SaraTonin

If we’re specifically doing recent games, then Outer Wilds really is a once-in-a-lifetime gaming experience. Which, if you’ve not played it, you really want to play with as few spoilers as possible. It’s genuinely one of the most profoundly moving experiences I’ve had while consuming any media.

For a serious answer WRT the people who genuinely didn’t think this administration would act the way it is - in his first term, he was mostly surrounded by people who were competent and who respected the law & checks & balances. When they got told “kidnap people off the streets” they said “I can’t do that, that would be illegal”.

So the fact that these things weren’t done in the first term made people think they wouldn’t be done in the second term.

Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people are incredibly uninformed about politics.

I mean, I do believe that Joe Rogan is both ignorant and stupid, so…

I’m reminded of a case here in the UK a few years back where bigots left something like 200 bacon sandwiches on the doorstep of a mosque. The next day the mosque released a statement to the press thanking the unknown people for their kind donation and that the local non-Muslim homeless population had very much appreciated the sandwiches that the people at the mosque had distributed to them.

Get the emulator BbebEm: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/

Developed for Windows, but ported to a bunch of other systems and OSes.

Then go to the BBC Micro Games Archive. [edit because I forgot the link] https://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?atoz=C

There are a tonne of games to download, but I’m going to recommend 2, both of which are still incredibly fun to this day.

The first is Citadel, which is a puzzle platformer. Would probably be called a Metroidvania today, as the formula is exploring a labyrinth of screens to find keys, objects, and solve puzzles, but it was actually released a year before either Metroid or Castlevania.

The second is Chuckie Egg. This is a much more straight-forward “one screen is one level” platformer where you have to dodge enemies and collect objects before a timer runs out. Where this stands out from the pack is the physics. Your character is really bouncy when jumping against walls and platforms, which allows you to fling yourself around the stage in a way that’s really fun.

And, if you’ve never played it, I recommend last year’s UFO50 on Steam. The concept is that some game designers found a forgotten 80s console from forgotten studio UFO Games along with 50 cartridges and ported them over. So what you get for £15 is 50 8-bit games, all of which have some modern ideas but which could conceivably have been released in the 80s. It’s incredible value for money, and there’s even a kind of meta-narrative as you watch the studio’s games get more sophisticated over time (for example, the first release doesn’t have any background music) and characters return. And, of course, there’s a huge variety of styles and genres.

It’s not made before the 90s, but if you’re after that feel rather than necessarily specifically games which were actually made then, then UFO 50 is very much worth your money and time. You’ll honestly marvel at how ridiculously underpriced it is.

As a last note, if you are at all interested in archaeology, then Elite Dangerous is basically a modern port of the original BBC Micro game. If you’ve played the former and boot up the latter, you might be surprised how little has actually changed and how much they stretched computing technology to fit that entire game into 8 bits and 16Mb of RAM.

But it really all you’re after is strictly just games made before the 90s which still play well, then try Citadel and Chuckie Egg. The emulator & ROMs are all free.

This is called the “relative privation fallacy” - where it’s stated or implied that action shouldn’t be taken on one issue because larger issues also exist. It’s like suggesting that the police shouldn’t try to catch pickpockets because unsolved murders exist.

The truth is that it’s possible for organisations to work on multiple fronts at once and that making rules around food labelling doesn’t imply that “the world is[…] burning” isn’t also something that’s being worked on.

I think that can be accomplished by rules like, say, having to have the words “plant-based” clearly visible next to the word “burger” in a legible font at an equivalent size. And if it contains any actual meat, then it has to say something like “40% real meat” in an equally visible place in an equally legible way.

At the moment what happens here in the UK is that you get things advertised as “mlk” or “scheese”. There’s no standardised language, and it’s actually harder to work out what it is you’re looking at. I imagine it’d be similar if people have to start selling “brgers” and “bergurs”. Might even lead to more chance of a mix-up for people who can’t read well.

A specific logo would be good, too. Separate, easily distinguishable logos for vegan, vegetarian, and containing meat. At the moment there’s no emblem which tells you something contains meat, and there’s no standardisation on vegan/vegetarian logos, which means that both are a “V” which is either green or in the negative space of something green, and which can be in any font. This isn’t optimal for quickly and easily informing people about the contents of what they’re buying.

So, again, it’s helpful but nowhere near as helpful as it could be - not least for the fact that there are plenty of manufacturers who have veggie/vegan products who don’t label that fact at all. Presumably for fear that the vocal minority who say they won’t eat anything which doesn’t contain meat might not buy their products. But if everything had such labelling, then that would just make it commonplace and people would get used to seeing these labels on their bread/pasta/whatever.

https://youtu.be/nVQplt7Chos

That’s a 90-ish minute video by evolutionary biologist Forrest Valkai goes over the science of sex and gender. The TL/DW version is that the quote here is exactly right. Sex is fuzzy and before you could even start to say something like that it’s binary you first need to establish which of the many sex markers you’re going to use and why you’re excluding the other ones, gender is a social construct which is not the same as sex, and any modern biology textbook above a high-school level will say exactly that. Not implicitly, but explicitly.

If it’s the kind of thing you’re interested in and you’ve got 90 minutes to spare you could do worse than listen to a scientist lay it out.

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, but I’m not going to argue.

Here’s a fun fact, though…people in the US pay more in taxes towards healthcare than we do here in the UK. And then they have to pay on top of that.

It’s almost as if having an entire for-profit industry acting as middle-men doesn’t lead to the best value for money.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/articles/howdoesukhealthcarespendingcompareinternationally/2016-11-01

Despite less than half of the USA’s total healthcare expenditure coming from government expenditure or compulsory insurance schemes, it still spends more per person on these financing schemes than the UK- £3,111 in the USA in 2014, compared with £2,210 in the UK.

That’s fair. It’s not like the whole thing around Northern Ireland and Britain isn’t without its complications and controversies, to understate it massively. But that applies just as much to saying that people from Northern Ireland aren’t British as much as it does to saying they *are *.

Assuming “British” is being used colloquially, as it often is, to describe someone or something from the UK, then there are Irish accents in the UK. The island of Ireland contains Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. People from Northern Ireland have Irish accents. Try telling Nadine Coyle she doesn’t have an Irish accent.