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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Depends on how far a species advances, I’d guess. It wouldn’t surprise me if advancements set us (and other potential life out there) on a trajectory where it’s possible to just get most nutrition needed via passive intravenous implants, maybe only with a requirement to drink water to maintain fluid balance. Or we just get to the full cyberpunk cyborg option and all you need is an occasional battery recharge or something.

    With the resources available today, mankind has the ability to solve world hunger, but that still keeps the dependency we have on various global supply lines for food. Few nations are truly agriculturally independent. Lenin once said that society is no more than three missed meals away from chaos, and I believe the only permanent solution to that issue would be if a society no longer needs to eat.


  • Agreed, especially on the psyops front. It’s no secret that Russia has been manipulating global politics for a long time now, and France is another European country which has seen a rising Russia-friendly neofascist movement in Rassemblement National. They’ve just barely been kept out of power the past few election, but as their numbers keep growing, one must only wonder how much longer that can be the case.

    Similar with Germany and AfD. Europe is being worn down from within and no one seems to be inclined to do anything about it.







  • Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.

    The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.



  • You can!

    Worth noting for anyone looking to play both N64 games is that OoT Gerudo stay stunned indefinitely (until the area is reloaded) but the Pirates in Majora’s Mask who are borrowed from the Gerudo guards only stay stunned for a short time before getting back up.

    This incentizes use of the Stone Mask, which can be obtained from the invisible guard by giving him a red potion. If playing the N64 version, he is located outside of Ikana Graveyard, which is a place that you can get to at that point in the game but many might not have bothered exploring yet. In the 3DS version, they moved him directly into Pirates Fortress so he’s harder to miss, but it does require just a little bit of stealth to get to where he is first.




  • I just think it stopped being a good deal the moment they implemented their first price increase. That signalled that they’re willing to do what every other subscription service does and raise prices as arbitrarily high as people are willing to pay, with the enticement being that once you’re in deep enough, you can’t unsub or you’re left with no games.

    If you have copious time for gaming and are always on the hunt for sometbing new, is it still a better deal than buying every game at release? Sure, at least for now. But the patient gaming strat at least gives me a backlog of affordable titles too long to finish them all, and I can also return to it at any time without worrying about titles eventually disappearing from a subscription catalog.




  • That’s exactly it, they have the ability to go about certain scenes in different ways.

    I still only have the Astarion/Cazador example, because that’s the only origin character I played as, but one moment I remember as different between Astarion as party member versus Astarion as player is the conversation with his former lover Sebastian before confronting Cazador.

    In my playthrough with Astarion as an NPC, he basically auto-piloted through most of that conversation. He remembered who Sebastian was, it was somewhat touching, and the player was able to ask Astarion questions for context.

    In my playthrough as Astarion as the player, you can navigate that conversation in different ways, but there are also certain things that are no longer a given. You actually have to roll to remember who Sebastian is (which I flubbed) and that changes the course of the conversation away from the NPC “default” conversation.

    Edit: I found some examples of that specific scene on YouTube, to compare the differences.

    Astarion as a Party Member

    Astarion as an Origin Character




  • Not sure if this applied universally, but I remember for years and years the common knowledge was that plastic caps are unrecyclable for some reason, and there used to be separate bins to toss them at recycling centers. That’s no longer the case, so keeping the cap connected to the bottle is one way to demonstrate that they should be recycled together.

    (By “recycled” I mean most likely shipped to Southeast Asia to then most likely just find their way into the ocean)