BobbyBesar

Has there been a major update recently on this? The Sadpuppy fiasco has been ongoing for quite some time now (I suspect it's even been discussed in this or the Social Justice thread). Just wondering if something prompted this NPR story in particular, or if they're just catching wind of it now.

From some of the wikipedia quotes, it sounds like they were attempting an intentionally misleading pre-release campaign to make it seem more like a typical magical girl show. So, the deliberate use of more stereotypically moe-ish characters might be part of that. I'm trying to figure out whether I think Madoka is good enough to recommend that my wife watch. She tends to be somewhat more critical than I am, and I specifically think that I got more out of the action sequences than she would. It might be worth it just for the visuals, but the more that I think about it, the less thematically coherent and interesting it feels. Maybe we could watch the films, which would be slightly less time intensive, and would also be something new for me.

One of us* should watch both of them to find out! *not me

Also, unrelatedly, Dragonball: Evolution is on Syfy tonight. Holy crap is it bad. Update: this is probably the worst movies I've ever seen. Justin Chatwin's acting is a war crime.

I watched Madoka, based on some specific recommendations and the fact that it's on Netflix (dubbed, but a reasonably good job of it). It was pretty good. I thought it was doing one thing for a while, but it ended up being more of a Whatever Happened to The Magical Girl?, which is kind of neat, I guess. I assume I missed a lot of references in the first half of the series (for instance, after seeing Sakaya's world, I assume every witch world we see is a reference to somebody specific. Also, I didn't quite understand the Murakami / Superflat witch, which I assume has some significance (as Murakami's work is very charged), but I haven't thought it out yet.. How much Madoka actually is there? There are 3 movies on Netflix as well. I gather that Beginnings and Eternal are retellings of the series? (Which seems like a good idea: I think several sequences dragged a bit and the overall story would have worked better in 4 hours than 6). It looks like Madoka:The Movie might be an alternate timeline though? Although I'm lukewarm on some of the character design, it's still quite beautiful overall. The Dave McKean style multi-media witch worlds were neat, as were the several silhouette sequences.

Mayo on a burger is fantastic, although if you're using store bought mayo, I can see the reticence. Mayo is also the correct condiment for dipping fries into. Seriously, home made mayo takes about 3 minutes to make.

Re:Salt and salads, I used to not understand salads at all (we never ate them growing up, Chinese family, so usually some variant of sauteed chinese cabbage*). It just seemed weird to eat vegetables raw, like eating an ingredient instead of a food. At some point I read something that noted that "salad" derives from the same root as "salt" (Latin: sal), so by definition a salad is supposed to be salted. Now, I enjoy salads, largely because I specifically toss them with salt and black pepper before applying any dressing (often, this means you need less dressing as well). So, I still think of lettuce = ingredient, but lettuce + salt = salad = food. * It's still almost the only way I cook vegetables. Heat Oil + Garlic, add leafy vegetable + rice wine + salt, saute until wilted.

Malay* uses K for all hard C sounds, and S for soft C sounds, so C is always pronounced CH. * When using roman letters. There's a traditional written language that looks like arabic, but it's terrible and nobody likes it.

How do you feel about quay?

I think even (especially?) in that context, some people would be turned off by the "warrior" part, as (at least from my perspective), it isn't taken literally and can be seen as trivializing the concept (on the contrary, it's possible that outside the context of a gaming community, "warrior" _can_ be taken more literally, since it doesn't have DnD connotations). In that case, I think something like "social justice activist" or something like that might be seen to be more appropriate.

Thanks for the example. I actually listened to several radio stories about it, but came out the other side still not understanding what it was.

This may not be particularly relevant, but I strongly associate "social justice" being used pejoratively with Glenn Beck (2010). He used to harp on it as a concept, and I always thought it was a weird choice of phrase to demonize: "Wait, are we against justice now?" So I always figured that Beck probably popularized it in Breitbart / Stormfront sorts of online communities, and that ultimately that's the usage that GamerGate eventually picked up.

I have a hard time with how unpleasant Rick and Morty looks. The show is still good enough that I can get past it, but it's a thing that I have to actively ignore.

Not to be confused with the Promise Keepers. I was really confused for a minute.

This isn't directed at you directly, but as a thought experiment, it's interesting to try swapping it with "All men should be put in prison." This may be somewhat more relatable to the stereotypical middle-class white person, but i think it's also easier to see how it would be similarly disproportionately offensive to people of color, given the incarceration rates for many minority groups.

Sorry about dredging up an old argument, but I was thinking about this: There are certain contexts where finite but arbitrarily large numbers might be "effectively infinite", such as the number of possible chess games (which is too many to be played before the heat death of the universe). For precision's sake, these should probably be referred to as "effectively infinite" or "un-computably many", but "almost infinite" may not be a terrible way to express this. (Pedantically, of course, it's still wrong.)

The PS2 Grandia games did a bit with positioning and AoE attacks within a standard JRPG battle system. But they're pretty by-the-numbers JRPGs beyond that.

It's a fairly common argument, although one that has significant problems. The argument is that (assuming the labor market is perfectly competitive) the labor market clears at, say, $7 an hour. A minimum wage is a price floor on labor. Therefore, setting the minimum wage to $15 (above $7) results in a labor surplus: there are more people willing to work at that price than are willing to hire. There's a couple problems with that. One is that minimum wage jobs may not be price-sensitive: if you want somebody to wait the tables, increasing the cost of labor may not decrease your demand. If you needed X waiters before, you still need X waiters. Maybe you could get away with fewer than X waiters, but how many less? Is your need for waiters going to be cut in half? Probably not. Will some restaurants go out of business due to increased labor costs pricing their product out of reach of their customers? Maybe. But, all restaurants will be equally affected by this rule, and so the playing field is still fair for all competing restaurants. And as Cordeos mentions above, the multiplier effect of increased demand from the low-wage workers may result in restaurant demand remaining more or less constant. (Studies indicate that this is probably the case). The other thing is that labor is very much not a perfectly competitive market. For one, it's kind of impossible for a laborer to exit the market. (i.e. You have to pay for food and lodging). The unemployment numbers don't count people who aren't actively looking for work, so the unemployment _metric_ might reflect a roughly competitive market, but those people still need to eat somehow. As long as they're alive, they are still "producing" labor. Personally, I don't think any of that even matters though. I've come to view the minimum wage not as an economic efficiency argument but as a moral one: we have a moral obligation to provide a living wage to people who are working. (I'm also increasingly in favor of a guaranteed minimum income for people who are priced out of the labor market, but that's a whole other can of worms). I typed the above before your youth unemployment clarification. While it's true that's a different case, there's a canard that minimum wage jobs are entirely (or primarily) gateway jobs for young people, and so pricing it as supplemental income (below living wage) is fine. However, that's simply not true. There are large (and increasing) numbers of adult people who rely on one or several minimum wage jobs to make ends meet (see the DOL link above).

A word of warning about the Boss Fight series: they're all done by different authors with (what appears to be) minimal editorial oversight, so they vary hugely in quality. ZZT is apparently quite good, and I think Earhbound is as well, but all accounts I've seen peg the Chrono Trigger book as pretty bad.

How about induction cooktops?

That sounds conceptually similar to another seemingly obvious proof (and my personal favorite), the proof for the pigeonhole principle (If you have n boxes and n+1 pigeons, there must be at least 1 box with 2 pigeons in it).

*Bwaaaaaaaamp*

The weirdest thing about this is that in Shovel Knight (at least on Normal difficulty), death is essentially meaningless because checkpoints are so plentiful. But money requires time to grind. Also, one of the most likely outcomes with the death bags is that you retrieve them, but die during (immediately after) the retrieval. This was especially easy to get into with the ronin-heroes) So, it can be rational (and not fun) to try over and over again to get the same bag back up to n times, as long as n*time to get bags < time to grind that much money. In that regard, the game felt largely designed around considerations for expert players / achievements challenges (speed runs, no death runs, etc).

That fruit is a durian. It's the king of fruits.

This isn't necessarily a perfect fit for it, but this reminds me of a popehat post that I bookmarked so that I can re-read it everytime there's a twitter "thing": http://popehat.com/2014/11/17/shirts-and-shirtiness/ Yes, the joke was tasteless, but it was a throwaway retweet and who knows what the intent was, if any? It's probably worthy of a "hey, that's not cool" followed by a "You're right, my bad", rather than an escalation of dog-piling and twitter-quitting.