Nightmare Kart
https://youtu.be/t7nGTQZJiSw
https://youtu.be/QwcVSTkZf-k

I’m never sure where to draw the line with metroidvanias. Does Dark Souls count as metroidvania? or Link’s Awakening? Cave Story?

Minecraft - mouse tweaks, Alex’s Mobs, The Bumblezone
Morrowind - I forget what it’s called, but the one that adds the mainland
Risk of Rain 2 - any character by Enforcergang. Especially classic sniper and rocket

It was so roundabout and specific that I couldn’t possibly remember the details, but there was apparently a certain baseball player who got an unbelievable score, which was in some way both a holy number and statistically impossible.
They knew all the details and connected it to the player’s own questioning of religion, but I thought it was absurd. Somebody, somewhere, made a very specific play in baseball? Doesn’t sound that unbelievable.

This only includes data from 2024. Anything Trump has done as president is irrelevant to this ranking. If you think 28th out of 180 sounds bad, wait until the data for 2025 comes out

No, it’s 2.5 eggs per dollar

I totally lost my ability to tell whether or not I was hungry. I don’t keep a regular meal schedule anyway so it was hard for my body to adjust back, I think.

32 hours after making a dumb bet. It messed up my appetite for months afterwards. I got $20 though. Not worth it.

That’s a strange assumption to make. No, they are not all taxi drivers, shop owners, or carriers of anything especially heavy, to my knowledge.

USA, Bangladesh, Austria, Singapore, Japan

I’m extremely skeptical that tens of millions of people, a huge percentage of the working population, make any significant income from TikTok. Do you have a source for that?

I mostly agree although rather than saying author intention is a vital aspect of art I would say it can be, but that the raw, uninformed experience is almost always more important

So often I have friends read a book or watch a movie and say “I don’t really get it, it doesn’t make sense, I didn’t really like it” and then some time later they’ll come back and say “actually, I read the Wikipedia article about it and now I understand. The author actually intended it to be about [xyz]”
Um, what? If those themes and ideas were not evident in the original story, then what does it matter what the author intended? Surely the author also intended to write a cohesive and understandable story (and evidently failed, for you). Surely the author intended to convey those themes in the story itself. You didn’t enjoy the movie, you enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about the movie.
If author intention actually matters to non-meta media analysis, then that totally undermines anything the author actually does to convey the ideas in the work itself.
If (to make a specific example) my friend watches Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and concludes only from the Wikipedia article about it that it’s abstractly about Oshii’s loss of religion, then that totally ignores everything in the movie that does or doesn’t convey those themes just to create a shallow interpretation based on what the author was allegedly trying to do.

Even something like “Tanaka” I often hear pronounced like ‹tə 'na kə› rather than like ‹ta na ka›
‹a ki ɾa› becomes ‹ə 'ki ɹə›
Not sure if the IPA is precisely correct in there but the schwa ə and the stress is what I hear oftentimes.

I don’t know if I’m remembering the plot correctly but I think you can control the actions of only the target individual and only in a way that’s reasonably possible

Yeah but it depends.
An elementary school near me recently replaced their chest-height chain-link fence with a 10ft steel bar fence with spikes on top. There’s some benefits to a fence, but the spikes just make it seem menacing. And I guess more abstractly, it communicates that school is a dangerous place that’s walled-off from the rest of the world rather than a place that’s just like any other part of society. This is in the USA, I should mention, so maybe the cynical message is more accurate.

Blade Runner.

Maybe it was more impressive when it came out, but I watched it for the first time a few months ago and it was shockingly below my expectations for the reputation it has. Confusing plot, forgettable characters, a (very cool! yet) shallow, uninteresting setting.
I had heard that famous “tears in the rain” monologue some time before watching the movie and thought “wow, that was awesome. I can’t imagine how much better it is with all the depth and context that the movie will add.” Nah, it’s from a character who we know basically nothing about and comes out of nowhere with no connection to any part of the story-- if anything, the context of the movie detracts from the cool monologue by turning it into a “what is this guy even talking about” moment.
Thematically it had potential with questioning the line between the humans and human-like robots, but they don’t go anywhere interesting with it. When it’s a theme that’s been explored by everything from Ghost in the Shell to Fallout 4 to Asimov, I’m gonna need at least a molecule of interesting development to happen before my jaw drops.
2/10, not recommended.

The orca from this story is from one of the same pods that was part of that trend, although she’s too young (1998) to have been part of the original trend. But perhaps her mother once wore a salmon hat

Orcas are very intelligent, emotional, and social, arguably moreso than any other non-human animal. For this orca individual, the reality was doubtlessly just as much of a dramatic and emotional journey as it appears in the headline.

All my games with over 100 hours playtime. Outside of those, probably Minecraft which must be over 2000 and some console games, maybe a couple Zelda games and Persona 3 FES at 100-200

edit: if you’re looking for recommendations, I definitely say Spelunky 2. Try to go for all the achievements and it’s a super difficult grind. Probably the hardest game I’ve played but very rewarding