• 7 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • cacher does, but cache as in “cache-toi !” (go hide!) and “je me cache” (I’m hiding) are pronounced “cash”.

    Besides, “correct” pronunciation in a different language is pretty meaningless. The word may have come from French but we’re speaking English, not French.

    Also, it might not be a loan word so much as a legacy-of-foreigners-taking-over word (c.f. the Normand invasion of Britain), which doesn’t tend to help the language’s users care about respecting the “original” pronunciation. I’m not certain when exactly cachet entered English.






  • Pretty good review!

    I’ve not yet been to all the new planets. What I have seen lines up well with the characterization of Wube strategically disabling the things in the base game / on the starting planet (“Nauvis”) that I grew accustomed to. Instead of simply adding ever more lengthy production line recipes, they have forced us to approach many existing production lines in a drastically different way.

    In the base game, you can play around with ratios and targeted throughput, but you almost always will have the same machines crafting the same recipes, in the same order. The most significant decision when designing a production line is often whether to bring an item in by belt or instead bring its components and craft it adjacently.

    Space Age shakes that up by introducing several new choices/decisions to make. There are alternate recipes to be unlocked (similar in function to Satisfactory, without needing to hunt for hard drives on a map). There are now multiple “looping” recipes (the input items can be part of the output). Most notably, which recipes are available to you depends on where you are building - not only planetside vs in-orbit, but planetside vs in-orbit across all planets. The planets have different resources on them, and their orbits contain different ratios of resource-laden asteroids. Same goes for the routes between planets!

    I was very afraid that the extension would feel like “more of the same, just longer and more tedious”. That’s the experience I’ve had with most overhaul mods I’ve tried, and notably why I never bothered paying Space Exploration (whose author ended up working with Wube on the Space Age extension). So far my experience has been the exact opposite. It really feels like every single new “thing” feeds back into the core gameplay by “rejuvenating” it in new ways.


  • Wow, I didn’t realize that C.S. Lewis was riffing off of 1 Corinthians: 13 when he wrote (emphasis mine)

    When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.





  • There’s a scene in the game where the character is taking a shower. The shower stall is glass, and the glass is frosted from around ankle height to neck height.

    I haven’t played the game myself, just came across the scene on YouTube several years ago, so I don’t know how justifiable the choice of the scene is in the first place. At least, from a technical point of view, it makes sense to me that they modeled the full nude body so that the frosted glass would blur what we “see” in a realistic way. It’s a lot easier to model something and then have the glass blur it, instead of directly modelling the blurred version for example.

    Personally I think most of the creep factor comes from the fact that this character is explicitly modeled after a live human being who presumably didn’t sign up for that.



  • So, a few things:

    • many of the men accused have stated that the husband pitched the idea as “this is a kink she really enjoys, being drugged and then having sex with strangers”. (Of course they never pretend to have met her in person beforehand to get her consent for the whole thing in the first place)
    • there are some that have said “what’s the big deal? It’s his wife, he gets to decide to lend her out to his friends.” (!)

    I don’t know how many of the first group are being honest, but the existence of both can give you an idea of how bad our culture used to be towards rape, and still is to a large extent.

    There’s a pretty striking moment of archival footage, from the 60s or 70s I think, of some french dude being asked in the street “and you, have you ever raped a woman?” And his response is a very matter-of-fact “well, of course!”.

    People don’t want to believe that rapists are, in many ways, just ordinary people. So they both refuse to see it in others, and refuse to see themselves as capable of even contributing to the problem. Hopefully this can be the wakeup call many men here in France need to realize they must push back when their friends make rape jokes, for ex.











  • Some choice excerpts:

    Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

    “These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”

    She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”

    And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

    But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

    “There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ "

    My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.