Master And Commander: The Far Side of the Earth.

It’s a war movie with an all male cast, and the manliest moment in it is when the Doctor who is doing surgery on himself to remove a bullet from his chest, looks at the captain who is assisting and asks “Are you alright?” And the marine that accidentally shot him is anxiously waiting outside the tent to make sure he’s okay. GAH I’m going to the store and buying some beer and some popcorn and I’m watching a movie tonight.

It can be. If you look on a lot of the websites for video games they grant licenses to stream the game’s audio assets in the context of streaming gameplay.

I’m all but two of those.

Second draft of this comment, because I realize this has happened a lot during my lifetime.

Star Wars, like Star Trek, The Legend of Zelda - a lot of the media I grew up with - started out as stories, and then transitioned to settings, and have now become paint colors.

There used to be an answer for “Who is the main character of Star Wars?” When I was a kid, that answer was Luke Skywalker. When I was a teenager, the answer changed to Darth Vader, and now it’s a meaningless question, like who’s the main character of brutalism or who’s the protagonist of JNCO jeans?

Miss Mary Mack.

I hear she dressed in black with silver buttons down her back.

The girl arts. Double dutch, the hand games like Miss Mary Mack and Bisquick, stuff girls seemed to spontaneously do that boys had nothing to do with. It feels like, when I was 6, the girls around me were always teaching each other stuff like that, and then by the time I was 16 it had transformed into teaching each other the cha cha slide. Done well those hand clap games and such could be impressive to watch.

Okay, so back in the 1990s Charter Medical Corporation ran a suicide prevention hotline with the number 1-800-CHARTER. They ran a massive TV ad campaign with the tagline “If you don’t get help at Charter, please, get help somewhere.” These commercials ran on daytime TV so they were a little…oblique. Euphemistic. So that children wouldn’t understand them. So we didn’t.

Around that time, it was popular slang among teh youthz to say “you need help” as a way of calling someone stupid. You can hear one of Roger’s daughters say it in the first Lethal Weapon movie in response to his attempt at rapping.

And of course, people who “need help” should call Charter. So in the 1990’s there was a fad of us school kids calling each other stupid by saying “You need to call Charter.” And I wonder how local that was, I know at least two elementary schools in my county did that. American Millennials, do you remember this?

I’m sick of this lie that the internet isn’t real.

Have you ever heard it said that character is who you are in the dark? Kind of a Jungian take, the whole “you change your persona depending on environment and company, you’re only ever your true self when you think nobody’s watching.”

Well, I think the internet is “in the dark.” It brings out the actual in people.

IIRC some restaurants were flavoring their oil with horse tallow.

pneumatic staple gun.

Debating letter vs spirit of law is a symptom of a shittily written law.

The fairies in A Link to the Past were on a spectrum between Tinkerbell gossamer wings and a tiny dress, to angelic bird winged and long gowns. When a fairy appeared on screen, there would be soothing harp music.

On the N64, fairies were either firefly like glow balls with insect wings, or…pointy, head-tentacled, vine clad women that screech like a witch when they emerge or retire?

I forgot Eve Online existed. I got a free trial to it once, tried installing it on my Pentium III desktop, it booted but had this weird pink cast to it, so I installed it on my dad’s Pentium 4 desktop, got through the tutorial, like shot some asteroids, encountered another player in game, asked what the point of the game was, the other player responded “Whatever you want it to be.” and I quit the game and never looked back.

Factorio is the least pointful game I’ll accept: Here is a hammer, a pistol with 100 shots, 10 iron plates, a furnace and a drill. Build and launch a rocket.

Chicks going to cons cosplaying as Lara Croft with half a shoebox up her shirt will never stop being funny.

It does remind me strongly of the people I’ve cut off, yes.

It’s not so bad when it’s your first time through the game and you’ve never seen any of it before, when you’re taking in the scenes for the first time. It’s a bigger issue on the second playthrough, which…this game isn’t designed for a second playthrough. The fun isn’t in the mechanics and it isn’t exactly a feast for the eyes (the monochrome dithered retro styling is interesting in full 3D and I understand it was a pain in the dick to get the Unity engine to do that, but it’s still a bit…harsh), so most of the fun is learning what happened, and if you’ve been through it before, well.

Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.

If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.

Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.

“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.

“communism” devolves faster, is basically my thesis statement. I say, as an owner of a lot of power tools.

Granted, Obra Dinn’s pacing problem wasn’t about dialog. It was…You find a corpse, click, a musical sting plays, you get a few seconds of audio play, and then you see in glorious monochrome dithering the aftermath, and then you’re stuck there for the exact amount of time that some music plays. If you immediately learned something, you can’t do anything about it. If you learn a piece of information that puts something you saw earlier in a new context and you want to go back and look at it, you can’t do anything about it. If you’re not done looking when the music is over, you’ll clunkily have to come back in here. And woe betide you if there’s another corpse in that scene and you end up doing like five of them in a row.

I discovered it through its soundtrack. I was listening to West of Loathing’s soundtrack on Youtube, which was partially or entirely done by the same artist who did WTWTLW’s, so I got recommended some videos, looked up what it was, decided to give it a try, and…maybe if someone implements it for Apple II or some other machine that physically cannot support voice acting so we can dispense with the pretentiousness.

To port over a semantic argument from elsewhere on Lemmy:

You know the phrase “own the means of production?” A phrase I’ve been taught to associate with communism is “the workers shall own the means of production.”

Well, ‘the workers’ means ‘the people’, and ‘the people’ means ‘the public’, and anything owned by ‘the public’ is actually owned by ‘the government’ and ‘the government’ is controlled by ‘the elites.’ Which is why any communist nation falls immediately to despotism, the instant you actually form your communist government the elites are in 100% control.

I’ve argued with someone on here before on the difference between a free market economy and capitalism. I was taught in a free market economy, private individuals own the means of production. An individual has his tools, he works, and trades goods or services to others at prices set by the laws of supply and demand. Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production, a capitalist is a wealthy individual who invests that wealth - or capital - in ventures with an aim to make a profit. The boss owns the tools and pays workers a wage. The American system has sloshed around between those two extremes since the industrial revolution, periods like the early 20th century trusts and robber barons and…now, where large corporations headed by a very few very wealthy individuals own basically everything, and periods like the 50’s and 90’s when smaller startups in exciting new fields were springing up. The former are the closest we come to the elites owning the means of production, and it tends to be a terrible time to be alive for the average citizen, the latter are the closest I think humanity has come to “the people” meaning individuals at large actually owning the means of production.

Neither system “lifted millions out of poverty.” Neither capitalism or communism has the means or motive to do that. Industrialization did that. Turns out, improving the reliability and quality of food, water, tools and medicine increases the population’s standard of living.