Open Thread

Open Thread #292

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27 thoughts on “Open Thread #292

    1. This is utterly bizarre. Well, nobody could have predicted that there will be problems with law enforcement if you pump a country full of foreign-trained rocket scientists and engineers while replacing male policemen with random women. When I lived in London, I once witnessed how a bunch of “bobbies” dealt with a pesky group of protestors at a university event. From the sounds of it, they broke one particularly obnoxious guy an arm, of course completely accidentally. Today, you can be glad that the female officers they send in don’t end up getting gang-raped.

    1. I will not do a review of the entire TV show but a post on Succession is indeed high on my to-do list. I found the final episode quite remarkable.

  1. Tens of thousands of pictures and documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop just got released:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trove-nearly-10k-hunter-biden-laptop-photos-docs-appear-organized-website
    It’s great that we live in a democracy because this ensures that only the most competent and most able people rise to positions of power, and once they have risen to the top, their exemplary conduct serves as a great example to live by for the populace.

    1. “It’s great that we live in a democracy”

      Our mutual beautiful mother tongue allows me to say the following:
      “Das Wahlrecht der Nettosteuerkonsumenten ist die Sollbruchstelle der Demokratie”

    1. Didn’t expect such a skimpy outfit. It basically just looks like an entire bare ass on display.

    2. I wanted to make a comment about a few developers real quick. Obviously Capcom is on a roll here lately overall and is printing money like crazy. I think Konami might actually be able to pull off a similar feat albeit to a lesser degree. However, I can’t help but wonder if Square is in deep shit. Apparently FFXVI’s preorders are quite concerning compared to FFXV even accounting for the fact that the latter was multi-platform. The FFVII remake series will probably do well and some of those HD2D games they make seem to do okay relative to the budget they put into them, but I feel like they might be kind of screwed overall. I would just say “fuck ‘em” for putting out that Forspoken trash a while back, yet I get the sense that a lot of the people of the FFXVI, for example, are genuinely hardworking and creative people. So, that’s kind of a shame to see that the game might not do as well as it should. Who knows, it may be a best seller in the end.

    3. In my view, Square went on a downhill slope after the release of FF IX. Even though FF X is well-regarded by fans, there was a very obvious tonal shift. I found the game quite off-putting. I also cannot remember a single game of the last 20 years that was a genuine stand-out. Kingdom Hearts was probably their biggest single-player success, and if they had not lucked out with the MMO FF XIV, they would be in dire straits.

      The one major concern I have about FF XVI is that this is the first time in a long time where they purportedly want to give fans what they want. They have not done that in a long time, and as this game comes on the heels of that utter garbage game Forspoken, a bit of caution is advised. FF VII Remake was also not quite what the fans wanted, and this game has not nearly had the longevity one would have expected. Also relevant here is that Square has a history of really bad decisions. I think one of the key guys left after FF IX, and one of their next projects was some CGI movie that cost them hundreds of millions but barely made any money. They were forced into a merger with Enix. Otherwise they would have gone out of business.

      EDIT: Sakaguchi is the guy I was thinking off. He left in the early 2000s, and he was also responsible for the box-office bomb The Spirits Within.

    4. Yeah, Sakaguchi’s last FF game was IX. I think he has been reported to be in collaboration with Square in recent times, but I’m not totally sure. He had apparently been doing some indie-tier RPGs on his own since his departure.

      Just based off of the Geruda battle video I think it’s safe to say that FFXVI is going to be a decent game at least. They’ve also got some real talent working on that title as well. It will be interesting to see if Square will be around in another decade.

    5. I also just remembered that Mark_MSX put out a video within the last month or so discussing Square’s ridiculous proposal that the term JRPG is racist, and how they wanted to stray away from such derogatory connotations. The company really does seem to be splitting.

    6. FfX was the first one I played. I found the story engrossing, and loved the locales. I found the whole start with going from sci fi urban to tropical to be really exciting

  2. So two of my favorite things on YouTube combined yesterday. I’m sure everyone has seen those clips from the “Whatever Podcast”. I have those running in the background a lot of times, fun stuff.

    Another thing I have running in the background is this YouTuber called “PsychHacks”, he often has really good videos that give you new perspectives and understanding.

    So apparently he was invited on the whatever podcast. Would be interesting to how that went:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FecFhJ61zZ0

    It’s 5 hours long though. Never watched an actual episode of this podcast though. I usually just see really fun short clips.

  3. I stumbled on an interesting channel/blogger today. He specializes in sugar dating. I think it’s relevant to conversations we’ve had across threads on here.

    And if you listen to his logic you would think it’s me in that video lol. He makes largely the same points why sugar dating makes so much more sense once you’ve gotten enough lays the free way.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpgMaNyUME

    On his blog he’s also quite honest about age and how it affects things. He’s warning young guys not to buy into the manosphere bullshit about peaking in your mid-late 30s and to get laid as much as possible in your 20s. Apparently he switched to sugar dating at 39 or so.

    1. It is not uncommon to see even a more bizarre claim that men reach their peak SMV at age 50. This claim persists because people equate number of DMs with sexual attractiveness. Being an elderly man who receives a lot of attention from post-wall women hardly constitutes a success in dating. However, from what I’ve gathered from the blogger you linked is that men do indeed become most attractive in their mid to late thirties, but women lose interest in dating them because of social stigma or lack of shared interests.

    2. but women lose interest in dating them because of social stigma or lack of shared interests

      I can confirm that shared interest make a difference. I’ve shared this before, but in my niche age gap relationships are more common. Not like a ton more frequent but enough to where it’s obviously more common that in the general population.

      Fun fact, even chat gpt told me this. I keep challenging it with different questions on dating, where I challenge its feministic biases.

      It tells you that if you want to date younger, it’s more common in environments where people or different ages share a common interest.

    1. Tate is just a textbook narcissist and gets his supply from wherever he can. He doesn’t care if the attention is good or bad.

    1. I just saw a news story about this myself. Uncle Ted is one of the greatest intellectuals in recent history. It is quite interesting that he managed to kill himself in prison, and at such a ripe old age. Alas, this is what the mainstream says so I am sure that this is completely correct.

      I laughed when the leftist shit-rag article from Politico made this statement:

      Kaczynski’s death comes as the federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in the last several years following the death of wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein, who also died by suicide in a federal jail in 2019.

      Only the most uninformed people believe that Epstein killed himself.

    1. I was coming here to bring up Nora Vincent, and I see the linked ZH article already mentions her.

      She did have some serious underlying psychological issues, and commited suicide in Switzerland recently. Not saying it was mainly because of her experience, but it probably did not help.

      The story of her journey as a man was one of the earliest examples i saw that led me to question a lot of received wisdom about men and women, and I am thankful to her for that.

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