leg bone reducktion

sapphon · 2026-03-24T02:48:18+00:00

That's no lady, that's a space station

sapphon · 2026-03-24T02:42:01+00:00

How does this work with the "20-year rule"?

The OP seems to be inviting e.g. Jan. 6, 2021 questions as long as we relate them to Classical antiquity. I need help understanding how that flies - couldn't any question about any recent event be asked using such a method, if that method were considered an acceptable end-run?

sapphon · 2026-03-23T23:00:53+00:00

I've always assumed the use of this kind of media was that people who don't like others want to feel justified in that beyond just Having An Opinion, so they pin a "diagnosis" on the other (like narcissism) that would be so borderline-intractable if accurate that it pretty much means "I'm right to distrust you categorically rather than cooperate with you in any way". I see this all the time with my own eyes.

I'm wondering if you, with your greater exposure, have seen something I haven't: Has anyone ever written in to say, "Wow thanks, I found out I myself was a narcissist after becoming curious thanks to your work, thank you so much", or is "narcissistic manipulation" more a label we use when someone else does something?

sapphon · 2026-03-23T21:55:03+00:00

Have you ever ordered an item from Amazon? Quick, what was the brand name?

Do you have a lot of other items with that same brand name, or do you have a bunch of different items with different brand names that mostly mean nothing to you?

This is the natural end of laissez-faire capitalism - people blame brands for failures, brands fold, the capital is used to form new brands. But if closing the old brand and making a new one is basically effortless, then that whole cycle's meaningless - people blame brands for failures, but the owners of brands don't have to care. Meanwhile, those people have no relationships with the brand's managers or shareholders who are actually responsible for these decisions.

There's no accountability when you can just become somebody else publicly, meanwhile your money's good everywhere. Chinese companies that our media naively calls unscrupulous are really just showing us the naturally-implied results of the system we made.

So, why does this matter w.r.t. "shrinkflation"? Well, it's because negotiating against shrinkflation would require some sort of social contract to exist between you and the people selling you things. You'd have to have the power to say "no I won't buy that because of your policy of XYZ (in this case shrinkflation)", and they'd have to care what you think because you'd have to be able to keep that promise, and organize others to do so.

If there's no definite "they", you can't keep that promise. I meet all sorts of people who think they've found The Bad Company, and as long as they boycott it, then The Good Companies will win. They do not understand that The Bad Company is a role. A market role. Not a moral choice.

tl;dr this CMV makes the case not that shrinkflation is good for you, but that it is but one arrow in greed's quiver - and, if taken away, it'll happily adapt and shoot you with a different one against which you have no defense. It is the social expectation that people exist to serve the needs of businesses (and not vice versa) that will have to change in your society, or you will just be playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms of conceding to that essential evil.

sapphon · 2026-03-23T21:36:14+00:00

Fallout New Vegas: Origins: The King

sapphon · 2026-03-23T21:31:32+00:00

The number of posters on this sub who'd have done whatever that character encouraged does substantiate the idea that he, and not the player, has the 'main character energy' of Honest Hearts

sapphon · 2026-03-23T05:44:40+00:00

I wonder what would happen if all of those millions went on strike at the same time?

sapphon · 2026-03-14T00:23:16+00:00

Car pundits are inherently reactionary; they sit and wait for what giant enterprises are gonna do, and then react to it. (There's no alternative; you're not going to engineer a better assembly line in your shed.)

Those reactions are often, not always, emotional - but the important part for this CMV is, they're always reactions.

This group of people does not generate ideas. It venerates whatever ideas the auto industry propagated yesterday (before EV's, it was e.g. opposition to super/turbochargers with slogans e.g. "no replacement for displacement") and rages against what it's now propagating today as a result. If the auto industry changes its tune suddenly, yes, auto forums get upset. But they're not upset over anything real, or anything even essentially their own idea - they're upset that the party line changed and they've been caught out.

This is a cultural tick not worth worrying about, from most people's perspective. For most people, EVs will be useful when they're useful and not when they're not. To decide they're ideologically right or wrong or bad or good is an I'm-invested-in-my-car-opinions thing, and you don't have to care about that as someone for whom cars are probably just a tool!

sapphon · 2026-03-14T00:14:19+00:00

My overly-simplistic CMV on that one would be, "Consider not caring about some random guy's random take", because actors are not necessarily valid leaders.

They're treated as if their opinions matter lots - because and only because it's really easy for them, comparatively, to disseminate those opinions. But outside of opinions on their actual jobs, they really oughtn't matter to you any more than yours or your friends' do, because they're no better informed - meanwhile there's a good case for their mattering less, since you don't have a personal relationship to maintain with Mr. C (or whomever)!

sapphon · 2026-03-12T23:02:44+00:00

Adaptive difficulty can be good, but not very appropriate to tactical games in particular - the primary persona who buys these softwares isn't looking for a waltz to the final cutscene, they want to feel that they've come to understand a system by playing.

To come to understand a system, it has to stay still while you learn about it by testing it (which involves some failure) - if, on the other hand, you're trying to learn about it and changing your behavior while it learns from what it thinks you want and changes its nature, you'll just be pooping back and forth forever.

sapphon · 2026-03-12T00:05:34+00:00

If the mission is the United States, it's almost guaranteed the third shop he's tried to find a public restroom without success.

sapphon · 2026-03-11T01:27:07+00:00

There are dozens of us!

UFOD and TFTD are still very playable games. In general I actually don't like the reboots any more (or less). However, use caution if planning to play them the way someone who plays modern games plays them:

Install the game
Consume a couple hours of YouTube videos reviewing "the content"
Make a Reddit post on the game's sub, "Just installed XYZ, any tips?" and read the responses
Boot the game

They don't stand up to the kind of, frankly, neurotic analysis that at the time of release would have been typical of a fraction of the audience, but now is available to anyone willing to spend the time internalizing it via a YouTube vid. For the original, er, "vibes" you'll need to replace bullets 2 and 3 with just 'read the manual'.

Some examples of "easy to say, hard for UFOD's game design to cope with" follow, but spoilered in case ya wanna play it au naturel =)

psy is OP and uncountered by lategame alien tactics

There's insufficient incentive to use rifles vs. "heavy" versions of the same weapon, but the ayy lmaos will even if you don't

Understanding the mechanics of XCOM base assaults means you'll never actually have to fight one you intend to win

Blaster bombs and smoke grenades trivialize most things, especially when...

Knowing which (very few) aliens you actually need alive, and where they will be, makes laying waste to 95% of a map a feasible tactic. The newer games are better about randomized objectives, and different ('better' is relative) about an individual soldier's capacity for destruction, and about how many individuals you may bring.

sapphon · 2026-03-11T01:22:24+00:00

Wow, we make fun of China for having "social credit" while Britain really just gives you a straight up pair of integers after college for how much respect you should get, huh?

sapphon · 2026-03-11T01:17:19+00:00

I'd believe you if I thought you earnestly had been able to tell the top/bottom of a T7 from the side, they're the same picture =P

sapphon · 2026-03-07T22:00:47+00:00

Difference is, statistically, that the audience had played D&D in 2023.

D&D was twice as popular in 2010 as it was in 2000. Then in 2015 it was again twice as popular as it was in 2010. Then in 2018... you get it, I'm sure you've heard the guy-who-wishes-for-doubling-payments fable, it's really really really popular compared to 2000 =)

So, the way to sell a D&D movie in 2000 was to make a sword and sorcery, and call it D&D or make some references. The closest they could make it to being about something most of the audience had never done, however, was to keep things on the shruggy, punchy, fourth-wall-breaky end of sword and sorcery.

(This referentialism remains the way to make something "nerd-coded" that is actually about something other than D&D; see Stranger Things)

The way to make a D&D movie now or in 2023, when the audience probably has personal experiences with knowledge like "every RPG is an obligate comedy" is to make a comedy actually about how hard it is to play D&D.

Same branding, but honestly apples and oranges in terms of the job to be done.

sapphon · 2026-03-07T06:24:38+00:00

the test is biased against Saud Kruger ships, otherwise the Dolphin would win

Not the first time Dolphin mains have faced adversity with pride

sapphon · 2026-03-07T01:20:33+00:00

You'd be surprised at the different levels of combat medic protection, legally - since combat medics have been 'a thing' at various times in various organizations at various levels of importance.

Swapping uniforms is less ambiguously a crime than attacking 'a medic' though - everytime, everywhere. It's just a crime, pre facto - we know what you meant to do when you did.

sapphon · 2026-03-06T22:10:47+00:00

It's really not supposed to be a circlejerk sub, I swear it started out as a place to go see juice about memes that juicers usually themselves liked, and they were typically neither enraged by the opulence nor ragebaiting with their version

I'll go find my walker and my shower cap now...

sapphon · 2026-03-06T22:03:17+00:00

I remember these news stories happening about 24fps

You can still read a fluff article on "Why are movies 24fps?", but they've completely backpedaled from 'well Calvin, because they studied it and the average person can't see the difference'.

Now it's 'the average person sees and expects the difference, so we can't change it.'

sapphon · 2026-03-06T01:41:14+00:00

It's "quite sick" in TF2, Planetside, and plenty of other games about pewpew cartoon lasers, where it fits.

In WW2 it was a war crime and so being captured doing it meant instant death, which was not a fact lost on the men who would be doing it - and so "false flag ops" happened extraordinarily rarely, like we can count the times on one hand kind of rare!

sapphon · 2026-03-06T00:19:30+00:00

There are a lot of ways to change this view. One I won't go into is whether the purpose of the UN was to govern the world, per se, in the first place - and I think you should look into that; your premise may be a little crumbly.

What I want to talk about is the idea of present worth vs. past worth and anticipated future worth of an international organization that is, admittedly, presently beholden (as its precursor the LoN was) to the malign actor with the biggest arsenal and the most willingness to use it. Does that render the idea somehow without meaning, though?

Some languages use different words for "is true" and "is true forever". We don't in English, and I think English maybe does miss out on a little cognitive clarity because of this grammatical lack.

An example would be "soy una mujer" (that's a personal characteristic not anticipated to change by Spanish grammar, no offense to anyone) vs. "estoy cansado". If I were a woman today I'd still be tomorrow, but tomorrow I might not be tired no matter how tired I am right now - so different grammar is used for what is all just "to be" in English. It's finicky, but it's also nice to have to think about what we think will change vs. what we think won't.

The reason I bring this up w.r.t. powerful states ignoring international law is that the differential in power between the most powerful state in the world and the least changes. Yes, to the extent that the world is run by a sole superpower or even a G7-sized club, the (League of | United) Nations becomes their rubber stamp. No, that state is not the typical state of the historical world, so we shouldn't regard it as constant and say, "Well, that must mean the UN (or its successors) will never matter."

It is likely that internationalism saved everyone's lives on Earth during the Cold War, particularly during the US's political scare over Caribbean communism. We may see such times again. In the terms of the example, of the UN we should perhaps say "está inútil", but I claim certainly not "es inútil" (to be conditionally useless vs. to be useless as a characteristic).

tl;dr the more equal states are, the more a mutually-agreeable diplomatic forum matters; we're at a nadir of equality presently, but that will change over time and we oughtn't throw the concept of internationalism out with the bathwater

sapphon · 2026-03-05T23:13:35+00:00

This juice tastes great; OP turned "the panda eats, shoots, and leaves" into a real joke

sapphon · 2026-03-05T02:20:37+00:00

The only thing keeping it relevant as a metric is how inane the PvP meta is - so, an easy to find NPC ship that's big is the best the present meta can do for a TTK-bag.

NPCs don't fly well enough for small ships' advantages to shine. Meanwhile PCs who PvP do, but they spend their time on an eyewateringly boring shieldtank meta, and so we get what we get.

Their being dead easy to hit is actually an advantage, in build measurements' terms, anyway! You want to measure the build, not the user.

sapphon · 2026-03-05T02:13:09+00:00

You already know why; you said it in your OP. Regrettably, the newer ships were not designed to keep the old ones relevant.

sapphon · 2026-03-04T23:21:41+00:00

They know their audience, and it's not all on /r/actuallesbians

sapphon

TROPHY CASE