80’s’n’t

I think Kamala could have been the perfect candidate and she still would’ve lost.

The economy being in the shitter under the Biden-Harris administration killed any possibility of either of them winning another term. The economy ended up being the single biggest issue for American voters. Way bigger than bodily autonomy for women, LGBT+ rights, or Palestine.

TSMC hates this one easy trick!

I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

And don’t forget to do your dailies!

If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.

But then those sorts of countries usually have law enforcement that likes taking large amounts of “financial incentives” to do whatever a company like Nintendo wants them to do.

Taking a look at their website, I don’t think so (thankfully).

It’s an all-boys center based on how it’s described, but it doesn’t seem to make any mention of conversion therapy in explicit terms, nor does it imply that it is a type of program they offer. It doesn’t seem to display any overt religious messaging, either.

I see that they are also accredited by the Joint Commission, which is more reassuring on that front. Not to say there might not be some hidden skeletons they keep from the accreditors, or that they don’t have rogue staff who might try to push their own agenda anyways, but it means there are industry standards they are following well enough to pass accreditation, which most conversion camps would not even put in the effort to attempt.

Given that it’s a mental health facility for troubled teens, I’d guess this was most likely a tragic but otherwise unsuspicious suicide.

Well…you’re not wrong.

It’s the specialized tools you’ll also need to do all of that that’ll get you, though.

Just build one, cheaper to boot.

Coming into a thread that has nothing to do with politics and using it to soapbox your political superiority is still kinda cringe, ngl.

In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.

Caught me before I was able to edit! I thought about it for a second and decided that estimate was too high.

10 people is what I would usually say is a normal amount, maybe variable depending on how hungry people arrive and if there are any other dishes to snack on at whatever hypothetical party this is.

I can only eat 3-4 slices at most before I get full, but my appetite isn’t the biggest.

Usually what ends up happening is that I still order a party pizza for a group of 5 or so people and then end up with leftovers for a few days. Just can’t beat the surface-to-crust ratio.

A party pizza is basically what it sounds like, a pizza meant to feed a party of 10 or more people.

They usually look like this, a large rectangle cut into squares. Each square is about the width of your palm between your wrist and your fingers.

For just a bit more context. NYC currently requires that all new buildings must incorporate bird-safe glass, but has not made any moves to address what should happen with all of the existing buildings.

Birds see reflections of the sky or plants, or maybe they see someone’s plants inside through the glass, and they think the window is somewhere they can fly through or land on and end up smacking into it at full speed. The bird safe glass adds patterns to windows which are visible to birds and lets them know it’s not something they can fly through, though it isn’t a perfect solution.

Tragically, even when they may be stunned at first and fly away shortly after, most birds that hit windows will still later die of their injuries.

I mean it’s just the cake equivalent of a party pizza. It’s not made any differently than any other sponge cake, it just uses a larger square sheet to bake in than smaller round cake pans.

Fat, sugar, and salt are also “nutritious,” insomuch as they are components needed for survival. Too nutritious is probably a better way of looking at it. It’s a meaningless buzzword.

Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, and maybe others (they used the term “including”)

Nestle was the only company to comment, saying how they planned to increase their sales of more nutritious food. Always gonna spin it to fit whatever narrative they want to sell to their consumers and shareholders.

Filed before, updated and approved after.

There were several. Why didn’t these hypothetical single-issue Trump supporters vote for Cornel West or Claudia de la Cruz if their priority is narrowing the income gap? Even Harris promised to implement at least a billionaire tax.

If people were pissed about income inequality, they’d vote for the “tax the rich” candidates. Donald Trump’s agenda is the exact opposite about that.

I think there are two separate but related metrics at play here. Addressing income inequality would certainly go a long way towards improving quality of life for the working class, but Americans don’t care about someone having too much money as much as they care about having too little themselves.

Despite large movements like Occupy Wall Street bringing the topic of income inequality to the forefront of news for a while, the fact that it petered out and has ceased to be an issue means that enough members of the working class were still contented enough by their bread and circuses, so nothing came of it.

These voters don’t care if their CEO gets a $10 million bonus at the end of the year as long as they can still afford groceries and housing, but they do start to care a lot when they don’t. Only, blame is being directed at the government (inflated cost of living) rather than their rich bosses (wage stagnation).