Are they referring to the anime or Visual Novel of Fate/stay night?
Doug_S.
Karma: 1,349
Three worlds collide?
As of part 1, we’ve seen two...
I think I remember reading once that ant colonies do, in fact, produce worker ants that “cheat” and attempt to reproduce, while other ants enforce the “cooperative” status quo.
Shinji and Warhammer40K? So, we’ve been reduced to quoting fanfiction now? Oh, and can you fix me up with more of the good stuff? ;)
Well, we’ve at least gotten a few people into Earth orbit...
As for what to call the female equivalent of the “verthandi”—well, Edward Cullen of the recent Twilight series was intended by the author to be a blatant female wish fulfillment/idealized boyfriend character, although the stories and character rub an awful lot of people the wrong way.
Roko: Yes. Yes I would.
There are plenty of individual moments in which I would rather get laid than play Magic, but on balance, I find Magic to be a more worthwhile endeavor than I imagine casual sex to be. The feeling I got from this achievement was better and far longer lasting than the feelings I get from masturbation. Furthermore, you can’t exactly spend every waking moment having sex, and “getting laid” is not exactly something that is completely impossible in the real world, either.
Also, even though I’m sure that simply interacting with the girl of my dreams in non-sexual ways would, indeed, be a great source of happiness in and of itself, I’d still be frustrated that we couldn’t do all the things that I like to do together!
My brother might know the answer to this. I’ll ask him and get back to you.
Slightly off-topic, here’s a “fun” financial puzzle for you:
John Smith is in trouble. You see, he has liquid assets worth $500,000. Normally, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but John Smith owes Tony Soprano $1,000,000, and the loan comes due in exactly one year from today. If he doesn’t pay up, and in full, Tony is going to have him whacked.
John Smith figures that, in a worst case scenario, he could take his $500,000 to Vegas, bet it all on red on a single roulette wheel spin, and have a nearly 50% chance of paying off his debt. (He’ll worry about the IRS after he pays off Tony.)
You’re John Smith’s broker. Can you come up with a better investment strategy for John Smith and his $500,000?
Although having the girl of my dreams would certainly be nice, I’d soon be pissed off at the lack of all the STUFF that I like and have accumulated. No more getting together with buddies and playing Super Smash Bros (or other video games) for hours? No Internet to surf and discuss politics and such on? No more Magic: the Gathering?
Screw that!
Yes, when a character gets a Magical Girlfriend, “I’m not worthy of you!” is one of the most common reactions.
It just doesn’t seem to be worth commenting on, as it’s so tangential to the actual point of the post.
Incidentally, which is better, for the losers in the mating game:
A non-sentient lover, or involuntary celibacy?
I object to the term “catgirl” for “nonsentient romantic/sex partner”. A catgirl is every bit as sentient as Captain Picard. The word you want is “fembot”.
My soul got sucked out a long time ago.
[whine] I wanna be a wirehead! Forget eudamonia, I just wanna feel good all the time and not worry about anything! [/whine]
AI in strategy games universally ignores fog of war, so there’s not even fun of using that as a cover.
Not quite true; Advance Wars: Days of Ruin has the AI dutifully obey the Fog of War limitations. However, the AI is pretty easy to beat anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Stranger in a Strange Land may have been an attempt to describe a Weirdtopia.
Heh. A GameFAQs-style FAQ/Walkthrough for real life. What should I do with something like that?
Well, I actually am pretty much stuck right now, so the first thing I do is get myself out of my current jam (regarding employment and finances and such). Then I see if there is any section that covers vague general advice that seems relatively safe, and read that. Finally, I go lock it away in a safe deposit box at a bank and try to avoid using it again except in an emergency.
Taking the analogy a little too far, my game player ethics tells me that I should avoid looking up, say, future stock market returns or winning lottery numbers, because that would be cheating. Ideally, I’d simply want to use it to avoid blunders rather than to munchkin my way through all of life’s puzzles and quests. (Did I just verb “munchkin”?)
On the other hand, it might be worthwhile to ctrl-F “cure for cancer” simply because, well, some things are worth doing a little cheating for. (Is there anything one can do in the physical world that could count as an exploit? Heck, if anything can be an exploit, the human brain sure seems like one, considering that humans have literally taken over the world in what, on the time scale of evolution, is like the blink of an eye.)
postulating that talking about science in public is socially unacceptable, for the same reason that you don’t tell someone aiming to see a movie whether the hero dies at the end. … I started thinking that, well, maybe it really would be a good idea to get rid of all the textbooks, all they do is take the fun out of science.
Maybe they should exist, but shouldn’t be thought of and written like textbooks. Maybe they should be like video game walkthroughs. You use them when you’re stuck, as a last resort. Or, you just go dive right in, because you want to play optimally and make sure that you explore everything.
Of course, it’s kind of hard to make learning many sciences into an experience that is like exploring a video game, because most people don’t have the equipment on hand to, say, recreate the experiment that led Rutherford to hypothesize the existence of the atomic nucleus. On the other hand, you could make mathematics into a much more game-like experience, by simply presenting progressively harder problems and challenging students to come up with methods to solve them.
You may or may not be aware that mathematics in the Middle Ages was a highly competitive endeavor, with new problem-solving techniques, such as the general solution to the cubic equation, being carefully guarded trade secrets that mathematicians would use to challenge and one-up one another other.
The “corny pun” in this case being “Bayesian Conspiracy”?
I am somewhat more disturbed by the suffering of the eaten babies than by the baby-eating itself. I don’t like the baby-eating but I could tolerate it by chalking it up to Bizarre Alien Biology or whatever, but it should be possible to euthanize the babies before they are eaten, or whatever. Basically, I hate pain more than I hate death.
Consider the typical human reaction to the treatment of food animals in factory farms...