oats_son
12d ago
What an amazing post. Imagine all the history those old guys lived through. China seems to have replaced India as the land of mysticism in the American public's eye. You married pretty well, if your relatives own hotels and are Party members. I also like how you've managed to visit astoundingly rich areas and also seemingly more poor rural areas, but they all have a commonality in keeping some baijiu in store for such an occasion. For a visitor in your situation, it would be an easy mistake to make to think that they drink it at every lunch and dinner. I hope that when I own a house, I can keep expensive liquors for visitors, too. That's good motivation to try to play around with expensive steaks so you know what you're doing when the time comes.
oats_son
12d ago
I appreciate the advice you were already given. Stronglifts 5x5 looks like a great program. My question is how you guys keep this kind of routine up for any extended period of time. You're giving up 45 minutes or more to drive to the gym, get changed, wait for your spot to be empty, lift weight for 5 sets, then repeat a couple more times for other spots, then drive home, 3 times every week. Do you lift alone? How do you make it bearable? I'm not having fun when I do it and it really hurts that it's cutting into my already limited free time. I just feel like it's a bit overvalued in comparison to something like deciding to spend more time cooking at home, which I find to be a lot more fun and tends to save you money.
oats_son
13d ago
Ever since I saw how Japanese songs are written, I have kind of thought that rhyming is a bit of a stupid thing to require for every English song. When I say that, I'm usually thinking of Yorushika songs, though there's a lot out there that I think is very pretty, speaks to life's fundamental tribulations, and is artfully put together. Do you have any opinions on English poetry/songs versus Japanese poetry/songs?
Of course, I doubt removing the rhyming requirement would improve the content of American pop songs at all.
oats_son
19d ago
If you haven't already, you have to approve this to make it visible. You really gotta start looking more closely, man.
oats_son
23d ago
I know at least one of them is serious about it because I explicitly asked. The others are generally even more right wing than her. I've had to self censor quite a bit lately.
oats_son
23d ago
I think this fits well into this thread.
Speaking as someone who frequently talks to multiple right wingers, I get the impression the "Big Mike" meme is actually serious. Every single one of them that mentioned it eagerly brings up new evidence in favor of the theory. It's one of the most annoying memes to me for this reason. Comes across as pointlessly cruel and also pointlessly racist, based on basically nothing. I would probably be similarly annoyed by the Obama birth certificate stuff if I was into politics as much back then.
oats_son
23d ago
Thanks. I'll have to take some photos of a menu and send them to you sometime.
oats_son
23d ago
For sure, and a good pattern for how that can happen, but excuse me, I asked for your favorite inauthentic dish that has been mangled by cultural transfer. Like, worst of the worst, you're-doing-this-so-wrong type thing.
I told a friend from western USA that I put romaine lettuce on my tacos, and he reflexively said an incredulous utterance and immediately went to get his Mexican wife's opinion on it.
oats_son
23d ago
I think you make a very good point about subversion and derivation. As I said in a different comment, you just can't make a game like Half-Life 1, because it's been done before. Even if you do it just as well again, it just gets looked at differently. It wasn't there first. The subversion and commentary thing also clearly defines why I think Earthbound is probably far better than Undertale (or maybe even Mother 3).
That being said, I think there's still a lot of room to do new things. You can make genuine stuff while doing some things that you wanted to see done that has never been done before. Undertale did some of that, though it's overridden by all the meta commentary that it did. There's a lot more room for play in video games than there is in movies, since a game can portray a lot more things and be a lot longer. Playing Earthbound is similar to playing LISA: The Painful RPG in mechanics, but there's a hell of a lot of difference in the nuances that I think let it stand on its own, even if it has a lot of flaws.
oats_son
23d ago
Oh, yeah, you really need the co-op mod for SPT. I think it's called Project FIKA. That's actually how I learned the maps initially, some other Tarkov junkie leading us. Yes, the PVP is really the selling point, tense stuff. I just think that Tarkov takes the gear progression way too seriously. You should be able to have a decent chance of killing anyone in the game, rather than the game saying "too bad, you brought in level 3 bullets but you needed level 6, also you've got level 5 gear and he's level 60". SPT fixes that a bit.
The maps of Tarkov are one of the biggest selling points for me. So huge, so very detailed, so war-torn. It made me realize one of the reasons I love Left 4 Dead and Duke Nukem 3D were for the maps portraying real places.
oats_son
23d ago
Thanks for the suggestions. I like the looks of Echo Point Nova, but it looks very slide-y with non human enemies and cartoony graphics. Part of the appeal of Max Payne 3 was going to a shithole Latin American country drenched in sun and humidity as a fatass sweaty drunk who quips extremely pessimistic lines every 30 seconds whose heft you can feel when doing the classic Max Payne diving technique. Shooting people never felt better than it does in a Rockstar game, too.
Related: I liked the stories of the originals, but I think Max Payne 3's story isn't bad enough to be worth bashing. It's written a lot less flowery, but there are a lot more lines in it that I feel tempted to quote.
oats_son
23d ago
To tell the truth, I didn't get that carried away with it. This wipe, I played to level 15 and then lost all motivation to launch the game, mysteriously. That's usually how it goes. I get a desperate urge to play, then I do, then it's over. Next time, I think I will do the single player mod version so that I at least get to keep my progress (and also so that Delivery from the Past isn't impossible), but it does lose something to be fighting bots instead of players. You die a lot more often in live as well, which keeps you on your toes and can make something like a pistol run pretty thrilling. I didn't actually take any EMS kits anywhere this wipe. Got my legs shot out by scavs and crawled veeerrrryyyy slowly to extract a couple times. I think they let EoD players have the same privileges as Unheard, but it's a very time consuming game and you're a busy guy now.
Of course, I liked Max Payne 1 and 2 as well, but 3 really scratched an itch I didn't know I had. There was some free multiplayer game with slomo shooting, but it didn't feel nearly as good.
oats_son
23d ago
I don't think there's any real way to tell out here. Every restaurant I go to serves fajitas, which are Tex-Mex, I'm told.
oats_son
23d ago
oats_son
23d ago
Like you, I liked Unreal Tournament 1999. Arena shooters aren't very common nowadays. I also liked Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Marathon a lot, and on that front, there are a lot of boomer shooter options. New Blood Interactive released a lot of games like that, and I also liked Ion Fury somewhat. But these days, if I want something adrenaline pumping, I actually don't play those games, I play something more concentrated like Hotline Miami 2 or Katana Zero. Those really got an addicting formula of "try something, kill people really fast, die, instantly restart and keep killing people". Alternatively, for something different and not very commonly recommended, Streets of Rogue was pretty arcadey and intense at times due to the roguelite nature of it. Lots of options to play that game, like Deus Ex.
I really liked Gothic 1, but I failed to get very far in Gothic 2. The story wasn't as compelling to me, and the setting was more boring from the outset. "You're stuck in this insane penal colony trapped with other homicidal prisoners and also pockets of orcs and goblins and random deadly wilderness creatures and the sorcerers want you to take this letter to the fire mages" was a much better hook than "Omg, dragons! Off to starter town with you!"
I think there aren't really any games like Half-Life. It was pretty unique, even for the 90s. It had a lot of things going for it: environmental storytelling, sparing amounts of NPC dialogue, no dialogue from you, a general survival horror vibe from everyone, and a fun chaotic romp through a sprawling facility. Despite all that, the scope was not that large. I'd say the indie scene is the most likely to produce something like that, but no one wants to do it, because that's not something new or innovative. Maybe something like Selaco is close?
If I had a single recommendation from the last year, it would probably be Dark Souls. I really didn't picture it as being a game I would like, but it was seriously compelling. The setting, the interconnectedness, the weird NPCs, stats that actually mean things, and finally, combat that is really fluid and feels great. If the difficulty is turning you off, don't let it. There are ways around the difficulty.
oats_son
23d ago
I have to question the usefulness of such a broad question. Even talking about 90s games is very broad. In my youth, I played on an iMac G3 and played tons of shareware titles that probably most 90s gamers have never heard of.
These days, my addictive personality becomes apparent even with modern games. Escape From Tarkov, Dark Souls Remastered, Caves of Qud, and Katana Zero all made me noticeably tank my own health in my lust to play them as much as possible. Just yesterday, I was reminiscing that I really liked Max Payne 3. These are all games that aren't exactly new, but they do fall outside of the late 90s to late 2000s parameters. I think there's tons of good stuff out there, it just needs to be found and played to death.
oats_son
23d ago
Thank you, I was wondering for a while whether I was actually wrong and that that's just how Mexican paella is. I wish I could drag someone who would know to my favorite spots and ask them about everything on the menu. Are nacho fajitas authentic? What about all these quesadillas? Notable Mexican dish omissions from American-Mexican cuisine includes pozole, which is insanely common in Mexico apparently but nowhere around here makes it. I asked a waiter if they had it once, and he laughed and said "my mom makes it just about every night" but admitted the restaurant does not make it.
I had no idea spaghetti and meatballs was a falsehood. I have to wonder what they do with their spaghetti.
oats_son
23d ago
Huh, I'm not sure. Pizza took off so hard that now it's like there's competing visions of the food rather than one clearly right one and one clearly wrong one. When I was in college, I liked the margherita pizza they served, but it was mangled too. Big, round slices of tomato on each slice of pizza, along with basil in roasted whole leaf form. I'm not sure if I've actually ever tried the proper kind yet. Might be something you have to go to an urban area to get.
This reminds me of American sushi versus Japanese sushi. I think I prefer American by a lot -- maki rolls are way better than nigiri. Raw fish all tastes very similar to me, and I am apparently too unrefined to get much out of raw fish. Interesting texture, I guess.
oats_son
23d ago
In my area of the midwest, many Mexican restaurants serve an almost certainly horribly inauthentic paella. Mexican rice plus fajita vegetables (onion, bell pepper, tomato), chicken, shrimp, and covered in queso. As far as I know, proper paella has no queso. Does that mean I never order paella? No, absolutely not, I love the stuff around here. I am similarly told that a chile relleno filled with liquid-ish queso cheese is also not authentic, and I usually order one of those too.
What is your favorite inauthentic dish that has been mangled by cultural transfer?
oats_son
24d ago
Also, the assertion that more acceptance of casual sex leads somehow to more pressure have sex seems a bit mixed up to me, much less an increase in "tricking" women to have sex.
For me, this is pretty clear. You can frequently see questions like "by what date are you supposed to have sex?" on dating forums or reddit (or maybe just the latter). Usually, the answer is anything between "the first date" or "no further than the fifth date". These kinds of rules and expectations absolutely do increase the amount of pressure on dating couples to have sex before any kind of commitment, unless you count going on a few dates as commitment. Girls don't want to lose good men they find. I think there is pressure on men to ask for sex frequently as well. If you don't, you might be gay or not into your date very much.
oats_son
25d ago
Same. The line
If you're going to criticize him, at least bother to get some facts correct.
was particularly vexing to me. I don't like spreading misinformation, of course, but I would be spending a very long time if I had to check every assumption that I hold. That's where you get to be grateful that people who know more than you can correct you when you're wrong. I promise that I was trying to use "unconstitutional" correctly when I made that post.
oats_son
25d ago
Which group of men would that be? The ones I would think of would be the philosophers and other important people behind the 1960s sexual revolution.
oats_son
26d ago
American corruption is a lot different from Mexican corruption.
oats_son
26d ago
For the trolling enthusiasts and Art-of-the-Deal readers out there: At what point am I allowed to take his rhetoric on Canada seriously? What baffles me is how the hell he could want it in the first place. It's got so many problems... But with that latest post from him, I kind of believe he actually does want it.
Personally, I'd rather see a Mexico takeover. It would be a lot more satisfying to make it a zero-to-hero country, maybe go in and strangle the cartels to death and ensure good elections with no corruption, and watch it bloom. Maybe it would get even better than Spain!
It seems to have worked to stop the counter tariff, actually. I wonder how long this dance will continue.
A training buddy or a spouse would fix the problem entirely, because I like talking a lot and you can talk all you like during a lifting session. I think, also, if I had a home gym, there would be no problem either because there would be no or very little wait and you could put on a podcast or some music or an audiobook (or fall back on conversing with your training buddy) and you would be in your house after the workout instead of having to drive home. Another way to solve it would be to have an actually fun hobby for resistance training like rock climbing. With rock climbing, every session can be something to remember. But lifting weights at a gym alone is the worst, most boring time sink to me in a way that cooking, doing flash cards, reading, flossing and brushing my teeth, or showering is not. Even mowing the lawn is more compelling. Jogging on a treadmill is more compelling, though not by much.
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