I like metric for weight, that's about it. Cooking with metric is a lot easier. Celsius is nonsense. There's very little real life use of having the boiling point being an anchor. Fahrenheit is anchored on real life daily measurements.

Probably. Although, I think blacks know that less whites = more Hispanics, which is a much worse state for them.

I'm not asking for 10 hour games. I'd rather 30-40 hour games (like Mass Effect). When I say hub, I mean games where you spend a long period of time in a single area exploring, getting quests, doing quests in the vicinity of that area, etc. before progressing the story to the point where you then move on to a new area. Some games do this with acts that keep in that one place until the act is complete, others allow you to explore a limited amount of locations until you need to move on to new places as the story demands.

You only played through the Mass Effect games once? I know I played them multiple times. The Witcher 2 was a game I played through probably 10 times, but only played through TW3 once. I played Dragon Age Origins multiple times... and I'm sure I've played through many other 15+ year old RPGs multiple times.

Even if you want to be more generous and mention more semi/smaller open world games. I've played through the Yakuza games multiple times, which features smaller hub based cities. Kingdom Come Deliverance (1) is an example of a smaller open world that I enjoyed replaying, but that was at about the limit of what I would want to deal with in an open world. IMO, big for the sake of big is just stupid and a waste of time/resources. I'm not against smaller open world games that can keep the world dense and interesting.

For RPGs, if you make the player's choices matter, and have decisions change the world then you can play easily make hub based games replayable. If you must have an open world style game, then making the world smaller and more intimate is a better design choice. Filling open world games with countless travel hours does nothing to improve the experience to me. I'd rather spend hours exploring every inch of a city than going there just to receive some quests, then being forced to go somewhere else, come back, get a new quest, on repeat. For example, Citadel in Mass Effect is probably one of the most memorable RPG locations I can remember. I can also probably play through Flotsam in The Witcher 2 or even Vizima in The Witcher 1 blindfolded (exaggerating obviously). There's nothing like that in these open world games.

I find that most of these larger open world games lack any memorable locations because every new location is just another quest giving hub with little to do because the game requires you to experience the rest of the world that the devs spent countless hours building. It also ruins the focus of the game. I'm not saying some devs don't ever pull it off, but it's rare IMO. Everyone wants to try to do it, but most can't.

Funny enough, Vavra isn't even making games anymore. Decided to go into movies. That was the big payoff for him.

There's also a second gay one night stand. Also, the ability to get drugged and raped by a woman and then apologizing for it.

I still think that open world is one of the worst fads in gaming over the past 15 years. Once Skyrim blew up, everyone needed to make open world games. For every gem, there are heaps of games that are worse off. I'll take the old hub system with content dense levels in most cases over a world that has some hot spots mixed with vast areas of nothingness that's pretty to look at.

It's all a black box, but it does remind me of even at the local level with town budget votes where all the teachers show up en masse to give themselves raises and then no one else does, but then proceed to complain when their taxes go up after the town budget increased again.

People have been talking about the draft coming back since 9/11. I'll believe it when I see it.

I hated that jingle. Catchy, but not in a good way.

Japanese games are mostly decent, if you're into them. Otherwise, Western devs are mostly all lost.

I've been using a coding assistant at work. I have no idea how good the code is, but if I as a finance guy can create applications that only rely on a dev guy for final deployment, then a lot of guys will be finding themselves out of a job sooner rather than later.

I never understood the idea of fapping to something where you don't see the person's face or even their whole body. Girl (if it even is one) could be hideous.

I think they vary.

Yeah, meme is BS. If someone was really a sharpshooter showing up at a place with so many bodies, there'd be a way bigger body count than you've seen at every single one of them. Thank God that hasn't been the case.

and do you think a mainstream publication is going to judge mainstream burgers or niche ones? They may not say that the most popular is the best, but it'll be on the ranking somewhere because people know it.

Also, I'd still make the argument that while Mariah Carey is run of the mill pop music, her vocal abilities are in the top tier. She has a 5-octave vocal range, which isn't all that common.

I mean, I think the list is garbage to begin with. I just find it interesting that Mariah Carey is one of the call outs for not belonging compared to the rest.

That may be so, but people can go on and on about music theory and what makes a great song, but all that matters in the end is if people listen to it. You can write the most technical and amazing composition, but if only a small group of people listen to it, then it doesn't matter that much. There are heaps of people who write amazing music and probably do it better than any mainstream artist. I certainly like more complex and deep music than a standard Mariah Carey song, but I bet you that 50 years from now more people will be listening to Mariah Carey belt out All I Want For Christmas Is You than they will some of the greatest song writers of the 20th and early 21st century.

It's the same thing with Taylor Swift. Average singer, average looks (IMO), average songs, typical lyrical topics, but yet people consider her an amazing songwriter because she knows how to write earworms. She already has 14 #1 songs. Yeah, mid-grade mass appeal stuff, but somehow she's the biggest thing around. At least Mariah Carey had one of the best voices in modern pop music and was quite attractive in her prime.

Mariah Carey has the second most #1 songs ever and cowrote almost all of them. I know #1 singles isn't the definition of good writing, but it certainly means you can write a ton of songs that appeal to the masses. Can't discount that even if you don't like mainstream stuff. I personally don't think I know many more than a few of her #1s, but it is what it is. Of course, it could have now to do with how good her voice was rather than anyone else.

When the site first started up I made some posts in the meta forum trying to get them to create a better methodology for rising posts since stuff dies there after an hour so almost nothing can stick around long enough to reach hot. Nothing ever changed and the site continued to be completely admin driven.

Won't work. They're built to withstand EMP unless you're going nuclear.

Your best bet is probably hacking.

I got a bigger return due to the change in SALT.

The day AI video generation is advanced and easy enough to generate long porn videos will be quite interesting. People being able to create a woman who checks every box in their list of what their dream woman looks like and have them do everything they want and maybe even put themselves in the video rather than some random dude... It'll destroy the industry.

I don't trust most male influencers, female? Yeah, ok. Especially if they're attractive, it's a slim chance that they're legit.

The whole transition from Reddit to TDW to PDW was strange. Especially doing it all without crowd funding and never disclosing who pays for it.

If the government actually did what was in the best interest is the people, they'd tax the shit out of corporations that like to rake in that sweet American revenue, but refuse to hire Americans.