I’m curious what about Chrono Trigger makes you think it’s a mess.  While I’m 100% with you about nostalgia blurring our perception of games (for instance, my favorite Final Fantasy game is IV, which had an awful localization and the story was so full of poorly-used tropes that it practically oozes with predictable…

40 meters is a HUGE area. There is zero reason for them to make the radius that big. Where I live in Texas (a small suburb of Austin), my neighborhood is right next to the City Hall, which also has a small shopping strip on the same property. The City Hall is a gym, and one of the businesses is a pokestop. Both are…

The thing about nihilism, or perhaps more appropriately existentialism, that often gets me is that everyone seems to only grasp the first part of the equation. The core idea behind both nihilism and exisentialism is that there is no objective meaning to anything, no inherent purpose or truth in reality. The universe…

In fairness, before MK8, there was no reliable way to escape the blue shell at all.

I don’t think she “let” him do anything. This situation was spectacularly fucked - I guarantee you this woman probably thought that if she tried to force him out or pissed him off, things could easily turn violent. So she got her boyfriend to come help and just tried to keep this dude calm while waiting.

I agree with you, though it probably is no surprise given that I’m an Eagle Scout. While I love the GSA, especially their focus on empowering girls in broader society, the two programs are not really in any way equivalent. The BSA, for all its problems, can be an amazingly worthwhile program, especially with regards…

I’m glad I’m not the only one who found the flight/swimming controls to be horrendous. The feedback I gave during the alpha was entirely about how horrible it felt to try to fly or swim. I’m sorry, but trying to emulate joystick behavior (i.e. the automatic return to neutral when you let go) with a mouse (which you…

Yeah of course, I don’t think that’s weird at all. Especially for a game where your primary engagement is actually going to be inhabiting a character and making meaningful choices, that’d be something I’d want, too. However, I agree with you that the chances of seeing a AAA game like that are low, because frankly…

I’m not the poster to whom your question was directed but I am about 72 hours into the game, so I think I can answer you. Every character that you get a romance option for is a potential romantic partner. Some of them you more or less just have sex with, others are more romantic, but there isn’t a single time where…

God yes, this show can’t die fast enough.  I’ve hated it since its very first season.

I don’t know if I agree with you on the first part, though I’m with you on the whole biological drives thing. Caveat: I hate BBT so I did not watch this episode, and am solely going off of what Hazel wrote, but I’m assuming IVF, not more, ahem, traditional methods of fertilization. If it’s the latter, then the rest…

Well, I should clarify - generally speaking, Blizzard almost never bans an account for no reason - the false positive rate on those things is very low, but this means that a lot of legitimate accounts who get hacked get banned. What I meant above by the 10% are people whose bans were upheld. In your case, I would’ve…

I agree with you. While I’m sure there are occasionally people for whom the BBB works, when I worked at Blizzard doing CS, the vast majority of all BBB complaints we heard about were the result of people who either disagreed with our policies or were misinformed. Like, “my 12 year old got banned because he got hacked…

As a male consumer of porn, I have to say that your friends likely are fooling themselves rather than outright lying to you. I mean, I don’t know your friends, but I don’t think they’re actively lying to you because they are secretly turned on by it. Rather, what I mean is that it’s because it’s so ubiquitous it’s…

You’re absolutely right - at some point, whether or not forces outside our control are determining our actions becomes moot. I’ve always found arguments for strict non-determinism lacking, and strict determinism seems to lead to conclusions that appear absurd, so I guess I’ve always been drawn to compatibilism. I like…

If we are simply slaves to deterministic forces outside of our control, then doesn’t this imply that we should simply dissolve society in its entirety in favor of pure hedonism? After all, what philosophical basis do we have to attempt to force order on society? Why do we have laws, if no one is truly responsible for…

I’m not sure the point of this article was leading to the deterministic conclusion you draw here. Even Sartre’s existentialism was ultimately a liberating philosophy - there is no external meaning, but the conclusion was that our purpose is to create our own meaning, our own fulfillment, rather than a denial of…

I’m sorry to hear that - I’ve never heard of any responsible doctors who say that it’s ok for people under 18 to smoke weed regularly. Most information I’ve read usually says it can heavily affect developing brains. I hope your godson gets the help he needs to get his life back on track.

It sounds like it’s a combination of the two. I’m 34, and until October of 2017, I basically smoked every day for about 10 years, and I never experienced anything that you or Rich described. I would occasionally get fits of paranoia, but they were usually mild. In fact, I usually score pretty high on neuroticism in…

I have to agree with you.  I don’t think it’s just rose-tinted glasses - I genuinely think SoM was a great game when it came out, considering the environment of games back then.  But today, it’s way too grindy, and misses some basic creature comforts and conveniences that we’ve come to expect from games.  That said,…