 units, it's fine IMHO. On recent playthroughs, I did notice that the campaign in Warcraft II seems like more of a challenge, and I found myself actually running out of resources, and not really getting 2nd or 3rd tries if an assault failed. Starcraft by comparison had a campaign that was relatively easier, with more plentiful resources and a less aggressive AI, that seemed willing to let you recover from mistakes until you got it.
But I don't think you can directly compare multiplayer games. How "hard" a competitive game is will always be contingent on the players involved. Likewise, I'm not sure I consider the sort of "difficulty" that hinges on whether you have access to a wiki or not actual difficulty. Looking up what OP strategy works on a boss isn't that much different from the sorts of moon logic puzzles that eventually killed point and click adventure games, and which most gamers rejected as being artificial "difficulty". It's not difficulty, it's just bad design.
That said, there are hard games from back then which still hold up. I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did. Lately I've been stretching outside of my gaming comfort zone and throwing a credit into the original arcade Gradius from time to time. It felt like a big achievement when I was able to semi-reliably get to level 3.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
The problem is, you are dealing with, I believe, clinical narcissist. Twitter addicted, attention seeking game journos/activists. It's a raw, bleeding, narcissistic wound that there is anything that "cool kids" like which they can't participate in. That there might be any experience other people enjoy which is inaccessible to them. Begging them to leave something alone, lest they ruin it, simply means nothing to them. If they don't get to join the club, the club shouldn't be allowed to exist, and damn all the people who derive enjoyment or community from the shared experience of overcoming a challenge. There is literally nobody, no organic groundswell what so ever, clamoring for "accessible" FromSoft games.
I'm simply amazed that conversations like this even occur. If a game is too hard, I just don't play it. I don't need every game to be for me. Probably the majority of popular games I don't play. I attempted to play Demon's Soul once upon a time, and got my poop pushed in so hard a few bosses in I gave up. Never tried another FromSoft game, I don't care. There are literally tens of thousands of games out there. Play any one of those and get over yourself.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Can we please have a moratorium on word policing? Especially if it's literally all you have to say? There is nothing more obnoxious, low effort, and uncharitable that picking a single word out of a 10,000 word essay and harping on it for a lazy paragraph.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I've seen little evidence the Democrats have a plan B aside from jailing Trump. I see constant reports that their ground game is in shambles, they are hemorrhaging in every demographic except college educated white women, and polling in nearly every bell weather or swing state is devastating to them. But they just don't seem to care. They are either very stupid, or they have assurances from the usual three letter agencies about another, more pro-active Peter Strzokian "insurance plan".
Put me down for Trump dies in prison, and somehow all the cameras were broken and all the guards were on break.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
It's less day trading and more week trading. Less gambling, and more selling the lottery tickets to gamblers.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Sound like the direction my wife was taking with out daughter, before I put my foot down and said we must discipline her. We don't have to let her act the way she's acting. She'll probably freak out and throw a giant tantrum. It probably won't work, effectively, at least at first. But calmly doling out consequences for actions will work. I wasn't even proposing anything bonkers. Just sending our daughter to her room when she talked back and refused more gentle corrections to cease.
My wife pushed back claiming that sounded "abusive". She claimed nearly all corrective measures were "abusive". She'd swallowed some bonkers gentle parenting bullshit. The problem was, our kid would walk all over her until she blew up at the kid about what a shitty brat she was acting like. This seemed far worse, to me, than just calmly sending our daughter to her room.
I won that argument, one of the few I have won, and after sending our daughter to her room for a week when she back talks, it stopped. For whatever reason my wife, after that resounding success, said she didn't think it worked. I was utterly baffled, and asked why she thought that, our daughter has almost completely stopped back talking. She said she didn't know, she just felt like it didn't work.
Can't win em all I guess.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yeah, Denis Leary is... Denis Leary. He often revealed himself to be thin skinned. He allegedly cribbed his entire stage persona from Bill Hicks, to say nothing of lifting many jokes nearly word for word.
All the same, his No Cure for Cancer special is among the greatest comedy specials ever recorded. I can appreciate Bill Hicks material more, but I laugh far, far harder at a (probably coked up) Leary screaming and sweating on stage belting out the material at 3x the pace with less meandering.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I have that too. This is not the only thing I'm up to. Not even the majority thing. Not even the majority of a minority thing. It's a minority of a minority of a minority of my investments. I'm trying it for fun.
All the same, I'd be willing to bet if there was a massive social campaign to "normalize" people who want to amputate random limbs, it started being prominently featured in countless shows, and it began getting taught in kindergarten, the epidemiology behind the disorder would enormously change. We'd have countless teen girls experiencing "Rapid onset bodily integrity identity disorder", and often entire friend groups.
Then que all the midwits citing the old research under the old social conditions about how "Nobody chooses to do this flippantly, and research shows they are much, much happier after you perform the amputations." I wouldn't put it past the same liars we've been dealing with for the last 20 years, lying about how puberty blockers or cross sex hormones are "completely reversible" might pull some similar nonsense word games about the amputations being "reversible". Or doctors start scaring the fuck out of parents with "Would you rather have a disabled son or a dead son?"
It's more important than ever to say say "no" to this nonsense early, no matter how cruel it sounds. Turns out a lot of these old medical ethics to "do no harm" are load bearing, no matter how many sophist you throw at the word "harm".
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