Topics

31

Not at the Dinner Table / Vermin Supreme

« on: January 10, 2012, 05:15:16 PM »

I'm endorsing this guy.

32

General Chat / IT'S 2012!

« on: December 31, 2011, 11:55:27 PM »

GOOD JORB!!

33

Video Game Chat / Official Zelda timeline revealed?

« on: December 21, 2011, 11:14:59 PM »

Source.

Main Timeline
1. Skyward Sword
2. Minish Cap
3. Four Swords.
4. Ocarina Of Time

Split 1: Link defeats Ganon — childhood branch
a) Majora's Mask
b) Twilight Princess
c) Four Swords Adventures

Split 2: Link defeats Ganon — adult branch
a) Wind Waker
b) Phantom Hourglass
c) Spirit Tracks

Split 3: Link fails in Ocarina Of Time
a) A Link To The Past
b) Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons
c) Link's Awakening
d) The Legend of Zelda
e) Zelda II: The Adventure of Link



I haven't thought about it in too much detail yet, but the three-way split actually makes a lot of sense. When LttP talked about the Imprisoning War like it was an actual war, it wasn't talking about OoT as we know it, it was talking about the way the situations in OoT would have played out without one kid going around doing everything.

When exactly is Link's failure in the LttP timeline, though? Did he die in a dungeon, at the final battle, or did Ganon kill him as a baby, or what?

Does this mean that Four Swords is meant to be the origin of Dark Link, including OoT Dark Link?

34

General Chat / Winter 2011 ADVANCED Poster Awards!

« on: December 10, 2011, 05:30:30 AM »

Hey! Tiebreakers! Loads of 'em!

Tiebreaker voting will be going on for the next few weeks until 12:01 AM Eastern on Sunday, March 11th. Make your voice heard again for the first time!


It's approximately that time of year again I suppose! Let's do this dukar!

You know the drill, but in case you don't, here is the nature of the drill:

• Don't vote for yourself. Vote for me instead.
• You can vote for two people in each category. You can vote for one as winner and one as runner-up, or equally for both.
• You can also vote for just one person in a category if you want.
• Change your vote by editing your post as many times as you want, until voting closes.
• If you have better ideas for award categories than me, throw them out there and see if they catch on.
• Votes should be for stuff that happened in 2011, or on December 30th or 31st of 2010 (when the last awards started). Stuff that happened this month is okay, but try to remember back farther if you can.
• Voting will close at 12:01 AM Eastern time on February 4th, 2012.

The categories, separated by the category of the category, are categorized as follows:

Star Awards
The Star Awards are the best of the best. If you get one of these, you are obviously a better person than everyone who didn't get one.

Poster of the Year: All in all, who best exemplified the spirit of the forums this year?
Post of the Year: That one perfect comment that tied everything together, or that perfectly constructed Zelda timeline theory, or that one ribald riposte that... um... ratcheted... something... whatever.
Topic of the Year: The thread that tied us together to collaboratively create something hilarious, moving, intriguing, or other various emotions.
Image of the Year: A drawing, a photo, or a well-timed meme. Actually, probably just a drawing or photo.

Flower Awards
The Flower Awards are almost as nice as the Star Awards, but not quite, because flowers are gay. Close, though.

Most Amiable: Amiable means nice.
Funniest: Funny means funny.
Most Creative: The poster who would have come up with better category descriptions than that.
Most Creepiest: Who do you most suspect of having a secret collection of body pillow pillowcases with pictures of his (or her!) Sunday school teachers printed on them?
Smartest: Who's the most out-of-place in this cesspool of neckbeard?

Mushroom Awards
The Mushroom in Mushroom Awards represents either growth or basicness or something like that; I'm kinda vague on that one.

Best Mod: Who did the best job keeping us in line?
Best Newbie: Who was the best new member? (Note that the member does not have to have registered in 2011, only that they first became active in 2011.)
Blast from the Past: Which returning veteran inspired the most nostalgia in us?
Most Missed: Who needs to dump their girlfriend and come back to us right now? This does not necessarily have to be someone who left in 2011, just someone who should've been here.
Most Improved: Who had the most striking contrast of posting quality between back thenish and nowish?

Leaf Awards
The Leaf Awards are all awards from early incarnations of the Poster Awards that haven't seen much play since then. Let's find out first hand why they stopped being used.

Best Name: Names are more permanent than they used to be, so this doesn't have to be exclusively names that were made up/given/changed to/used/whatever in 2011. Just which poster around here do you think has the coolest name.
Best Signature: Some people recorded their sigs in the new sig topic, so you can use that for reference if you want to try voting in this one. You can also go further into the past than 2011 if you want, since this category hasn't been around for a while.
Most Average: Does this mean most normal by Fungi Forums standards, or most normal by normal standards? You decide! I guess.
Most Mario-wise Poster: Who is the most freakishly obsessed knowledgeable about Mario minutiae (or Mariotiae, as I like to call it)?
Meowiest Poster: Meow.

Frog Suit Awards
Winning a Frog Suit Award obviously makes you a better person than the people who won Star Awards.

Dynamic Duo: Which pair of posters need to get a room already?
Queen of Posters: Who's the fourteen-year-old who we will elect to be the person who appoints our senator and makes us eat cake and ties our mother down while sweating to the oldies?
WTD Award: Who and/or what made you say "WTD?" this year?
Glorb Award: It's the Glorb Award.
Deezer Award: It's the Deezer Award.


Copy and paste this to use for your votes, or don't:

Code: [Select]

[b]Poster of the Year:[/b]
[b]Post of the Year:[/b]
[b]Topic of the Year:[/b]
[b]Image of the Year:[/b]

[b]Most Amiable:[/b]
[b]Funniest:[/b]
[b]Most Creative:[/b]
[b]Most Creepiest:[/b]
[b]Smartest:[/b]

[b]Best Mod:[/b]
[b]Best Newbie:[/b]
[b]Blast from the Past:[/b]
[b]Most Missed:[/b]
[b]Most Improved:[/b]

[b]Best Name:[/b]
[b]Best Sig:[/b]
[b]Most Average:[/b]
[b]Most Mario-wise Poster:[/b]
[b]Meowiest Poster:[/b]

[b]Dynamic Duo:[/b]
[b]Queen of Posters:[/b]
[b]WTD Award:[/b]
[b]Glorb Award:[/b]
[b]Deezer Award:[/b]

35

Site Discussion / Good King Deezeras (And Other Christmas-Type Hits)

« on: November 26, 2011, 02:54:30 AM »

KINGDEEZ.zip (16.3 MB; MP3s; also includes album cover and lyrics)

Merry Christmas, TMK!

36

Not at the Dinner Table / Student loan debt: What's the deal with that?

« on: November 21, 2011, 01:37:27 AM »

Here's a video that says we shouldn't.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPZZ5o1nY2M" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPZZ5o1nY2M</a>

Okay, first off, we need to differentiate between federal and private loans. Federal loans are backed up by the government, and usually only amount to a few thousand a year. That few thousand is what is subject to the minor rule changes in the recent executive order, taking the percentage of income they can take from 15% down to 10%, and taking the maximum repayment time from 25 years down to 20. Any other portion of the tuition that is not covered by grants, scholarship, work study, or savings is covered by private loans from Sallie Mae -- an institution that, like Fannie and Freddie, was started by the government, but is independent enough that it's not subject to those rules, and, unlike Fannie and Freddie, has not yet been bought back by the government.

Federal loans have repayment options such as Income-Contingent Repayment and Income-Based Repayment. If you fill out all the paperwork for Income-Based Repayment, your payments will be greatly reduced to an almost certainly manageable level, and if your income is very low, the loans will be somewhat frozen -- they'll basically be in forbearance, but (as best as I can tell) no interest accumulates on them in that time. In contrast, when you get a Sallie Mae loan, until a couple years ago, it would probably be a Signature Student Loan, where your options for repayment are pretty much either two-year interest only or four-year interest only, and where you don't have to make payments until six months after you leave school, but all the interest from that time is added to the capital. Now, the loan you'd probably get is the Smart Option Student Loan, a name that doesn't make much sense seeing as there aren't any options. You make interest-only payments while in school (for me, it was $189 a month for one loan (they stopped offering Signature loans right before my senior year), and then interest+principal payments six months after you leave. You can't change that payment amount, and from what I was told last time I called them, you can't even request to put it into forbearance.

So long story short, if loan payments are actually a problem for you, they're Sallie Mae loans, not federal loans, in which case the tiny vote-buying tweaks in that executive order don't even affect you.

Now I angrily argue against the argument in the video:

1. These loans are voluntary. All borrowers are excrutiatingly well-informed of how much they’re borrowing and how much they’re going to have to pay back.

About half of all college students take out loans and when they do, every lender clearly spells out exactly how much you’re on the hook for and what your monthly payments are going to be after you leave school.

Critics say that 18-year-olds don’t understand what they’re getting into and shouldn’t be held accountable for their decisions. But that’s an argument against letting kids attend college, not against letting them borrow against future earnings to get a degree that will increase lifetime earnings by somewhere between about $280,000 and $1 million.

- No. It's not entirely voluntary. We were constantly told for eighteen years that we needed to go to college if we didn't want to end up dying alone in a ditch. We were coerced. Most of us were not capable of making informed decisions -- not when all the informants at the time were universally telling us (though, I must emphasize, with the best of intentions) that the options were either go to college and get rich, or don't go to college and die alone in a McDonalds' dumpster.
I mean, conservatives believe 18-year-olds are too stupid to make the right voting decisions because they're too brainwashed by Jon Stewart, so why do they think 18-year-olds are smart enough to know just how much of their lives they're signing away when they go to a $25,000-a-year school that they can't afford?

- An extra $280,000 over my lifetime? Great, 'cause by the time I pay back all my loans, I'll have given Sallie Mae over $189,000. Yeah, a net average of about two thousand dollars a year is definitely worth paying over a thousand dollars a month for a decade or two.

- I was 16 when I started college; 15 when I decided to go and where to go. 14 when I said to my mom, "You know, I think I might take a year off instead of starting college right away" and she said I had to go right away or else I wouldn't be eligible to possibly win a couple-thousand-dollar scholarship from my dad's company. (spoiler -- I didn't win it anyway). Should I really have to pay the rest of my life for a mistake I made at 15? A mistake that I was led into by my parents and the entire culture at large? A mistake made with the intentions of bettering myself and society?

2. The amounts being borrowed are hardly overwhelming. While the cumulative total of all college-related debt is huge – approaching a trillion dollars, it’s bigger than credit-card debt – it’s not so big for individuals. The typical college graduate who borrowed money to attend graduates owing about $25,000. They’ve got a minimum of 10 years to pay back that amount and the repayment schedule can be extended and modified for a wide variety of reasons.

The monthly payment for $25,000 in student loans at going rates comes to around $290 a month. That’s not chump change. But given that the that college grads have unemployment rates that are less than half the national average and that the average salary offer for graduating seniors is almost $50,000, the loan amount isn’t so bad either.

Yeah, $25,000 hanging over your head right when you start out in life isn't big at all. Do you know what average means, by the way? It means there's a buttload of us with six figures of debt. My monthly payments right now are $820 a month. It'd be about a hundred more if the federal loans were still in repayment (income-based repayment FTW), and it'll be over $900 a month in March because I just put them into forbearance for three months because I'm out of money, and the interest from those three months gets capitalized when they come back. I'm working part-time for minimum wage, and I make about $850 a month. Just under $850, actually. Oh, and three out of the four loans that make up that $820 are currently on interest-only payments. That means two things:

- I'm making zero progress on actually paying them off.

- They'll be a lot higher in about two years.

With loan payments already 97% of my income, and soon to be over 100% (as previously mentioned, Sallie Mae is still technically private, and therefore not the slightest bit subject to that 10% of income requirement), how the heck am I supposed to save up money so I can move out to somewhere with better prospects so I can get a halfway decent job?
Right now I'm just on a treadmill, going nowhere, except I'm also being force-fed Big Macs while on the treadmill so I'm not even losing weight. I get $800, I give $800, my principal stays the same, and every day is just a day closer to the payments going up.

3. Bailouts are never a good idea. Like Tea Party activists, Occupy Wall Street protesters are right to rail against bailouts for big banks and financial institutions that are politically connected. But student loan forgiveness advocates are wrong to perpetuate yet another cycle of bailouts. It’s never right to socialize losses while privatizing gains. That’s what the banks did – they risked their money on stupid investments and then got made whole at the expense of taxpayers. Student loan forgiveness is simply another version of the same swindle. And it offloads the costs of other people’s decisions onto taxpayers, who guarantee federally backed student loans.

I don't know what the right decision is now, but I've got a good feeling that if we'd spent a trillion dollars on this instead of on the stimulus, most people of all ages would be better off by now. If I'd graduated with no loans to pay off, I would've taken the few thousand dollars I'd saved up, moved to Philadelphia or New York City, and gotten a job in my major. And if I didn't find anything, I'd go back home, get the job I have now, save up for a while (while also buying a PS3, stimulating the economy), and go try again in a few months. With that six-figure cloud hanging over my head, though, I can't do much of anything.


The education bubble is popping. We got stuck for so long on the idea that everyone needs to go to college, just like everyone needs to own a house -- whether or not they can afford it, whether or not they can afford the loans, whether or not their major will ever get them a job that pays that kind of money, whether or not there's any demand in those fields. We kept subsidizing it, thinking we could level the playing field by lifting the whole thing up on pillars, but all it did was make it a farther way down for the ones who fall off it. Every time we all got another couple thousand dollars from the government to go to school, schools knew they'd be getting another couple thousand dollars from each student, raised tuition by a couple thousand dollars, and started new programs dependent on that money.

(Incidentally, I didn't get any financial aid from the government for college, because, since my dad makes $70,000 a year, they figured I wasn't poor enough to need help paying for a $30,000-a-year school. Even though my dad has seven kids, a wife, an ex-wife, and a mortgage, and we're a thirty-mile drive away from everything, and he drives from New York to New Jersey three times a week to go to work because they wouldn't let him transfer his seniority to a closer place, and also his company's stock is currently trading at like five cents and will probably go bankrupt before he retires. So anyway, when the idea is that we keep giving "everyone" more money to go to college, all it does is push the price of college up at the same rate, and the more we push it up, the more people won't be included in "everyone" and will have enormous tuitions to pay. Also, I know I definitely should have gone to community college, and I probably would have if I hadn't been fifteen and stupid when I made that decision.)

We can't afford to keep extending this out, to where next generation sees a master's degree the same way this generation sees a bachelor's, the same way the previous generation saw a high school diploma. Everyone goes to school, then everyone goes to high school, then everyone goes to college, and now we're learning stuff in college that would've been taught in high school a few generations ago, because we have to keep pushing it back so everyone can get in.

The failure was not in our decision to go to college. The failure was that the previous generation thought they should send us all there (why are we being punished for obeying?). A noble effort, and one that I genuinely do respect them for, but we now clearly see that the "everyone gets a bachelor's" model doesn't work -- certainly not in the middle of a depression. A college degree meant something last generation, when only a few people went on to that level, but when it's the default position, it loses a lot of its value. And now we're all graduating into the worst economy in decades -- which, again, is the fault of the older generations, not us -- and we're finding that employers either want masters'es or experience. Bachelors'es are... well, certainly not a dime a dozen, but you know what I mean. Everyone's got one. Less scarcity = less value. Though they still cost the same, for now.



If not universal loan forgiveness, then at least force Sallie Mae by an act of Congress to abide by the 10% rule -- or, heck, just some percentage under 90 -- so we can get our blasted lives together already, and the 20-year rule, or maybe 15 years would be better, so we're at least not still paying this crap off when our own kids are going to college (if we let them).


Or at the very very least, make student loans dischargeable through bankruptcy again. Right now, they're pretty much the only debt that bankruptcy can't discharge, which only serves to inflate the bubble faster. See, right now, getting in on student loan action is, theoretically, pretty close to a zero-risk venture, because no matter how hard up we are, we can never get rid of the payments (also because the people you're selling to are 17 and impressionable). Sallie Mae knows it can always scrape back every penny, and that you have no recourse. With that kind of setup, why would they ever show any restraint in lending? What interest does Sallie Mae have in making sure they lend responsibly -- that loan recipients will realistically be able to afford the payments?

And there actually is a conservative argument for it: Don't look at bankruptcy as just a bailout for people who were irresponsible and got themselves into debt. Look at it from the other perspective: It's the natural negative consequence of a lender taking a bad risk. Sallie Mae got greedy, overreached, and made a risk that didn't pay off. Shouldn't they have to suffer the consequences of that? If we continue to keep bankruptcy off the table as an option for student borrowers, we are, in essence, bailing out Sallie Mae. We're telling Sallie Mae, "It doesn't matter that you made horrible decisions and lost big; you're going to get your money back on those investments anyway." By not allowing bankruptcy, we are saying Sallie Mae is too big to fail.

The intention of taking bankruptcy off the table was, I'm sure, to make more kids able to go to college by encouraging more lending. But the only way they could make Sallie Mae so willing to lend to all of us was by stacking the deck entirely in their favor.

From Sallie Mae's perspective, student loans are investments. They put tens of thousands of dollars into each student with the expectation that in five years, they'd start seeing a return on their investment -- that if they spend $30,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 to buy this kid a degree, he'll get a better job than he would have otherwise, and they would share in the kid's profits. Right now, they're finding that a buttload of those investments are not giving the returns they expected, but they still want to collect the amount they were promised. If Sallie Mae had gone into these investments knowing that bankruptcy was a possibility, or that they could only take up to 10% of their income and there was a possibility that that could end up being less than $90 a month, they would have been more judicious about who they gave their loans out to. They would have thought twice about giving someone $100,000 to get an art degree. And yeah, fewer people would have gone to big expensive private colleges, especially those from less privileged backgrounds. But they could still get into community colleges, so... yeah. Overall, that probably would've been better.

(The Department of Education does give out loans knowing that they run a real risk of not getting back the full amount, but, being a not-for-profit governmental institution, they absorb those losses, to an extent, for the common good, as they should.)


Here's the situation we're in: Things are messed up. The borrowers (the Millennials who are graduating college now) and the lenders (Sallie Mae, and to a lesser extent the Department of Education) both made mistakes. Right now, no matter what we do, someone is going to get bailed out of their mistake, and someone is going to pay the trillion-dollar pricetag on both mistakes.

Option One: We keep things the way we are -- bailing out Sallie Mae, making millions of twenty-somethings pay the price for mistakes they made when they were teenagers (as well as for mistakes made by Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, many before they were born), crippling the new generation of innovators and businesspeople and workers (and voters), and continuing to inflate the college bubble.

Option Two: We drastically restructure the student loan system -- bailing out students, forgiving a lot of debt, making Sallie Mae pay for its mistakes (and the mistakes that teenagers made while under the whelming influence of the college culture that Sallie Mae was largely responsible for fostering), and start making steps toward a more sustainable system than the one-size-fits-all throw-money-at-it education approach that's been failing us for decades.

(One more thing -- let's stop pretending that these two options are a dichotomy between making taxpayers bear the burden, and making students bear their own burden. Middle-class middle-aged taxpayers will feel the impact of this either way. They're feeling it now when their kids are moving back in with them (taking all their food and depriving them of grandkids) because there's no jobs that pay well enough to cover the cost of both loan payments and existence. They'll feel it when they need a new kidney and there's not enough doctors to go around because we're still trying to pay off our loans. They'll feel it when the economy stagnates because a whole generation has no disposable income. They'll feel it when the government has to step in to bail out Sallie Mae with a half-trillion dollars that would have been better spent years earlier on the students. And if nothing else, the middle-class middle-aged taxpayers will be feeling it fifteen years from now when the Millennials make up that demographic, and they're still on the hook for $1,000 a month.)


While total forgiveness would be nice, it's quite unlikely, would have a lot of unintended consequences, and demanding it does make us look kind of selfish. I think that, along with allowing bankruptcy, applying the 10% and 20-year rule to private loans is probably the best option. I'll take a page out of Herman Cain's book and call it the 20-Over-20 Plan: federal loans can take up to 10% and private loans can take up to 10%, so lenders get [up to] 20% for [up to] 20 years, and if there's no return on the investment in that time, too bad (And it's not like I'm going to intentionally work for minimum wage for twenty years just to screw with them. If the 20-Over-20 Plan were enacted, I would be able to move out of my parents' house and get a real job within a year, and Sallie Mae could start seeing some real money from me, in a sustainable fashion.).

(15-over-15 would be nice too, but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.)


I don't want my student loan debt to be the defining characteristic of the rest of my life. I don't want to have a mortgage before I have a house. I don't want my parents' house to be repossessed because my dad's the cosigner. And... I'd prefer not to have to spend ten years in the military to get past this (if they'd even take me, considering I have a heart murmur (not to mention i'm also fat and lazy)).

37

Mario Chat / PeTA vs. Furries

« on: November 14, 2011, 05:04:49 PM »

I have to admit, I always get a kick out of PeTA's Mario Flash games. They're pretty fun.

(the picture is a link, by the way)

38

General Chat / :)

« on: November 09, 2011, 10:40:59 AM »

39

Fan Creations / Searscat

« on: October 29, 2011, 08:24:05 PM »

Does this technically break the "no advertising" rule?

So, backstory: I work at Sears. We had a thing last month where whoever got the most CSATs -- the surveys you can do at the website on the receipt -- in a month would win a prize. There was a poster announcing it, which read:

HUGE CSAT CONTEST!!

FIRST PRIZE

THE ASSOCIATE WHO GETS THE MOST SURVEYS CALLED IN WILL WIN $50 COLD HARD CASH!! YES CASH!!

SECOND PRIZE

IF THE STORE'S TOTAL RATING IS >75% WE WILL SERVE HAMBURGERS FREE TO ALL ASSOCIATES!!

I then decided to take the top of the page, fold it over a bit, and staple it, so it read

HUGE CAT CONTEST

I then changed the first prize to read "...WILL WIN $50 COLD HARD CATS!! YES CATS!!" and the second prize to "...WE WILL SERVE CATBURGERS FREE TO ALL ASSOCIATES!!", and added a third prize which read "THE ASSOCIATE WITH TEH LARGEST CAT WILL RECEIVE A STAPLE!" Below it, I inserted a staple, with an arrow pointing to it with the label "like this one". Below that was another staple, labeled "or this one", and to the right was a row of a dozen staples, labeled "OR ONE OF THESE!"

Finally, I decided to enter the huge cat contest myself by drawing a huge cat on the back of the poster. Below is a close recreation of it, as the original was stolen by my manager at the time and thrown out somewhere (probably in her office, as I checked most other trashcans in the area).

So then it kinda blossomed into more and now I've made a whole bunch of these guys. Originally, they were all supposed to be the same cat in multiple costumes, but I'm thinking now there's probably a few different guys.

An alternate military outfit.


An angel.


A Pokemon ninja guy.


Michael Jackson


Some kinda Code Geass-like thing iunno?


Crossdressing maybe?


As Waluigi.


With butterfly wings and a trucker cap


An ad for our rewards point system


An ad for Craftsman (note that that is a piece of bread, not a sandwich)


In this one, the wings are made of rusty metal and fishnet. He is wearing shoepants, but without the tongues.


This guy has four arms and three rows of breasts. His veil is held up partially by tiny chains connecting to his earrings, and partly by the thing on his head. Also he has moth antennae.


This chick has a robot arm that is half steampunk, half Portal. She also has bat wings, giant fake gold lashes on one eye, and a belt with a zipper on it (which is something that we actually sell, though not in purple)


Lands' End calls for a simpler, more sophisticated, laid-back design, like this six-armed dragonflycat-angel wearing a strap over some of his breasts.


...whereas Kmart requires a more dynamic design, leveraging their red color scheme


And finally, something for the holiday season.


I'm planning on eventually putting a bunch of these in an envelope and sending it to corporate. I'm debating whether or not I should include any explanation.

40

General Chat / That "nice guys suck" article

« on: October 06, 2011, 05:48:11 PM »

This describes me with frightening accuracy and I don't know what to do about it.

My response:

On closer examination, she makes some good points. They definitely apply to my one relationship, at least.

You never know if a Nice Guy really likes you for who you are, or if he has glommed onto you out of desperation because you actually paid some kind of attention to him.

At least partially guilty.

They bring roses to a "lets get together for coffee" date.

Or start designing wedding invitations in their head when they've barely met her. Yep.

they either come-on too strong, too hard and too fast, OR, they are so shy and unassertive, that they hang around pretending to be "friends", in the hope that somehow, someway, they will get the courage up to ask her out for a "date".

Oddly, these are actually two sides of the same coin. We desperately want companionship and acceptance, and when we see an opportunity, our instinct is to go all in and elope on the spot, and then we recognize how weird that is and so we don't say anything at all.

They are so desperate to please that they put aside their own needs, and place the object of their desire on a pedestal. Instead of appreciating her, they worship her. We are only human, and pedestals are narrow, confining places to be -- not to mention the fact that we tend to fall off of them.

This is important.

Nice Guys are always asking HER to make the decisions. They think it's being equitable, but it puts an unfair burden of responsibility on her, and gives him the opportunity to blame her if the decision was an unwise one.

This too.

They use their adoration as a foundation for claiming that "no one will ever love her as much as I do." Instead of being a profound statement of their devotion, this is a subtle, but nasty insult. It is akin to saying to her: "You are a difficult person, and only *I* can ever truly love you, so be thankful I'm here."

I kinda thought it sounded that way too when Will Smith said it in Hitch, but it could also just mean "no one will love you the same way that I do."

"She is my Life, my only source of happiness..." YECH!

This is definitely a majorly unhealthy attitude, but I don't know how connected it is to nice-guy-ness. Seems more Twilight-y, really, and Edward is definitely not nice. Neither is Bella, really.

This ultimately boils down to the fact that Nice Guys don't like themselves. Is it any wonder women don't like them? In order to truly love someone else, you must first love yourself. Too often Nice Guys mistake obsession for "love".

To be fair, though, it's not just us mistaking obsession for love, it's the entirety of society. Listen to basically any love song. Look at how everyone thinks "Every Breath You Take" is a love song.

You don't have to be an ego-inflated, arrogant jerk. You just have to LIKE yourself. You have to know what you want out of life, and go after it.

So yeah, I'd say that's pretty accurate.


Discuss.

41

Forum Games / The Add A Word And A Half Story

« on: October 01, 2011, 01:22:37 AM »

I'll write a word and part of the next word. The next poster then adds the rest of that word, a full word, and part of another word, and everyone after that does the same. Capogiro?

One d

42

Mario Chat / Numbers and Dates in the Mushroom World

« on: September 26, 2011, 07:23:47 PM »

(I was going to put this in Mariology, but I figured it'd get more response as a separate thread.)


In Paper Mario, we get to see Bowser's diary. The entries are all from the month of ☆, and the days of the entries (which may or may not be consecutive, but are definitely in order) are as follows:
O/O
O/X
X/X

In Thousand-Year Door, we see several entries from Flavio's log. They are again in the month of ☆, but the days are:
XO
XX
X♪
X☆
X♥
OO
OX
O♪
O☆
O

In TTYD, it seems to be a base-6 number system. Oddly, X comes before O when it's in the tens digit, but comes after it in the ones digit, and when there are slashes (I don't recall there being any days with slashes in TTYD, so it's unclear whether they would come before or after the numbers without slashes. I'm currently replaying it and hoping I'll find some later on.).

There is little room for skipped days in Flavio's log entries -- The first three entries are explicitly shown to be consecutive days by the rising and setting of the sun, and the third one, Day X♪, is on the day they were shipwrecked. He then writes three entries, Days X☆, X♥, and OO, and on Day OX writes "Three days on the isle now." O♪ and O☆ are when Mario enters and exits Cortez's cave, respectively (I doubt Mario spent more than two full days in there, if even that. He probably went in at evening and came out the next morning or afternoon.), and O is after it's all over (possibly skipping a day (as no Day O♥ is recorded) to give him time to collect his thoughts, though it could also be a typo or just weirdness in the way Mushroom Worlders count).

Since XO through OO are consecutive, it seems rather clear that O represents 1 and ☆ represents 4, and so, X-O discrepancy aside, it is likely safe to assume that ☆ is the fourth month of the year.

Having established that ☆ is the fourth month, it remains to be determined how long a month is on the Mushroom Planet. Presumably it is based on the phases of the moon, but the moon in TTYD seems to be much smaller than Earth's, as Mario is able to traverse it in about six screens (though the gravity is more similar to our moon, which makes sense in conjunction with the gravity seen in Galaxy. It's also possible that Mario wasn't traversing the whole moon across its widest point, but rather a latitudinal circle near a pole). There is also at least one more moon, the very small one in Yoshi's Island; this one is probably too small to be seen, but it's possible that it's depicted smaller than it actually is due to the art style.

If we can figure out the month and day system, it could then be combined with the year system in Super Paper Mario, based on the founding of the Flora Kingdom. Granted, the Flora Kingdom is in another dimension, but apparently in Mario's multiverse, alternate dimensions run concurrently in time, similar to the way time travel works in Partners in Time, where it's more like there's a Present World and a Past World that flow simultaneously and can interact, so I say run with it. Super Paper Mario takes place in Flora Year 1626. Thousand-Year Door gives the ages of several characters, including Toadsworth, so if we can figure out how long afterward SPM takes place, we can get approximate birth years for them.

(The symbol numbers seem to only be used for dates; most everything else seems to be on a standard Arabic numeral base-10 system.)

43

Mario Chat / Creeping Graphical Sameyness

« on: September 10, 2011, 05:10:52 AM »

First, I'll quote that post I made in another thread:

The M&L in-game art has been feeling a bit off to me lately. I guess everything just feels unnecessarily big and spread-out in BIS. Sprites are high-res, but with no added detail; they're just big. The sprites and the map layouts in SS felt much tighter and less clumsy.

I also don't like how the series has become less stylistic. In SS, everything was drawn in an original style, but in PiT and BIS, all the sprites feel like they're just traced from the 3D renders.







It's also noticeable in the color scheme -- M&L had a rather distinct palette, giving it a coherent, unified theme, while PiT and BIS just use the big bright official colors for everything, and it's just kinda all over the place.

For some reason, though, PiT and BIS turn Luigi blue. But the dancing is still good.

Hopefully a sprite-based console version would get them thinking more stylistically again.

You know, I'd really like to see a game (maybe an RPG) based on the cartoons and comic books. Except good.

I was reminded of this when I saw just now that Paper Mario 3DS is now apparently changing the Dry Bones to look more like they do everywhere else. Observe:





This probably shouldn't annoy me as much as it does, but it does. I mean, is it just me, or are all the Mario games starting to converge a little too much?

Compare the Koopalings in Superstar Saga to their unused sprites in Super Princess Peach (which, incidentally, is possibly the most graphically generic Mario game yet):




Or how Yoshi's Island DS smoothed out all the pixels and made things just too smooth, largely removing the pen-and-ink-and-crayon motif. Kinda like when they try to restore old black and white movies to put them on DVD using algorithms to find and erase all the dust on the film, and the algorithm goes too far and ends up erasing all the film grain too and it doesn't look like film anymore, it just looks like overly smooth, generic video.









In addition to the standard enemies all looking the same, Bowser's Inside Story, Super Paper Mario, Yoshi's Island DS, and Super Princess Peach also all seem very proud of the fact that they are at higher resolutions than SNES games, and therefore can make bigger smoother images without pixelization. And so that's all they do is make stuff that's not pixelated. I miss pixels.

It's in the 3D games too. When Galaxy came out, I liked that we had a 3D Mario game where everything looked the way it was supposed to, but now, I'm actually starting to miss Sunshine's uniqueness. And I've never like Sunshine's graphical style. But at least it had a style. And is there any more generic-looking Mario game than NSMBWii?

I'm overreacting a bit, but back me up on this, guys. Isn't it all starting to look too standardized? Too samey?

44

Not at the Dinner Table / Why Obama Should Be Re-Elected

« on: August 08, 2011, 05:55:11 PM »

45

General Chat / Two British guys go to Walmart for the first time

« on: July 28, 2011, 12:04:25 AM »

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj1OF7d9m4" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj1OF7d9m4</a>

Britishness ensues.

(also one of them has goggles)