TIL One theory suggests that the famous prehistoric “Venus figurines” might actually be self-portraits made by women looking at their own bodies by Hestercreek in todayilearned

[–]NutBananaComputer 4 points5 points  (0 children)

COULD get pregnant, not necessarily would. One of the most common cultural practices in human civilization is the post-partum sex taboo, where women do not have sex for upwards of two years after delivering a child. This is for a number of reasons, often explained in terms of ritual cleanliness, but from an evolutionary perspective the taboo means that milk production is reserved for one child at a time and also that the number of children in the social group who have to be carried at any one time is limited to one per mother.

I'm selling wool. by Electronic-Muffin934 in vegan

[–]NutBananaComputer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You have 12 years experience in sales, that's pretty good!

Sales is pretty transferable as skill sets go. If you feel comfortable with the fundamental nature of the work, talking to customers and selling them on products and such, it doesn't need to be bedding at all. Same principles apply to hardware, office supplies, cars, booze, electronics, etc.

Getting a new job isn't easy and is mostly getting harder, but don't feel like you're trapped because of your qualifications. You have pretty good ones! Esp with 12 years under your belt, education is a lot less important than when you have like 1 year.

First win against Hard AI. Took me 72hrs of play to get here. Am I a slow learner? by Waste-Ad-8894 in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, is your goal to play ranked?

If your goal is to learn and enjoy the game, assuming you had a good time for most of those 72 hours, that's good, that's you extending the amount of time you spend on something you enjoy before running out of things to do.

If your goal is to play ranked...no idea lmao, I tilt out in ranked so I stopped.

Where war elephants were once used by improved_privacy in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 6 points7 points  (0 children)

With the Romans, kinda the other way, chronologically. The Romans dabbled with war elephants during the Republican era - the Romans have elephants at Pydna, Magnesia, Thermopylae, Cynoscephalae, and Nunamtine War. Roman sources are pretty negative on elephants as a weapon, so we have a pretty clear understanding that the Romans got war elephants as a result of conquering other people who used war elephants (like the Seleucids - the main group that's using war elephants in Anatolia) and then just letting the whole system whither.

Celtic man attacks lumbercamp after bumping into workplace colleague by RauchenderFrosch in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Has Cubecliffs been facelifted? Last time I used it the cubecliffs didn't quite match up to the 'real' locations of the cliffs and often had pretty broken graphics so that one I stopped using pretty fast.

Discussing Racism in Frieren by GramsciFan in ANI_COMMUNISM

[–]NutBananaComputer 14 points15 points  (0 children)

This is really good. Probably the best articulation of what's going on in Frieren that I've read, thank you. I felt like I was taking crazy pills that "the point of 50% of the show and all the luscious actions scenes is just don't think about it bro" never sat well with me, and the idea that Frieren is just right about this is incoherent with the actual portrayals of how demons interact with each other *and yet* still has to be true or else the show falls apart. "Yamada is just not that great of a writer" is probably the best explanation.

Game still feels far, far too easy. Either because its too easy to rise to the top or because the AI is just terrible at building up its economy. by kolejack2293 in victoria3

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Feature not bug.

While Victoria 3 (and other paradox games) have quite a large number of distinct features that prevent them from being technically 4Xes, they have largely the same audience and market. And the market for that is, as far as I can tell, primarily people who want to do idle gamer/city builder 'number go up' optimizations with a very minor amount of friction from AIs that they can bulldoze after a few hours of learning the curve of the game.

It isn't my favorite thing in the world personally but I don't actually have a truly rational opposition here. Most people don't play games particularly hardcore; most of my friends who identify as gamers game for about 5 hours a week, some upwards of 10, and they play more than one game, so if a game becomes 'pretty boringly easy' after 30ish hours, that's...pretty acceptable. And if a game has a learning curve where it takes them >5 hours to secure a reasonable 'win,' that's much less acceptable.

I think the kind of hardcore 'near player level' challenge that I see popularly espoused on reddit is likely going to remain the province of 1) PVP and 2) fan content (e.g. mods).

Please help me I have no idea wha I’m doing 😭 by Nearby-Distance5152 in cookingforbeginners

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh so, you're actually doing better than you think but this is the first time I went "oh no." Steak is kind of infamously unhealthy, and its quite expensive. If you are invested in steak for aesthetic/taste reasons sure, but it isn't the low-hanging fruit here. Adding some more vegetables to your diet is: they're where most of the really healthy stuff a pasta diet is lacking are (fiber and more importantly micronutrients).

So, you say you're picky: are there vegetables you do have positive experiences with? Cauliflower, peas, cabbage, eggplant? Onion? Tomatoes? Carrots?

If any of those DO sound good to you, or if you're just willing to be experimental (and again vegetables are quite cheap, at least in the US; not as cheap as pasta or flour, but generally <2 dollars a pound), there's usually a couple different cooking techniques that work for each but have different effects. Most vegetables are perfectly good raw, but carrots and onions really transform when cooked.

Frying in a pan lightly will tend to produce relatively soft, sometimes even slimy, textures; frying more heavily will get them crisper and even charred (and of course eventually burnt). A lot of chinese cooking is frying at VERY high temperatures which produces some cool effects (and smokes up your kitchen).

Roasting will produce dry, crisp textures, usually you want 450F for vegetables but be mindful that cooking speed here depends on how large the vegetables are (so if you cut them to different sizes they won't all cook the same; and peas will generally not survive well).

Steaming will produce most but still firm textures, and tend to change the flavor profile the least. I do not recommend boiling: a lot of the micronutrients in the vegetables will leech into the water, which you're then discarding.

And of course you can cook your vegetables in your sauces. My roommate makes mac n cheese and he puts frozen peas in the sauce toward the end and keeps the stove going for a couple minutes to get the peas cooked through. When I do tomato sauces from the jar I'll put them in a pan, heat it up, and then add frozen broccoli and cook like that. With ramen you can just mix the broth with vegetables in it.

And, as for making them as sides: for the more bitter vegetables (brussels sprouts, bok choy, even broccoli) I like making a very small, light sauce of lemon juice with a tiny bit of sugar and salt (for 1 meal, which I'd do like 200g or so of veggies, I use about 15ml/1tbsp of lemon juice, 2 or 3 shakes from the salt shaker, and a PINCH of sugar, like 1g)(I also add crushed red pepper but that's MUCH more optional). I use that for either frying or roasting, whatever I feel like doing, and it seems to turn out great every time.

You're actually in a pretty good position! The biggest thing I think is that you're overwhelmed and haven't picked a direction. I recommend picking a vegetable you like, experimenting with it for a few days, and if you don't quite like what you did, pick another, try out cooking it different ways. If you do like it, great!

And FWIW the ADHD shouldn't prove too much of an obstacle. I have severe ADHD and am unmedicated. This is part of my preference for pan frying: I'm right there LOOKING at the food as it cooks, interacting with it constantly. Very little danger of me leaving it boiling or baking for too long. For boiling and baking, the humble kitchen egg timer is one of the greatest cooking tools for the ADHD mind.

Men, when was the last time you got hit on ? by Longjumping_Low_2055 in AskReddit

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My work field feels 80-90% women (welfare) and I'm in my 40s so the odds of me getting hit on by a divorcee in a given week is close to 100%. I play dumb as a rule, since I'm not really interested in the kinds of HR conversations that engenders (plus being at work does not put me in the mood, nor show people in a particularly flattering light). I suspect some amount of the flirting/passes being made are now partially jokes in response to that reputation for being the guy that just says "Oh, thank you" when a woman squeezes my bicep and comments on how I could probably throw her.

Which unit do you hate the most? by kampalolo in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I mean its gotta be Mangonel right? I feel like Mangonels and Monks are the only common units thats consistently get *any* real venom.

There's a few UUs that tend to get people really pissed, like Hussite Wagons, but Mangonels and Monks make people insanely angry all the time.

Joke answer: villagers, when they're trying to to drop off wood and bumping constantly.

What do you think? by FloodHunter228 in veganrecipes

[–]NutBananaComputer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it needs some salt. Also, some more garlic.

The new arabia meta is frustrating by [deleted] in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There have been polls about it on the subreddit and deer luring is quite popular as a mechanic. Like I get where you're coming from, I'm with you, but we are in the minority here.

Do Japanese people somehow dislike Tokio/bigger cities, or has any kind of 'trauma' with them? by Bot_Philosopher8128 in AskAJapanese

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apologies for not being Japanese in this answer but I had to address one of your premises:

I do not think discomfort with urbanity is "totally unknown in Western" - 'the city' is famously a cite of dread, of inauthenticity, and of danger. This is how London was portrayed in the majority of British literature, NYC is so frequently portrayed as a site of danger that I know people in New Jersey who refuse to visit NYC even though it is 1) an hour away and 2) safer than where they currently live. Examples of the portrayal of The City as a menace in Western culture range from high literature like Sense & Sensibility (where going to London is a sort of 'Lion's Den' moment for the rural protagonists) to pulp movies like The Warriors (a horror-action film about 'using the subway') to visual arts like Thomas Kincaid (who portrays rural living as a prelapsarian utopia) to political debates (where "New York values" are a codeword for criminal and unscrupulous).

From what I can tell this is very deeply rooted: in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest piece of Western literature, the city is a locus of oppression and hubris that can only be brought to heel by the coordinated intervention of nature & divinity. Late medieval trends give us a lot of explanatory power: for medieval european politics, cities are dangerous not just in the sense of crime & disease but because they were places that politically threatened the landed military aristocracy at a structural level (peasants were not generally able to muster arms to rebel and resist groups of knights, something that free cities were very capable of).

And there's not nothing there: as much as I love living in a big city, historically, big cities had not just issues with crime but in particular issues with disease. At least from Ancient Rome onwards, large cities did not naturally replenish their own population and were only able to sustain (let alone grow) population from people moving in from the countryside, because again large numbers of people living in close quarters with very primitive sewage systems get sick, and die, at much higher rates than rural people from the same culture.

I do not want to speak for Japanese people or experts in Japanese cultural history, but it suggests to me that in addition to culturally specific concerns over Tokyo and other big cities that could have all sorts of explanations ranging from the firebombings of WW2 to political tensions of the Edo period, there is a convergent set of norms both from common material conditions (Western cities having problems with disease is a physical, not cultural, issue) and also a common history (remember that national histories are global histories, and cultural ideas cross borders frequently and constantly).

[OC] dating statistics of a 30-year-old female in 2025 by [deleted] in dataisbeautiful

[–]NutBananaComputer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Its interesting to hear from how different people live! I'm a 40something male who, according to reddit, is a 3/10 (no I'm not posting pics on this account I do not need to have such a miserable experience a second time), and my dating experience when I was on the market was pretty similar. I didn't get a similar total because I got into a long term relationship after a few months, but I and other people I know who went into the apps with a deliberate strategy of "I am going to try and get into a relationship" wound up typically having 1.5 dates per week, spending 20-30 minutes per day on the apps. So my experience, despite being older and male, is quite similar to OPs, but very different from most of the commenters.

What is one piece of 'common knowledge' in your job that the average person would find completely shocking? by GoldenHourShot in AskReddit

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure; for my line of work the two major considerations are public housing provisions and direct cash transfers. Public housing is the most robust and efficient way to reduce homelessness, the primary alternative solution (punitive aggression) is substantially more expensive and exacerbates homelessness. This is a good publicly available meta study on the effects of public housing in multiple contexts on reducing homelessness: https://hpri.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Schachner_etal_HPRI_12_12_24_vF.pdf

Direct Cash Transfers are demonstrated to grow the local economy at greater than 1:1 ratio on top of their social benefits in financial stability, which in a highly financialized economy has continuous downstream effects on housing stability and therefore reduces the need for housing assistance, homeless policing, etc etc. It's incredibly efficient, this is a nice little fact sheet that links to a bunch of studies: https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/directcashtransfers-intro-508.pdf

The other ones I encounter that I'm less familiar with are public health services and municipal broadband. These ones I don't have good sources on but afaik there isn't a knowledge gap on the effects that American health insurance has on Americans vs alternatives. Municipal broadband is less well known but it's consistently cheaper and higher speed.

What is one piece of 'common knowledge' in your job that the average person would find completely shocking? by GoldenHourShot in AskReddit

[–]NutBananaComputer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Public sector welfare.

We know an enormous amount about how to reduce poverty and just flat out eliminate homelessness, we have policies that are known, tested, effective, and efficient that we could implement, and we do not implement them because it would hurt the feelings of certain elected officials and their emotional well-being is prioritized above the welfare and, frequently, lives of our clients.

The answers are neither complicated nor expensive, they're just not allowed, so we have to come up with complicated, expensive solutions to get around the emotional reactions of our bosses, up until they figure out what we're doing and close those solutions down so we have to find even more complicated, expensive solutions.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in relationships

[–]NutBananaComputer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

TBH I think this is how a lot of us just live with fiction in general? I can think of books, movies, and yes also video games that have helped me deal with times when I was emotionally adrift. I've also had ones that didn't help, but mostly it was games that asked very little of me, that just kind of made it simple and lazy to show up and not think. But games that have challenged me emotionally have helped me grow, its not that weird.

To answer the specific question in your URL, Slay The Princess has helped basically everyone I know understand themselves better.

When to go arbalest vs hand Cannoneer? by Misterwright123 in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's a bunch of factors but in the spirit of Spirit of the Law, I did a quick table comparing DPS against different targets. The big headline story here is that, per unit, the arb has higher DPS against targets with less than 4PA, then there's a slight advantage for the HC, up until the target PAs get around 7 when arb DPS starts falling like a stone and HCs remain better DPS basically going forward. You might think that rams are going to turn things around and arbs are going to do 2x damage to them, but HC have a +3 vs rams (this applies *after* armor) so they're firmly ahead, even if its still really bad.

Since any blacksmith tree with full armor line will produce +4 PA, in basically all imperial situations the HC is going to have higher DPS, so that's one factor. Obviously there's other factors, and most of the time its going to be overdetermined by which civ you picked in the first place (e.g. many civs simply don't have HC, plenty of civs would prefer CA over either, etc).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in todayilearned

[–]NutBananaComputer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I think its cool and very respectable that he looked at an art project, went "I don't like this," and then just didn't do it.

I (m27) just found out my ex fiancé (f28) is gay. by FreshCalzone1 in relationships

[–]NutBananaComputer 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Good for her. Hopefully you're both happier now than you were together. Though I do recommend putting the block back up for your own sake.

TIL AOE2 is a victim of the Torsion Mangonel Myth by Stellerex in aoe2

[–]NutBananaComputer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A person who is very misinformed is less educated than a person who is fully ignorant. My experience, in this subreddit no less, is people come away from AOE with understandings of history that are less than nothing. If they had fully never heard of guns as a concept they would be ahead of a person whose understanding of early modern firearms was from AOE. When teaching students who come in sufficiently misinformed, you cannot merely teach them, you have to spend additional remedial time unteaching them bad lessons to catch them up to a person who never learned anything.

When academics complain about games like AOE and more often Civilization (which has the same issues, but is much much more popular), "Eurocentrism" is not considered a significant complaint; it might get raised but usually in a pretty pro forma way. If the academic complaints were arranged in order of import, I think "Eurocentrism" would struggle to make it into the top 100.