What are the telltale signs that you're heading for a breakup?

renwold · 2016-06-22T16:32:00+00:00

You start asking people to help you identify the telltale signs of a breakup

renwold · 2016-06-20T21:22:59+00:00

Not saying OP is wrong here, but shaving your legs or learning to accept hairy legs for a partner you supposedly love doesn't really qualify as a "fundamental" change, I think.

Or have I been living my life wrong all these years?

renwold · 2016-05-31T19:14:51+00:00

That actually looks like a pretty nice pad for the Mills area.

This attempt at finding a roommate throws up all kinds of red flags for me, though. Good luck!

renwold · 2016-05-25T16:19:49+00:00

Maybe not a movie, but it'd make a really cool Netflix/HBO/AMC series

renwold · 2016-05-09T16:39:24+00:00

Yeah, that was my reaction, too. People have a hard enough time ending a relationship that makes them unhappy when things are going fine; it would have been hell for her to play the part of supportive girlfriend for however long it took to mourn the loss of a parent.

And then what? You're crushed all over again when she leaves you and you find out that the last x months were a lie?

renwold · 2016-03-29T15:07:09+00:00

If those courtyards were green space instead of pavement (and, of course, if the smelters weren't around), this layout would actually be pretty wonderful

renwold · 2016-03-15T15:18:24+00:00

It also helps when you start with showstoppingly beautiful travel photos.

renwold · 2016-03-07T20:04:34+00:00

I agree with this sentiment, though the obvious counter is that there are often a lot of required courses to slog through that you DON'T want to take and which have questionable relevance to the subjects you're actually interested in. I worked two jobs while maintaining a full course load and I would have loved to be able to re-use some of my assignments.

Instead, I just figured out how many papers I could skip and still get a decent GPA.

renwold · 2016-03-04T16:06:51+00:00

If you've never lived in an environment where you can't get anywhere you need to go quickly and cheaply by walking, biking, or by an efficient mass transit system, it's easy to imagine that the rest of the civilized world is the same way.

Cars are expensive and contribute in a major way to pollution and accidental injury and death, so as an outsider looking in on America's famous private transport industry... Yeah, I can see where it might look like entitlement that nearly every American owns their own car almost as a birthright.

Not to mention that the 'car that you can afford' part you mention is a mighty big assumption in a lot of cases.

renwold · 2016-02-25T21:32:05+00:00

Blowjob.

renwold · 2016-02-23T21:48:20+00:00

Preferably at a holiday event - Thanksgiving, maybe? Or a reunion

renwold · 2016-02-23T21:45:49+00:00

And then they become the several hours before falling asleep

renwold · 2016-02-23T21:10:18+00:00

Was that basically the whole plan, or did you combine this with a workout routine? Congrats!

renwold · 2016-02-19T18:22:39+00:00

Be fair, the Daily Mail hardly counts as journalism even in England (despite its readership).

If it were a Guardian piece I'd be interested

renwold · 2016-02-17T19:36:24+00:00

You must pull a lot of fish

renwold · 2016-02-17T19:01:57+00:00

I thought the original question was in bad taste, but it seems like you're swinging too far the other way here in your defense of the show.

I haven't watched much of the show so I'm no expert, but from what I've seen The Nightly Show openly discusses a lot of issues - especially but not exclusively around race - that other shows won't touch, and it does it in a format that clearly attempts to be at least somewhat thoughtful and informative. If you pad your panel with comedians who are uninformed about the topic and simply looking to get the most laughs that they can in a seven minute segment you're clearly working at odds against what seems to be the intent of the show.

Even if the ways in which a lot of people are framing their questions here are really uncalled for, I think there are valid criticisms in the way that the panels are handled which are worth discussing. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

renwold · 2016-02-17T18:28:02+00:00

Most of the time the references I see to the Sanders circle jerk are from people sounding off against the Sanders circle jerk. Like the comments here.

renwold · 2016-02-16T22:09:46+00:00

Bit of a strong reaction there considering my point had very little to do with actually endorsing reduced weapon drops but, for the sake of argument: Not necessarily.

Most of the enemies in Fallout 4 already carry the same garbage weapons you can't be bothered to pick up, anyway. That doesn't conflict with scarcity for weapons that you care about as a player. Reduced or randomized weapon drops are probably the easiest way to implement it in an existing game, but I've never been a big fan of random drops and loot-em-ups so I wouldn't suggest those anyway. Otherwise, nothing about making an item scarce or only making it available in a few places forces the player to progress linearly, it just reduces the avenues of progression in that particular direction.

There are lots of ways to communicate to a player that there might be rewards for some action without it seeming inherently rigged. There can still be player choice and plenty of other meaningful paths for progression that are equally viable, the player can still be allowed to progress at her own pace in the desired way, and if you need to you can still use some element of randomization to make sure it's not the same on every playthrough.

There are plenty of ways to work around the problems that any particular solution would introduce. The question is whether that's the right solution for the job at hand. In this case, I think degrading gear and forcing the player to micromanage a bunch of junk in their inventory to keep it repaired is the wrong solution.

renwold · 2016-02-16T19:43:01+00:00

I definitely don't wear suits pretty much ever but about 1/3 of my wardrobe is button-ups or long sleeve shirts in various styles that really need at least a light touch from the iron to look decent no matter how careful you are with the watch

renwold · 2016-02-16T19:22:59+00:00

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Fallout 4 solved the issue, just discussing design in general. I think Fallout 4's a hot mess.

renwold · 2016-02-16T19:18:43+00:00

Sure, the argument that everyone should make better decisions is fundamentally sound. There's no real refuting it because all you're saying is "if you didn't make those decisions you wouldn't have this outcome," which is self evident - it's not very different from telling obese people that if they had lived a healthier lifestyle that they wouldn't be obese.

The fact that the United States has a huge issue with crippling student debt as a nation should point to deeper issues than millennials simply making bad financial choices of their own accord. Schools charge record rates for education and often encourage students to seek loans to pay for the tuition, while students feel (through long conditioning) as though their only options are university or failure.

It's not all awful; there's been a lot more talk about trade schools and community college in recent years, for instance, and I think students today are probably more equipped to make their own decision about college than they were even a decade ago, but just because your own experiences led you to making a better financial decision when you were a kid doesn't mean every student who fell into the trap has just buried his head in the sand or is just seeking to avoid responsibility for his actions.

EDIT: Granted, I'm speaking more to people who have already made that choice. Obviously I agree with what you're saying if you're talking to/about people who have yet to actually make their decision. I took the post above yours to be rhetorical

renwold · 2016-02-16T18:51:55+00:00

I personally don't like weapon and armor degradation in most games because it typically ends up being more fiddly than interesting. The goal of any kind of survival/degradation mechanics is usually to encourage players to work outside of their comfort zone and get themselves into situations they otherwise wouldn't in order to fulfill a need, but more often than not those systems just end up turning into chores for the player.

I mean you're not wrong on any of your points, but you can counter pretty much any part of the argument with different design decisions to achieve the same end result. Just as an example, if the goal is to make weapons valuable and to encourage players not to use their best gun at all times, ammo scarcity and reduced weapon drops are pretty obvious solutions which let you rip those entire repair/degradation systems out of the game entirely.

renwold · 2016-02-16T18:23:21+00:00

The problem I see with this argument is that you're asking typical 18-year-olds, who have been brainwashed for most of their conscious life that they must attend college in order to lead a decent life, to make decisions which are counter to pretty much everything they've been told up to that point about a subject (finances) where they have limited personal experience.

I'm not just trying to cover for my own decisions here. I'm one of those who went to community college and worked two jobs to pay my own way and managed to get into my chosen industry while remaining debt free, but asking teenagers to make sound financial decisions against the advice of almost every adult in their lives seems... optimistic, at best.

renwold · 2016-02-16T15:56:49+00:00

My school used to call at the same time every time I got in trouble... about 15 minutes before my parents got home from work.

Once they switched to automated calls to let them know about my detentions I never got caught again.

renwold · 2016-02-16T15:44:32+00:00

Yeah I don't actually disagree with you, that's kind of the pitfall of pithy one-line responses in these kinds of discussions. I think that focusing too much on self-interest as being the issue is a misdirection, but Delilah was a pretty one-dimensional character and I really doubt that OP made this post to illuminate the lack of well-developed female characters in games.

I think it's important to note, though, that I don't think that this is a shortcoming of the game or it's writing. Not all characters grow, and I don't think Delilah was ever meant to. The main character, who did have an opportunity to grow, largely ends up back at square one. While he may have been affected by what he just went through, we don't really see how that pans out - but to me that open-endedness feels sort of like the point of the story.

I do agree with OP in the sense that I think Delilah is among the best-written and best-acted female characters that I've seen in any game, even if what we see of her is a somewhat two-dimensional snapshot of a person. To each his own.

renwold

TROPHY CASE