pigeonburger
2d ago
You do raise an interesting point that they probably go to restaurants; after all, having a access to all chefs in a city would offer more variety than a single chef would. But the situation I would imagine one would consider a private chef is for those who have a large mansion away from a large city's restaurants.
pigeonburger
2d ago
only literal billionaires have personal chefs
Why though?
I would imagine to hire a good chef that could otherwise have his own restaurant, you'd have to offer a good 6 digit salary; maybe somewhere between 200 000$ and 800 000$ depending on experience and details such as whether it's a live-in, exclusive or flexible position. Is that unattainable for mere multihectomillionaires?
For heterosexual males, the essence of the lesbian fantasy lies in watching two hot, conventionally feminine women with high sex drives have sex with one another.
I think part of the appeal, that has become mostly obsolete with the broadening of the porn offering online and with better handheld cameras, is the "implied threesome". The camera, in "straight lesbian porn", is meant to make you think it's you the viewer, you're there next to these two girls, watching them warm themselves up. You could and will join in at any moment you wish, whenever you're ready your penis is going to be a welcome addition to the fun the two girls are having. They're not gonna go "Ew, what the fuck are you doing in our bedroom naked!?" they'd go "Yay! Penis!"
Now though, with the explosion of the internet, amateur porn and amateur-inspired professional porn (stuff like camera in hand POV "gonzo" porn), you can find a lot actual threesomes which on top of the same things you see in lesbian porn and straight porn will also include acts like double blowjobs. It's not like threesomes were impossible before, but you have to take into account the difficulties of filming porn in a professional way were only increased by adding another person.
pigeonburger
2d ago
the level and pace of play actually makes it more watchable than the men's
I've been unable to watch it because I'm used to men's hockey, but I guess it might be a good on-ramp for people not already into hockey. It is overall the world's best professional sport for spectators, but the fact that somehow other sports are more popular show that there might be an issue of easing people into it. It's fast, it's strategic, it's robust, it highlights personal courage and grit, it requires its athletes to be complete well-rounded athletes instead of min-maxxing specific traits, it's exciting with games (at the pro level, not as much in the Olympics) usually ending with a close score. It hits the perfect balance of personal and team effort in success. Goals are neither infrequent (soccer) nor too frequent (basketball). The flow of the game feels mostly natural, less artificial stop and go (football, baseball). The only thing I'll grant other sports over hockey is that hockey is perhaps less relatable especially in places with less ice rinks; any kid on the planet can play pickup soccer, you just need a ball and a big enough field. Basketball you just need a ball and a court. Hockey needs a bit more than that.
pigeonburger
2d ago
More like the other way around, the bulk of the gameplay is the action RPG, so it's simplified anime MMORPG with a Factorio layer. It tries to be an "everything" game with some of the side activities. You get puzzle gameplay (nonogram/picross inspired), market trading, tower defense, relationship management/courting (giving gifts to your waifus)...
I arrived at the end of the first batch of main quest content of Arknights Endfield and while I didn't quite reach max level/endgame content yet, I think I can say that the game has been generous enough that I could make the team I wanted without having to pay anything and I'm pretty certain I'll be able to reach endgame content with that team. I did put in a lot of hours. The monetization seems well balanced in that, if I really really want to get a specific 6 star, I probably will be able to accumulate enough banner pulls to do so, but not often. However, it's less balanced in that from what I understand, one wouldn't be able to guarantee one without spending way more money than I can ever imagine spending on a virtual waifu for a game. I think it comes to about 2$ per pull, 80 pulls for a guarantee to get a 6 star that will in 50% of times be the banner one, 120 pulls for guarantee to get the banner 6 star. Maybe it'd work if you only need a bit of a boost to get your guarantee for a specific banner, but I can't imagine paying that much ever.
Not that I'd need to, the game gives you 2 pretty good 6 stars for free (Endmin and Ardelia) and playing the content over the first month I ended up with 4 extra 6 stars on top of the two they give you, and that's not counting that I got at least two duplicates in those. And even then, I could have built a team of 4 and 5 stars, they're not necessarily inferior to 6 stars, they just tend to have less dramatic designs.
The factory gameplay is addictive and creates reasons to log in every day, but I'm looking forward for more stuff to be unlocked in the 2nd region, as the game is hinting at more content for the factory that isn't quite there yet. There's factory-related concepts I've barely started interacting with. Some of the side content is less fun, though thankfully can mostly be ignored for now. The tower defense stuff isn't very well implemented to my taste.
The main gameplay itself is fine, it's a like a more action oriented, simplified MMORPG. What is really next level for this game though are the production values. I don't know how much other games in this genre (single player, action RPG gacha games, like Genshin Impact) made but the company behind Endfield clearly believes they can make a lot of money because this is not a cheap cash grab. Almost everything is voiced, and that's a lot of voiced lines... Like, a LOT. Over I think 4 languages? And it's pretty good voice acting too, I was surprised to hear the people in the 2nd region, which is "china themed" have the very distinctive accent that native chinese speakers who speak good english end up having. Animation are lush and high quality. Graphics are as good as they could be while maintaining the ability to be played on either computer or mobile.
pigeonburger
4d ago
Yes, but that's not what ultimately matters. The Fremen victory in Dune is not secured by fighting men in the field, it's secured by long term plans and a superior understanding of the ecology (Paul realising that the Fremen held the spice cycle hostage with the water they had been stockpiling all that time). The fighting men only had to win until Paul could expose their actual victory to all the other actors. Without that, the long-term prospects of the Fremen are dim, even if they can keep winning fights in the desert.
everything that had a movie very loosely based on
That is a lot of stories though. PKD might be one of, if not the, most adapted writer of the 20th century.
*EDIT: Ok, checked and he's nowhere near Stephen King in how many works he has had adapted.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Second Variety has been adapted in a movie, if you enjoyed that. The movie is good cheap 90s sci-fi jank, called Screamers.
pigeonburger
9d ago
I would say I enjoy watching most Olympic sports, and most sports in general, in a limited fashion. Really following a sport is a time consuming, brain capacity consuming proposition, personally I have only limited space in my life for it so I chose to follow the best one (hockey). Following a sport adds a layer of enjoyment to the spectacle, you get to enjoy the "storylines" of it, but there is still, to me at least, the raw enjoyment of the game itself. That has its limitations, without the context the enjoyment fades, so I have it in me to watch one or two american/canadian football games a year, or Olympic sports once every two years, but it's not just hype, the sports are genuinely mildly enjoyable to watch to me.
What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.
Outside of missing ENT which I quite enjoy, I don't think this would have worked for me. I came back to it later and I love it all now, but when I was a pre-teen/teen in the 90s, there was reruns of all of the Star Trek show playing all the time on TV, and TOS, TNG and DS9 never had much interest for me. TOS because it looked stupid: the action is robotic and looked stupid, and the plots basically all felt like they boiled down to sufficiently advanced aliens act like gods, until Kirk says "nope" and somehow he'd end up clumsily wrestling with a goofy looking alien somewhere along the way. I know it hit different for kids in the 60s and 70s, but you'd need a kid with a specific interest in "retro" shows to enjoy TOS on its own now, which I would guess isn't too common unless you live in a bunker and have deprived them of modern media. TNG and DS9 didn't interest me because it seemed like non stop politics and relied on too much built up lore that I didn't care about.
Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life?
Rarely, but I'm not sure whether it's because kids are not trusted to be on their own or because his schedule is kept full by his parents. Comparing my nephew at any age to myself at that age I certainly had way less structured activities scheduled to keep myself busy. All my free time would basically be either me playing on the computer/watching TV on my own or playing outside unsupervised (or very loosely supervised) with friends. Sometimes I guess I was also being an annoying little brother watching whatever my brother was doing. By contrast, my nephew is driven from sports training to playdates every weekend.
How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)
I was born before the 90s, and went on my own walking to and from my elementary school every day, at 6 years old. It was considered a normal thing back then.
I like to think I turned out fine, but I'm conflicted as to how I will want to raise kids if I have them, because my own upbringing goes against both "old" and "new" rules. I was allowed to be on my own and wasn't really "kept busy" by my parents the way kids nowaday are, but also I was an early "screen junkie". My parents had barely any control over the time I would spend on the computer, and I certainly could go on full-day binges.
13ish is fine, but a sharp younger kid might like it earlier.
I have three suggestions for starting points.
As you suggested, Wrath of Khan is a good one to start with. the TOS movies, from two onwards (the first one might confuse as to why these characters coming out of retirement is a big deal), are detached enough from the series that they won't feel like you're missing half the plot if you just watch them on their own. They have enough action to keep a child's attention. The action is modern enough that it doesn't look goofy the way the action from the 60's does.
For my second suggestion, I'll go very much against the grain and suggest maybe the most divisive series as a starting point: Voyager. It is "my Trek" in the sense it's the one that introduced me properly to the series, and I posit it's a good starting point, because its concept inherently reduces the requirement of knowing the lore that was built up on, without discarding it wholesale either. Yes, it's "lesser" in that it's not as good an example of the virtues you would hope the show would demonstrate to the kids, but those virtues are still there. Janeway is not the greatest role model, but in most episodes she's a decent one. Sometimes she does a cheeky little war crime, but what Starfleet captain hasn't?
The Animated Series might also be a good starting point, especially if you want to start him earlier than 13. It's simpler, introduces to the universe, and while it hasn't aged all that well, I think it probably aged better than TOS has visually. Or maybe I just forgave it because I had different expectations of cartoons back then.
pigeonburger
11d ago
Does it really need to be spelled out why the "average school shooting" is not covered? Because the "average school shooting" are gang bangers doing everyday gang banger shit, and not what people actually think about when "school shooting" is invoked.
Is there an opposite to non-central fallacy, where the fallacy is taking a non-central event as central in order to inflate the impression of frequency of the non-central event?
Some of the commentators on TV here outright stated it for at least one of the competitors, that they moved to Georgia to be able to compete in the Olympics.
Makes sense, tbf, these young people have invested the majority of their teens and early adulthood into getting ready for this event. The Olympics are, for sports that don't have popular professional leagues, the only sports competition that give you validation from people who don't follow your sport, and especially for figure skating, the window where you are competitive is short; one or two Winter olympics in the more competitive brackets. Having it ruined due to geopolitical event that you have no control over feels like bullshit, and I don't blame them for trying to find a way around it.
pigeonburger
13d ago
Yeah. I imagine people would say russian roulette (or any unhealthy, high-stakes gambling) is exhilarating, but that doesn't mean a gambler is not being true to themselves if they decide to drop the unhealthy habit.
That said, I can easily understand a steady girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband being insecure about the idea that maybe the unhealthiness is not inherent to the hotness, and that the person they see as their soulmate is gonna drop them when they find someone that's both exhilarating to be with AND not destructive.
pigeonburger
14d ago
I think it's just teasing out some emotions out of them. Men, and teens, don't like to share their emotions. Women are the opposite on that. A well-adjusted teen typically won't share much with his mother, but early romantic/sexual experiences are a uniquely vulnerable point for men. It might even serve a societal function, maybe an attentive mother might uncover a psycopathic tendancy if the reaction from her son is unusually muted or violent.
pigeonburger
16d ago
We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime.
Sentence, ideally no. Arrest, yes, though the bar is high. Suspect/investigate, all the time.
The same people absolutely believe discrimination occurs in culture/education/training/etc. If I cited an article showing that e.g. childhood participation in private music lessons for orchestral instruments had a race skew (which it does), would they be surprised? I really don't think so. Do they believe that lessons and practice just... don't matter? That's the only way I can think of to justify the notion that a fair meritocratic test of orchestra applicants wouldn't show a similar skew even assuming uniform innate capacity and interest.
The usual justification I hear is something you're brushing briefly against here: interest. What DEI proponents think is that the underrepresented minorities are not taking private music lessons for orchestral instruments because they don't feel welcome or invited in those fields. They feel it's a white or asian thing, not for them. Culturally, it's less of a thing they're likely to be introduced to.
So to steelman the DEI side here (which I must state I disagree with, but it still deserves steelmanning), minority enrollement in these activities requires bootstrapping; get a generation of these under-represented minorities in there or two by putting your thumb on the scale if necessary, hype the fuck out of them, and hopefully the next generation of the under-represented minority will be inspired by the DEI hires, will get on the pipeline early and the minority will not be under-represented anymore and you won't need to put your thumb on the scale.
I don't think it has ever worked, but I think that's the general idea.
*EDIT: To clarify why I don't think it ever works, is because it's extremely conceited. You have to assume that people are dumb and won't notice that your thumb is on the scale, and won't notice that the DEI hires are worse than the meritocratic ones. Which has a tendancy to backfire, if all the pro/famous under-represented minority athletes of a specific sport, or orchestral musicians are noticeably worse, it's likely to reinforce the idea that there is something innate with the group that makes them worse at that activity. Which would be worse than having only a few less-than-representative numbers but at least they perform to the same standard as others, which doesn't damage the "interest gap" potential explanation and won't discourage the people who do have the interest.
pigeonburger
17d ago
I guess I should specify what I mean by trolling here; it's true that outside of the "military intervention" aspect Trump does some trolling too, like the "51st state", calling the Canadian Prime Minister "Governor", etc... I'm guessing he says that because he finds it funny. I find it funny too. And the performative pearl clutching he sees in return is funny too. But the interest is genuine.
pigeonburger
17d ago
The thing is that last year, I saw multiple right wingers say that the Canada stuff and the Greenland stuff was all just trolling, not serious.
I don't recall hearing or saying that; the interest is genuine and has always been genuine. Canada is not serious in the sense that the possibility is and was extremely remote, but if the US sees the opportunity, I think any president, not just Trump, would try to bring Canada in. It'd be a massive legacy setting achievement. Other presidents haven't brought it up, but either Trump has a different idea of what is or isn't realistic, or thinks what you never ask, you never get. Greenland was a strategic interest of US military, one of their "it would be nice-to-have it" things that no one thought was possible. Anyone who told you that Trump wasn't serious about Greenland probably never knew that the US' been trying to buy it since the 19th century. And it turns out probably still isn't possible, but maybe Trump will get some additional concessions for his military bases there, we'll see.
The part that is the trolling has always been the military intervention.
pigeonburger
18d ago
I think the main difference is how would you even argue for or against gay marriage? The difference of opinion on it and topics like it are on a different level than a debate. It is closer to a conflict theory topic than mistake theory. Religious conservatives don't argue against it because they agree that gays should be able to marry but disagree that the government should be the one to do it; they don't think gays should be able to marry, at least not in the same sense as traditional marriages, and usually more broadly.
Housing affordability, healthcare, education, etc... Are more mistake theory. There is a general agreement on both sides that it would be good if housing, education and healthcare were more affordable and higher quality. Both sides have the same goal, but the strategy to get there are at odds, usually some sort of opposition between government intervention vs free enterprise and markets.
pigeonburger
19d ago
Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is?
I think it's one of these midwit meme distribution. Glug thinks cartoons are low-brow childish entertainment, midwit thinks since it's not aimed at kids it's adult and somewhat sophisticated. Genius knows it's mostly endless rehash of tropes comfortable to its audience.
pigeonburger
19d ago
Yes, and if you take into account empty nesters, it's not that atypical for older people to move from a house sized for a family with 2+ kids to a smaller house, to a condo or an apartment that requires less upkeep work and, as a result of the downsizing you mentionned, frees up money for retirement.
Not being able to see the puck to me is a weird complaint although I guess it might be valid for people not used to hockey. It's not so much that nuh-huh, you can see it, but that with a bit of awareness of the game and a decent sportscast, it's obvious where the puck is whether you see it or not. The player with the puck moves differently, other players move differently with regards to him and the camera usually follows the puck.
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