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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Definitely agree with a lot of the listed games but wanted to add some I haven’t seen yet:

    • Monster Hunter: Rise. The Monster Hunter series’ most recent main series instalment sees you playing as a Hunter of massive creatures, carving them up and using the parts to craft stronger and better equipment. Multiplayer only available with multiple switches, but is still a very rewarding solo game.

    • Cadence of Hyrule. A Zelda and Crypt of the NecroDancer mashup that sees you play as Link or Zelda in a musical world where everything moves at the speed of the beat of the music. Very novel and interesting game, but relatively short.

    • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. This is a true roguelike and a remake of the first game in the offshoot Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series made by the same creators of the Shiren the Wanderer series. Gameplay is turn-based and grid-based, with randomly generated dungeons for you to conquer, and you play as a human who’s been turned into Pokémon alongside many others you can befriend.



  • What you are suggesting is cornering an animal, and then saying “Hey, we should corner it more because it’s acting aggressively.” And then acting surprised when it attacks you.

    I really like this line of logic because it highlights how the insipid manosphere’s propaganda directly targets the most animalistic part of the brain - the amygdala - and uses fear and anger to propel antisocial behaviour much as a cornered animal lashes out against its captor. It’s a very apt metaphor beyond the simplistic reasoning it suggests.


  • it’s more than analog cigarettes

    I assume you mean less and yeah, that would make sense on the face of it. It just seems as though there’s no empirical evidence that nicotine specifically causes skin damage - only evidence that it causes blood vessel constriction. Do you have a source that shows a causal relationship from constricting blood vessels to poor skin health? That again would make sense to me, but I just don’t like to base my positions on assumptions - I’m a raw data sort of person.

    There’s definitely no world where nicotine is harmless - it causes very clear harms beyond simple addiction that we’ve known for some time - but it’s important to be accurate around how much safer nicotine is in its other forms, particularly as you mentioned that it’s a necessary medicinal quit-smoking aid compound.

    If vaping nicotine is the equivalent of five minutes of sun exposure per day without sunscreen, that’s a tolerable risk. If it causes anywhere near 50% of the damage that cigarettes cause, that’s a serious issue.


  • Thanks four the sources. So there’s evidence that nicotine impacts blood vessels, but not yet that that impacts skin condition? That makes sense, nicotine use in isolation hasn’t been around all that long yet. As I mentioned, that specific link doesn’t appear to have been studied yet to the best of my knowledge, but I don’t have access to journalistic databases that I used to.


  • Does nicotine specifically cause skin damage? Obviously smoking tobacco does, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily the nicotine component that causes the skin damage. There’s thousands of chemicals in tobacco beyond nicotine and I haven’t yet seen a study that shows that nicotine in isolation impacts skin condition.


  • I feel like a lot of people haven’t ever played Rogue and so struggle understand what Roguelike actually means. Fair call, it’s a very old game with essentially no graphics, but to understand the genre properly everyone needs to give it a go at least once in my opinion.

    Side note; love me the whole Mystery Dungeon franchise. I still need to pick up the Shiren the Wanderer series.



  • If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

    We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

    The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

    Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.




  • Well, yes and no. Paying that fine once would just be a cost of doing business, but now that the precedent has been set if they continue to do it they’ll continue to get fined in that order. Those fines won’t need court cases, so they’ll need to be paid quickly and in full. Sure, the fine they received didn’t really hurt them but it will change their behaviour. It will also prevent others from engaging in the same behaviour.

    I don’t think the EU wants to bankrupt companies like Apple - it’s not in the collective best interest. They need to guide behaviour by setting up punishments that are deterring but not destructive. I think €500m fits that pretty well - it’s akin to giving a child a timeout while their friends play or a smack on the back of the hand. It’s doing what it’s intended to do.