If you want a pokémon game without new things, why want a new pokémon game? That doesn’t really make sense to me. I don’t think most of the gimmicks they’ve made have throughout the gens have been very good, but I appreciate them for the splash of novelty and I just ignore the ones I don’t like because I know they’re not permanent. I almost never tera-ed my mons in violet, I just grinded levels and planned my party like I have for 20 years.

By open world, I meant being able to travel through most routes and towns without a black screen or loading screen.

That said I wasn’t making a quality statement. I was comparing the most recent game with the first and I don’t know how there would be a significant market for a much more clunky version of an existing game with a huge chunk of features removed.

I definitely think the quality on the 3D models could be better, but I think the move to 3D has made the game more immersive and things like the size variations are charming details that makes “your” pokémon feel more unique. I was mainly questioning whether a product like that would actually sell well enough to be worth the effort, not making any statement of which is superior.

I’m not totally sure what that would add to the experience. The core battles are still the same, just with more added on. I like pixel graphics and old gameboy music, but I don’t see why people would buy it. It’s seems strange considering it would be the same game as before, but less.

Pokémon: Violet except: it’s 2D, scarcely animated, without double-battles, without shinies, without several types, without terastallizing, without the open world, without the rideable legendary, and so on.

That was me imagining it if it were limited to gen 1 gameplay. Maybe there’s a case to remake regions in like a style like emerald, but I still think it’s just a game that already exists but with less.

If you don’t know about them already, you should look into pokémon rom-hacks. Some are kinda like what you described, but they add their own twist like changing the story, adding new types, or adding newer pokémon or mechanics. A lot of them are really well made too.

The Binding of Isaac is already a famous title that has influenced so much of the roguelike/twin-stick-shooter genre. This game has permanently altered my taste in video games.

The game I’ve enjoyed as much as TBoI is Tiny Rogues. It’s much smaller, but still fantastic with rich build variety while never losing the need for skill and good reactions.

Stolen Realm is a turn-based tactical RPG that takes place in procedurally generated dungeons that play like little roguelike runs with overarching character progression. It’s multiplayer, but you can also just control up to six characters on your own too. It does eventually feel pretty repetitive and there are points that seem impossible to win, but it’s a unique game where you continually build that roguelike power fantasy and just progressively become more powerful to the point of it feeling game breaking.

Going Under is an adorable roguelite where you fight through various levels themed around a blend of corporate stereotypes and fantasy creatures like a crypto company run by skeletons or a delivery company run by goblins. The combat is a vaguely souls-like with an emphasis on weight and timing, but your weapons are office items found in each room that break down very quickly.

Webbed is a cute puzzle/platformer where you play as a little spider on a quest to save your spider boyfriend. The main gimmick is that you can shoot webs to create platforms, pull things, attach things to each other and more. It’s a short and sweet game that’s still decently challenging. It’s the only non-roguelike indie I recommend and it’s that good that I love it despite it being in a genre I rarely play and almost never finish.

Where I’m from, the tourists are usually nicer and more respectful than the locals.

Something I rarely see brought up is specifically the edgelord to right wing pipeline. When I was a kid, it was essentially standard for any boy online to try to be super edgy. Adolescents and teens just have a natural urge for rebellion.

The problem comes when kids think edgy and shock value humor is their favorite thing, but more mature online users reject that behavior and exclude these kids. These kids feel misunderstood and are drawn to figures and role models that accept what they like.

I’ve met a bunch of younger, “conservative”, incel types recently and they’ve all been edgelords who found their own little community instead of growing up. They largely have no ideology in the beginning but slowly absorb manosphere bullshit and over time they become less “ironic”.

The thing that got me to stop being edgy was joining the swim team and having my friend group go from edgelords to gay swimmers. I developed a ton of respect for them and they were my teammates; it completely changed my mind without me having to “conform” to the things I wanted to rebel against. I don’t really know how to get that across to some many kids that get sucked up into this madness though.

I felt that way for a while, then I found out those people didn’t care about me as much as I thought. I’ve been holding on to my anger at that to keep me going for a year now. I dunno what’ll happen once that burns out.

Nosgoth. An asymmetrical, team based shooter where you played as either vampires or vampire hunters. The vampires had more health and mobility but were only melee while the hunters had range and utility. It was buggy and imbalanced and I loved it and clocked like 500 hours before they shut it down.

Ah, yeah I got my sense of smell knocked outta me when I was a kid. I’ve read about some kind of treatment to help people train their sense of smell. It came up a lot in some anosmic groups I was during the pandemic. I never looked too much into it because there’s no point, but it might be worth a trip to an ENT in your case.

I’m anosmic too and I had the same experience in college. I never had to deal with “fresh” milk ever being not so fresh though. Although after reading your post, I think I’ll get a pitcher for milk so i can pour out the bottle when I get it to double check for chunks. You could try that too, but I can’t say how well it works.

I don’t think I can taste if milk is sour, but I’ve developed a tolerance to food that’s gone a bit bad anyway.

The tag I played melee under was “frenchfrymaster” which was stupid. So I changed over to my in-game nickname “FRYD” which was supposed to be “fried”, but a few years later I found out it’s the norwegian and danish word for joy and I started using a bastardization of their pronunciation.

There’s certainly a strained mobility in the country. I said it was a “caste system” primarily because from my limited understanding of the Indian caste system. Where people are born into their caste and experience an entirely separate culture from the other castes. It’s possible that I misinterpreted what classism is and that’s a part of it as well.

That’s a good quote and I’ll have to take a read of the book, but I actually think this perspective is actually part of the problem I’m talking about. To the eye of a famous accomplished author, it would appear that people below them glorify and aspire to the people of his class.

I mainly take issue with the gross oversimplification of all people below his financial status as poor and self hating. This was perhaps true at the time it was written, but I think the situation has changed since 1969 if this was true then. I think the problem isn’t really some kind of nebulous cultural inconsistency, but it’s a systemic failure in media like a said previously.

Middle-ish class people don’t talk about how poor people deserve to be poor; not even in the very conservative area I live in. They just don’t talk about them at all. That is except in the context of a news story they heard and every news story only covers poverty in two contexts: crime and societal decay. Poor people and their communities are only shown as dangerous things that people should avoid. This is unfortunately true in a lot of ways, but not the whole story and it turns every poor person into a potential junkie, gang member, or crazy person who should be avoided.

A lot of people here are looking for a philosophical answer, but I personally think it’s really just a class issue. Most people in the US don’t like to hear it, but our class structure is practically a caste system.

People generally despise the people of other classes (or castes), above or below. This is reinforced by segregation and media. Ultra Rich > Rich > Upper Class > Middle Class > Lower Class > Welfare Class > Homeless. All these groups live in separate communities with specific media environments that vilify the “others”. These groups only ever interact in ways with clear hierarchy. This is only exacerbated with the death of third spaces.

Having been middle class and sliding down the ladder to the point of imminent homelessness, I’ve been struck by the fact that the distribution of assholes for each group is pretty much the same. Over and over again, I’ve seen nearly no contact between classes to dispel the images projected by each class’s respective media ecosystem.

This country is so fundamentally segregated and divided that I really don’t know how it can be changed. There is really no clean and fair way to actually inform people about the similarities between people.

I’ve actually never tried brave search. Which is kinda funny because I started using DDG when brave came out and it was the default search engine.

What do you mean by slow though? Like just the webpage loading or the time it takes you to get good results? I’ve never noticed any load time, but I’ve always had a few tweaked content blockers running and that may affect my perspective.

I just did a quick read on it on it. “Work” is the application of force over time in the direction the object is moving. Pushing a shopping cart for example is work, because you have to constantly apply force to it.

From what I’ve read, it seems that magnetic force doesn’t do work because it doesn’t apply force in the direction the object moves. Magnetic force only “deflects” or changes the direction of an object with an existing velocity. It’s only a deflection because the force applied is always perpendicular to the direction of the velocity.

To use the previous shopping cart example, picture a shopping cart that already has a forward velocity that passes a magnet. The magnet only applies a force to the side of the cart towards the magnet. This doesn’t push the cart itself, but changes the direction of its velocity towards the magnet.

I’ve been using DDG exclusively for something like 8 years. It works great for regular text search and I use bing for image searches. I really don’t understand the reluctance of people to switch to it. To me, Google has been borderline unusable garbage for a long time.