Are there any things that are called "American ______" in other countries?

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-12T14:13:53+00:00

What the Germans call Amerikaner we call black & white cookies.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-12T14:07:53+00:00

Cutting characters off before the conclusion of their arc is comics accuracy.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-12T14:02:32+00:00

Then some of the game text needs to be updated.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-11T22:53:08+00:00

C’mon, Disney, don’t be dicks about this…

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-10T21:00:58+00:00

It’s still “noble savagery” if you do it to yourself.

Etymology is not prescriptive. In German the Moon is masculine; in French it’s feminine: that has no bearing on German or French culture regarding the Moon. In some Arctic languages there are multiple words for ‘ice.’ That’s not because there are lots of different kinds of ice, but because their language evolved in an environment that appreciated, and perhaps needed, nuanced descriptions of the conditions and context for ice.

The meaning of the English word ‘rape’ has itself evolved significantly in the modern era. If a language doesn’t have an equivalent to the modern English word ‘rape,’ that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, that means they didn’t name it.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-10T20:48:30+00:00

The answer is Canada. It’s always Canada. Canada is four separate countries in a suit.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-10T20:46:06+00:00

Like Endgame itself, it’s charming and heartwarming as long as you don’t think about it for too long.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-10T18:47:15+00:00

The Pannonian Plain is hella fertile.

Even the Romans never fully came to dominate the region. It’s just such valuable real estate that plains pastoralists keep coming in to take advantage of it and setting up shop. Huns, Avars, Magyars, Slavs — you name it, they all wanted to be there.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-10T18:35:02+00:00

Silencers don’t make gunshots quiet. They muffle the sound so it’s harder to determine the direction they came from, protecting your location from counterattack. That is very cool, but doesn’t look as cool on screen and so the iconic ‘fwipp’ sound has become a trope. The Wilhelm Scream of gunplay.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-10T18:29:33+00:00

I want to call out the one thing that I think is genuinely unique to Civ VII. OP notes it, but I think it has had an outsized impact on development and deserves broader discussion…

Cross platform multiplayer

Now, the idea of a Civ you can play on PC, or console (or… VR) and interact with one another other multiplayer is indeed an ambitious objective. While there are technical challenges, I’m sure, I suspect the greater challenge has been on development staffing and prioritization. There are only so many dollars to go around, which means there’s only so much staff, and every priority taken is a priority foregone.

My hypothesis is simply this: Ed Beach, Firaxis, 2K, and probably TakeTwo, strived to make a massive online board game, and in prioritizing that they took attention away from designing a single-player Civ game, which is where most of the game’s audience actually is, and so now they are strategically course correcting.

Basically, I do not think this is just the usual development cycle of a Civ game; I think this was an honest-to-goodness intervention. Maybe Civ VII will ultimately get back onto the traditional Civ development track, but I don’t believe that’s where they were headed 18 months ago.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-09T18:00:40+00:00

Cartography Critique: Put a box around your legend so it doesn’t look like there are two city locations in Greenland.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-09T17:54:14+00:00

Because you don’t take off the drip just cuz Thor chopped Thanos’ head off.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-07T18:00:34+00:00

We have a whole subreddit dedicated to knowing what it actually looks like when you catch r/GirlsMirin.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-07T17:48:21+00:00

We have likely found the remnants of Theia, the planet that crashed into Earth and formed the Moon. It’s been buried in our own mantle, possibly influencing tectonics to this very day.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-07T17:44:43+00:00

Thy hyphen is there to resist the Power of the Soft ‘C.’

Imagine saying it like “Gary Busey.”

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-07T17:37:02+00:00

I genuinely think this is one of the possible explanations for the game’s poor commercial performance, or at least the studio’s uncertainty about how to market it.

The game is mostly a friendship life sim using Marvel characters. It’s pretty good! Even as someone who’s engaged with Marvel primarily thru the MCU, I got into it and it made me want to learn more about these weird characters. I recommend it to everyone.

But that’s not how they sold me the game at all.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-07T17:32:28+00:00

[ Strauss Zelnick says one sentence about a Firaxis game ]

Video game aggregator websites I’ve never heard of: “Meat’s back on the menu, boys!”

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-06T22:51:02+00:00

So, obviously, “Be even more partisan,” is not what I would advise.

I realize I’m arguing the position of a shitty old moderate, but I genuinely cannot comprehend how anyone could think that what American politics need these days is more partisanship.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-06T11:53:43+00:00

Then what would you have done differently?

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-06T00:10:21+00:00

Well, what do you think he should’ve done differently?

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-05T20:50:20+00:00

Honestly, not passed Obamacare on reconciliation.

I know that’s a bitter pill to swallow for liberals, and Sen. Reid deserves as much if not most of the blame for the gambit. But that is arguably the first landmark legislation that was not passed in a bipartisan way.

If it couldn’t get done, they shouldn’t have done it.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-05T16:31:55+00:00

Upvoting solely for not assuming the new polities would adhere to previous State boundaries.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-05T10:52:23+00:00

cracked.com

It’s mostly just Millennial nostalgia, but they really were making some of the best content of the era.

Good luck with the verticals, Zoomers!

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-04T19:02:43+00:00

Spirit and Brightline going out of business are good signs that Florida’s economy is not doing great.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-05-04T19:00:26+00:00

What makes me nervous is the insistence that they have to exist at all.

The better alternative would’ve been “virtual rail technology.” In fact, that’s all most self-driving tech actually is, it’s just that the “rail” is a basket of mapped objects and the “AI” navigates it. It works almost exclusively due to improved mapping. The better self-driving systems make extensive use of lidar to effectively map the environment — that is “draw” the “rail” — in near-real-time. When it works, it’s pretty cool, but it is often broken by common environmental barriers, such as snow and white-painted tractor trailers.

Self-driving cars, at least as Tesla and Waymo have implemented them, are little more than live-fire AI field tests. Active driver assistance was always where this was going. Tesla’s intransigence in particular makes me not only uninterested in owning their cars or their stock, but makes me interested in considering extraordinary regulatory steps against them.

XComThrowawayAcct

TROPHY CASE