Pretty interesting review for anyone interested. There are spoilers about 2/3 through: https://youtu.be/HMUugZ3DxH8?feature=shared

It’s probably the format they watched when they were younger, which would be a major contributor to nostalgia. I still keep a VHS player and my parents’ old copies of the pre-special edition Star Wars movies along with Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

Not just the customers, but the “business partners” too! If you want your search results at the top of the list, pay up! Sometimes you even get to pay for your ad to be shown in a context that’s not relevant at all, despite all the data collected to personalize ads!

Don’t go bringing that crackpot Edward Gettier into this. Caesar would know the Germans (those who hail from Germania) as a disorganized, unorganized group of tribes with a common heritage. That’s a justified true belief, or at least as justified and true as one could expect of him. His beliefs would not cover a unified German nation, at which point there can’t be a belief part of a JTB.

Man, I loathe this guy. There’s a sign of him at my work lunch area with some rhyme about “something something, avoid a slip up” and I’m just thinking “yeah yeah, whatever Glasses Office Man! Why are you targeting my demographic specifically?”

Maybe some mental mixup with Snowpiercer, which does take place on a train surrounded by snow?

I think it’s worth playing the first because it’s a much smaller scale and sets up the world. This one is set 30 years later so the society from the first game has significantly grown and expanded, with a lot of the evolutions in gameplay stemming from that. You probably could jump right into the second, but you may feel like you’re missing something at the start.

Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.

There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.

And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”

I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.

It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.

I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.

I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.

If you say so!

“I guess I don’t know. Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.” With a look on his face that clearly shows confusion at why you spent two whole responses about something as insignificant (in his mind) as potatoes. Everyone else probably has similar looks.

For small talk like that you get one response on the topic. If someone said I should order potatoes because I’m Irish I’d lean so far into it, adapt an obvious accent, and say “Oh I do loove me potatoes.” If I wanted to backhand him a little I’d tack on “Except during the famine when there were no potatoes. Those were daark days” to the first statement. There’s enough humor in the accent to cover the callout mass starvation he probably unwittingly referenced.

I don’t know, are we?

Living with my new roommate, about 2/3 of the infodumps she gives me about random stuff I already know. I always want to stop it because it feels like a minute of wasted time, but I don’t want to dissuade them from sharing info.

I end up just repeating “She doesn’t know what I do and don’t know” and just agreeing with the information when she’s done.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if they’re custom they can put the driver seat on the right side, which makes stopping at mail boxes much easier. I don’t know of any non-import vehicles that are street legal in the US outside the USPS. It makes sense at this scale as well. A quick search shows that one line of cars, the Nissan Altima, sold just shy of 60,000 vehicles in a year. I don’t know if that’s a good benchmark for sales needed to make designing a vehicle worthwhile, but there are already 60-80,000 new USPS trucks ordered, and at that point since the designers would be working with one organization instead of trying to market to thousands of consumers it’s probably easy enough to build a custom car for that organization’s needs.

Yeah, I started taking Kurzgesagt videos with a grain of salt a while ago, hence the “apparently.” Their explanation just fit NoName’s assertion pretty well. Never bad to make the possibility of being wrong explicit though!

There was a Kurzgesat video about this a couple weeks ago. Apparently if you don’t spend calories exercising/biking, your body will find other ways to burn it like increasing your immune system activity (which can have poor long-term effects). There’s an adjustment period when you do start exercising where energy is still spent on sedentary things and the actual exercise before the former is reduced to mostly match the latter.

I have also read that regular exercise can lead to an increase of base metabolic rate by ~5% though, which is like an extra 100 calories per day.

I think the series name is “techno-mage in unix_surrealism,” so the community name is just a reference to the series name. I want to say the main character does have BSD installed in her sword.

Hmm there’s the entrance so if I follow the streets to the other end then… yep! There’s the villa. It’s just like fake life!

There is a difference between stating your thoughts/opinions then people being offended vs saying something that you know is offensive (which the headline indicates is the case) then people being offended. The former may challenge beliefs, while the latter likely lacks that line of thought. You may be mischaracterizing all instances of offense as challenging ideas when some may just be hurtful for the sake of being hurtful.

I’m not sure why you think *all *left-wing people don’t care about being called names, or why that would be a trait of left-wing people specifically. It just seems like an overly generalized statement about a group based on your personal experience.

I assume post truck LLVs are excluded for fairness.