Merus

So I'm playing through Tropical Freeze right now, and I'm really struggling to see why Danielle rated this so highly. That's not to say I'm struggling to see why Danielle liked it, it's an animal-themed platformer a really solid game with a lot of creativity and personality*, but it's not particularly ambitious. Also there was a bramble level, and it was an appropriate difficulty based on the levels around it! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE DONKEY KONG, RETRO * I really like that this game has decided that the Kongs are simple creatures that tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake, even when they're the heroes. It opens up the Kongs to be used in other contexts, like Donkey Kong Adventures: Geopolitical Negotiations

I wonder why it feels reductive to reduce sanity to a meter, but not for health.

Start putting them up on Wonder Trade, try and flood it with male Combees

I'm trying to work out how the Power Glove and the Sega CD are analogous. I mean, I was a PC kid so maybe it's an advertising thing, but the Power Glove was a shitty third-party peripheral cashing in on the hype of the NES, and the Sega CD was one of duelling first-party efforts to extend the life of the Mega Drive. (teg's right, it's a 3DS DSi, which is a shame because that screen is actually much improved.)

It bothers me that they make these games where you have to Survive! and there's no effort to model mental health. Killing things should be costly. Killing people should be worse.

On the other hand, I'd much prefer to just hang out with Donald Glover so I'd imagine he's much more dateable.

It's not great but it's probably the most watchable movie based on a game. It doesn't take itself at all seriously and that helps a lot.

I think they can compensate for it in the script by having the Major have American-made artificial body parts, which makes her stand out weirdly (not that she didn't already), but I agree they shouldn't have to.

I think we'd immediately be able to tell, to be honest.

I have encountered one pot smoker that I knew was a pot smoker who was a cool dude who was not in any way part of Drug Culture. I've definitely run into my far share of tedious people who are largely fixated on getting high, but I think that might be a youth thing more than a drug thing, honestly.

I just recently found out about the 4-koma format, which is usually conflictless but is still oddly satisfying.

I feel like the TV series is a more successful version of what people thought Ghost in the Shell was about.

It's a pretty smarmy response to be calling for respect right after you've decided that everyone who disagrees with you can't have a good reason for doing so. I don't think this thread was a good idea - this is a topic that requires friendship and trust, and that's hard to build in a text-based medium. I'd far prefer to have this discussion with my vegetarian friends, in part because I can trust that when I'm talking about how the kinds of things people can digest is different for everyone, they won't try and argue that this is analogous to human sacrifice.

I think that's the sticking point - it's not particularly new, what works about it is that it is rock-solid execution. It takes appealing ideas from the popular games of the era and uses them thoughtfully - Zelda II combat except with 30 years of experience; Mega-Man style bosses except with appropriate gating so players can't pick the hardest level first; Castlevania items except item acquisition is permanent and the mana costs are balanced; an economy that has just the right amount of pressure without being stingy or generous etc. etc. I don't think the game would work nearly as well with modern graphics - not only is the design drawing heavily from touchstones of the era, but the concept itself, a knight that wields a shovel, works better the more abstract the game around it is. A game with modern graphics couldn't get away with Shovel Knight without making it goofy and cartoonish.

Suck it up, buttercup Shantae ain't ever coming out here except for the iOS port.

Also interesting: I saw a video recently that described the structure of the brain and why it hurts to think, and you can in that video how the host is on autopilot until she starts having to work out if Chuckie is right about the sun and the moon and decides she needs to engage her frontal lobe.

I did one of these recently, they wanted me to fill in the next number in the sequence. No worries, they had those on the Mensa test, it'll be fine -- it was easily the hardest one of these I've ever seen. The number sequences barely had any logic holding them together, and getting people to crack them in 2 minutes was just cruel.

Two of the things you're saying are benefits to hemp are that it can be used in place of lumber, and that it has medical uses. The hemp plant stripped of cannabinoids is useful only for the former, but the question about legalising cannabis is almost entirely focused around cannabinoids, not the other properties of the plant. I can't imagine anyone would object to genetically-modified hemp plants being used as a fibre, so it's hardly a benefit of legalising cannabis. I acknowledge that duelling studies aren't especially helpful - the appropriate way to settle a medical question like this is to wait for a meta-analysis that combines everything we know about cannabis use and all the studies that have been done so far, and whether there's enough evidence to make a call one way or the other. I don't treat that research as particularly authoritative. It's only interesting because of how close it tracks to the personal anecdote. Actually, that's a fifth thing: is medical marijuana still useful in countries that have more effective public mental health programs than the US?

Okay so why do I keep hearing about people that have to come off vegan diets for health reasons? I'm aware that vegans exist because I read the thread and I'm not a fucking idiot.

Wait hang on, that has Ern Malley in it. Guys, Milo's mentioned Ern Malley in the first 'poem' which throws the entire enterprise into question. I don't think these poems should be read as actual poems, not as earnest expressions of Milo's soul, anyway.

So there's like four different questions in this topic: Should drug offences be a priority for law enforcement? (Personally, lol no, treating it as a public health problem is way more effective at dealing with abuse) Is marijuana actually safe? (Given that my uncle, a long-term pot smoker, developed schizophrenia over the years, and that there's been research that suggests cannabis does increase the risk of schizophrenia, I think maybe it's not? Like, it clearly affects the function of the brain, and we know most of those chemicals have pretty serious side effects.) Is marijuana safer than legal chemicals? (Well, hmm. Alcohol serves a vital social function in Western societies, but is banned in large parts of the Middle East, and has been responsible for a public health crisis widespread enough that the American constitution banned it in an effort to curb it. Smoking's legal in most of the West, but it's increasingly heavily restricted as we acknowledge that it's really dangerous, and it's effectively banned in parts of Australia - one of our states has restricted sales to people born before 1986, and we were the first country in the world to mandate government-designed packaging for cigarettes.) Should marijuana be legal? (I don't know? It kind of feels like we might have dodged a bullet by banning something for bullshit reasons that might actually be a risky thing, but it's still a bullshit reason and it's not a great idea to have a law that's based on bullshit reasoning. For instance, LSD research appeared promising, but because it's widely banned, it can't be developed further - but then you hear about that time researchers used LSD to keep going a really ill-advised experiment where a female human lived with a male dolphin for a month. [it ended up about where you'd fear it would.]) And then there's the question of how people feel about hemp that's been genetically modified so it doesn't produce cannabinoids, which is obviously a slam-dunk but I strongly suspect will really put the cat amongst the pigeons. Take, for instance, Zeus's post up there where he conflates cannabinoids with hemp as a fibrous material.

I'm not entirely convinced that eating meat is unnecessary. I mean, yes, you can substitute legumes, but my vegetarian housemate basically has to eat eggs every day to ensure he's getting enough protein. If he couldn't have eggs? He'd have trouble (also, he is a big cheese fan, so that'd probably be only one of his major objections). I get that people could stand to have some good meat-free recipes in their arsenal, and that people's diet should be mostly plants, and that Twig is cruising for big health problems down the line... but cutting it out entirely? I think that comes with problems that aren't readily acknowledged. I do live in a city that has amazing access to seafood, though, which changes the equation somewhat. The environmental impact of farmed fish isn't anywhere near as bad as cows, and they have much smaller brains. I also wonder what happens when vat-grown meat becomes a reality and many of the animals we've domesticated because they were useful to us start to die out. Humanity evolved to wrench the environment into a shape that was comfortable to us - so which is better, ethically: taking responsibility for the environment that we made, or trying to wrench it back into our perception of a more 'natural' environment?

So I was going to stay out of this thread because it seemed like it was going to be about free speech generally, but it looks like it's mostly about Charlie Hebdo, so: obviously murder is an inappropriate response to anything, but given that mosques are straight up being attacked in France right now for no reason, there's a part of me that wonders exactly what it takes to get a society to stop punching down. Like, it bothers me that one of the big reasons why the burka is worn by Muslim women is because during the 20th century there was a real push for Muslims to assert their Muslim identity in response to Arabia's marginalisation in the aftermath of World War 1. I can't fault the reasoning, and saying 'hey your culture's standard of modesty seems unfair' only contributes to that marginalisation. I also find it interesting that a country that has Fraternity as one of its guiding principles didn't manage to think of a #IllRideWithYou kind of thing, although I recognise the circumstances were completely different and Sydney has time to adjust to the idea of a lone nutjob before anyone died.

Yeah; they're introducing point and click, which was built by a modder in the Residual engine and ported into the Remaster by Double Fine after getting him in as a consultant.

I've been listening to The Dollop for my comedy. When it's not being funny, it's being interesting, and when it's not being either of those things it's eroding my faith in humanity. It's not perfect - the hosts are not as progressive as they like to think they are, and while the prepared material usually isn't a problem, occasionally when reacting to the story some of their shittier opinions come up. (For instance, J Edgar Hoover might have been a transvestite, but that has nothing to do with his delusional paranoid fear of communist subversives.) If you can get past that, it is at least entertaining. The recent Cereal Men episode is a highlight.