BobTheDestroyer

So, Terry Bernadino?

Currently playing MGSV on PC. I never got into the metal gear franchise because I wasn't willing to keep up with the play stations. But it's a surprisingly good game. A little fan-service here and there (cough, Quiet) but the gameplay is solid. I like how they tie achievements with in-game rewards, things like rescuing a certain prisoner unlocks a new type of weapon or something. It's a good motivation to complete all the optional parts of the missions. And the missions are replayable, which gives you plenty of opportunity to get the best ratings and rewards.

Whether humanity will survive really is an open question. Despite all the rhetoric and protests and promises the annual CO2 emissions have continued to increase steadily. It's wishful thinking to imagine that we are going to do anything about this before the consequences of our choices force our collective hand. Any report or scientific paper that includes a phrase like 'there is still time' is just not accepting the reality of the situation. A year ago James Hansen published Global Warming in the Pipeline where he wrote "Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG amount is 10°C". A 4–7 degree rise over 5000 years ended the last ice age, Ocean levels rose 400 feet. A 10 degree rise in a century or so would be way too fast for most species to adapt. It would inundate the majority of our most populated cities. I could go on, but I get depressed writing about this.

Nothing is ever 100% safe. Risk assessment is a big part of federal regulations. (See refs at JSTOR and NCBI) One of the key questions is what is the cost/benefit balance for a product. Kitchen knives are hazardous, but it's very hard to cook without them, so they balance heavier on the benefit side despite the risks. Radithor is all risk and no benefit, so it was an easy decision to ban it.

The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here's a list. The part he left out is the cost/benefit analysis. I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren't so useful that it's worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child's life.

I played Satisfactory for a while. Got a little past oil extraction and power generation. I think I was doing it wrong, though. I only made one actual factory, like with a floor and such, and it was one of those little templates you can design and make several of. Most of the stuff I built was just scattered about the map with miners and constructors and smelters just laying about everywhere and conveyer belts connecting them. It felt disorganized and, well, unsatisfying. The transport tube (the futurama style one) was fun, but most of the rest of it just felt like work. That and the fact that there was no provided reason to do any of it caused me to just lose interest after a while. I think the Christmas gift construction tree, where the last item required like 10,000 gifts collected was kind of discouraging too.

What keeps you motivated to improve, rebuild, and progress in the game? And what am I missing?

No offence taken. You're right. And one of the few things the two parties cooperate on is working to insure it never changes.

We've been arguing about this in the US for my whole life, and I'm not young. At this point it should be obvious neither of the two faces of our government has any interest in doing anything more about guns than using the topic as a wedge to divide us and as a source of campaign funding. So you want to ban guns. Is that the hill you want your children to die on? How about instead of insisting that's the only way, we enact a solution that keeps kids alive and that both the red and blue team can agree on, like, say, mandatory armed guards (a paid job, not volunteers) at school entrances. Is it in conflict with our ideal vision of a peaceful society? Maybe, but it works. Other countries have done it and it stopped school shootings entirely.

Fix your deep psychological issues with shopping! It's the American way.

Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an “adequately excellent lover,” it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list…. The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.

source

Enshittification, once again. Cory Doctorow's latest talk at DefCon about it was pretty good.

Subnautica. It's not long but I enjoyed every minute of it. And the requirements for a 'perfect game' on steam aren't too difficult.