Stepos Venzny

I only remember one instance of Kif being homophobic, when Zapp says Lee Lemon is filling him with “other emotions that are weird and confusing.” Not wanting to constantly see your commanding officer naked isn’t homophobia.

And his annoyance when Zapp sang a name-swapped version of Lola was about how Zapp is acting toward Leela by doing that rather than the subject matter of the original song. Zapp even replaced the trans subject with a cis one, what could a transphobe even be objecting to?

I was giving the Lee Lemon thing as an example where I agree Kif’s reaction was homophobic, saying it was the only such example I could think of.

The patrons are responding to the way he’s performing. Zapp is broadly a parody of Captain Kirk and this scene was a reference to William Shatner’s infamous spoken word cover of Rocketman, at least until Zapp fully broke down and started wailing the name of the woman who hates him. The only reason the song is Lola is because that’s a famous song you can easily swap Leela’s name into.

I swear I remember a Kif reaction, too, by the way.

Xenophobia isn’t a medical term. All the examples you listed are xenophobia.

Some words just have more than one definition is all. It’s not about me, it’s about the dictionary.

It would greatly benefit your argument to provide another possible explanation.

So, underneath all the dramatic and flowery language, the argument being made seems to be “if the purpose of our biology is to make its own DNA persist, it wouldn’t make sense for biological chimeras to exist; based on the ability of cells to coordinate even with different DNA, the main goal seems to be human cells cooperating to make a general human form.”

This anthropomorphizing of biological building blocks is ridiculous. Cells and DNA are not in competition over who runs the show because they aren’t sapient. And I fully understand that the scientist making this claim understands that on an intellectual level but I mention it because the backbone of this argument is to conflate the literal and the figurative. The only inconsistency in cells being compatible despite having different “bosses” would be an ideological one and, because there isn’t any actual ideology at play, it doesn’t matter whether it’s consistent when attempting to describe it. You’ve proven a metaphor wasn’t literally true, congratulations.

But setting all that aside, this still doesn’t actually function as a counter argument. If we are to accept the premise of DNA’s authority as literal truth, is this function of unrelated cells to be compatible with each other not a logical extension of the DNA’s will? It more benefits the DNA for the organism to be viable even if that means other DNA also persists. It has a greater chance of reproducing itself if it’s not in a corpse.

Not only does the argument hinge on anthropomorphism, it also hinges on this metaphorical entity being self-destructively spiteful.

Lastly, it is downright comical to mention things like “cells know on their own that the heart goes on the left” when making an argument that a different characterization of biology is wrong based on the existence of rare biological edge cases. Some people’s hearts aren’t where hearts normally go. I’d let this kind of thing slide as a simplification of the truth were this not part of calling out exactly the same degree of simplification from someone else as being invalid.

I'm ready for a new era in Mario voice acting of an Italian voice actor putting on a cartoonish American accent.

I've absolutely died as a result of bad dialogue choices but that's just role playing; sometimes something you might choose to do can only logically result in your death and I, for one, am happy to be given that choice. I've straight up deleted a character profile with lots of progress because there was no in-character way not to do the thing that would kill me in dialogue. That game over is just that character's canonical ending as far as I'm concerned. He couldn't not shit-talk that god, that god couldn't not erase him from existence out of spite. If the game had not provided me with an option to shit-talk the god, I would have been annoyed that none of the dialogue options were true to my character.

There's a warning sign with a silhouette of a deer on it to warn drivers to be on the lookout, and somebody graffitied a little guy riding on its back. It's been that way undisturbed for at least the couple of years since I first noticed it.

The "unanimously" part of this really should have been in the headline, that feels like way bigger news than the rejection itself.

It's a part of my most hated trend in the video game industry: video games that are ashamed to be video games so they try to fool you into thinking they're a more "respectable" art form like TV shows or movies. The mainstream hype we're seeing is probably that it's popular with Naughty Dog fans rather than Final Fantasy fans.

I wish these types of games would at least consistently ape more interesting TV shows and movies. Alan Wake seems like the only one that didn't aspire to be something forgettable. I don't even like Twin Peaks but at least it's an identity.

This game is okay enough that I'm probably going to eventually finish it but I don't think I'd ever feel tempted to start it again even if somehow every other option available to me were objectively worse because at least some of what's left would be memorable enough to care about.

In general, the graphics are roughly the same as FFXIV.

The graphics are apparently deceptively good. Not immediately jaw-dropping for us lay people like the series is known for but more of a technical quality. I thought it was underwhelming on first glance but I admit I enjoy the things that video brings up now that I've started paying attention to them.

I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.

I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.

Flat Earth.

It’s not the most immediately shocking, not the most colorful and dramatic, but there are two factors where no other conspiracy theory can compete:

1. It is so easily falsifiable that basically more people would have to be in on the conspiracy than not.
2. Nobody would stand to gain anything from the lie.

“It’s okay to fail” seems like it would have been a more valuable life lesson than “it feels good to beat a really hard video game” and it concerns me that you’re so okay with the amount of trauma this entertainment product caused him.

The fact that you’re sharing this story of years of repeated meltdowns caused by a video game and calling it an example of games being beneficial is pretty surreal.

It is literally removing authority.

Blurry looks more realistic than blocky, especially on the low-resolution CRT monitors old games were designed for.

Now that we’ve got better screens and games with better graphics, we see early 3D as a stylized aesthetic and a lack of texture filtering fits that aesthetic better but these games’ actual goal they were made with was realism.

Do you disagree with anything Hedge said up there? Because you sound extremely argumentative in tone but you don’t seem to have claimed anything that contradicts any of it.

I've just been clicking the X to close that popup and nothing has happened to me.

But I don't think the software can differentiate between the ideas of defined and undefined characters. It's all just association between words and aesthetics, right? It can't know that "Homer Simpson" is a more specific subject than "construction worker" because there's no actual conceptualization happening about what these words mean.

I can't imagine a way to make the tweak you're asking for that isn't just a database of every word or phrase that refers to a specific known individual that the users' prompts get checked against and I can't imagine that'd be worth the time it'd take to create.

West of Loathing. The RPG stuff is great and the comedy is great but really the main strength is I just enjoy reading its dialogue. The vocabulary and sentence construction have a real sincerity for the setting contrasted against the silliness of the rest of it that makes both parts hit harder.

Similarly, the first three Monkey Island games which achieve that same injection of the heartfelt into the wacky by way of their gorgeous art and music.

But as far as the joy of just doing something it's hard to beat the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, to just be dropped into a level and be told "do cool stuff for a while".

For anybody playing this for the first time, an important piece of advice:

Don’t be a completionist. Leave areas before you’ve done everything in them and don’t do any side quests you’re not interested in.

It’s my least favorite Dragon Age but it got a lot more hate than it deserved because other open world games trained people to play it the boringest way possible.

Of course, one reason I might mind is if the machine uses what it learns from reading my work to produce work that could substitute for my own. But at the risk of hubris, I don’t think that’s likely in the foreseeable future. For me, a human creator’s very humanity feels like the ultimate trump card over the machines: Who cares about a computer’s opinion on anything?

This is really naïve. A huge number of people simply don't care about creative works in those terms. We're all encouraged to treat things as content to be consumed and discarded, not something to be actually thought about in terms of what it was expressing and why. The only value of a creator in that framework is that the creator fuels the machine and AI can fuel the machine. Not especially well at the moment but give it some time.

At multiple times in the episode I yelled "DO IT, COWARDS" and then they went and did it.

Maybe offer them better incentives than the literal version of the go-to metaphor for not getting paid well enough.

Really, though, what I can’t stop thinking of is my cat. Things have gone a lot better with her since I switched from trying to train her to do some things and not do others to just communicating at her level; I indicate my own intention to do something and let her make a decision based on that. For example, it took three occasions of counting down from five before closing a door for her to develop the habit of either crossing through at the last second or leaving contentedly after it closed instead of scratching at it again.

If you want crows to do something, I think that’s the way: become predictable for them and let them choose how to proceed. I think if you walked the same daily route and consistently picked up litter and left food in its place whether they were the party that brought the litter or not, then they’d puzzle out how to game that.

When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren't the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie's portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody's materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.

I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because "I've played this game before, I know how it works." I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn't until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that's when all the systems fell fully into place: you're supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.

Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there's a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.

I believe it’s a reference to when his penis was famously described as looking like the little mushroom people from Mario games.

I beat Tears of the Kingdom without doing any main quests at all after getting to the surface, which I didn't realize going in would mean beating it without the paraglider. It changes everything about how you approach movement and even a lot of the combat when you don't have that crutch to lean on.

I accidentally created a speedster pacifist in Oblivion, building the crap out of my speed and acrobatics and neglecting the archery and stealth I had planned to specialize in so I just had to rush through dungeons stealing all the treasure and weaving between an ever-growing web of enemy attacks. By far the best Oblivion character I ever made.

Traditionally yes, don’t ask me how.

“Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible,” Mr Dadayev reportedly said.

Then ban that?

I’m not saying the goal here is in any way acceptable, obviously, but mostly it weirds me out how indirect and ineffectual this method is. So much of the outside world’s musical culture makes it through this filter.

Touch screens don't lend themselves to Snake the way buttons did, so the only good mobile game is now functionally unplayable.

That's not weird, that's just smarter than the rest of us.

It's such a fun phrase to say, though.

Jack

As an actual name by itself, not the typical John and then using Jack as a nickname for it.

Title says "his" as in the character, not "its" as in the show.

My favorite ME1 build is Infiltrator. The damage output of a properly modded sniper rifle can get truly depraved late in the game.

The only notable thing about the game is that it's extremely pretty. So I say start it again, see how much this prettiness matters to you on this new TV, and then decide whether to continue.

Furniture of proportionate scale to my body.

To all you fellow deviations from the average height: look up the ratios of how your body is supposed to relate to chairs, tables, counters, and screens and search for ways to make that happen. These things are not supposed to cause you inevitable pain.

You can’t make everything perfect, especially if sharing spaces with people who don’t match your scale, but do what you can and it will make a huge difference.

Also this is good advice for the regular-sized, the problem is just less pervasive for them.

I mean how bad is it really to use a little filler?

My understanding of Baldur's Gate 3 is that everybody is romantically interested in the player character.

Maybe I'm just a catch?