Open Thread

Open Thread #426: Misc.

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

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65 thoughts on “Open Thread #426: Misc.”

    5. Just wait a few days and he will claim that he does not know who Epstein even is, and never knew it. I chuckled when he said, “He has been dead for a long time.” I also just realized that we hardly ever get footage of Trump from behind. Is this because he does not want it to be known that he is wearing a kippah?

    7. “Democrats try to amend crypto bill to force the release of the Epstein Files. Republicans block the move.”

      This is so bizarre I don’t know what to think. The left and Trump’s base are apparently in full agreement on this. Do leftists not care that those files are presumably chock full of dirt on Clinton, Obama, Gates, Soros, and who knows who all else? Trump is acting as if he’s in them instead, yet I’m supposed to believe the left just sat on that for the last ten years?

    8. My guess is that it’s possible that the left was just trying to save face knowing Trump and his buddies were in the files, and the left sat on them all those years for similar reasons. Neither side wants the files to be released. At least not while those implicated by them are all still living. It’s also proving to be quite potent bread and circus material.

    1. I can no longer tell if such videos are total bullshit, offering plausible deniability for YouTube and creators for their jerk-off material, or if there is a factual basis, however small it may be. Given the direction this genre has been going, it will probably take only a few more years, and a sizable number of people will tell you that yoga does not really exist, being nothing but a lame excuse for putting women into tight pants.

    2. I mean, it’s probably not a completely unusable position for this purpose, but it’s definitely clickbait.

    3. Just went back and watched the video for any additional educational info I may have missed. Notice how the “patient” does a full eye roll at the 28 second mark.

    1. Amazingly, this law mirrors their stance on prostitution, i.e. the sale is legal, but purchasing is not. Imagine dropping a few bucks on some online whore and the government throwing you in prison for it! This is absurd, but if we assume it is not, why not just take it one step further, making the consumption of (free) porn punishable to the same extent. You could argue that you paid for your phone or computer and your Internet connection, so you spent money with the purpose of exploiting women.

    2. I can foresee a scenario where Sven or Erik lands themselves a sentence for patronizing a whore for online service, meanwhile Muhammad gets a slap on the wrist and a welfare check for stabbing the same whore to death on one of her early morning jogs.

    3. The groundwork has been laid already. There are several stories of cultural enrichers getting sentenced to a few hours of community service for raping local women while whoremongers face prison charges for the crime of paying a woman for her services. Eventually, these two plot lines will converge.

    4. I honestly get the sense sometimes that, after WW2, NatSocs went into “hiding” (think Op. Paperclip and Nazi’s being absorbed into US intelligence agencies etc.), and there is some sort of long game plot to cause a worldwide backlash from whites back towards nationalism. The idea would be to make left leaning policies and communism look as utterly detestable as possible for white populations. Whether intentional or not, the outcome may very well be similar.

    2. These types of videos give the impression that men are better off in regards to percentages of women being statistically likely to spot in the wild, however, they tend to leave off the metric of body count, for which drastically reduces the number of actual existing women in any pool modern day. Not to mention that the likelihood of any given woman being available and willing to hook up with or date any ol’ frat boy off the street are pretty slim. Men are way worse off. In actual people, most people just end up settling at some point or another as they get older, or being alone.

    4. CQV, I would appreciate if you softened your language. We are all civilized here.

    5. What I’m saying is that if you apply filters like body count, debt, obesity, and tattoos/piercings to the calculator, then the chances of a man finding a woman in the West is less than 1%. However, they never filter for that type of criteria in these videos, which gives a false impression of female availability.

    6. I think your original point was about being able to discern whether or not a woman is good wife material. Aaron Clarey wrote a book on this, I believe. The percentage of women who are wife material is less than 1% in the USA, for example. Out of maybe 1000 women, suppose 3 of them are wife material. Of those 3, the number of women who will be AVAILABLE and ATTRACTED to you is probably zero. So, you’d have to sift through a sample size of maybe 10,000 women or possibly more to find a suitable wife. However, the odds of that happening and logistics needed are probably not in your favor. The constellation prize is settling for less or being promiscuous.

    8. “CQV, I would appreciate if you softened your language. We are all civilized here.”

      Thank you, Sleaze. Sometimes I unconsciously get in a hurry and resort to my texting shorthand which does not read nearly as nicely. Lol at “constellation prize”.

    10. @Sleazy,

      Note taken!

      @Pickernanny,
      My apology,

      I actually thought that it is some sort of American way of expressing. I am not sarcastic here but I thought it might be how a native American expresses himself, like peculiar syntax. Sometimes I encounter rather odd sentences from letters of Confederate soldiers.

    11. Not all these girls expressing their true intentions, say what they mean and mean what they mean, but you can compare them to those trashy American women:

      https://m.youtube.com/shorts/-D7rja9a-nA

      A Jersey Shore douchebag will stick out like a sore thumb in China, near these girls.

    12. @Aaron

      I agree. CQV is better than that. And I don’t even like PN. Hahaha. Kidding, kidding. We’re all a bunch of ole pals here. Cheers.

    13. CQV, now that you mention it there are a lot of American dialects. A lot of which use grammar improperly, or even made up words which are not necessarily slang. I consider the epitome of American speaking to be with a Transatlantic accent, but that form of dialect is completely dead from what I can tell. People in the South, especially in rural areas, tend to speak incorrectly out of habit. I’ve met black folk who speak very well only to transition to “ghetto speak” when they’re among fellow blacks and feel comfortable in doing so. Some Latin people leave out syllables in words making it sometimes hard to decipher specific words. For example, they’ll say lit-er-ly instead of lit-er-al-ly, or they’ll phrase things like “I’ve been having her (pet cat) for two years” vs., “I’ve had her for two years.”

    14. On the topic of Latin people in America, or even those in Central America, the type of Spanish they speak is not exactly like how it’s spoken in Europe, as you might have guessed. The type of Spanish that is taught in school, for example, is much more formal.

  6. I looked more into the Nintendo Switch 2 yesterday. Despite sharing my general skepticism regarding some of the decisions Nintendo has made, I do not think that the harsh criticism of people like Mark_MSX is justified. Super Mario Kart World may look like a lame cash grab at first, but it is a pretty big game that adds plenty of innovation to the series. It is also a big graphical upgrade. Nonetheless, it does not appeal to me. Donkey Kong Bananza, on the other hand, is a genuine breath of fresh air, with its use of voxel technology, large-scale destruction, and overall sometimes enormous chaos on screen, such as enemy numbers. I am also very pleasantly surprised that this game will include some side-scrolling levels as well. I had some of the most fun in gaming with the brutally difficult “K levels” in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, with some of them taking you hours to master them.

    Reply

    1. Which of Mark_MSX’s criticisms exactly? I think he makes a great point in reference to the marketing of the device. It’s more or less boils down to being a pro version of its predecessor. If we could have had this console back during the pandemic it would have been really nice, however unfeasible such a release might have been from a business perspective. MKW is a pretty big step down from 8, imo. There is way too much filler, as well as exploitability of its systems to make for a well-calibrated racing game. As for the former point, there are wide open tracks that have players going in a straight line for what seems like a minute at a time or more. I can’t help but feel like this is super dumbed down, but you can at least grind on the roof of a bus passing by in the meantime as you wait for the next turn a mile up the road.

    2. I was referring to his “innovation is dead” or “Nintendo died with Iwata” mantras. Mario Kart World takes queues from open-world racing games, while retaining its original charm for the intended audience. I am not interested in the open-world aspects, but they seem to be optional anyway. DK Bananza, on the other hand, is a pretty creative title. It is also quite daring as destruction-based gameplay is not a mainstream concept. The most prominent title with such a feature was arguably Red Faction, and perhaps Battle Field: Bad Company 2, which are both about 15 years old. Large-scale destructibility has fallen by the wayside in the meantime. Arguably, DK Bananza is a more creative title than Breath of the Wild, which applied the standard open-world formula to the Zelda franchise.

    3. “I was referring to his “innovation is dead” or “Nintendo died with Iwata” mantras.”

      Aha. So, how has Nintendo managed to innovate this time around? In terms of the console, we now have voice chat which was originally implemented in 2002 for the Xbox. Other than that, it’s simply a slightly beefier console.

      With MKW, it takes cues from Forza Horizon. As you point out, destructible environments in DK is a concept that is over a decade old. However daring it may be to revive such concepts, it stands as a testament to their lack of forward thinking. Nintendo may not be completely creatively bankrupt, however, I would argue the point still stands that they have stalled considerably in innovation. Not to mention their increasing levels of authoritarianism. I can almost see them patenting the grinding systems of MKW and retroactively suing the developers of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games.

    4. The console itself is not particularly innovative, I agree. Regarding gaming, I am quite jaded, so seeing Nintendo embrace a concept like destructible environments is a gameplay element I consider innovative. If you go back fifteen years ago, people were very impressed by destructible environments and there was the expectation that this would be a standard feature in games going forward. However, this did not happen at all. Voxel technology is also a relative niche, much more commonly used in indie games than big-studio productions. DK Bananzo may not be a revolutionary title, but it exhibits bigger risk-taking appetite than what Nintendo’s detractors did expect. On that note, games like ARMS and Splatoon were also quite innovative, certainly more than another Halo or Forza, or another cinematic Sony game.

      I do not want to defend Nintendo for their practices, but it is also relevant to point out that gaming has become a lot more competitive than it used to be. Long done are the days when Nintendo dominated the market, or that consoled did so. In the early 2000s, there was even the view that PC gaming was dead or at least on the deathbed, and then Steam came along, reviving this platform. I do think that Nintendo’s policies are anti-consumer. On the other hand, they fight tooth and nail to defend their commercial position. Arguably, this is motivated by the fact that their survival depends on Nintendo consoles remaining viable products. They have a stronger vision, and are more focused, than Microsoft and Sony.

    5. “They (Nintendo) have a stronger vision, and are more focused, than Microsoft and Sony.”

      Agreed. However, if in the future the Xbox is able to seamlessly integrate with Steam, as it is already beginning to attempt to do, then consumers would perhaps just get the next Xbox console and play all their Steam games instead of buying a PC. Maybe if Nintendo would license out their software instead of fighting tooth and nail to keep them safeguarded they could make triple the sales. They could potentially also save a lot of money on hardware manufacturing and distribution etc., and they could still sell their gimmicky peripherals to function via bluetooth. At this point, I don’t see much value in any particular console as they are all pretty much computers of varying strengths that don’t do anything special. In the case of modern Nintendo, they have their intellectual properties and that’s it.

    6. Nintendo has a pretty unique economic situation: 1) They own their ecosystem and 2) they are able to set and maintain very high prices. If they had to compete on Steam, they would not only have to pay 30% to Valve for the distribution. On top, they would probably be forced to offer their games with substantial discounts. For their big sellers, this would mean that they had to double their sales figures for the same profits. On console, their big titles move hardware, which indirectly creates demand for their second-tier franchises. This pull-factor would disappear as well if they went third-party. Also, they have some of the most recognizable IPs in gaming. Not a single IP of Microsoft or Sony is anywhere near the recognition of Mario, Legend of Zelda, or even Kirby. Pokemon has been going strong for about 30 years. They have a moat bigger than any other game studio and they have massive cash reserves.

    7. Sleazy do you rate Battle Field: Bad Company 2 as a good game? I never checked it out but loved the idea of shooting/blowing everything to pieces in a game.

    8. I have no idea if it holds up. It has been a decade or so since I last played it. Back then, I found it really enjoyable. Apart from the gameplay, it has also one of the better single-player campaigns in the FPS genre.

    9. Digital Foundry made a performance video for Bonanza that I skimmed through earlier this morning. About the performance at around the 13:00 mark of the video, they were lamenting about how the title compensates for a lot of activity on screen by halving the frame rate (still a locked and steady 30 FPS). I’m not really bothered by this kind of stuff. Anyone who has ever dealt with modern PC gaming would be overjoyed to have this level of development quality , especially considering how underpowered the S2 is compared to a beefy rig. Dead Space remake on PC, for example, is a complete joke.

      I just wanted to comment that the gameplay footage did look really good in terms of its design. A lot of people were really pleased with Astro Bot, probably because it was actually a game instead of a shitty liberal arts film. In terms of platform gaming, however, I don’t think Astro Bot compares to DKB based off of just watching footage of the two games.

    10. A steady 30 fps in a relatively slow-paced title is not an issue at all. I have avoided watching any DK Bonanza footage as I am interested in playing this game one day, likely buying a Switch 2, plow through a small number of games, then selling it again, not unlike I did it with the original Switch and later the Switch Lite. On a related note, I recently skimmed best-of lists for the Nintendo Switch as I have not really been following it for about half a decade. There are not that many games I could imagine giving a try.

    11. I get the feeling that there is a real possibility you could acquire a S2 with DKB and become bored enough with it, not even a few hours in, to drop it. One problem I foresee is that the side scrolling levels won’t be worth the effort to get to. I remember years ago when Sonic Unleashed came out and my friend hurried it over, only for us to become quickly disappointed. The fast levels were awesome, but to get to them you had to endure long stretches as werewolf Sonic in only what I can vaguely describe as slow, plotting and uninspired beat-em-up style platforming that felt like a chore. I don’t think the 3D aspects of DKB will be quite that bad, though. For high mastery games you’d probably have get more mileage out of something like Mario Wonder or even Mario Maker 2, the latter of which for if you wanted to get deep into some of those crazy custom levels.

      I have no clue what Zelda will look like going forward, which is about the only thing that could pull me in. Even if it looks really good I’ll probably abstain from this generation of Nintendo. I do, after all, have a very high quality back log of PC games to start/finish/revisit that I couldn’t justify the purchase. The good news is that Nintendo products retain their value pretty well. However, many of the new S2 games are no longer physically going to be on the cartridge, and instead effectively act as keys which might prove iffy on the secondhand market. Thankfully though, sources conclude that DKB will indeed be fully present on the cartridge which should make resale much smoother, I feel.

    12. Speaking of high mastery games, I recently managed to get the first place on the Mountain course in Rave Racer. This is a really great game, but it is not much talked about. There is a small group of Sega die-hards online who sing the praises of their classic arcade games but in my view, in the 1990s they were no match for Namco. Sega games were impressive often only because of their cutting-edge graphics.

      I recently thought about my attempt of getting into BotW years ago. The game did not grab me, but it was to no small extent probably also because I was not in the mood for a long adventure game. Years later, though, I made it through Dragon Quest XI and quite enjoyed it. Objectively speaking, the latter is a much less engaging game, with mechanics that are downright primitive. I can imagine giving BotW another chance, and also trying out some other Switch games, like Pokemon Legend: Arceus, primarily because I find the graphics quite appealing. I will have to see how engaging DK Bananza really is. However, basically any game Nintendo puts out is at least competent. The reviews and initial impressions are positive, and the game is apparently not even that long. I think it is safe to assume that it is worth a play-through, and that this will mostly not feel like a drag.

    14. I normally play this game with the sound off, but not because I do not like the music. I simply cannot stand the lines and tonality of the commentators. This was a real misstep for Namco. Worse, in Ridge Racer V, they doubled down. The announcer just does not shut up and is downright condescending. All three games are worth playing and overall, Ridge Racer 2 is the most polished version of the original arcade trilogy.

    15. Yeah, for sure. The voices are particularly unnecessary. Can you leave on the sound effects like the engine sounds, collision noises, checkpoint indicators and such, and remove the sound track/voices? If you could do that and have like a trance playlist or something cued up to go along with your gameplay, then I could see it being a great experience.

    16. There is no such option in the game’s settings. An alternative is to use “MAME cheats”, i.e. modify data in RAM, but I do not want to sink a few hours into such an endeavor. When I play this game, I either put on a podcast or some electronic music, which works well enough.

    1. This video may be staged, but it is believable. This is the key part. Thus, even the worst-case scenario does not invalidate them. I have seen a few videos that were obviously staged. These two must be above-average actors if this is not staged.

  9. I just had a memory of my anti-game youth. Hotties would invite me into their study group, get my number etc. But they DON’T call.

    Youngsters out there: Get THEIR digets, and seal the deal.

    Reply

  10. I just skimmed NeoGAF, after a long hiatus, coming across this gem of a thread where someone complains about dithering to simulate transparencies, and at least two of the three examples mentioned do not relate to transparencies at all, like dithering indicating DK’s size when sitting in a non-transparent hole. Dithering is used to make it very clear that this is a visual aid. Of the people in this threat, I only noticed one person who called out that this is a different use case compared to dithering in the 16-bit days:
    https://www.neogaf.com/threads/am-i-the-only-one-who-hates-the-use-of-dithering-in-modern-games.1686378/
    Gaming was in a better shape when there were geeks around.

    Reply

    1. In the Mario example it just looks like the tree thing in the foreground is obscuring the camera and being dithered. The checkered board style of dithering Nintendo uses actually looks pretty stylistic which fits their games pretty nicely.

  11. US politics is about as believable as (US) professional wrestling, i.e. the WWE circus show. Here, we are supposed to believe that Pam Bondi communicates to Trump publicly via X:
    https://x.com/AGPamBondi/status/1946014427670851643
    I find it implausible enough already that Trump even writes his own tweets. Few public figures do, so why would he?

    Reply

  12. Tulsi Gabbard declassified internal documents showing that Obama orchestrated the Russiagate hoax:
    https://archive.ph/isLBj
    I am sure it is a mere “glitch” that the Wikipedia page on this topic has not been updated yet:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
    In a sane world , these declassified documents would be the subject of major news stories. Strangely enough, the mainstream outlets I just checked are quiet on this topic. They are probably still aligning internally, waiting for the memo with the key talking points, but the preference is surely to sit this one out.

    Reply

  13. They should release the Epstein files! Shadey how he and that MacAfee fella died in a similar fashion. Looks like the “Deep State” is bi partisan!

    Reply

  14. I just checked YouTube, saw a notification for a Donkey Kong Bananza stream by Synthetic Man, so i hop on, with the intention of listening in for a few minutes, not watching the footage. The timing was not good because he apparently got dumped by some chick when he was live and instead talked about this relationship, overlaid with sappy music. This came across as him emotionally manipulating his viewers. I quickly closed the browser tab.

    Reply

    1. I had popped in for some stream here and there also, but did not witness this. I’m confident he isn’t very experienced with women and also doesn’t have a lot of options. If I were him I’d try to leverage his large following and hopefully reel in some mid pussy. I’m not overly optimistic though, because Dunky is one of the most successful gaming youtubers and he ended up with a chick that looks like a weasel (not trying to be mean).

    2. Just realized that the alleged chick that did the dumping probably got a huge ego boost when Simp-thetic Man was sulking to his hundred of viewers over her. If he would have never mentioned her and appeared unaffected throughout his stream she probably would have hit him back pretty quickly. Even if they do end up rekindling, she’ll always know she has a significant effect on his emotional state and will harbor some level of disrespect for him.

    3. One final observation about SM. Even on his last video about Death Stranding he came across as pretty existentially disturbed. I’d much rather he made his points without all the doomer-ism, because it comes across as desperate. I do, however, understand where he must be coming from. Even being a successful YouTuber and all, it must be pretty boring living in his hometown streaming from his parent’s attic. It probably doesn’t help that his hobby and right-leaning views tend to attract a lot of other disenfranchised men. I could see it becoming a pretty miserable position to be in after a while, and then also waiting for the day for YouTube to terminate your career.

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