domain:noahpinion.blog
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
I enjoyed myself playing the XCOM 1 remake, and especially XCOM 2. I even tried Xenonauts, which is a spiritual successor to the original XCOM, but just didn't like it very much. I guess the 1980s aesthetic and the clunky mechanics weren't to my taste.
(Why hasn't someone made Phoenix Point but good? You can actually aim the weapons yourself! There was granular destructible terrain and cover piercing!)
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Mexico is a failed corrupt one party mafia state, but it does have free and fair elections and still has to pass out handouts and incorporate stakeholders- both the literal cartels but also labor unions, religious interests, big business, etc- to keep winning those elections.
Hungary... it's probably easier to list the bribery the government/ruling party doesn't engage in. From bribing impoverished villagers with literal sacks of potatoes to controlling the issuance of economic opportunities like cigarette sale licenses to benefit its supporters to using government loans/grants to ensure favorable media coverage.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
· Edited 14hr ago
I have so much free time (and OOMs more money) and I barely play any video games. 15 year old me would cry. At one point, I would have chalked that down to depression and anhedonia, but that's way better now.
I find myself bouncing off 90% of the ones I do try.
- Didn't finish BG3, though I think I made it halfway.
- Played like 2 hours of Clair Obscure before getting distracted
- Reinstalled Teardown, didn't play it
- Rimworld, an all-time favorite: I refuse to play Vanilla, no insult to Zorba, but it's such a painful experience. I also have an addiction to installing 17 gb of mods for a 500mb game, which is great fun till it all breaks and I have to debug it. Happened again a few months back, after I had already spent 3 hours fixing my modlist, and now a DLC came out and I have to wait for everything to finish updating.
- Total War Warhammer 3: Another favorite, same issue as Rimworld, down to updates breaking mods, or just mods breaking mods.
- Arma Reforger: I play it semi-regularly, but it's by far best enjoyed with friends. I was a senior NCO (don't laugh) in an American clan, but then it imploded because of internal drama and burnout. I hop on modded pub matches for a few hours, but it's just not the same.
- Escape From Tarkov: A good (but uncompromising) game ruined by bad development decisions. I no-lifed it for a while, but just couldn't bother to repeat that process. I had a lot of good buddies in Singapore and Malaysia I met playing on those servers, but the latency doesn't allow for that anymore. Great guys, I personally raised half a dozen Timmies who would shit themselves if they heard a bush rustle into cracked PvPers who are far better than I ever was.
- There are so many goddamned games collecting bit rot in my SSD. The only saving grace is that I pirated most of them, so at least I'm not losing money.
- I left my old Quest 2 back in India. Don't feel like buying a new one here, and it would be inconvenient in a shared apartment.
What's wrong with me? I splurged on the world's 4th best gaming pc (1 CPU and GPU down from the best of the best), I have the time. It's not anhedonia, because I clearly still enjoy reading, writing, and arguing with people on the internet. I still watch people play and talk about games, I look forward to new ones and wishlist them, I just don't really play them. I don't like this, what's the point of having all this money and fancy hardware? Don't tell me I'm getting old and crochety :(
At this point I might have a kid just to have someone to play coop with.
Corvos
1d ago
The Devil Is a Part-Timer. Done by the same guy as Steins;Gate I think and similarly has more range for the voice acting and snappier writing compared to the sub or the original Japanese.
gattsuru
1d ago
They… kinda have both. Although, while pretty far from the weirdest junk out there(you don’t want to know how ducks work), still pretty far from mammal anatomy.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
crocodile penis
Divorce this woman right now! Even if you're not married! Anyone ought to know that crocodilians have cloaca.
I jest. She sounds like a keeper, you're a lucky man and I look on in envy.
(Did the 18th century taxonomists know this? When I consider this more deeply, she might have a point.)
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
I enjoyed the charming quaintness of the argument that expanding the House to 11,000 people would require fewer, not more, staffers to keep up with the magnitudes more institutional relationships such a reorganization would imply.
Eetan
1d ago
There is no catboy character because that doesn’t exist in the Western imagination.
Tales about talking human-like animals are older than castles, cathedrals and other medieval tropes.
It depends where you draw the line. If 19th century gothic horror is traditional, why not 20th century Disney style animal people?
(and WOW indeed buckled to the pressure and added multiple cute and fluffy playable races)
Throwaway05
1d ago
This comes up on Reddit a lot so you can always search over there (Steins;Gate generally shows up on lists but I was never a fan of that anime in general).
Anything recent and high budget (ex: Dan Da Dan, Apothecary Diaries) is always likely to be good.
Someone else here mentioned Cowboy Bebop which I think is a good pick but that is in part because the English voice fits the mood and vibe better, I don't think the dub is truly stellar by modern standards.
My personal vote is FMA: B, the dub is pretty great and has some big names you'll recognize if you know their voices, but the outtakes are absolutely incredible and work better if you spent the show listening to those interpretations of the characters.
zeke5123a
1d ago
Probably not from a discounted cash flow perspective. Also you ought to factor in failures like the Star Wars hotel in WDW.
kky
1d ago
Mexico is AFAIK basically a narcostate. Opposition “disappears” and then reappears in several different garbage bags.
Hungary - not familiar on the details, what gibs do they give to whom?
SA is a bit of a special case. To be a majoritarian gibs-based political party, on practical terms you need an exceptionally productive minority to tax for the sake of the voterbase. This doesn’t happen in most places. SA, with a wealthy white minority, is able to do it. I’d call it an exception that proves the rule.
yofuckreddit
1d ago
John Wick is a well known franchise. Perhaps not quite mass market.
Dune?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Something nice about Vanilla WoW is that each location was drawn from one specific European fantasy source. It’s not just some random person concocting his own fantasy. Stranglethorn Vale has the vibe of a colonial expedition into South America or perhaps Africa, Tirisfal Glades pulls from gothic horror, etc. So they are renditions based on real preexistent motifs, and the game takes you through a survey of European fantasy and history. It’s not all just “fantasy medieval area”. There is no catboy character because that doesn’t exist in the Western imagination.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Hungary and Mexico both do this. I'm pretty sure South Africa does as well.
Throwaway05
1d ago
While I'm sure you had some exceptions I doubt you had the current situation where many states had problems with a flood of zero English effort population and the government was both forced to and decided it was fine to essentially instantiate a second official language.
And for instance the Pennsylvania Dutch are small, isolated, insular, and German - and still are. Very different from getting on public transit in NYC and getting surrounded by Spanish speakers.
kky
1d ago
Hmm… I’m not sure how true either of those is of the examples I gave. Japan’s main “gibs” are highly focused domestic policies around food and agriculture, and I think they’re better categorized as strategic subsidies. Singapore mostly gives to its minorities, but the ruling party depends on the (non-gibs-receiving) Chinese majority for most of its support. I do know that Singapore actively represses other parties, but Japan does not, and the main party actually lost an election recently (and are now trying desperately to reform internally to weed out corruption).
Is it true of, say, Russia? Yeah, because Putin doesn’t depend on votes. But I’m not sure it’s true of countries with permanent or near-permanent elected parties. If there’s information you have to the contrary I’m all ears.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
Big highlight for me was Padeen getting addicted to the Laudanum and Maturin casually telling Martin that a x20 dose is usual for an addict.
Holdo also had the sin of being a terrible leader in general. Going from assuming command to a mutiny in a matter of days, when the mutineers are experienced and committed believers in the cause, says far more about the commander than the mutineers.
Plus, it was frankly poorly thought out on a thematic level. 'Defer to people in positions of authority and do as you are told even if they appear incompetent' is not only contrary to the themes of much of Star Wars, but anathema to a lot of the cultural convictions of the more individualist/egalitarian West. In turn, it created tonal confusion for the major themes of the movies, while also flagrantly demonstrating the lack of concern for the verisimilitude of the broader IP.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There were massive German-speaking enclaves in the USA until the world wars. You can still find enclaves where the older folk prefer Italian.
Gundam? Pokemon? Dragonball Z? Half a dozen other major Japanese IPs?
Even if we limit to within the Anglosphere, I'm fairly sure that- various efforts to the contrary- franchises like D&D, Warhammer 40k, and most fighting/strategy genre video games are more popular among men than women. Each of these have had merchandising, novels, movies/TV series, comics, spinoffs and emulators, and so on.
Agreed that this makes districting quite the tough nut to crack.
I had a thought that I should learn more about the history behind the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified by the very people that it took power away from. I did a little bit of reading, but there are competing historical perspectives that I'll have to ruminate on further.
There are definitely parallels in terms of national/state-level dynamics, impinging on one another. It also seems unlikely to me to propose that people at that time were simply naive to the possibility that such a rule change would be likely to advantage/disadvantage them. Some explanations try to argue that some of the main implications had already effectively come about via other means, so it wasn't a terribly sharp break. I don't know.
In any event, perhaps worth ruminating on and reading more history. It seems not entirely impossible to come up with something, but perhaps it is the case that nationalized interests are too entrenched and 'smart' to the scene that even minor steps will be more effectively blocked. In that case, we'd probably need to be more clever to messy up the predictive capabilities.
I haven't totally given up on toying with various schemes, but it is a difficult problem that is seriously resistant to most flippant proposals.
TowardsPanna
1d ago
It's annoying to hold BTC and no ETH at all right now. Could have tripled my money with ETH this year. It wasn't so much in terminal decline after all.
Rate cuts announced: ETH goes up 10% and keeps its gains. BTC goes up a few percent and starts to give back its gains, as usual. Fucking whales thinking this is a good enough price and unloading their bags, always a little too hard.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
All congressional districts are A: contiguous and B: have very roughly the same number of people- the number of Americans divided by the number of representatives. Google says this is 747,000, but grain of salt. The one caveat to (B) is that every state gets at least one representative, even if- like Wyoming- it has less than 747,000 people.
You can just google congressional district maps- by state probably gives a more detailed view- to see the twisting contortions involved.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
One party states also hand out gibs constantly and force influential stakeholders into using their platforms to support the ruling party.
Huh, you're right. I learn something new everyday.
Unfortunately, I do know about duck penises.
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