jericho
1yr ago
Really? I would be absolutely shocked to hear the writer sides more with Cleanthes than Philo.
Cleanthes allows too many major assertions by Philo to go unquestioned, and those that are pushed back against are only done after conceding ground.
That being said, I do genuinely believe the author is trying to fairly portray his more moderate opposition and does a better job than most at doing so.
jericho
1yr ago
Interesting - there seems to be some regional pricing going on with that one. Where I lived before, it was (and double-checking, still is) a full $20 pricier than Bulleit, but here it is only about $10 more. I'll have to check it out.
jericho
1yr ago
But hey, I'm not a person of drunkeness. Never been drunk in my life. I get a feeling of pressure inside my forehead after say 200 ml of hard liquor or equivalent, and never feltl like drinking anything more to find out.
Sounds like you do have a decent tolerance, though! 200 ml of hard liquor would have me well into drunk territory.
jericho
1yr ago
For hard liquor, usually bourbon, usually Bulleit or Woodford Reserve. I've found $20-50 is my sweet spot for 750ml bottles of liquor.
For beer, usually a local lager, pilsner or wheat ale.
I tend to semi-binge drink- I will go weeks/months without having anything, then I'll get in the mood to buy a bottle, then have at 1-2 glass each week night, 2-3 each weekend night until it is gone.
If for whatever reason my pattern gets broken (I get sick or have plans that preclude drinking) I'll stop early and then pick it back up weeks/months later when I get the urge.
Honestly it is the same pattern I follow with games/books as well, like a very specific kind of addictive personality.
jericho
1yr ago
For the 1920s and 1930s, I was just going off of this which is just the source from the Wikipedia page.Since that data was from the NCHS, I then compared it to the rates for 2021 and 2022 from their dashboard, which showed 2021 and 2022 as being a bit lower than the averages for the 20s and 30s.
The numbers I saw from the first link seemed ballpark with the other ones I could find (The FBI crime data explorer only goes back to 1985 and tends to show lower rates across the board than the NCHS data, but is in the same ballpark and trends in the same direction by year).
Once again, just what I could find quickly off Google, not a rigorous analysis.
And yeah, not a commentary on rates of violence, just in terms of folks going in the ground.
jericho
1yr ago
That seems highly relevant when discussing the murder rate in terms of violent crime, but less relevant when discussing the murder rate in terms of life expectancy.
Unless the argument is the life expectancy lost by the increased # of aggravated assaults outweighs the life expectancy gained by the decreased # of outright murders. Though I would not phrase that as life expectancy lost due to increase in murders.
I'm afraid to think what kind of taboo content people that have created this include in their sessions.
I cannot speak to the history of it and I'm sure these are used in some campaigns that explore more extreme stuff, but the tables I've heard of where these are used are on the opposite end.
That is to say, they have these cards in case a player is uncomfortable with situations that are pretty bog-standard for fantasy settings (fantasy racism, religion being portrayed either positively or negatively, sexism, classism, etc)
jericho
1yr ago
Increase in murders
What numbers are we looking at here? Googling around the murder rates per capita for the US as a whole during the 1920s and 30s seem to generally trend higher than murder rates today, but those are just the easiest ones I've found and I could accept the methodology has changed to such an extent it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
jericho
1yr ago
I agree with you broadly but:
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean all of their social/political/economic views are suspect as a result?
I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.
jericho
1yr ago
My understanding is that while there is not a shortage of prospective adoptive parents for babies, there is one for children.
jericho
1yr ago
Also my experience. Even Newt Gingrich, possibly one of the least charismatic politicians I can readily think of, was quite a bit more charming than the average Joe when meeting him in person.
jericho
1yr ago
I have one family member who has steadfastly refused to change from a flip phone to a smartphone, but everyone I know who owns one keeps it with them whenever out and about.
Setting aside the question of whether it is or is not a poem for a moment, reading this really drove home to me how much my appreciation of works of art is context-driven.
My opinion of whether or not this writing was worthwhile was entirely wrapped up in how how old it was- you summarized some of the main thoughts as
Today we have dishwashers! And buy products that come from all over the world! And can easily afford them so what was exotic or scarce in the past is now something to be had everyday
And there's a big difference to me between someone putting down those thoughts during/shortly after the boom in modern household appliances and globalization versus last week. My opinion of the piece dropped precipitously when I found the date it was published.
That's not to say that art only has value if it is truly novel, but if you're doing something that has been done a million times before, you have a higher bar to clear and if you're trying something brand new you'll be cut more slack.
jericho
1yr ago
IIRC, some of the Great Awakening utopian cults were explicitly abstinent; not "no sex before marriage" abstinent, absolute abstinence. Sex is sinful, and the end of the world is right around the corner, so having children isn't important compared to being right with Jesus. They aren't around anymore, for mysterious reasons.
Believe you are thinking of The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing aka The Shakers. I also thought they were fully extinct, but it seems they're merely functionally extinct, with either 2 or 3 (seeing conflicting reports) remaining in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
jericho
1yr ago
If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!
The issue is often that their competitors are not any better in this regard. Or, even when they are, any advantage from customer service is absolutely swamped by other considerations.
I travel a lot and have had a range of experiences with hotel front desks, but I can't say any of them would ever trump even a small difference in price or location. I think the only exceptions I could imagine would be those bordering on the actually criminal.
Especially in the era of travel aggregators, a lot of folks are looking at just the price tag and maybe a map.
jericho
1yr ago
I love the irony that baseball cards from your father's era are valuable because kids played with them (and ruined them) and Moms threw out the collection later, while baseball cards from my era are still totally worthless because everyone from my childhood saved them in archival quality protetive materials (I still remember kids arguing about the merits of various cardboard boxes and plastic pockets sheets) for long term storage.
The exact same thing happened to comic books, of course. At least that has the advantage of it not being too expensive to read old (but-not-too-old) series.
jericho
1yr ago
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
I suppose if you do not consider new weapons for the culture war to be part of the culture war, it would be unrelated.
My impression is also that the user base for video games generally trends less woke than the developers, so I would predict this particular weapon getting pointed one way more often than the other, but that remains to be seen.
jericho
1yr ago
Thank you, that seems to be correct.
The murderer would be lambasted as a caricature of antifa members were he not a real person.
jericho
1yr ago
I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere.
I'll cop to ignorance on my part, whose murder does this refer to?
jericho
1yr ago
Most piercings are a miss for me (even many earrings) but for tattoos it is entirely on a case by case basis, with some being awful and some being quite fetching.
jericho
1yr ago
Honestly, it might be worth just keeping a lookout for whenever the inevitable Definitive Edition drops. Even as someone who liked the game and story overall, much like D:OS2 it's clear the back third got less attention than the first third and I'm guessing that much like D:OS2 many of those issues will get cleaned up later down the road.
jericho
1yr ago
since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace).
Why have encounters that involve no real decision-making? At that point just cut those ones and have interesting encounters give better rewards. I get maybe having one or two an act just to embrace a power fantasy, but a system being better for grinding isn't much of an endorsement when you can just design the game without grinding.
Now, can be a completely separate issue that the encounters are poorly designed, but then it makes more sense to me to spend more time tuning the encounters rather than slapping in a fast forward button.
A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions...
I feel the overall complaint is correct, but much of the issue of too many actions are a result of it NOT being a direct translation of 5e. Bonus action shoving, dipping as a thing at all, bonus action throwing things and all the short-rest weapon abilities etc were added on by Larian to basically give martials more stuff to do.
D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat.
The inventory management is absolutely trash, especially given separate inventories between characters and the extra steps to swap characters in and out to access their inventories.
That said, I'd say Larian did an OK job tackling half of this complaint (the loot in BG3 is generally a lot more interesting than base 5e), but made the other half far worse- the absolute deluge of magic items you run into is not standard 5e, it much more resembles Pathfinder. Looking at the table from the DMG for starting at higher levels makes it clear how absolutely loaded down with loot you are in BG3, before considering that without attunement slots you're also not only collecting but using a lot more.
This also makes the above issue with too many abilities worse, as many of the more interesting magic items are more interesting because they bestow yet more abilities.
This ought not to be taken as a defense of 5e, more showing that it can be hard to parse out issues with 5e, issues with Larian games in general (obsession with barrels, bottles and surfaces) and issues with BG3 as a result of Larian trying to fix issues with 5e.
I've had Eagle Rare and quite liked it, but spot-on in terms of availability. I've only snagged it as a consolation prize in a Blanton's raffle.
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