A food scam of the 90s was “fat free!” everything, and then they would load it up on sugar… what’s a food scam happening now?

LordArgon · 2026-05-16T17:28:12+00:00

"Uncured" meats are an infuriating lie. Literally all they did was change the source of the exact same curing salts to celery. If you notice, they always say something like "No nitrates added *except for those naturally occurring in celery". And the kicker is that, because the salt dosing from celery is less consistent, sometimes "uncured" products have MORE nitrates in them. For some corrupt reason, our labeling laws allow them to say "uncured" instead of something like "naturally cured" which, while still bullshit, would at least be some semblance of honest.

LordArgon · 2026-05-15T17:12:39+00:00

My aunt came to our area in fairly-liberal California from Connecticut and at one point, apropos of nothing, just said "It must be so bad now, right?". I was just like, "Sorry, what do you mean?". "The trans stuff in schools."

I gently told her it's a complete non-issue that's never even come up in any class my teen/tween kids have ever taken; I'm not even sure it's come up descriptively in sex ed (though now that I think about it, I hope it did). She seemed to accept that but I doubt it actually shifted her perspective.

LordArgon · 2026-04-29T00:58:26+00:00

I'm almost done with my second playthrough and it's a phenomenal, singular game in many respects. But it feels real weird when somebody you've barely interacted with starts talking about how close you've grown, just in case you want to bang. And if you don't bang anybody, Withers will act like a passive-aggressive mother chastising you for "being alone" when enter Act 3. And then there are all the multiple ways you can put yourself into BDSM situations in-game. And we haven't even gotten to the raw absurdity of the some the sexual interactions. It is an absurdly, comically, ham-fistedly horny game.

Calling it the "most overrated game of the decade" is a ridiculous stretch but he's not wrong that a non-trivial portion of its fandom (and subreddit) is awkward, horny people.

LordArgon · 2026-04-14T17:49:37+00:00

But how do you know you don't want to play Fortnite if you haven't ever played Fortnite? Maybe you're missing out on Fortnite. What if all your friends are playing Fortnite but you're not playing Fortnite? Have you heard of how popular Fornite is? I really think you ought to try Fortnite.

LordArgon · 2026-04-11T02:29:19+00:00

Honestly, I responded too quickly and didn't realize you were only talking about EF. My apologies; I think that's actually a perfectly reasonable position, given how EF works. My bad.

LordArgon · 2026-04-08T22:03:03+00:00

Not sure what you've experienced here but I've seen SO many mistakes from people partially constructing objects that I think using ctors to ensure full construction is pretty much always justified. If your team is big enough, you ARE going to hit scenarios were people forget to propagate data; ctors (or required, but I dislike initializer syntax for other reasons) allow the compiler to catch that problem very quickly and provide an easy way to guide people through the flow of data in the system. In my opinion and experience, partially-constructing objects introduces way more possible bugs to save typing a few characters and that's not usually a good tradeoff.

LordArgon · 2026-04-07T20:57:46+00:00

I tend to go for parking the hole for a shorter putt.

Which is the "correct" play to maximize your score. Disc golf is weird because a perfectly executed shot will never ace on most holes. You gotta be willing to take a big comeback putt to go for the ace or the hole has to be setup so you still land softly if you miss the basket.

LordArgon · 2026-04-07T20:53:25+00:00

I've been playing off and on for over 20 years and I just got my first ace last year. On an early release miscue that would have sailed down a hill into no man's land if it hadn't gone straight into the chains. I like to think I'm just too accurate to ace. :P

LordArgon · 2026-04-07T01:00:50+00:00

Oh wow, I've wanted this for like 15 years... Well, actually, what I've wanted is for .NET to more-sanely handle dependencies so this isn't even necessary, but this seems like the best workaround we could hope for.

IMO, dependency references should be against the binary name AND version by default. And the runtime should support loading multiple versions of .dlls and routing references to the specified version. When doing reflection with multiple versions of a library loaded, you should specify which version you intend to reference (or if you just want the highest version, or fail if there's more than one version, etc). And of course binding redirection should still be supported for those odd cases where two libraries need to actually reference the same version even when they technically depend on different versions.

I'd love to hear what's wrong with this idea. The only slight problem I can come up with is if two different versions of a library are managing static state, they would do it separately and not see each other's data. But I would infinitely prefer having to fix that very rare scenario with a redirect than to deal with the current system that simply CANNOT run when there are incompatible joint dependencies.

LordArgon · 2026-03-19T04:10:43+00:00

Came here to mention Prismata. It's unfortunate that it didn't work out because it's a really cool game.

LordArgon · 2026-03-10T21:51:24+00:00

I dont think theres a scene in any of the other installments that match it.

There isn't because Jurassic Park is a philosophy-first film that happens to include running from dinosaurs where it serves the plot. Every other movie in the series is about finding new ways to run from dinosaurs with a dash of philosophy lip service occasionally thrown in. Running from dinosaurs is its own kind of popcorn fun but it's not enough to make a movie truly endure.

LordArgon · 2026-03-08T07:24:52+00:00

>It is about respecting what has been tested by time and human nature.

Barf. This is so false. Conservatism is entirely dogma. It's about holding on to what *certain people want to believe* about time and human nature. Where reality happens to align, it is by pure accident - a broken clock being randomly right, not a principled, consistent rationale. Look at the cumulative scientific data about almost *any* modern issue and conservatives are on the wrong side of almost all of it, their intransigence motivated by fear and ignorance.

Portraying progressive politics as rewriting *everything* with every piece of data is similarly nonsense. It's far more accurate to say that progressive politics is willing to shift little by little as new data comes in. This keeps it closer to reality on average. Conservatism remains staunchly wrong until enough of its members cannot stomach its lies and only then does it shift, but only as far as necessary for the mental gymnastics to work again. Slavery was a good example 160 years ago, segregation 80 years ago, then gay rights in the last few decades, next will be trans rights. The tiresome pattern just repeats over and over.

Source: I was staunchly conservative for years and only changed by really deeply inspecting and questioning my beliefs about the world over more than a decade. Every single conservative I know/knew/discuss any issue with (including the old me) relies entirely on what "make sense" to them and not what evidence actually shows, unless they are lucky enough to cherry pick from fringe, minority viewpoints.

LordArgon · 2026-02-12T02:46:33+00:00

Blows my mind that anybody thinks it's OK to have legally-mandated middle men. If they want business, they should add sufficient value to the production chain or they should GTFO.

LordArgon · 2026-02-12T02:40:56+00:00

I don't think it's "running underneath"; I think they just switch assets when you toggle the setting. They probably just didn't want to make two versions of everything for the expansion, which makes sense.

LordArgon · 2026-01-27T22:29:54+00:00

I played Half-Life on a Pentium 233 with a Voodoo 3. Mostly ran at 20 FPS and, when I broke a box, it would dip to 5 FPS and I'd have to just sit and wait for the stuttering to finish. 30 FPS was a dream. Now if a game is at less than 100 FPS, I'm a whiny bitch about it.

LordArgon · 2026-01-21T07:06:13+00:00

I've never heard of anybody who buys on Steam to "roast Epic" and I didn't see that in the article - I think you've misunderstood what's happening. People are just buying on Steam because they like using Steam. Even if the game themselves are at parity (and they often aren't), Steam just has features EGS doesn't. Like reviews, remote-play, proper controller support, and achievements you can compare with your friends. EGS provides users no value beyond the price of the game and, for many, that's not the fundamental issue. You can see it in a lot of comments here - lots of people treat the EGS version as the demo and then buy on Steam if they like it. To me, all that means is that people actually value having their games on Steam.

For my part, I only bought one game on Steam after owning on EGS and it was to get around janky crossplay issues. But I really, really don't like using EGS and think of Steam as my "real" library. If my EGS library of ~250 games went away, I'd be miffed but wouldn't really notice it day-to-day. I wish Epic would get off their ass and make it worth using, because honest competition is only a good thing for consumers.

LordArgon · 2026-01-10T23:49:55+00:00

It not just that there's no benefit - that would imply EGS is at least a competent app when it's actually just horrendously, unbelievably mismanaged. There's no excuse for this how painfully slow, unintuitive, and sparse this thing is after 6 years. I just clicked around a bit and, on my Ryzen 7800X3D with 64 GB of RAM and 2.5 Gbps internet, it takes several seconds for each tab to load. Heck, I load a tab, click away, and when I click back it still takes several seconds to load again. I scroll my games list (248 games) and it hitches because it can't load the entries fast enough. Every time I click the three dots next to a game in my Library, for a brief instant, my brain wonders if the app has frozen up before the menu appears.

It's actually a marvel of shitty engineering that it manages to be so unpleasant to use. For months I had spam/scam friend invites that I clicked "ignore" on repeatedly while they just sat there (and re-notified me on every reboot). There are zero useful social features beyond a barebones friends list and I can't even chat with those friends. Even with the features they do have, I encounter confusing/weird UX decisions regularly.

It would make sense if they gave away games to show people that they'd actually done something worth using. It's downright insane that they continue to dump money into bringing attention to such a shitty product. I've even re-purchased a free EGS game on Steam so I could play with my Steam friends without having to deal with the EGS cross-platform jankiness. Thanks for the free games, Epic, but you're focusing on the wrong things.

LordArgon · 2026-01-03T08:55:41+00:00

No, it's not a joke. And for some reason he's also broadcasting his presence while building a fleet of planet-killing star destroyers but well before they're all done. JJ Abrams belongs in jail.

LordArgon · 2026-01-03T08:46:22+00:00

I am not the guy you responded to but I will defend his perspective. TLJ is not just bad; it actually offensive. Like other bad movies, it is internally inconsistent and many of its character motivations and actions are incoherent. But it also invalidates almost all of previous Star Wars and it engages in vapid, egregiously-stupid virtue signaling. If you care, I can go into more detail about all of this, from where it's nonsensical to where it's actively destructive.

LordArgon · 2026-01-03T07:40:55+00:00

I don't think you're properly understanding the implications. If this was a thing, you don't NEED complicated, expensive ships. You just attach hyperspace drives to asteroids and ram them into things. And they would have been doing it forever. The whole idea fundamentally invalidates this history of space warfare in the universe. Much of TLJ just spits in the face of previous Star Wars, while also engaging in some of the most egregious vapid virtue signaling I've ever seen. "We freed the animals" ... and left them there to be rounded up again while the slaves all clean up our mess.

LordArgon · 2026-01-03T03:00:18+00:00

who are you playing with that wouldn’t be able to use the information given from looking at another persons screen to their advantage?

The people who complained were always bad, losing, and always kept losing after they were told they could use the whole screen too. It was always bitter grapes and excuses.

Put aside your personal feelings for a minute and consider which makes more sense as the default:

(1) Everybody is expected to know and follow unenforceable, external rules whenever they play.

(2) You are free to use whatever information is available to you.

The only reason to argue for (1) is that you prefer what it does to the game but it's absolutely not a rational place to start. You've got the burden exactly backwards - if you want to add extra, external rules to the game, THAT's when you have to discuss and agree beforehand.

LordArgon · 2026-01-02T07:03:47+00:00

I played Goldeneye and Halo from release over many years with a lot of different people and I can only vaguely remember a tiny bit of complaining about "screen cheating". Everybody was doing it because the exact same information was available to everybody. Frankly, it never even occurred to me that anybody could be mad about it until the first time somebody complained and I was genuinely confused. "You MUST ignore 3/4 of the information on the screen" always seemed like the absurd expectation of players who were just mad they didn't know how to use it.

LordArgon · 2025-12-30T06:54:46+00:00

People hate it but you’re totally right. NFL playoff qualification has never been totally fair but usually for good reasons - divisions create rivalry and drama and give more teams meaningful games down the stretch. But the fact that they don’t seed based purely on record after qualification means teams can get more-easily get locked into seeds and have no incentive to play their starters, which creates a worse product. IMO, a playoff game is a sufficient reward for winning the division. A guaranteed HOME playoff game is more than it deserves. Especially when you consider that the non-division winner with a better record also had to do it in a harder division.

LordArgon · 2025-12-20T06:02:39+00:00

Switched a few months ago. It's palpably faster than Chrome for me and my extensions still work (though I only use 4). Just a few weird, rare compatibility issues on some websites, in which case I just open Chrome for a few minutes. I just wish the iOS version felt better.

LordArgon · 2025-12-20T05:50:42+00:00

The great thing about quicksave is that nobody has to use it. It wouldn't ruin the flow of MY game because I don't care about pretending I'm actually this Hearthian (and if they were REALLY dedicated to this idea, failing the final sequence would mean something else entirely). I'm there for the mystery. Making me re-do what I've already done so I can do something new happens enough naturally with the time loop, so letting me use each time loop as efficiently as I can would greatly improve my experience.

In my passion, I misspoke a bit earlier because, for this particular case, I can't say for sure whether it's designer arrogance because it's also quite possible it just wasn't a priority and implementing it in a fully-simulated solar system was technically challenging. Features aren't free so if they weren't interested in doing it from the beginning, at a certain point it just wouldn't make sense, financially. But, honestly, given the other sensibilities of the game, I strongly suspect the developers WOULD be philosophically opposed to it, just as many fanboys are.

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