Same ways gay people get ‘straight married’.

Could be family pressure. Could be internalized hetreonormativity making them feel like they ‘should’ do this. Could be they haven’t really realized, come to terms with, or accepted their own identity.

I mean, think of a ‘stereotypical’ aromantic guy. He’s interested in women, and sleeps around a lot, but despite not getting feelings, might ‘settle down’ with one partner because its ‘normal, respectable’, even if it’s not something that makes him happy. Probably won’t make the wife happy either, but that’s it’s own issue, why she might marry a guy that ‘doesn’t do romance’.

I specifically called out not ‘difficulty’ in making friends, but ‘desire’ to make friends. As far as I’m aware, autistic people still desire friends usually.

Huh, that first one feels more like Schizoid personality disorder. My impression is that, while autistic people can struggle to make and keep friends, they do generally still want to have the same amount of friends as an allistic person.

I think controller is only ‘necessary’ for souls games due to them not supporting keyboard and mouse well. I’d prefer to use keyboard for it, but all of the inputs and menu-ing is fucked up.

Tbh, its a testament to how good the games are, that they are enjoyable despite a huge lack of QoL across the board

I mean, that’s the point of Dune? The ‘prophesies’ aren’t real, they’re seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the same group that spent millennia breeding the ‘savior’. And, he’s not meant to really be a savior, but their catspaw.

But also, he’s definitely not actually a savior, on account of all the death he brings. It’s complicated, but overall a deconstruction of white savior narratives and similar stories.

Big disagree about burgers and jerky.

Those beyond/impossible meats are fine I guess, but they’re not good. Weird taste, long lingering aftertaste. Solid C+ in my opinion.

While I prefer vegan jerky actually. That super tough peppery gluten jerky (pleather brand is what I’ve been getting) is great, as are the softer soy or mushroom jerkies. They are different, so no shade if you don’t like them, but there’s no tier for ‘you can tell the difference, and they taste better’.

Nuggets idk much about, as I’m not really a fan. Same with mayo.

Milk is another one where oat milk is better tasting than dairy milk imo.

agree about cheese generally. I can’t have nuts, so I’ve never had cashew queso, but that queso you can make with potatoes and carrots, while sounding weird, is actually pretty great. Maybe A- tier imo.

Also, article skips over the chemical part of this: Vitriol, the name for the impure sulfuric acid they used, was green (due to some iron and cupper sulfates). You can use sulfuric acid to purify gold; it’ll dissolve the silver and copper in a gold alloy, but not the gold itself, giving you 100% gold.

However, the green lion can also ‘ascend’ by combing with nitric acid to make aqua regia, where it can dissolve gold, “devouring it”.

Overall, a good video. I’m definitely opinionated about rpgs and editions of DnD, and don’t share his blanket love for each edition, but he’s right that the vitriol over edition wars are silly.

I don’t really agree with his WoW take; of just, being able to hop from DnD to WoW for a few months to have fun. I hate WoW, from a personal enjoyment level. I don’t knock anyone for enjoying it, but I’d rather do just about anything else. My friends jumped onto it on launch in highschool, and I joined them for a week or so, and I genuinely do not see the appeal. I’m not trying to be bitter or anything, so much as saying I am not able to just, go and have fun with WoW, or frankly any MMO I’ve tried.

But, there’s no RPG I’ve ever touched that I feel that way about. I don’t really like 4e for several reasons, but overall, if my group otherwise really wanted to play more of it, I know I could have fun playing or running it. Outside of truly dogshit ‘games’ like FATAL, I’m sure I could have fun playing just about any RPG, and even a FATAL one-shot could be fun, despite the rules (though, it’d veer awfully close to just laughing at a live-reading of the rules than really ‘playing the game’)

Still, I have no real interest in 5.5. Frankly, I currently have no real interest in 5e at the moment, though that’s more from ‘edition fatigue’. Like, I have many complaints about 5e (I’m not sure if you could play a lot of 5e and not notice it’s mechanical flaws), but I played it enough to get tired of it, which is a compliment in a lot of ways.

But I love playing new games. I’ve fallen in love with PF2e recently (though with 2 campaigns hitting level 14-ish, some fatigue is creeping in), and we’ve giving ICON a run. I’m looking forward to trying Exalted Essence and the new WoD stuff when a rpg slot opens up (running 3 games right now as it is). And I’ll probably return to DnD at some point, but nothing from 5.5 feels like it really ‘fixes’ the issues I have with 5e, or otherwise ‘sparks excitement’ in me. But also, it looks fine.

Though, if the really do centralize it to an official platform, I definitely won’t be touching it; I hate DnD beyond as it is, and how there are no PDFs for the 5e books (officially), which is a bummer but able to be worked around. And, even if they try to centralize 5.5 digitally, there will definitely still be books, and probably still be PDFs able to be found, though I’ll probably want to avoid the edition on principle anyway if that is the case.

Where’s ‘turning the music off and driving in silence’?

I miss 3.5’s cloistered cleric. I’m glad PF2e included it as a core option, and I wish Onednd’s holy order subclass choice separated it out further, making ‘robed scholar’ clerics a central option, instead of just an objectively worse choice than wearing the heaviest armor you’re proficient in (usually medium).

Yeah. It was worse in 3.5 ironically; despite casters having more downsides than 5e, spells were overall stronger. It did leave this narrow window at levels 1 and 2 where martials were basically strictly better, but caster quickly skyrocketted in power, especially if you were playing with prestige classes.

Spell power was reigned in for 5e, and pretty sharply at that (most notably from adding Concentration). But, they also washed away caster downsides, by making cantrips at will, casters not quite so fragile, and by softening Vancian casting. 5e is still absolutely more balanced than 3.5, but that’s not saying a lot; 3.5’s power level was all over the place.

Still, I feel like 5e’s levels 1-5 are pretty balanced, and the martial/caster imbalance doesn’t really become painful until like, level 12.

I think the more important balancing is just ‘making battlemaster maneuvers resourceless and available to all classes’.

But I’m not against ‘limit break’ as a short rest ‘charge’ available to most martials.

TBH, the above is basically the way PF2e handles martials; at least half of their class feats are more or less ‘resourceless maneuvers’, and many martials have access to ‘focus spells’, which are basically just short rest charges for exclusive class features, that just happen to mechanically be considered spells (though, notably, PF2e doesn’t give fighter focus spells, making them nearly 100% at-will).

Personally, I think the most important fix to the martial-caster imbalance is to nerf casters, who just are too strong, but A) that’s basically what PF2e already did, and its largely complained about (though I love it). And B) Its not strictly necessary, if you buff Martials by a large margin (though, imo, that starts to get into like, demigod territory that I don’t love).

In the older editions, like the ones you’re talking about, casters had serious downsides. Between being very fragile, spells being interrupteable, and sometimes having different XP amounts, casters were kinda ‘glass cannons’, and needed a martial frontline.

In 3.5 and 5e, casters have had these harsh downsides decreased or removed, while not otherwise losing power. They are more or less strictly better than martials, in the sense they can do 90%+ of what martials can do better than they can do it, while also doing several other things. And the few things martials do do better, it’s by slight degrees.

It’s not just that casters are powerful, it’s that they’re powerful and flexible, able to be top tier in several different roles at the same time, and can change what roles they cover by resting and swapping spells.

Whereas martials can sometimes build to be top tier in one role, but they’re largely locked into that one role, or can build to be okay in several roles (and be outclassed by casters in all of them).

You are, of course, correct.

But even so, costs are costs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved communism, and are in a moneyless, stateless existance, you need labor and materials to build nuclear, and labor and materials to maintain it (along with other infrastructure).

And, I’m not anti-nuclear; it does make sense to use sometimes, in some amounts. Its just very very costly for what it provides.

But frankly, even only accounting for current tech, wide spread nuclear just doesn’t make that much sense compared to renewables + storage and large grids interconnects.

Sockeye salmon are reddish pink. That’s always what I thought the association was.

Its almost entirely made from plants

And like, even if it was dinosaurs, Dirt is also (partially) made from decayed animals. And, oversimplifying, that dirt becomes plants.

And that’s all fine for vegans, because it doesn’t involve exploitation of animals. Like, if you needed to raise and kill animals to use their corpses to grow plants, that’d be animal exploitation.

You want the one and only environmental problem in our food industry, that is it.

I’m genuinely sorry if that’s the takeaway from my message, as that was not my intent. That was, actually, the vibe I’ve gotten from you; that the primary issue in food production is locality. I think there are dozens and dozens of issues in our global food supply chain, and maybe a third of them are tied to meat production.

But I don’t think all of humanity must give up meat or anything. My main opinion is that meat is over-represented in our diets, especially American diets, and that huge demand for meat has economically incentivized meat production in areas and ways that aren’t sustainable. But I do think meat can be sustainable. The primary issue isn’t meat existing, its meat being over produced.

Much of what you say in your reply is correct, at least in part, so your not wrong that meat could be produced more sustainably. But, also as you say, it mostly isn’t. So, I choose to not eat meat. But I’m not asking you to not, but rather saying that your proposal, of eating exclusively local, isn’t practical for 90% of humans.

But yeah, you’re right, “it’s a sad fact that many states export so much local food, meat, only to import crops from the other side of the country.” That’s 100% correct, and a problem.

But your soy point isn’t really correct. https://ourworldindata.org/soy. While yes, most of animal feeds is soy meal, a byproduct of soy oil production, if you compare the amount of soybean directly consumed by us, its slightly less that then 7% whole soybeans fed directly to animals. So, animals are eating more straight whole soybeans than humans are eating tofu, tempeh, soymilk, etc.

And, on top of that, Soy meal is human edible. Yes, it often does require further refining, but it already is used to make things like Textured Vegetable Protein and Soymilk, since neither need the oil. And, we lose somewhere between 2-5x the energy using that soymeal to feed chickens, and somewhere between 6-25x that energy feeding it to cows.

And to reiterate, I’m not saying to burn down all animal agriculture and make everyone everywhere vegan. I’m saying that I agree with a lot of what you say, about reworking global logistics and agriculture to make all farming more local and more sustainable. And, as a consequence of that, meat production will have to drop. Factory farming is horrible on so many fronts, but it is efficient at pumping out loads of meat. To dismantle that, like you’re proposing, will result in lower global meat production, even if some localities might actually see a rise. Small scale operations are less efficient in terms of total meat production, even if they’re more efficient by most other metrics (all those pesky ‘market externalities’).

Okay, but what if nut allergy :(

Its hard out here, being a vegan allergic to nuts.

Sticky tofu is hands down my favorite. Something like this: https://veganonboard.com/sticky-lemon-tofu/

Soy Curls is honestly my favorite ‘meat replacement’ (though, I’m not too hot on ‘replacing meat’). They work for doing things like mongolian beef, or just lightly frying after marinading for ‘chicken strips’ to top salads or sandwiches. https://thevietvegan.com/vegan-mongolian-beef/

Soups are of course, pretty easy. I like Lentil Chilli, heavy on the seasonings and beans aside from lentils. Minestrone or lemon orzo are both also great. Thai curry or pho are both more work imo, but amazing (though, both broth bases can often have chicken or shrimp in them).

Burgers, and while impossible meat et. al. are fine I guess, they’re a bit pricey. I honestly prefer a good chipotle black bean burger over them 9/10 times. They’re pretty cheap to buy, but also not very hard to make, with most of the ingredients being cheap.

I personally like seitan, but I know quite a few other vegetarians don’t, so it might be divisive. BUT, in terms of cheap protein, its damn near rock bottom in price. It is some work to make stuff out of it from scratch, but ‘indian mock duck’ is usually seitan, and can be bought from indian stores if you just want to try it. But seitan works to replace burgers, chicken tenders, steaks, sausage, etc. Tons of recipes out there.

The problem with eating locally, is that it isn’t a viable way to feed humanity. Like, yeah, the more local the better, you aren’t wrong. We all should buy local foods as far as is possible. But the nature of humans living in cities, and many cities being near good trade areas rather than good agriculture areas, means that it just isn’t viable.

If everyone was like you, and bought local near-exclusively, the price of food in most cities and many regions would skyrocket, and unless people stopped, many would starve.

Not to say its a binary; we do ‘overship’ foods, and certainly could (and should!) eat more local foods.

Add to that, that demand for meat (especially beef) means that a lot of animal agriculture requires the shipping of plant feed for that meat; see how the majority of soybean farming (77%) is for animal feed. And, similar to the point above, ‘grass fed’ beef just isn’t possible to do while meeting demand. If we want grass fed animal meat only, a lot of people are going to have to give up meat, or dramatically cut down on meat consumption.