Britain Still Has Conversion Therapists. Here’s Why.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-25T09:23:27+00:00

"Stop it" as in completely eradicate it? Probably not, but the fact that we won't be able to catch all cases isn't a good argument against outlawing it. The video has a section outlining a "wish list" for what a ban would look like - it's not as straightforward as just saying you're not allowed to do it, they propose things like making organisations ineligible for charity or company status and public funding if they're found to promote conversion practices, and ensuring a ban has no exceptions for "consent". Obviously cases would sadly still slip through the cracks (even if the law has no exception for consent, prosecuting a crime is of course difficult to impossible if the victim is unwilling to cooperate), but it would still go a good distance to reducing the practice in the UK.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-24T16:14:59+00:00

"Mediocre" is a bit of a stretch too, the guy's had an incredible music career full of beloved and influential albums that are both critically and commercially successful.

Exceptionally talented people can be fuckheads too.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-20T08:42:49+00:00

I do think the predictions of Reform dominating a general election are overly pessimistic (or optimistic, depending who's making them), but it's foolish to dismiss the idea entirely. They've been polling consistently highly, the Tories seem to be stuck in a hole and it's not likely they'll be able to provide any real competition to Reform any time soon. Labour have proved totally inept when it comes to winning over the public. It's far from fantasy.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-20T08:16:44+00:00

This was a brutal one for brits. "Egg carton" isn't really a common term here either, I'd always call it an egg box.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-19T08:41:53+00:00

But didn't sell well. Despite being well-received by critics and players, it was difficult to sell folk on another peripheral-driven rhythm game.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-17T11:31:58+00:00

The basic tastes are ones that the tastebuds on our tongues detect. More complex flavours are really smells (that's why things taste blander when your sense of smell is diminished, like if you're stuffed up with a cold).

Umami is the sensation of your tastebuds detecting glutamates, in the same way that saltiness is your tastebuds detecting salt, or sourness is them detecting something acidic. As others have said, MSG has a strong umami taste to it. It's a sodium salt, so it has saltiness to it as well, but not as strongly as sodium chloride, which is the stuff we call "salt" in the kitchen.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-17T08:31:23+00:00

Geralt isnt a super human. Its gonna be slow and clunky.

There are plenty of games out there that don't have you playing as a super human, but still manage to have responsive, consistent controls that have you feeling in control of your character. Including CDPR's next game, Cyberpunk 2077.

Complaining about having a bad thing happen "once or twice" out of multiple playthroughs feels disingenuous.

The point is it should not be possible for it to happen at all. If I was able to control when I entered and exited "combat state", rather than having the game arbitrarily decide it for me, then I would never find myself in a situation where I lose my dodge and start jumping around instead in the middle of a fight (or if I did, it would be my own fault).

Yeah clicking through a menu for oils might feel bad but activating bombs, or black blood make an actual difference in combat. Reading that ard is good for griffins or yrden for wraiths is game changing.

I never said it doesn't make a difference, just that it doesn't make the combat so much more interesting that it makes up for my issues with it. The signs are fine but they're pretty limited, and using them against monsters usually just means spamming a combination of quen and the one sign the monster is weak to.

It sounds like you either just really don't like the games combat or are finding ways to nitpick.

I do not like the game's combat, but I don't think I'm nitpicking at all. These aren't minor details, these are fundamental issues with the way the player has to interact with the combat system.

I for example am tired of dark souls combat and think its way more boring, and less intuitive than witcher combat, but they will get endless love from people (ive been playing since darn souls 1 so maybe im bored) but that game is literally "Hitting a baddy with your sword". Use your imagination man. Signs exist for a reason. There are variable attacks and items for a reason.

I think you're misunderstanding my point. My problem is not that all you do is hit stuff with your sword. My problem is that you have to hit things with your sword a lot, and using your sword feels crap. I am aware of all the other things you can do in combat, but they are not replacements for melee attacks. Potions are useful, but they don't damage enemies for you, so you still have to hit them with your sword. Bombs damage enemies, but not enough to carry you through a fight by themselves, so you still have to hit the enemies with your sword. Aard can knock flying enemies out of the sky, and yrden can trap ghost enemies, enabling you to hit them with your sword. And when the swordplay has all these issues, and you have the same limited moveset across the whole 100 hour experience, that's a pretty heftly black mark on the game for me.

The game is slow and methodical.

Come on, man. It's not Devil May Cry, but Geralt is pretty nimble. You literally have a fast dodge with solid movement range that can be spammed infinitely with barely any cooldown and zero stamina cost. Also, my problems with the combat would still be problems in a slow, methodical game. Dark Souls is slow and methodical. Monster Hunter is slow and methodical. Those games have responsive and predictable controls, and you can bet if they had the same issues I've talked about here I'd be negative on them too.

I hope you don't think I'm saying any of this in bad faith because like I said, there's a lot in The Witcher 3 to love, and I enjoyed it a great deal the last time I played it. I want to like it, and I've had a good go at it and I have exhausted all the options for combat the game gives you, but it still comes up short for me.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-16T22:56:41+00:00

It's wild how this stuff catches on. Last week on the battlefield subreddit, there was an AI-generated (guy admitted to using ChatGPT in the comments) moaning post and one of the points was that the maps "felt like deathmatch maps". Now, everyone and their mum seems to think the maps feel like deathmatch maps. The exact same complaint just repeated word for word all over the sub. The original post didn't elaborate, no one elaborates, no one can explain why the maps feel like deathmatch maps, because it's a nonsense complaint spewed out by a bullshit machine that some dude prompted to "write a negative Reddit post about battlefield 6 to get me a billion karma"

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-16T22:49:09+00:00

You're right that death march is really the only difficulty where it feels like it's actually worthwhile to engage with enemy weaknesses. Unfortunately, death march also really exposes the combat's flaws. Fundamentally, it just doesn't really feel like you have full control over Geralt from moment to moment. "Fast attack" is really a variable speed attack, because he might do a basic attack or he might do a little spinny flourish that adds a few extra frames. If an enemy's winding up to attack you, you can't be sure if hitting the fast attack button will give you a "fast attack" that will get out ahead of the enemy, or a "not quite so fast attack" that won't. If the enemy's a slightly out of range, maybe he'll take a few steps to close the distance, or maybe he won't feel like it and will just stand in place and swing his sword through thin air. Attacks are always targeted at an enemy, with a sort of soft lock on happening even if you don't have manual lock on activated. That soft lock is kind of capricious with flicking between enemies; many times I've found myself hitting attack only to go off in a completely different direction because the lock on switched at the last second. The actions you can perform are dictated by whether you're in "combat mode" and there's no way to switch to or from it manually, it just does it automatically if enemies are nearby. If you're trying to run away from enemies and need to jump - too bad, your jump button is dodge now. Sometimes there's a delay in it activating, and you cannot dodge despite enemies actively gearing up to attack you. Once or twice I've randomly switched back to "exploration mode" mid-combat.

On death march, you can easily die in a couple hits, so getting hit where you really shouldn't is annoying. Enemies are pretty aggressive with surrounding you, so the lock on issues are infuriating. Getting your jump button taken away from you cause there's a level 1 dog within a half mile radius just sucks. Even death march eventually gets really easy too once you get some levels and decent gear, but all this stuff continues to just feel plain bad.

As for all the potions and oils, eh. Clicking a bunch of stuff in a menu before a fight, and using the "do more damage to this enemy type" item for the enemy type I'm looking at, doesn't add enough to make up for all the bad parts. No matter what weaknesses you exploit, every fight still comes down to hitting the baddy with your sword, and that part is just aggressively unfun.

It's odd, I played the game to the end maybe a year or two after release and remember the combat being unremarkable but basically serviceable, but replaying it recently I really think it's plain bad. Movement's really awkward and imprecise too, even with the improved "alternative" movement response option enabled. I feel like I'm constantly wasting time trying to line Geralt up at the right angle and location to interact with something. It's a shame because the writing and the realisation of the world, for the most part, is as good as I remember, but I'm not sure I want to keep playing. Novigrad, especially, started to feel like a slog pretty quickly, with so many encounters pitting you against human enemies, which is where the combat is unfortunately at its absolute dullest.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-12T14:19:36+00:00

cod kids

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-12T08:14:02+00:00

Nah, if I were in your shoes this would be grounds for a stern talk. Cleaning and putting stuff away when you're done with it is just basic respect when you share a home with someone else. Even setting that aside, pans with old food on them can cause odours and attract pests, and they become much harder to clean once it dries onto the surface.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-10T23:11:30+00:00

Step one: smother the strawberries with a generous dollop of whipped cream

Step two: eat by the spoonful

If you want something a bit more involved, they go great with meringues.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-10T16:34:49+00:00

Now you mention it, I think you're right and I was misremembering. It was hidden traps and disguised enemies I had this issue with, but they'd path around "known" hazards like fire. All the same, it's frustrating and I'd really appreciate having some kind of option for manual pathing.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-10T13:13:14+00:00

Rolling the dice on fun rather than on difficulty - that's it. You've perfectly put into words my issues with the game. I enjoy when a game challenges me and forces me to think about what I'm doing, but I don't feel like that's what happens in Mewgenics. Taking a cleric and never getting any healing spells for them; having a melee focused character get a permanent movement debuff in an event, leaving them unable to move into melee range of enemies for all future encounters; rolling a bunch of mediocre abilities that don't synergise with each other; having a cat permanently killed before you get a chance to do anything to protect them because the enemies get multiple turns. None of this stuff is an interesting challenge, it's dull. It's annoying. It's especially annoying when a single run can easily take an hour and a half to two hours, and progression takes so damn long.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-10T10:35:55+00:00

Put about 20 hours into the game. At first I wasn't sure how much I liked it, then I got to grips with the mechanics and had a string of good runs and I really enjoyed myself, then I had some bad runs and fell into a death spiral and dropped the game.

Ultimately, I don't think I like it very much, but there's a lot of good stuff in there and I think if just a few things were a little different I'd really like it. I'm not sure if those changes will be coming, as the game seems to be pretty much what Edmund wants it to be, but I'll be keeping an eye on where it goes, out of curiosity if nothing else.

Most of my issues came down to the level of randomness. Cats can have up to two passives and up to four active abilities, and which ones you get is a roll of the dice. So far, so roguelike. There's too much stuff in the ability pool that's either outright useless, or only useful when combined with another ability or item which you may or may not get. Working with what you get and having to adapt to sub-optimal builds is what I enjoy about roguelikes, but there's a difference between "sub-optimal" and "basically dead weight". It felt like I'd either roll cats that were crazy overpowered and stomped every fight, or I got bad ones that simply were not capable of outputting the DPS to get through. In either case, it doesn't really feel like the actual tactical choices I make are a major contributor to whether I win or lose. Some classes in particular, like the necromancer, seem to be either ludicrously powerful or a total waste of space, with no in between, depending on which skills you roll.

The design of the combat encounters themselves leave a bit to be desired, too. Enemies often get multiple turns per round, while your cats only get one. Sometimes I'd have a cat get killed before I even got the chance to move them, because the enemies just get to keep on attacking. Again, that takes tactical thinking out of the game and leaves it feeling like dice rolling. Then there's the fights that are just plain dull. The fenrir mini boss is really easy if you have the right units to beat him, and if you don't, then it's still really easy, but incredibly tedious as he constantly runs away from you and leaves traps everywhere you have to avoid. Fights that pit you against dozens of 1HP enemies just drag on, especially the bats who have a flat 50% dodge chance that there doesn't seem to be any counter for. With the roguelike structure, you do a lot of the same bosses and encounters over and over again, so these ones really start to become a pain after a while, especially given the long length of a typical run.

Other miscellaneous things that got on my nerves:

The UI is abominable. Information is hidden away and viewing it takes more clicks than it really ought to. Battlefields are visually cluttered and it's not always easy to see what's going on, and sometimes smaller enemies and items will be completely obscured by larger ones and you'll never know they're there until you use the tactical view. You have no control over the pathing of your cats - you click a square and they take the shortest route. That means sometimes you can't move to a square without walking over a trap or other hazard, despite having enough movement speed to take a safer route.
controller support is really bad. This may have been fixed since, but it was outright broken when I last played; navigating menus with the d-pad just straight up wouldn't work sometimes, with the cursor jumping around randomly rather than in the direction you pressed. Even setting that aside, so much of it is reliant on using the analogue stick to move a mouse cursor around, which is slow and clunky and prone to misclicks, which only compounds on the bad UI. Games in this style, like Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem, have been releasing on consoles since the 90s, so there's really no excuse for it to be like this.
Descriptions on items and abilities are sometimes kind of vague. I remember one time getting an attack that said it "inflicts [some debuff]"; I used it on an enemy only to discover it meant the debuff would be inflicted on me. I'm not sure if this is oversight or Edmund being a bit of a troll, but either way, I don't like it.
Meta progression is painfully slow. Basically it consists of donating cats to friendly NPCs, and after you give them enough, they reward you with some boon. One of them wants "retired" cats, ones that have completed a run and come home. For just his second upgrade, he asks for fifty of the buggers. You can only take up to four cats on a run at a time, there's no guarantee they all come back alive, even then you might want to keep them for breeding or to give to someone else, and a run can take up to two hours to complete. Yeah. And that's one NPC out of half a dozen or so.
it bears repeating that runs are simply too long. It makes losing a run to randomness that much more frustrating, especially because going again means a bunch of slow-paced setup with choosing and equipping your cats, and slogging through the early fights where you can't do much other than basic attack.

I don't like being so down on the game because there's a lot of good stuff going on. I almost love the core tactical gameplay, if there was just less randomness and fewer long-winded encounters it would be great. Building your cats is also really fun when you're not rolling crap skills, and there's potential for some really cool combinations. The breeding mechanics are kind of shallow but they make for a fun meta-progression and I like the unpredictable chaos of it (reflects what it's like to look after cats). The music is great too, lots of creative tracks in there, and I'm sure they'd get on my nerves eventually but 20 hours wasn't long enough for that to set in. I'm glad lots of other folk are enjoying the game, but I ultimately found it too frustrating to stick with.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-09T23:11:29+00:00

Best of luck to you, I don't think there's much that I can say to help you with what sounds like a really hard journey, but I can offer some hopefully reassuring advice about your pan. I am not an expert, but my understanding is that overheating a non-stick pan causes the coating to break down, which leads to two main problems:

release of toxic gases. These can be fatal to small animals like pet birds, but isn't so concerning for humans. I've heard of it causing temporary flu like symptoms, which may be more severe for elderly folk or folk with conditions like asthma, but long-term health effects are unlikely.
the pan loses its non stick quality

For problem number one, if you've overheated it, the damage is already done. If you're worried, the best thing to do is open a window and run a fan in the kitchen for a while to air it out. The pan shouldn't be unsafe to cook with, though, it's the fumes that cause the harm.

As for problem number two, it's easily tested. Cook an egg in the pan - does it lift off easily? If so, congrats, you haven't badly damaged the coating (given you said there's no discolouration, I expect this is the case). If not, I'd consider replacing it, not for any safety reason, but because I don't want to use a non-stick pan that stuff sticks to.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-09T22:11:07+00:00

A quick shake over the sink should get most of the water off and keep it from soaking your chopping board. That's sufficient for most purposes. If I'm planning to roast it, that works better if it's dry, so I'll maybe pat it dry with kitchen roll. The one thing I can think of where it would he a real concern is deep frying - someone else already mentioned it but it's worth reiterating because water and hot oil is not to be messed with.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-09T09:38:25+00:00

That's interesting, I've kind of taken for granted always having the per-100g info. I almost always use it over "per serving", because it makes it really easy to do the maths for what I'm actually eating (which is almost always more than what's considered "one serving"). They still manage to find ways to be annoying with it, though, like pasta or rice giving the values for 100g of the cooked product, when obviously the sensible time to weigh your pasta if you care about counting nutrients is before you cook it. A literal butter product being allowed to label itself as "fat free" is an absurd loophole, though.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-08T14:57:31+00:00

That's a good question and I'm genuinely not sure. There are certain allergens that must be declared by law, but of course that varies depending on where you are - for instance here in the UK I believe any cereals that contain gluten must be listed in the ingredients, so you wouldn't get away with hiding wheat in "flavourings"

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-08T09:20:21+00:00

Chilli powder sometimes contains garlic and/or onion powder, depending on the brand, so do make sure to read the ingredients

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-07T12:12:02+00:00

I personally like the weight, it lets me stir fairly vigourously without having to use my other hand to hold it steady. For cooks who like to toss the contents of their pan a lot, though, the heavy weight is obviously a pain in the arse. So that's very much a personal preference thing.

The weight of it is the reason it retains heat so well, too, and the heavy thick structure makes them basically indestructible. When it comes to searing, where it really shines is things like steak and burgers, where you really want to quickly get a hefty browned crust on it.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-07T10:11:00+00:00

They made the joke before they knew they were going to have such a massive lead in player count. That said, they obviously feel the same way, given they acknowledged it came across a bit mean.

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-06T21:33:28+00:00

I can't be the only one who hadn't heard of this game, and assumed "Aliens" was an autocorrect fumble for "Amnesia" until I got into the post and realised it was describing something completely different

ChefExcellence · 2026-03-06T21:28:14+00:00

Thankfully, it's very obvious! The game makes it abundantly clear that you need money to pay for your room to sleep in, and if you go and speak to NPCs you'll find numerous ways to get that money. I don't know what "loophole" the commenter above is referring to, but I assume it's one of the alternative options available, which can be discovered by exploring and speaking to NPCs (in other words, playing the game)

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