problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.
This is just Andy Weir's style of writing and if the movie captured that (I have not watched the movie) it succeeded surprisingly well at adapting the book, I guess.
I have DNF'd all of Weir's books because of that. His prose and dialogue is just grating; the constant ironic quipping and attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations feel very out of place. One of the most horrendous examples of millennial ahh writing in existence. I find it honestly surprising that he isn't actually within their age range because he shares that same pathological inability to take anything seriously that is so typical of that whole cohort.
Aussie and Kiwi slang for British people, yes. I have heard it's a shortening of "pomegranate" but not sure if that's just folk etymology.
From a Malaysian, currently living in Australia: I usually don't really think about Canada all too much since pretty little of what it does affects me. I have been over there, and kind of have to agree with @OliveTapenade in that I think of it as being like a less belligerent and less polarised US with more legacy allegiance to Britain, with the (sort of hilarious) quirk that the nation's self-conception is largely defined around not being the US despite sharing a very large number of cultural characteristics with their more powerful neighbour. Perhaps the differences may seem large if all you know is the North American cultural sphere, but to the rest of the world the distinction is not that clear. Canada is really just not all that distinctive internationally nor is it that prominent when it comes to foreign affairs.
When it comes to being "internationally respected", I could not honestly say I respect Canada that much. This may be harsh but when it comes to my respect and regard for a nation, it's not geopolitical leaning that most influences my view, but general competence, and that includes how it handles internal concerns. Its ability to build infrastructure, deliver on QoL things like safety and convenience, and just generally make canny and efficient decisions are all important. But the sheer tragedy that is Toronto's public transport is illustrative of a larger problem Canada has. When they insist on building Transit City-like Potemkin light rail transport all over the city, then spend 10+ years and billions of dollars to build a single line that's barely faster than the bus lane it replaced, THEN promise to try and fix the failure with bullshit like signal priority as if that isn’t just duct-taping over a serious structural issue, well, "respect" is not what comes to mind. When I think about Vancouver's little experiment in decriminalisation which quickly made them the fentanyl capital of North America (the DTES looks downright post-apocalyptic), "respect" is definitely not what comes to mind.
I can respect China in spite of it being a very disruptive geopolitical actor because it possesses a level of competence and state capacity that is currently allowing it to eat everybody else’s lunch. I can't, however, respect a country when it seems incapable of fixing simple issues. On a base level, respect at least requires that you be a serious actor capable of getting your affairs in order at home (and abroad), preferably with a telos that amounts to more than simply coasting off your current comfortable position and behaving as if your global standing is so assured that you can tolerate endless inefficiency, dysfunction and policy failure at home.
To be fair this is my opinion on a lot of Europe as well, so Canada certainly isn't the only one being subject to this withering assessment.
problem_redditor
10d ago
Work.
Pay taxes.
Die (this may result in further taxes being paid).
Tax accountant here. Also true in this industry. The ones that are least likely to be able to pay our fee are also the ones that are least likely to be able to pay for a proper bookkeeper to get their accounts in order, and also can't pay their tax debts. Their information all comes in late because they're disorganised and time-poor and they tend to have far less leeway with the tax office to ask for an extension. You end up spending a significant amount of time fixing their errors, and negotiating with the tax office on their behalf trying to make sure that they don't bring the Legal Hammer down.
Working with these clients is like fighting a losing battle. Soul-destroying experience, business failure just compounds and compounds and compounds to the point that keeping anything afloat becomes a herculean task.
Somebody has to, and no-one else will.
I do that, and I used to engage in this kind of wrongthinking way more in a very rigorous source-driven manner, but I've been saying the same things so many times and pointing to the same ever-growing corpus of information (that everyone conveniently ignores) so much that I ended up feeling like writing on gender wars discourse was a waste of my time and an act of egregious self-mutilation worse than actual self-harm. Sense of gratification completely went to shit after the 6th straight year of doing it.
Keep fighting the good fight though, indeed somebody has to do it.
Sweet matcha drinks heavily mixed in with milk/coconut milk can be pretty good in my opinion, since the grassy taste is softened out significantly by the other components. But matcha proper, drunk the Authentic Japanese™ way, certainly tastes like liquid grass and is absolutely revolting. I like my tea steeped in the Chinese manner.
In any case I think the better green East Asian flavour is pandan. It's like Southeast Asian vanilla, but with a fresher, nuttier flavour.
Playing Deltarune at the moment (so far I've completed chapter 4, haven't gotten to playing 5 yet). I really wasn't going to play it; I'm time-poor and don't usually have the energy or motivation for skill-dexterity games like this one, but every friend of mine in existence wanted to see me play it and so here I am.
This game is much, much better and more enjoyable than Undertale, I have to say. Undertale was absolutely chock-full of these utterly frustrating JRPG pop-up battles where you could be subjected to an impromptu fight against an enemy at any moment, meaning you had no ability to plan any of your fights and made the simple act of walking around something you barely wanted to do lest you get ambushed by some disproportionately difficult enemy without enough health items. In contrast Deltarune foreshadows its fights adequately since its enemies can actually be seen wandering around in the overworld; they're visible from a mile away and this means encounters can either be avoided or planned for in advance, and it makes the act of walking around a lot less tense since the game won't just foist unwelcome encounters on you.
The battle system itself is a lot more refined here as well. It still sticks to the same core gameplay routine of RPG turn-based battles mixed with bullet hell components, except this time you have three characters to do battle with now instead of just one, which allows for a far greater degree of strategy and coordination in fights and really makes combat much more entertaining than in Undertale. For somebody like me who may as well be handicapped when it comes to reaction time, I find myself compensating on the strategy side very often, doling out health items and coordinating group attacks at opportune times, and this made it easier to get through fights then it otherwise would be if it were a pure bullet hell game. The increased strategy component in Deltarune means that there's a lot of flexibility in how you approach fights.
Difficulty is an aspect of game design that I've seen endless debate about and there's no easy way to "solve" difficulty in games in a way that makes every single player happy with the level of challenge offered, but at least in my subjective opinion it's well-calibrated for the most part, though chapter 4 has a hard spike in difficulty that coincides with a sudden increase in the intensity and ominousness of the narrative. I think it generally works, though I was banging my head against the wall in frustration for a while at the final boss of chapter 4 (which is very difficult) but the boss of the chapter is something that has been foreshadowed for a good portion of the game and is tremendously built up to, so the difficulty doesn't feel unearned. It really feels like an accomplishment to beat it, and almost comes off like something you really should not have been able to do.
There's also a lot more playing with format here than there was in Undertale. Deltarune really experiments with some fights, with battle mechanics calling back to many other games, and sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. As an example of where this really works, there is a bossfight in Chapter 2 which involves you fighting a shounen mecha version of a character with Punch-Out! gameplay, and it's legitimately a great moment. Chapter 3 has a bossfight involving a mechanic where you play minigames for points, which culminates in a Special Attack towards the end where they get thrown at you in rapid-fire succession WarioWare-style. Much of the time these gambits pay off really well, and helps innovate on the general gameplay loop such that it always feels fresh.
It's sometimes the case however that these diversions into alternative gameplay can feel underdeveloped, and also some of these gambles work less well than others. For instance Chapter 4 features a miniboss named Jackenstein whose attacks involves you collecting points in a Pac-Man-esque setting peppered full of bullets that deal damage, and the attack doesn't end until you collect a key located on the far side of the battle box and make an exit; frankly it's quite a frustrating boss to play through. The base battle system in Deltarune feels quick and keeps you on your toes, this boss on the other hand forces you to go slowly because there is no timer, no predetermined end for an attack and every time you bump into a bullet you lose a shit-ton of health, so you're incentivised to slowly wait for the correct openings where the bullets part in order to progress without losing health. When you die on this boss, you have to go through the entire laborious process all over again. I found myself getting impatient with this, just a insanely bad concept for a boss battle in my opinion. In general though, the gameplay is an all-around improvement on Undertale, and it's very fun to play.
It also looks much better than Undertale. Though I have to say the chapter-based release schedule of Deltarune does mean there's this persistent inconsistency in the production value between chapters, which makes the game feel far more uneven than it would be had it released in one go. There's a clear upward trend in polish as the game goes on, with Chapter 1 having by far the jankiest presentation, least expressiveness in the character animations and most rudimentary environments, which then steadily improves from then on. You can also clearly see ideas, character illustrations and concepts in the earlier chapters that disappeared or were replaced later on, which again adds to the feeling of a lack of cohesion. It's unavoidable with this kind of release really, but can feel jarring at points. Still, looks great and the soundtrack is a certified hood classic.
Plot- and atmosphere-wise it's noticeable just how much more ominous Deltarune is compared to its predecessor. This time the game is centred around a prophecy that looms large over the whole narrative, which slowly begins to come true as you play. There's a lot of quirky funny stuff that's typical of this type of fiction (which is often laid on too thick) but as Chapter 4 develops you begin to learn that the prophecy includes far more than you initially believed, predicts far more than you initially believed, and the chapter hints at an infohazard of the highest order at the very core of the prophecy - one that concerns the main characters - but is evidently so horrifying that everybody who knows about it denies it, refuses to talk about it, and attempts to cover it up as if it doesn't exist. There's a strong theme of fatalism and lack of agency at the core of this game that is almost antithetical to what Undertale offered up, which is that Your Choices Matter; in this game that concept appears to be thrown into question pretty heavily. The heavy-handed, almost child-like moralising that Undertale deployed in its attempts to subversively critique the gameplay loop of RPGs is noticeably absent here. At the halfway point of the game, it really is trying its hardest to foster a sense of impending calamity on the horizon, and at the final part of Chapter 4 you meet a colossus of a being that has no consciousness, can't be reasoned with, and in spite of the fact that it's an infant still in the process of hatching, it is a fight your characters barely scrape through even with help.
Overall I really like it. I think in spite of the association Toby Fox's games have with insufferable they/thems who really just like anything that looks and feels like "happy Tumblr neurodivergent shipping time" and fill the internet with unhinged gay and trans fanfictions of their favourite characters (which his games certainly cater to a lot) and Cawthon-esque lore fanatics who spend half their life poring over the smallest details and secrets in a game only to make a 30 hour video about it that ends up being completely wrong (which his games also certainly cater to a lot) there is a genuine attempt here to make a good, well balanced game that's compelling.
Probably the closest real-life analogue to this for me has actually arisen when travelling. Unexpectedly finding some relaxing, quiet café or corner in a noisy and chaotic foreign city really captures the sense of transient respite that save rooms attempt to induce. It's like stumbling into your own personal little refuge.
Daily-life things like "going home after work", "taking a shit on company time", etc are just a bit too humdrum and pedestrian to capture that kind of feeling. I find that things tend to stop being stimulating the second they get folded into a routine, and envy people who don't get habituated to things as quickly as I do. Experiences I used to treat as sacred quickly become profane with exposure.
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