They seem to be able to kill whistleblowers pretty effectively, that's something.

It always boggles my mind that this was posted before Trump got elected. This was before the impeachment, before the Mueller probe, before #TheResistance. Prophetic.

Covfefe without hamberder. Sad.

WAHL is a good answer. They are a bit on the pricier side, but a lot of professionals use them.

This is a very common ailment among conservatives, young adults who somehow look both 12 and 50, but never their actual age.

It drives me insane! People keep talking about what AI is going to do while ignoring that it currently doesn’t do anything. Every application is just a tech demo or a needless augmentation of something that already existed. Anyone who has “lost their job” to AI was already going to be fired and got “we replaced you with AI” as an excuse. Nonsense all the way down.

There is semi-canonical lore, as in not confirmed but explicitly not apocryphal, that Grimace is meant to be a giant, sentient tastebud.

The whales are radicalizing the boats. You love to see it.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He's a comedian, and he doesn't have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he's been criticized in the past it's by liberals who are mad that he's being critical of liberals. I'm not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

Oh yeah, this guy is committing a serious federal offense and could very easily be put in prison if the authorities decided to prosecute him. Whether that would actually happen depends on how connected he is to powerful people, of course, but there is zero ambiguity about the legality here.

Are they stuck or do they just not want to end up in Baltimore?

This is where a lot of people misunderstand the purpose of the trolley problem as a thought experiment, and why it doesn’t apply to voting or other lesser-evil-ism decisions.

The trolley problem isn’t about whether it would be better for one person or five people to die, but rather about your moral responsibility or culpability in a situation where you have the opportunity to affect the outcome. The reason it’s a “problem” in the first place is because it’s very clear that, absent any other information, it would be better for one person to die than for five people to die, but that, again, absent other information, it’s not clear whether or not you have the right or the obligation to make the decision to pull the lever. The ambiguity and complexity around your relationship to the situation is what makes it a moral dilemma, not the outcome. The answer to whether or not you should pull the lever depends on what ethical framework you apply to the situation, and that’s where the problem lies in the trolley problem.

If you use the trolley problem as a way of saying that the person holding the lever has a clear moral imperative to make the decision to pull the lever, then you’re implying that the trolley problem has a known and obvious solution, which means that all you’re saying is that your ethical framework is the correct one. If that’s the case, then you can just say that. You don’t need the trolley problem, and in fact you’re actually muddying your own message by implying that there’s any sort of moral dilemma at all.

The ideal solution is, as you say, to figure out how to stop the trolley from killing anyone, not to assume that there’s nothing that can be done about it. It’s actually pretty funny that libs like to use the trolley problem to talk about voting. The implication that the trolley requires human sacrifice as a matter of course is a pretty damning indictment of what they’re advocating. I would probably try to argue for my position in a way that doesn’t imply that innocent people have to die in the first place, but I guess that’s not pragmatic enough for them.

Swiss performer is nonbinary

Or perhaps they're... gender neutral

First off, this is a "me" problem. I'm not sure that it would translate to others, but I'll try to articulate what it is. Second, "low-budget" is a meaningless term that's probably reflective of my advanced age. I still remember when there were hardly any indie devs, and there was a lot of shovelware out there. Really what it's about is lack of effort, care, or polish in a game, which at this point is largely decoupled from budget, per se.

I think there was a time when turn-based gameplay was popular because it wasn't as hardware-intensive and it was easy to clone turn-based gameplay, at least on a surface level. Between mediocre JRPGs and mediocre turn-based strategy games, turn-based started to look like something that developers were using as a way of saving time or effort, or dealing with hardware limitations. That's not really the case today, as the limitations that existed 20 or 30 years ago aren't there, so it's somewhat irrational. That said, I'm also not nostalgic for that era, even though I know that a lot of people are.

I think my hesitance around turn-based games is similar to how some people in this thread are talking about card-based games. I like card-based games when they're implemented well, but if I'm playing a card-based video game, I don't want it to merely be a digital implementation of an analog card game. There has to be something, like the card game being set in a larger context, or the interactions being complex enough that you couldn't feasibly do it in an analog game. Similar with turn-based games, I don't want to play what is essentially a digital implementation of a board game, nor do I want the game to be banging spreadsheets together a la old JRPGs.

CRPGs with a lot of depth, like Larian's games, are great because every turn-based combat is like a little puzzle with multiple solutions. Something more tactical like Battletech can be really engaging because there are multiple layers to play at, from the mech choices and outfitting to the actual combat. Big strategy/4x games work well as turn-based games because there's an economy and lots of interesting win conditions to explore that require planning and taking your time.

That's more for bigger games, though. Smaller, more focused games can be great with the right execution. I really enjoyed Buckshot Roulette because of how well the developer set the tone. The game itself is relatively straightforward, but the amount of texture and flavor in the presentation really makes it sing. Same with Balatro, a pure turn-based card game, which has so much visual and gameplay polish that you can't help but enjoy the relatively simple mechanics and presentation.

The best turn-based games don't really need to announce themselves as turn-based games, because that's incidental. They're games about something, with turn-based gameplay being simply the design choice that the developer felt was the best fit for the game. I find that when games announce themselves as being turn-based, it obscures why I would be interested in the game, which is why I mentioned it specifically in my original comment. Hope that helps!

I never played Yakuza, but that looks rad

When I first played Witcher 3 I was like “why the fuck would I play a card game in this vibrant, immersive, story-rich action-adventure game?” and then somewhere along the lines I got to the point where I was running around the whole game world ready to suck dick for Gwent cards. I have no idea how they got me, but Gwent is easily the best game-within-a-game I’ve ever played.

MMO - I like multiplayer games just fine, but whenever they call it “massively” multiplayer, I know it’s going to be a grindy time-sink with anemic gameplay and the requirement to join some sort of group of other players in order to progress. It’s one of the few things I have filtered on Steam because it’s a guaranteed hard pass every time.

Turn-based - This one is hard for me to admit because I’ve played lots of great turn-based games and will inevitably play more of them, but for some reason when turn-based is a key feature, my brain interprets it as being a low-budget and/or low-effort game, or that the gameplay won’t match how the game is presented. It’s not that I dislike the concept of turn-based play, but when I see “turn-based” in a description I just glaze over.

Early Access - I don’t dislike early access, but the fact that it has no specific definition bothers me a lot. There’s no way for me to tell whether the game is a complete enough experience to be worth starting, so I usually end up passing until the game gets a full release (which isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that early access is an automatic red flag.)

There are certain genres that I’m not that interested in, like puzzle games, visual novels, hardcore simulation games, etc., but the above are things that make me think twice about a game even if it looks interesting otherwise.

That’s a good point. It’s not a blanket excuse, but I’m much more inclined to be understanding of someone making political compromises out of a legitimate concern for physical safety than because of careerism or misguided desire for consensus. I wonder if Nelson Mandela would have gone harder into the paint if he hadn’t been locked up for thirty years.