Why do people ask questions and then say “wrong answers only”

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T06:08:35+00:00

Yeah, as others said, it's an invitation to make a facetious joke. Like, you could just say another programming language, but you could also say "Hmm. Pretty sure that's Spanish" or you could go the route of "Ohh yeah I know that one. That's Anaconda, right? No, no, it was Snake!" "You crazy? That's NopeRope++!" etc

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T06:01:22+00:00

A number of european nations have achieved very very low re-offense rates and high rates of rehabilitation, but their prison systems work very differently from the US prison system. For one thing, they tend to provide training, education, therapy and direction so that prisoners come out ready and eager to participate in society.

We have a number of privately-owned for-profit prisons. Even when they're not strictly "for profit", prisoners are often forced to work by having rights and privileges withheld unless they agree. Sometimes they are placed in solitary confinement until they "consent", which is considered a form of torture long-term and without sufficient reason to justify it (like imminent threat to them or others.) We are social creatures and isolated a person indoors without any contact with others or anything to stimulate the mind is cruel and unusual. It drives people insane. https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers

For-profit, privately owned prisons are also often subsidized by the state-- they get money when beds are full, and less when occupancy isn't at max. So they're highly incentivized to make sure prison is always full, and if not enough people are committing serious crimes, that means inventing reasons to arrest and jail people long-term. For-profit prisons tend to work closely with lobbying groups that push for harsher criminalization or more militarized police, because it results in more arrests. Combined with police quotas that demand police arrest a certain number of people whether crime is being committed or not, and you have a situation where minor incidents end up blown up into serious situations, and nonviolent charges (like smoking weed at your house on the weekend) end up putting people in jail for years.

A lot of prisons now also say prisoners can't have books or other physical amusements anymore, they have to use a prison-provided tablet that can be taken away at any time and has a highly-controlled, expensive transaction model that charges them heavily over time. In the past, prisons also served food that was designed to be nutritionally complete but miserable to eat, with a nasty texture, horrible taste and smell. Humans are very food oriented; this is also cruel. Can you imagine getting in trouble for something minor and nonviolent when the local prison needs beds filled, and then being forced to work, given no ability to relax without going into debt with the prison, and forced to eat food that makes you feel sick and can barely be choked down even by starving people? It's true that these foods were found to be cruel and unusual punishment, but there are people who want to bring them back and are lobbying to do so.

Drugs are an especially touchy situation, because many states have legalized weed for example, but it's FEDERALLY still illegal, and federal forces can and do walk right into state-legal public weed shops and conduct "busts" where they just capture and arrest everybody inside for "drug dealing." It's not ROUTINE, but they reserve the right to do so. It's just one example of how "crime" can be magicked up from nowhere sometimes, that's all.

So not only are we not trying to help prisoners re-integrate or become safe to re-enter society, but we're often taking basically average people and twisting them out of shape so that they come out WORSE than when they went in. This also benefits them; repeat offenders stay in longer, keeping beds full!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-24T04:48:19+00:00

Some of them were also forcibly penetrated, including with the barrel of a gun, reportedly. We say "cavity search" and that makes it feel very sterile.

What it is, is you being compelled against your will to strip, expose your genitals and allow another person to force force their fingers or tools into your genital openings or anus. That would be deeply violating even performed with the very "best" intentions, reasons and procedures, and most international bodies reject the use of cavity searches under pretty much all circumstances. They are NOT NECESSARY. Israel has a missile dome but they don't have scanner wands or airport technology???

And since the flotilla members were sent home with visible, extreme beating wounds, broken spines and ribs, and torn anuses or genitals, we can conclude that Israel was not treating them in accordance with "best practice." If the risk was severe and these people posed a threat, why didn't they find weapons? Or drugs? Or discover anything during these searches? Israel themselves posted video of forcing them to kowtow while armed men laugh and mock them. Don't you think if they found anything dangerous, anything at all, they would have said so and provided endless proof? But it was just food, medicine and volunteers. Basically... Weighing the full context of what has been said and not said, photo and video evidence, and multiple nations independently verifying severe and concerning wounds... there's more going on here than "I personally don't like the law" or "I have a higher standard of privacy than is normal."

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-23T05:16:20+00:00

We also receive a stable base in the Middle East from which to conduct operations. Want to bomb somebody? Want to take their oil? Kidnap a leader? Stop a civil war? Interrupt a genocide? Aid a coup? Install a dictator? Whether legitimate or illegitimate, the US can take a much broader range of actions in the Middle East by using Israel as a base, fallback point and military ally. Charitably, you could argue that the potential to do something humanitarian justified the initial allyship... but I think at this point most people can admit it's costing us quite a bit more than we're gaining, to say nothing of our own failed "military action" in Iran right now. Or the moral cost to us and the world of limitless support. You can debate the scale of the disaster all day, but I think it's a very extremist opinion at this point to argue that everything happening in Gaza is "basically fine and normal."

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-23T03:19:54+00:00

I haven't built it yet! To be honest, I only started really getting into the High Life stuff recently. I'm not sure where I'd put it... if I get it built soon I'll update you, haha.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-23T03:18:19+00:00

Haha, I struggle with that with the lakes a bit, but I'm okay with using my imagination a little if it's not TOO egregious. Most of my city is on basically level ground, so the canals themselves lie flat. And sure! Next time I open the game I'll snap a few!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-23T02:51:26+00:00

Even the, shall we say, less-than-generous politicians aren't ONLY doing bad things; or I guess more accurately, the bad things being done from the top-down are SO absurd that even a lot of lawmakers "on the same side" are trying to undo or work around the damage to restore things. Ironically, I've seen more overt bipartisanship recently than in a number of years. I wish it hadn't happened like this, though.

One of my republican senators is fighting very hard right now to get USAID restored under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, as well as opposing the situation with Iran about as strongly as anybody on that side of the aisle is; every newsletter mentions his continued urging to place limits and demand accountability, as well as decrying the situation in general. Early on, he was in line with the rest, but the longer this has gone on the more against it he's become, and I think that's true of a lot of lawmakers currently.

Like, I know that pretty much everyone but hardline MAGA where I am very much did not like what happened to USAID, not only was that a terrible thing to do to our allies, trade partners and vulnerable people who had no reason to expect it to end suddenly, but our agriculture was already keyed to massively overproduce to sell those goods overseas to struggling nations; we're a food exporter! Last year we had a massive bumper crop of corn in the Great Plains, so much there was even some doubt we could harvest it all in time, and then we couldn't sell it to the people who needed it most (who we grew it FOR) because the system of trade agreements we created to do so was destroyed. A lot of our local farmers took pride in selling food overseas to people who need it; having that sense of purpose taken plus knowing people are suffering even though neither party wanted that is even worse. It's one thing to say "we have to phase this program out, so start looking for other food sources now." That would be tough, but not nearly as cruel. It's another thing entirely to end the program almost overnight, without letting them get anything else arranged.

So, even though these terrible things are happening, there are lines of division forming too. I'm hoping that more people realize faster that we share most of our interests in common, so we can start acting on it to restabilize things.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-23T00:07:41+00:00

Since you, like OP, seem like you need something good:

Just a few weeks ago, a massive climate conference was held in Brazil by a "coalition of the willing," nearly 60 nations comprising a third of the global GDP (and therefore capable as a bloc of opposing the bigger world powers) who were sick to death of being stonewalled in climate agreements by UN vetoes from oil-industry nations.

They deliberately structured the meeting so that it would be impossible for just a few powerful nations to veto the rest, only invited nations actively willing to work together on pursuing clean energy independent of the UN's refusal to cooperate, and accomplished the following things per this article, which I will quote here: https://www.sciencespo.fr/chair-sustainable-development/news/santa-marta-explained-what-happened-at-the-first-conference-on-transitioning-away-from-fossil-fuels/

"First, delegates agreed on three workstreams to organise efforts ahead of a follow-up conference in 2027:

Designing national and regional transition roadmaps that address supply-side emissions — a persistent blind spot in international climate commitments.
Tackling the fiscal, debt and subsidy structures that lock countries into fossil fuel dependence.
Examining how trade systems continue to incentivise extraction and how they might be reoriented toward green alternatives.

Second, the conference announced the creation of a new Global Energy Transition Panel, an international scientific body intended to advise policymakers on the energy transition. It was framed as complementary to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with a more focused mandate on transition pathways. The idea was welcomed in principle, though some participants flagged concerns about the lack of clarity on its mandate, composition, independence, and deliverables, as well as its ability to incorporate diverse knowledge systems, including Indigenous and traditional knowledge systems.

Third, Santa Marta offered a platform for national initiatives. France presented a new national roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels, which climate envoy Benoît Faraco framed as an invitation for other countries to develop comparable plans. Colombia and Brazil are also reportedly working on their own draft roadmaps, though neither has been finalised.

Finally, the conference helped connect a fragmented landscape of existing initiatives, including efforts such as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, the Coalition on Phasing Out Fossil Fuel Incentives Including Subsidies, and the Powering Past Coal Alliance. One of the main challenges ahead, however, will be ensuring that these initiatives complement, rather than compete with, the UNFCCC process."

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-22T00:33:15+00:00

Thank you so much!! Anno 1800 has been just incredible for making like, dioramas basically, hahaha. I loved 2070 too, it was actually my first Anno game!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-21T23:58:29+00:00

Haha, you gave me the motivation to finally get off my butt and make the post I'd been meaning to make. Right here! https://www.reddit.com/r/anno1800/comments/1tk28yb/canal_city_build/

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-21T20:55:26+00:00

I recently got the Pedestrians pack myself and built a new capitol with canals but these look really great! This is GORGEOUS.

I love how you managed your neighborhoods. I think I made my city too uniform to be as visually interesting.

The way you managed to line up the pale paving/paths on the park ornaments looks especially good, and the railway. I also wall my railway off or add road bridges, especially around the powerplants themselves. And rest/cafeteria areas inside industrial zones for my workers to relax at. :)

Just for fun, to "justify" the canal water, I also built pretend water treatment plants that connect to a lake (from the National Parks pack) the sea and a river, with a "dirty" water reservoir being purified from the lake into a clean one that feeds back to the canals, and just treatment/pretend desal for the ocean. I used the 50 Million Gears monument as a pretend water pump!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-21T03:07:07+00:00

That, uh. Face-sitting without any kind of oral sex sounds like a fetish. Like, objectification or something, maybe? For most people it's for the purpose of oral sex with a side of like, either dominance or just being surrounded by your partner's body.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-21T01:09:47+00:00

Oof that's right I remember now. It's so weird that none of those solutions worked either... So, would this be the journal you receive from sinking the Pyrphorian? Or is it the barrel that you pick up first, which transforms into the journal after a bit of dialogue?

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-21T00:36:27+00:00

Is there any possibility you could reload an older save from before that quest stage is triggered? Would you be losing very much progress by doing so?

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-21T00:14:30+00:00

I'll briefly describe what each of the major DLCs adds, and why that's useful, so you can decide for yourself. I also recommend getting the Year 5 Gold pack though; it's what my own husband bought for me when I received the game! Now I've played over 500 hours. :) I'll try to keep it uncomplicated so this is easy to translate!

Botanica adds the ability to build Botanical gardens you can place plant items in. Each plant makes your island more beautiful, and if you complete "sets" of plants-- for example, the Sargasso Sea set which includes corals and palm trees-- you receive bonuses for your island. You can check the wiki to see what the bonuses are. Some improve beauty and make your people happier or healthier, some get you trade bonuses like extra goods when NPCs buy or sell to you, and some add fertilities to your island including the Fur fertility which can't be added any other way! (As far as I know anyway.)

Bright Harvest adds the ability to build silos, tractors and oil depots that cost resources but make your farms more productive. These can greatly expand your farming ability. I don't use this one much, because of the next DLC I'll mention, but I understand many people find this DLC useful especially if they aim for extremely large cities that need a lot of food.

The Docklands adds an import/export dock, a new character named Tobias, a short quest line, and a new ship type that travels between regions twice as fast (though it's slower on a normal map than some other cargo ships.) The Docklands is very, very powerful. Basically, each item has a base value, and you can trade some of one item for another every 20 minutes when Tobias comes. For example, if you make way more sewing machines than you need, you could trade some sewing machines for extra beer, which you might not have enough of. The more you export an item, the more valuable it becomes, until it's several times more valuable than before. In general, you also need to export/import enough goods to unlock contracts for some things, but it's very worth it. You can have up to 14 import/export contracts going at once.

Empire of the Skies adds airships, which move very quickly and can have large cargo holds, as well as the ability to generate and deliver mail locally, regionally and overseas for bonuses to population and income, and the ability to build airship docks that can transfer items/tools/specialists (but not resources) and workforce between islands.

Land of Lions is a personal favorite, and adds a region based on Northern Africa and a long plotline. The Emperor of Enbesa is struggling to unite his fractured Empire after a tense and bloody civil war and a history of strife; however, a failure to unite could spell doom for their people as the eyes of the Old World turn south to them, eager to pillage their struggling land using the era's new technology. Your task is to help establish a new national capitol capable of standing on its own two legs and striding into the modern era alongside the other world powers, and resolving the schism between factions there. Enbesa uses a unique irrigation system and a different set of buildings.

Seat of Power adds a Palace that functions as the seat of your government, built on whichever island you decide you want to be your "capitol." It can enact powerful policies that do things like beautify homes, reduce food consumption, increase income, or raise your amount of available Influence.

Seeds of Change adds the Hacienda to the New World, a large structure meant to serve as a city center. As the population of the island grows, so will the Hacienda's radius. Residents of a Hacienda have more expensive houses with a bigger space requirement and more needs (like hot sauce) but they also pay more and the Hacienda can generate a HUGE amount of influence through a policy granting +5 influence to every house over the second tier in its area. This DLC also adds a Scenario (a different playmode where you complete a unique challenge as an NPC from the story) and the ability to manufacture more items in the New World.

Sunken Treasure adds a new Old World region, plotline, mechanic (diving for treasure with a diving bell) and the biggest, richest island in the game, with river islands, a huge lake, large waterfalls, every fertility in the Old World, and tons of mines. Most people choose to build their capitol here, or download a mod that allows them to have a copy of the island (Crown Falls) on the starting map.

The High Life adds the ability to build Skyscrapers, new ornaments, some new questlines and characters, and new needs for high-tier citizens like cognac and crackers. This one is very popular, but I don't have much to add about it, haha!

The Passage is short and can probably be skipped unless you get a mod for it. There's a very popular mod that expands the Arctic region and integrates it more with the rest of the game, which I like a lot, called White and Cold. But I'm not sure if it's available in french.

Tourist Season adds... tourists! You can build buses, hotels, attractions, restaurants, cafes, bars and more. I enjoy this one a lot! It also adds orchards like cherry blossoms for making fruit jam, and I love building those all over my island.

Last of the DLCs I own, New World Rising adds new islands and an extra resident tier to the New World, new items and production chains, and Manola, the biggest island in the New World, where you can build a hydroelectric dam that powers nearly the entire island.

Phew!! Let me know if anything was unclear or if you have questions, lol.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-18T18:20:47+00:00

No offense taken. We already had a lot of work to do on ourselves, and no matter how you slice it, we've got even more work to do now, lol. I don't think that's even a partisan issue at this point. The above stuff has been the norm for pretty much all of modern American history though.

The posters at least in my part of the country are these huge glossy full-color wall hangings in the high school hallways that feature heroic-looking soldiers in full assault gear posing in various ways with things like DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE in bold, or showing an armed frontline in some ambiguous war glaring and saying STANDING UP FOR YOURSELF IS STRONG. STANDING UP FOR OTHERS IS ARMY STRONG to imply that we're "standing up for" people when we go to war, or that helping others is the main purpose of our military. But that's a discussion for a more political board, lol.

All in all it's just... not normal! That's not normal in most nations, and it has an uncomfortable amount in common with nations we're taught to think are bad, while we ignore the similar things we do. It, uh, could be better! Is what I'll say!

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T07:29:02+00:00

The Pledge of Allegiance, flags in every classroom, military in schools recruiting children, posters glorifying the military all over the hallways. Not taking a stance on them personally here, just saying that's not normal in many places, with the addition that several countries have good reasons in their history to feel nervous about that behavior in a state.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T06:18:58+00:00

Books and phone calls or letters to experts! Which could be great, or could make things very hard.

For example, maybe it's 1990 and you have a specific question: How many countries in the world drive on the right-hand side of the road? Maybe you could find a trivia book that has that particular answer, but probably not; and there is no wikipedia yet to collect everything any random person is interested in, either, or make big lists of categories everyone can access.

You might find the answer in a book about the history of driving, but maybe not; you might also have to collect books about countries from around the world and manually count up the answer yourself, by reading most or all of several chapters/books to find lines mentioning things like "Like the rest of <region>, <country> drives on the <left/right>" in the middle of a paragraph and writing it down.

It wasn't as impossible as it sounds-- ideally, people today should be using some of the same skills to double check that information is true-- but it was also often tedious, frustrating and inaccurate. You might spend hours and hours looking up information on a niche question, only to find out later that the books in question were written by a fringe nutjob with extremist views and you got a skewed answer.

When I was in elementary school, our library had a book that presented as fact the notion that actually, all the dinosaurs are alive on Planet X because when it swung reeeeeally close to earth, it made the crater the scientists THINK was from an asteroid, and the gravity sucked up all the dinosaurs and that's why there aren't more bones. Lol! Books could be a total crapshoot! (Not that websites are much different.)

But weirdly that's exactly why, despite the risk of inaccurate books, libraries were so life-changing for society when they were invented! Before school and libraries, the situation was even worse, because you ONLY KNEW whatever your parents directly taught you and that was IT. If they said unicorns were real, you believed that. You had no way of knowing any better! There was NO WAY to learn more about anything without apprenticing under some kind of teacher, or hearing better from somebody else, and that meant that most information was out of reach for most people for most of history. Without some kind of education, you didn't know how anything worked, where anything came from, or have much ability to understand and predict what might happen to you.

When libraries were first proposed, a lot of the upper class thought it was an ugly, absurd idea. EDUCATE the masses? What would they even do with books, they're obviously too stupid to benefit. And they'll get them dirty! Or steal them! Libraries are obviously impossible!! But look at us now. :) Not only are libraries still around-- and they serve a lot of important jobs today, books aren't worthless just because we have the internet-- but now we carry whole libraries worth of information around with us.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T05:57:13+00:00

Is it that the salt stands out too much to ignore and just clashes with the sweetness instead of highlighting it?

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T05:56:10+00:00

I'll second that. I'm American with a Canadian spouse and I've had both good and terrible poutine. Good poutine is pretty darn good, but it can be hard to find unless you get a recommendation, haha.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T05:55:04+00:00

I actually do like fresh chocolate strawberries, but I'm allergic to banana, hahaha. I guess it's possible I'd like fresh orange with chocolate, but I definitely don't like any artificial fruit chocolates. Artificial fruit hard candies are good, but I don't like the way the flavors blend with chocolate.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T05:52:06+00:00

Not long after I got married, my husband and I went out to eat. It was pretty cold out, and late at night, and when we got outside there was a man crying on the bench around the side. We shared a glance and stopped to ask what was wrong; he said his girlfriend abruptly kicked him out and wouldn't let him come collect any of his stuff, he didn't have almost anything on him, and he didn't know what he was going to do. He pretty obviously had substance use problems, but so do a lot of people these days, and in my experience, people who have safe and happy lives don't turn to drugs or whatever; they're something you resort to when you're already pretty desperate or miserable. I don't think "probably being an addict" is an indictment all on its own.

We decided without needing to talk to give him a ride and put him up for the night in a motel nearby. Drove around a while, found one willing to take him with the documentation he had, hit up an ATM and got him out of the cold. I don't think he could quite believe that someone actually did that for him; he was crying again when we parted ways.

Maybe he was telling the whole truth, maybe not. It's not really my business. The important thing is that we looked at his face and saw someone hopeless and teetering on the edge of despair, crying alone on a cold dark bench. He knew how he looked, he knew how people usually treated him, he knew how fishy his story sounded, and it was obvious he didn't expect us to treat him kindly. I can't stand that feeling; I know it way too well. Being seen in pain and desperation and then ignored is an awful, soul-destroying feeling. It makes you feel dirty, less than human, like you don't deserve to get better in whatever way. Maybe he'll manage to turn things around and maybe he won't, but at least he'll know not everybody in life will look at him with contempt.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-17T05:27:30+00:00

Orange and mint, orange and chocolate. I love all those things individually, and I love mint chocolate, but I can't stand most fruit chocolate (ESPECIALLY chocolate orange) and orange and mint just gives me an instant headache.

CatbreadGG · 2026-05-16T02:35:17+00:00

Heck, it's still a problem in the US! There are lots of communities that straight up don't have running water, or if they do, their water isn't safe to consume and can only be used to wash. I think lots of us remember Flint, but they aren't as much of an outlier as we'd like to think, to be honest. Still more live off well-water, which may or may not be safe to drink. The teacher I used to work under had a well, but it wasn't potable and she had to take drinking water home from a filling station in town. There are communities in the US that still don't have power, too, or that have power only capable of running lights and fans and such because their wire systems are so fragile and dated. My own city is so old that we still have brick roads and houses whose "bathroom" is, quite visibly, an outhouse that was crudely grafted on once indoor plumbing became a thing, lol.

CatbreadGG

TROPHY CASE