As someone who has an interest in etymology and historical changes in vocabulary, I'm always amused by how fruitless the attempts to avoid negative connotations have been with regards to terms that used to be considered "normal" terms to describe mental disabilities.
All of these words described some forms of mental disability before becoming swear words and being banned from "respected" language use :
Idiot, cretin, retard, moron, dotard, feeble-minded, imbecile, lunatic. Attempts at being as distantiated as possible from describing illnesses have become swear words in themselves. "special" has become an insult depending on context. As did "challenged", "delusional", "deranged", "demented".
Replacing old words that became swear words with new words has never worked. The new words that describe the disabilities become swear words as soon as they become commonplace in the language. You may not be able to write "retard" on a filtered chat, but saying that someone is "fit to win at the special olympics" will work just as well and be left unfiltered. Until "special" too gets banned, and then whatever word replaces it will be the new insult in the eternal cycle.
Haha. Firefox went from above 20% marketshare in its early days, to below 4% today, and the number is continually dwindling. At this point it's the few defensive, aggressive fanboys left who are "speaking for themselves". We'll probably still hear this kind of comment from the likes of you even when usage drops below 0.01%.
And I don't want to hear the "it's chrome's fault" again from the FF brigade, IE had more marketshare in the IE vs Netscape days than Chrome has today, and it didn't stop Firefox from eating at IE's shares.
Firefox decline started long before they switched the extensions-system, In fact they lost majority of their share before that point, and seem to have gained a bit momentum back because of it, temporary.
> And I don't want to hear the "it's chrome's fault" again from the FF brigade,
Sure, who cares about facts when you can have guts-feeling...
> IE had more marketshare in the IE vs Netscape days than Chrome has today, and it didn't stop Firefox from eating at IE's shares.
IE had no marketing at that point, while Firefox did had significant marketing at the time. Chrome then started also with big marketing, while Firefox was busy with dying projects. Coincidence? Seems like marketing is a major factor for success even here.
There is an epidemics of people who argue on bad faith on the internet and just google links from pubmed to add to their ""argument"" without ever reading or understanding the articles they link to, expecting others to not go past the title (because most people aren't going to read full articles linked by randoms on comments), giving their ""argument"" credibility and weight solely based on the fact that "it's on pubmed, it's research". It has grown incredibly tiresome.
Not to mention there are tons of published papers that are worth less than toilet paper. This is a huge problem and pubmed is a central database that doesn't exert anywhere near enough curation, it is meant to be used by professionals of targeted interests who can exert proper critical judgement, not by random people.
>Recent reports that PubMed, one of the world’s leading biomedical databases, includes predatory journals and their publications1,2 is cause for concern. PubMed handles millions of queries daily and represents a key source of knowledge for health researchers worldwide. Much medical research that underpins clinical practice relies on the findings generated by peer-reviewed studies that are retrieved via biomedical databases, in particular, those that are free to search such as MEDLINE and PubMed. Thus, it is imperative that these databases are free of contamination by the outputs of predatory journals with their critically flawed peer review procedures.3 We analyze why this is happening and identify some possible solutions to stop the penetration of predatory journals and publishers into biomedical databases.
>Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper linking the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to inflammation of the colon and to autism, and upon whose illusory foundation the modern anti-vaccine movement rests, is listed on PubMed (though it is marked as “retracted”). There is a journal called Medical Hypotheses whose articles are also discoverable through PubMed. The journal’s purpose is to publish theoretical papers, and its editors will consider “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas” as long as they are written in a way that makes some kind of sense. One such paper proposes that ejaculation might be a potential treatment for a congested nose. Another argues that this handy intervention is “inconvenient, unreliable and potentially hazardous.” Both are, you guessed it, found on PubMed.
Just because it's on pubmed doesn't mean anything. There are so many terrible studies published and listed there that only a researcher of the studied field can tell whether it's any good or bad.
>They're proposing removing most of the nicotine from real cigarettes, too.
This must have been imagined by people who have no understanding of drugs whatsoever. Lessening the content of nicotine is likely to make people smoke -more-, I'd wager, inhaling more tar/cancer inducing substances in the process.
When the first e-cigs hit the market, most of the commonly found ones were things like the Joyetech eGo and eliquids that were frankly, unable to provide the necessary amount of nicotine to truly replace cigarettes. I found myself using the device far more than I smoked cigarettes, although it's probably still not as bad. A few studies proved that it's not just in the mind, people who vaped with those devices didn't have much nicotine in their bloodstream.
Modern e-cigarettes with high power delivery, or low power combined with nicotine salts, satisfy me much faster and I don't feel a craving all day like I did with the eGo.
Removing the nicotine but keeping the cancer stick has to be one of the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in my life. Absolutely insanity, this is just going to make people burn more cancer sticks to satisfy their craving.
No. Swing does not suffer from that problem because Sun actually cared about accessibility requirements back in the days, in fact, the only reason there's a desktop on Linux that has decent accessibility, Gnome (through the Orca screen reader and gtk accessility libs) comes from Sun's interest in having an accessible desktop for Solaris. KDE's track record is miserable in comparison to Gnome. Sun provided much of the funding for the initial efforts in making an accessible desktop.
Qt is partially accessible, in practice, it doesn't work well.
>Caries are a sign of an immune disorder or imbalance
Or just terrible habits like drinking liters of soda everyday. Besides the diabetes, the mix of sugar and acid is terrible for dental health, and contrary to the myth, brushing your teeth will not save them, at all, if one persists in terrible habits.
Yeah. I've finished Elden Ring, and as a long time admirer of what From Software did to revitalize the action RPG genre, I felt the open world was a deeply unnecessary addition that brings nothing but time wasters.
The truly wonderful content of Elden Ring is in the areas that received the level of care all souls games have, the legacy dungeons. Stormveil, Raya Lucaria, Leyndell, the sewers..
The basic open world fields present no challenge, nothing of value, no amount of enemy ambushes can stop you from just bugging away on the horse, the areas you "explore" as you discover the world consists of copy pasted dungeon tilesets with just a few variations that were hand crafted, I've seen multiple copies that were 1:1 of some rooms in places like caves, catacombs and so on. Bosses are reused to the point of exhaustion. There's like more than 10 bosses that are essentially clones of Dark Souls 1 first boss, the Asylum Demon, just with one or two new moves, and its attack hitting you harder than the boss it clones. The game cannot receive the excuse that "you can just skip this content, it's optional" either, because it was purposefully designed to force you to do open world chores if you want to get the "full experience". Upgrading weapons other than the ones that use somber stones is very painful if you do not explore the countless repetitive mining tunnels filled with mostly the same enemies and with always a copy pasted boss at the end, where in a previous souls games the materials would be laying around in places you'd naturally traverse as you complete the game, here, the Legacy Dungeons do not offer much in the way of materials, and you would miss on a lot of game lore if you didn't complete the copy pasted content because this is, after all a souls game, and souls games have most of their writing in... item descriptions. It worked ok in a 40 hours game like Dark Souls 3 where you'd pick up items as you progress through the game. It's.. infuriating when you're told you need to do 140 hours of copy pasted content to experience the same amount of -actual- content other souls games give you.
In many ways, the side content of this game feels like.. Bloodborne's computer generated Chalice Dungeons, which were a completely optional side feature of the game that could be safely ignored and left aside. Except that this time, From removed much of the content you'd find on the normal game path, and threw it all around those new chalice dungeons. Cool weapons, unique talismans, the game lore.. if you don't do this mind numbing copy pasted content you're only getting half a game.
I know, with all the accolades this game received from the gaming press, and the sales it achieved, earning itself a large part of a new audience that never played souls games, I just know, we're never going to see a traditional game by From software anymore, and I'm sad. I don't want more open world drudgery. The world didn't need another developer to fall into this trap.
Elden Ring doesn't have the quest compass, the quest log and other "easy mode" features of a game like skyrim. But it does have the copy pasted ultra linear dungeons that you complete in 5 minutes, it does have the repeated dragon fights that are all the same except one does a breath attack with blue colors and another does flamey breath attacks. It does have the formulaic world structure - each part of the map must contain X number of objectives to do.
In Elden Ring, these are :
each "square" of the map has 1 catacomb, 1 or multiple caves, tunnels, "hero tomb" with a chariot that instantly kills whatever it runs over, 1 dragon to kill, 1 Erdtree avatar or putrid tree spirit, 1 church with an upgrade for your flask, 1 tower with a ridiculously simple """puzzle""" (but often time consuming, like find three hidden turtles to kill on the island to open it), 1 evergaol with a boss you fight in an open arena...
How, exactly, is this game a breakthrough going against the grain of open world design? It doesn't go against the grain, it followed the formula to a T. Lacking the UI of mainstream games doesn't mean the world isn't designed like a Bethesda or Ubisoft game.
The only thing that is unique to Elden Ring, is the parts that was already done by every other From games. The open world of ER, though, is nothing new, nothing grounds breaking and its main purpose is to inflate the amount of playtime.
I understand de gustibus and all that... but, unanimous 10/10 in the gaming press? Is that all it took? If I was a game developer at Bethesda or Ubisoft, I would be very angry with the state of the gaming press.
Thanks, this comment really made me think. I noticed a lot of the same things you did, but my impression was much less negative.
Maybe it’s because of the presentation. In many open world games the UI makes it clear that there are “X towers to climb” or “Y camps to clear”… there’s a checklist of goals. Elden Ring just lets players stumble on things as they will. Even as the map design may be similar to other open world games I feel less pressure to “do all the things”; as a result my personal journey feels more organic.
I did recognize the template pieces used in caves/mines and it did turn me off a bit. But because I’m not guided to clear all of them checkbox style it was less offensive. In a way it’s smoke and mirrors: a lack of information makes the design more mysterious than it really is.
A sibling comment mentions that the length makes multiple playthroughs a pain, but I generally am a one and done for souls games.
In another thread I commented that the open world gives a casual player more options instead of getting forever stuck on a single challenge. I think that feeling of freedom combined with faster (but buggy) movement is responsible for the broader appeal and high scores. Oh and the art direction doesn’t hurt.
Yeah, that's more or less how I feel about it as well. I would even go further and say that the existence of the open world makes the Legacy Dungeons worse. It's quite unfortunate because in terms of visual design and architecture, they're some of From's best work; however, they tend to be full of the same enemies you've already fought multiple times in the open world, taking away from the feeling of venturing into the dangerous unknown that I personally find so compelling about these games.
It's also unfortunate that this looks like a game with a lot of build variety, that would really lend itself to multiple playthroughs, but actually playing through the content again sounds like a pain. Going through the wiki and making a list of places I actually need to go is not my idea of a good time.
I play elden ring on windows.. with dxvk/vkd3d dll because they fixed the massive stuttering issue that this console port had on PC. Even on windows this translation layer can give better performance.
>That scratch was caused by a bump into metal while she was carrying it by hand
Not to defend samsung, because foldable phones are a flimsy bad idea, but it's to be expected that bumps that wouldn't damage other phones (including phones that Samsung makes like the galaxy series) might damage the folders : the folders are made with a plastic screen, and on the recent models, a very thin, fragile layer of glass underneath the plastic. If you buy one, you really should have the expectation that it is going to fail at the slightest mishandling. You can even feel the fold when you touch the area, it doesn't take a major shock to cause damage there.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the flash chips might be wearing out and take longer to read/write to.
This is what happened to the Nexus 7 tablets, I owned one and the experience, which was great at first, became terrible over time.
Smart TVs are a mistake, unfortunately most (maybe all current productions) are smart TVs nowadays. TVs are something that can last a long while - I kept my old dumb TV for 10 years before the backlight became too dark for my liking -, smart components on the other hand.. plus, it's not like it's a huge inconvenience or extra expense to add something like a chromecast or fire tv to get literally the same experience the smart components provide, except that this time, if the stick dies, you don't have to replace the whole tv.
All of these words described some forms of mental disability before becoming swear words and being banned from "respected" language use : Idiot, cretin, retard, moron, dotard, feeble-minded, imbecile, lunatic. Attempts at being as distantiated as possible from describing illnesses have become swear words in themselves. "special" has become an insult depending on context. As did "challenged", "delusional", "deranged", "demented". Replacing old words that became swear words with new words has never worked. The new words that describe the disabilities become swear words as soon as they become commonplace in the language. You may not be able to write "retard" on a filtered chat, but saying that someone is "fit to win at the special olympics" will work just as well and be left unfiltered. Until "special" too gets banned, and then whatever word replaces it will be the new insult in the eternal cycle.