Dude, look, I'm sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.
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- 2 yr. ago
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- Joined
- 2 yr. ago
This may or may not count, but:
Getting access to all the weapon skills is so much faster, which makes trying out new builds a thousand times easier.
Not having to find and speak to the quest giver before I can do the quest is great. I like just having to get into their radius without having to track them down before and after.
I'm a big explorer, so I really appreciate the rewards for exploring the maps (and the compass pointing me towards the things I missed).
The jumping puzzles are amazing.
The free mount not being a boring-ass horse is pretty cool. Mounts having different abilities is also cool. Not having to spend 120 real days upgrading your mounts is really nice.
Getting experience from harvesting and crafting. Not having to spend real-time months researching things to craft them.
Underwater exploration. Yeah, underwater combat is kind of a pain, but it's still cool to have the option.
The directed story mode complete with boss fights in instances that can be done solo.
Classes are all totally different from each other; there are no "meta" skills for a specific role no matter what class you're playing (eg, unstable wall, aggressive warhorn).
Enough skill points in the game to learn every skill and every specialization, along with the ability to switch builds on the fly just whenever (without having to go back to a shrine and pay to do it).
I'm not sure how I feel about having a centralized auction house. A lot of my endgame in ESO was shopping and flipping valuable things from one trader to another, but I have to admit it's really handy to just be able to go buy a bunch of crafting materials in any city for the lowest available price.
Like, I could just keep going; there are so many things, both little and big, that I love about GW2. But for some reason, I just can't get into it. Maybe it's that it levels me up so fast that I don't get to really enjoy the view and learn the class. Maybe it's because the elite specializations change the class so dramatically that most of what I did learn during leveling is immediately obsolete at 80. Maybe it's because the combat feels kind of clunky due to being a weird hybrid of action combat and tab targeting. Maybe it's how complicated the buff system is, that I can't really wrap my brain around all the different boons and when I need them. None of those are really big deals, just quirks of the game that make it unique, like all games have. But it's not doing the same thing that ESO did for me.
I left right before High Isle came out, but nothing I've tried since has really caught my attention the same way. Even GW2, as awesome as it is, and as many QoL features it has that I deeply missed in ESO, just... isn't the same.
Did they ever get the Champion Points re-worked into something that doesn't suck? I hate the way the green constellations worked, particularly; whose idea was it to say "Nobody harvests, chest-hunts, fishes, and searches for crafting recipes at the same time, so obviously it's silly to let players equip all those bonuses at once"??
Even if not, I think I might drop Netflix and re-up my subscription. If just to remind me why I left, maybe?
Doc went corporate, and is now HMO. He's rich now, because he charges the other dwarves a monthly premium, but somehow their coverage never actually covers anything that's wrong with them.
Dopey has been replaced with Trippy, after discovering the healing powers of psychedelics.
Between climate change, the housing market, and stagnant wages, Happy found he needed some extra assistance to keep up the positive attitude. Fortunately, Trippy "knows a guy". Happy now goes by Xanny.
Bashful, after being diagnosed by HMO, changed his name to Social Anxiety. He can't afford medication, since HMO won't cover the brand-name drug to treat it (only the generic that didn't work and made him fat). But at least he has real diagnosis now, and he's working on it through on-line pay-per-session therapy from a company he heard about on a self-help podcast.
Grumpy spent years doomscrolling through Reddit and Twitter, and now knows The Truth about Them. He is now known as Ragey, and frequently encourages the other dwarves to Do Their Own Researchy.
Sneezy became a pariah during the COVID-19 pandemic, as everyone assumed he had it. To fight against that stigma, he changed his name to Allergy. Nobody believes him.
Sleepy discovered that the best way to not have to deal with any of the others was to lean in to his shtick, and is therefore still Sleepy (and hasn't been out of bed since 2016).
Games are like an interactive movie and there’s a ratio of moviness to gaminess and this one leans heavier on the moviness side.
The last Final Fantasy game I played was 8, and it was exactly because of this. They stripped out almost all the "game" bits (although they did give us a really cool card game minigame) and turned it into basically a movie you could occasionally interact with. The battles were mindless (there was no reason not to use your strongest summon every round, because it was both more effective than anything else and because it was totally free to do so), the "equipment" system was entirely optional (which was good, because interacting with it required mega-grind), and overland travel was a total afterthought. It was more of a "game" than anything Tell Tale put out, but that's a low bar, since Tell Tale only produces movies that sometimes throw in an attention check in the form of a quicktime event.
It was a real shame, because I had entirely switched system allegiance from Nintendo to Playstation just for FF7. Then the followed it up with 8, and it was obvious where they were taking the franchise. So I'm not surprised to see, all these years later, that the newest FF game is even more of that.
which will make the lower classes weaker and more prone to disease
Yes, the lower classes don't deserve heart disease, and only the overlords can experience the pinnacle of health that is the fatty liver! Our plans are coming together wonderfully, mwahahaha!
It isn’t like humans haven’t been eating bugs for decades anyway.
That's technically true. Hundreds of years (pdf warning) is, technically, countable in double-digit decades.
There are. Ignoring, for the moment, that lobster and shrimp are sea-bugs that billions of people eat without complaint, there are plenty of North American cultures that readily incorporated bugs into their daily diets. Here's a scholarly article on the topic (pdf warning)
I was even lucky enough to meet an Oneida man who gave me a recipe for cooking may/june beetles at a bonfire. They taste a lot like shrimp.
(The recipe: Catch a few beetles, shake them up in your hand to stun them, then toss them onto one of the rocks at the edge of the fire. Wait until they make a popcorn-like "pop" noise. If you like them less crunchy, you can peel off the wings before you eat them.)
I'm kind of in the closet because of a lot of this, but it's weird saying I'm in the closet when I'm ace. Like, on the one hand, what am I gonna do, go around telling everyone I don't have sex? That's weird. But at the same time, it's incredible how much normal small talk interactions with friends and even just-slightly-more-than-strangers revolves around sex and having sex.
"Sorry about that, I was up late last night and I'm still kinda worn out" "Oh, I'll bet you were, YOU DOG wink nudge"
or
"Yeah, my girlfriend and I are going camping this weekend" "Sounds like FUN, amirite? [insert multiple innuendos]"
or
"I'm going to be a little late to the get-together; I really need to clean the kitchen before I leave" "Going for that [HOT SEX ACT REWARD] huh? I get it! Go get [THE SEX POINTS]!"
Like, it's all over the place. It's every day. I just kind of nod along agreeably, but I feel like I'm a big dirty liar.
“We have no idea, but it’s definitely not that,” is a bit contradictory, don’t you think?
That's a technique right out of my ex's playbook: "Do you know or don't you?"
Example: "You said you don't know how many there are. That means there could just be 1. Oh, but you know the number is more than 1? So you do know? But you just said you don't know. Are you lying to me?"
I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I'm specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it's a mistranslation... but not always.
Next time it comes up for me, I'll keep a note of it and get back to you.
I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up "Dolphins -football", and use any version of "-" you'd like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.
Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.
By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they'll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?
Are there ghosts? Because I'll pay a premium if there are for sure ghosts.
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Sure! Here are a few things:
Cats vs rats (Scientific American)
Cats vs mice (Ontario Wildlife Removal)
The one above is a long paper, so I'll include a couple of relevant quotes.
From the abstract:
Domestic and feral cats control rodents well in some situations but only after some other agent has removed a large part of the rodent population.
From the conclusion:
Students of predation do not agree on the value of different carnivores as agents for the control of rodents. Howard's (1967) statement that "vertebrate predators usually do more to increase the population densities of field rodents than they do to depress them" implies that "without predation, self-limitation stress factors come into play at lower density levels, and that these forces operate as population controls more drastically than does predation." ... The evidence collected by the writer supports the views of Errington and Pearson that predators cannot effectively control rodent populations.
Barn owls vs rodents in general
Barn owls vs agricultural pests in general
By identifying the prey remains in the pellets, you can study the owl's food habits. For example, scientists found that pellets beneath one perch contained parts of 1,987 field mice, 656 house mice, 210 rats, 92 blackbirds, and four frogs.
My original source for the claim I made in my original comment was a paper that directly compared owls to cats in their predation potential of mice and rats, but Google is now a shit search engine that just wants to sell me pest control stuff, and I can no longer find it. I can't even find it on Google scholar, so maybe I've been hit with Mandela Effect and that study wasn't done in this universe. I hate when that happens.
Anyway, I'm using barn owls for a comparison because barn owl hatchlings are a common prey of feral cats. The point being that cats actually kill the things that are rodent specialists and that kill X times more mice/rats than the cats do. Unfortunately, that specific information is harder to retrieve than I expected it to be.
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I agree that there is probably no better rodent control,
Even their efficacy at rodent control is a myth. They're indiscriminate, opportunist killers that remove at least as many other more selective rodent-controlling animals as they do rodents (for example, snakes and owl hatchlings/fledglings).
The use of free-roaming feral "barn cats" are yet another one of those things that are "traditional", which is to say, not governed actual data-driven policy but by belief/superstition, much like so many other practices that flourish in rural areas.
Right? I'd see a couple of notifications pop up in my browser and my first thought would be "Oh, fuck, what did I say that pissed everyone off this time?"
It's actually be kind of hard to turn off "reddit mode" when I comment here; I honestly didn't notice how I'd started to enter every comment thread with defensiveness and verbal aggression/threat displays right off the bat, as an anticipatory maneuver. There've been a couple of times where I re-read something I commented here and said "Oh, that was an unnecessarily aggressive way to phrase that. I hope nobody sees it before this edit goes through."
I have a ton of these. I'll start with history:
The name of the woman depicted by the Statue of Liberty is "The Mother of Exiles".
On Feb 2, 2014, former New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio killed NY's official weather-forecasting groundhog by accidentally dropping it.
Dr. Ben Spock is most well-known for his groundbreaking 1946 book on child-rearing, but he's less well-known for winning an Olympic gold medal in rowing (in 1924).
The Second Congo War, which ran from 1998 to 2003, still holds the dubious distinction of being the deadliest war since WWII (5.4 million casualties).
When it was founded, Oxford University did not teach any classes on the Aztec Empire or calculus, because neither existed.
The oldest continuously-honored international alliance that is still in force today is the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance between England and Portugal, which was signed in 1386. [Note that there are a lot of people who will claim that the Auld Alliance (between Scotland and France against England, signed in 1295) is the rightful holder of this distinction, but they're wrong: it was formally ended with the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560, even though some groups continued to uphold it anyway, and it was made entirely obsolete by the Acts of Union in 1707, when Scotland was brought into the UK.]
And to mix it up a little, here's a bit of sports trivia:
Kobe Bryant is one of only 5 players in NBA history to have won the All-Star MVP award more than twice. Of those 5 players, Kobe is the only one who's dead (as far as I know right now). The rest are all still alive, because the NBA is much younger than most people think of it as being.
Especially since hydrogen as a fuel is a dead-end, so far as I can tell. In addition to the net energy loss that come from separating hydrogen from whatever else it's attached to in the precursor material (please tell me they're not using water for this...), who is going to want to drive a 2025 Toyota Hindenburg?
I hate how playing in peaceful locks you out of crafting a bunch of very useful items. Since bone chips and slime balls only come from monsters, I can't make my plants grow big and pretty with bone meal or make a lead rope for my horse. I'm sure there are other examples, but those are the two I care about the most, lol.