jericho
6mo ago
Increase in murders
What numbers are we looking at here? Googling around the murder rates per capita for the US as a whole during the 1920s and 30s seem to generally trend higher than murder rates today, but those are just the easiest ones I've found and I could accept the methodology has changed to such an extent it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
jericho
11mo ago
God I wish it wasn't cancelled.
I managed to completely forget about the movie being in production until a few weeks ago and am now trying to avoid hopping on the hype train for the next ~month.
jericho
1mo ago
I'll admit that's a trend, especially in the AAA open world design space, but I don't see why things have to be that way. There are plenty of other games where they're still designed for Alice, then Bob is thrown a bone by cranking his modifiers up and his enemy's modifiers down until he can faceroll it.
If you still need the Bobs to think the game is designed for them since they're your biggest market segment, just do what Bungie did for Halo 3: design your game around the "Heroic" mode, then rename your "Easy" mode to "Normal" so the Bobs don't feel insulted.
For a slightly more recent example, that's how the Owlcat Pathfinder games work as well. "Core" / "Challenging" utilizes the actual rules for the system, while "Normal" gives the player a variety of cheats to smooth out the experience.
jericho
3mo ago
That seems to fundamentally misunderstand how words work together? That's like someone linking to an organization for self-identified gay Republicans and someone else replying "There's nothing gay about being a Republican". Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't gay Republicans.
People are perfectly capable of being both gay and Republicans and identifying with both those labels, just as they are perfectly capable of being both radical feminists and anti-trans and identifying with both those labels.
Please elaborate. It seems to be limited to only the expansion of using the most severe allowable punishment (so would also be the case if the punishment for both murder and child rape were life without parole, but would not apply if the punishment for child rape were death but the punishment for murder was torture then death) for things less than murder.
One of the reasons why ancient legal codes where execution was a common punishment allowed for various different methods of execution, allowed for punishments beyond execution (such as also killing one's family, seizing lands and titles) etc.
Edit: To carry on the Qin example, if the penalty for being late was death but the penalty for treason was death and seizure of all your family's assets, there would still be incentive to not commit treason.
jericho
2mo ago
I've met a couple, though it is unclear to me if they were truly pagans or just atheists who liked the aesthetics.
jericho
6mo ago
Oh, I absolutely would be. Though I'm unsure how much of that is due to me being a lightweight (both literally and figuratively) and how much of that is just having a lower cutoff for what I consider to be "drunk."
jericho
6mo ago
Interesting - there seems to be some regional pricing going on with that one. Where I lived before, it was (and double-checking, still is) a full $20 pricier than Bulleit, but here it is only about $10 more. I'll have to check it out.
jericho
7mo ago
IIRC, some of the Great Awakening utopian cults were explicitly abstinent; not "no sex before marriage" abstinent, absolute abstinence. Sex is sinful, and the end of the world is right around the corner, so having children isn't important compared to being right with Jesus. They aren't around anymore, for mysterious reasons.
Believe you are thinking of The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing aka The Shakers. I also thought they were fully extinct, but it seems they're merely functionally extinct, with either 2 or 3 (seeing conflicting reports) remaining in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
jericho
8mo ago
Thank you, that seems to be correct.
The murderer would be lambasted as a caricature of antifa members were he not a real person.
jericho
8mo ago
I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere.
I'll cop to ignorance on my part, whose murder does this refer to?
jericho
9mo ago
Honestly, it might be worth just keeping a lookout for whenever the inevitable Definitive Edition drops. Even as someone who liked the game and story overall, much like D:OS2 it's clear the back third got less attention than the first third and I'm guessing that much like D:OS2 many of those issues will get cleaned up later down the road.
jericho
9mo ago
There's a refugee crisis outside Baldur's Gate and it is played in a very black-and-white way.
I'm fairly sympathetic to the message and still thought it was too on-the-nose and lacked any nuance.
jericho
10mo ago
Thank you for clarifying.
I thought Aaron Burr's ambition, portrayed as unbridled by beliefs, principles, morality etc was supposed to be that.
Honestly his Act 2 character reminds me of Commodus' lines in Gladiator (obviously Commodus is a far more straightforward villain for a whole host of other reasons, but his virtues are similar).
But I have other virtues, father. Ambition. That can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness, courage, perhaps not on the battlefield, but... there are many forms of courage. Devotion, to my family and to you.
jericho
10mo ago
Thank you for elaborating!
need "guardrails" to prevent vulnerable internalizers from taking these messages too seriously and personally.
Yes, absolutely. On the more serious side, this brings to mind Scott Aaronson's comment quoted in Untitled, on the less serious side of this David Mitchell bit.
Personally, to be blunt, I don't think there's much interest in actually putting up said guardrails.
Unfortunately I believe you're right. To the extent the trade off is even acknowledged (and it is generally treated as though it does not exist), it is acknowledged as being worthwhile.
jericho
11mo ago
Yeah, I actually bounced off the series when I first discovered it, went back into it due to the recommendation of someone who I trust in such matters and almost gave up again before I got to the good stuff.
Learning that the book series it was based off was itself loosely based off someone running a RPG on a web forum made a lot of the early installment weirdness suddenly make sense to me.
jericho
11mo ago
What would your metric for this be? As far as I can tell, contemporary immigrants are assimilating just as fast or faster than historically as measured by things like language or intermarriage rates (e.g. my German ancestors moved to Iowa in the 1850s and didn't stop speaking German until WWI killed off German American subculture).
It seems like the US census information for bilingualism etc for 2nd gen immigrants doesn't start until 1940 (only for either 1st gen or those unable to speak English before that), which is of course after many of the European immigrant groups of the late 1800s and early 1900s had pretty well assimilated.
That is to say while this was not revealed to me in a dream, take this as basically my unsupported impressions from 1st gen immigrants vs 2nd gen immigrants in the 16-35 age range vs 2nd gen immigrants in the 50-80 age range (which of course also opens up the possibility that the older group are simply more assimilated due to age rather than anything generational) rather than any sort of rigorous analysis.
jericho
6mo ago
I agree with you broadly but:
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean all of their social/political/economic views are suspect as a result?
I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.
jericho
3mo ago
On the slightly-less-extreme (at least compared to nullification and cannibalism) end of the scale, I sometimes think of that one reddit post by the guy who got into scat porn, hired someone to oblige him and then immediately regretted it.
Out of the small portion of people who actually go through with these fetishes, I wonder how many of them immediately regret bringing them into reality.
jericho
4mo ago
danger with weed is that you never get any "holy shit I need to change my life" moments.
I realized that I didn't do anything after work other than watch tv and play video games
It's funny that weed actually did give me one of those moments, albeit because I was already often doing nothing while sober before I started using it regularly.
It was just that (since I was using edibles) I was having to make a conscious decision to be alone doing nothing of value for several hours and the highs were punctuated by moments of stark self reflection. Before I started using them, I was instead regularly making the decision to do nothing without really thinking about it and without getting caught up in my own thoughts.
I haven't fully quit weed now, but I have cut down from my peak while also trying to be more social + productive while sober.
jericho
5mo ago
I don't know if I'm getting wooshed here, but the "it's" was referring to "4/20, 1989" which was the birthday IH listed. Not "it's" as in "it is right now".
jericho
6mo ago
Really? I would be absolutely shocked to hear the writer sides more with Cleanthes than Philo.
Cleanthes allows too many major assertions by Philo to go unquestioned, and those that are pushed back against are only done after conceding ground.
That being said, I do genuinely believe the author is trying to fairly portray his more moderate opposition and does a better job than most at doing so.
jericho
6mo ago
For hard liquor, usually bourbon, usually Bulleit or Woodford Reserve. I've found $20-50 is my sweet spot for 750ml bottles of liquor.
For beer, usually a local lager, pilsner or wheat ale.
I tend to semi-binge drink- I will go weeks/months without having anything, then I'll get in the mood to buy a bottle, then have at 1-2 glass each week night, 2-3 each weekend night until it is gone.
If for whatever reason my pattern gets broken (I get sick or have plans that preclude drinking) I'll stop early and then pick it back up weeks/months later when I get the urge.
Honestly it is the same pattern I follow with games/books as well, like a very specific kind of addictive personality.
That's wild, given the low priority the AP history tests place on dates (generally just wanting students to know the general order and timeframe of events). Absolutely setting her students up for failure.
My understanding is that at a lot of American high schools they'll hire people for the purpose of coaching then shove them into teaching history courses because those aren't part of state standardized testing.
I was lucky enough that most of our teams were such a low priority that it tended to be the other way around, with teachers getting roped into coaching something.
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