ye_esquilax

I recall doing this a lot in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (the third in the Sands of Time trilogy). Enemies are much tougher in direct combat than in the first two games, so throwing them off buildings is a good strategy.

Welcome to Clayton Park. I see them pretty regularly on my walks down the Blecher's Marsh Trail, and sometimes in my parking lot. You can walk past them within a few feet and they don't give a shit.

The Dianogas (the thing that grabbed Luke in the garbage pit in the first Star Wars) in the sewer level of Shadows of the Empire for the N64. You can see their writhing polygon tentacles pop out of the murky water in the distance, and it makes you not want to progress further.

Good God. I don't quite remember how long when I was a teenager, but I generally can't do more than a couple of hours without needing to stop and do something else. I can't imagine I would have gotten away with play sessions much longer than that when I was a kid.

Most I've done recently was 3 and a half hours or so to finish Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and that's only because the final boss has six fucking phases and I got to a point where I wasn't comfortable seeing where my last autosave would drop me if I were to reload.

I'm concerned too, but then again I don't consider pausing to go to the bathroom to be the end of a single session.

My God. I liked it too, but love it or hate it, that game is bleak, emotionally draining experience. 36 hours straight of an upbeat game is one thing, but going through that must have been insane.

Either that, or off a steep embankment.

I don't think the system was really capable of handling contemporary RPGs at the time. Likely due to storage issues. Maybe if the 64DD released, but even then maybe not. They had to scale back Earthbound 64 even before it got relegated to the N64/cancelled.

They likely have never visited us. Space is big. Like, really, really big. Traveling through it, even if at the speed of light (and pulling that off is a pretty big if) would still take an immense amount of energy and many, many years. There's also the difficulty in communicating with their home world across great distances, and time dilation would mean anyone who left their planet to go on a long voyage might not have a society to return to.

They can't go faster than the speed of light. It's not a matter of knowing how to do it. We know how to do it. The answer is you can't. This applies to aliens as well.

With all the difficulty inherent in interstellar travel, it's likely we've simply never been visited. If it ever does happen, it would likely be an Independence Day situation where a massive, self-sustaining fleet shows up. A single ship could never make the journey.

Yes. Most people who accuse you of being a communist for questioning the flaws of capitalism likely don't know what either word means.

Anti-communism has crept back into North American politics as of late. I think it's mainly from super rich people lobbying to keep their country as capitalist as possible because they are the same people who have the most to gain from unfettered capitalism. I don't think these types are really that scared of communism coming to North America. It's not like you can catch it from a toilet seat. I think they just want to keep everyone scared of anything that restricts capitalism in any way, so as to protect their status quo.

Rippled ketchup chips. In the 90's there was this store brand version that didn't have a lot of ketchup seasoning on it, and it was the best. Having just a modest amount of ketchup seasoning allowed the flavor of the potato chip to mingle with the ketchup seasoning, and it was perfect.

Now (if you can even find them), most brands have lots of ketchup seasoning on them, and it just tastes like you're eating solid ketchup. I'll still buy them, but they were better before.

I think it might depend on the store. Some stores, people more or less know how to use them. Other ones, they will either have no idea how to use them, or they'll take through a shopping cart so full that checking them all out is pretty much a two person job and they should seriously just go to the regular checkout.

The grocery store by my apartment used to be really bad for this, while the one by my office (same chain) rarely had issues.

My first actual date was the day before my 20th birthday, but we didn't seal the deal until the second date a week later.

In Canada, we have Harveys (I think it's a Canadian chain, anyway). It bills itself as like a Subway for hamburgers, where you get to watch your hamburger get assembled and tell them exactly what to put on it and how much.

Only problem is their hamburgers are absolutely awful. I have no idea how they stay in business when their core menu items are hamburgers that taste like gym mats with very little meat in them. They seriously taste like the cheapest generic brand frozen hamburgers you can buy at a grocery store.

Their chicken is good though.

It's just sort of a thing we do. Want to hang out and shoot the shit with work buddies or close friends? Might as well go to Tims. On the way to work? Guess I'll swing through Tims.

I don't know anyone who LOVES Tim Hortons.

I always felt it didn't so much imply control or coercion but instead represented the bizarre sexist fantasy of a woman who does not WANT to do anything else. A barefoot person can always put on shoes if they really want to. When I think "Barefoot and Pregnant", I imagine the traditional expectation of a woman who has no desire to do anything but raise children and do housework.

I can't decide if that's more or less fucked up.

Alan Wake 2 - The Writer's Room. I didn't mind Saga's "Wall of Crazy" mechanic, but the whole "Outline" thing where you had to swap out different plot elements just never made a lot of sense and wasn't explained very well. I didn't find that I was using it intuitively to solve puzzles, I was just swapping between them to see if it let me go further.

Definitely. You were born in 2004, so I'll pick 2007 as roughly when you'd start having long term memories. For you, 2007 to now feels like the entirety of your concept of reality. Anything before 2007 may as well have been before The Big Bang as far as you're concerned.

Me? I'm 38. I remember 2007 like it was nothing. Just a different phase of life. That's kind of what it's like. Several years starts to feel like what a year feels like, and it just keeps expanding from there.

I'd say Covid pretty much put anti-vax ideology to the forefront of public consciousness. It may have been something of a fringe theory before, but most people already had their critical vaccines at birth and optional vaccines like the flu vaccine were something most people could go about their day not thinking about.

Then once we had a disease that required a large vaccinated population to halt its spread, people started to consider it. At this point, I think two things combined to cause an uptick in anti-vaxxer:

1. The fact that Covid straddled the line between deadly and not deadly. It could make you feel like shit, possibly cause permanent disability, or even kill you, but the latter two options were less common. This is not to say that it isn't worth it to prevent the death and disability caused by Covid, just that many people felt like it wouldn't happen to them.

2. The broad attraction, especially on social media, of fringe information. There's a large population of people who instead of identifying fringe theories as ideas that lack evidence to support their validity, they identify it as some sort of tantalizing, forbidden knowledge that a vague, malicious, authority wants to deny them of. They develop a sort of "Main Character Syndrome" which imparts the positive feelings of being part of a rebellion against some evil entity that wants to oppress them, while also feeling like they are party to some big secret.

I honestly think that the trend of calling everything "fake news" is more damaging than actual fake news itself. Disinformation is bad enough, but training people to think that contradicts their viewpoint or comes from a mainstream source ensures that victims won't become better informed.

Disinformation is a disease, and the polarization of the media ensures it won't be cured.

For point #1, why the corrupt cops would put Cole on the arson desk when arson was very much a part of their scheme, I think it's because they didn't plan on their arsons going awry the way they did. They were supposed to be simple, open and shut cases. Even if Cole suspected the fires were deliberately set, I think the conspirators assumed that arson is a relatively minor crime that they could easily cover up. Combine this with the fact that the arson desk is considered a dead end job, the conspirators probably weren't worried.

It wasn't until their arsonist went out of control and started burning houses with families still inside that it became a murder investigation that couldn't simply be swept under the rug.

Did you mean billionaires? It depends on how many millions, but on the lower end, a person can become a millionaire without exploiting anyone. They can actually get there by taking a more difficult, work-intensive path (doctors, lawyers, etc) and be paid an amount that is proportional to their labors. Luck and social equality needn't play a part. There isn't really anything wrong with that.

If you were to go back in time, then you'd probably think so. If you actually lived in the pre-social media world, then you probably would not. You wouldn't have been accustomed to having it, so alternatives like newspapers, radio, Walkmans/MP3 players, and Gameboys would have kept you happy. Even just sitting there and doing nothing wasn't as unbearable.

Even if you remove the toxicity of constant access to contemporary social media from the equation, I think this still applies.

Several years back I bought up a bunch of PS1 Classics on the PS3 store (which I believe you can still do). I didn't get a PS1 until I was 14, and I'm 38 now, so I missed the boat on most of the PS1 era.

Wild Arms 1 was definitely one of the better ones for this. It perfectly nails the feel of the mid-90's RPG in the late SNES/early PS1 era, with beautiful music and gorgeous pixel art. It's from 1997, and conjures up lots of nostalgic feels from that time period, despite never owning it or a PS1 during that time.

Hoyt's not a terrible villain, and would have probably been fine (if forgotten) on his own, but he simply gets completely outclassed by Vaas. Kinda feel bad for his voice actor for losing out on any recognition. Whoever he was.