I’ve never heard of TemTem before and plugging it into Google Trends, it looks like it’s not even comparable to Palworld. It’s still somewhat big, looks like 500,000 copies sold. But still doesn’t really compare to what appears to be nearly 20 million Palworld players.
Companies lose rights to protect their IP if they don’t protect it themselves, so it may be in their best interest to go after the big competitors and pretend they’ve never heard of TemTem.
“designed to be sung to the tune of ‘Home on the Range.’”
(1) Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X
And after it’s grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
With its Y chromosome changed to X
And when I’m alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
(2) Oh, give me a clone
Is my sorrowful moan,
A clone that is wholly my own.
And if she’s X-X
And the feminine sex
Oh, what fun we will have when we’re prone.
(3) My heart’s not of stone,
As I’ve frequently shown
When alone with my own little X
And after we’ve dined,
I am sure we will find
Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
(4) Why should such sex vex
Or disturb or perplex
Or induce a disparaging tone?
After all, don’t you see
Since we’re both of us me
When we’re having sex, I’m alone.
(5) And after I’m done
She will still have her fun
For I’ll clone myself twice ere I die.
And this time without fail
They’ll be both of them male
And they’ll each ravage her by and by.
Source: autobiography of Isaac Asimov
“It’s against my religion to use preferred pronouns”
Also that religion: hi my pronouns are He/Him CAPITALIZED please. Please capitalize them when you use them.
🤷♀️
Half-Life, Half-Life Opposing Force, Half-Life Blue Shift
Chinese and Japanese would have so many. My favorite is probably 緑 which means green. I also like the simplified Chinese horse: 马. Special shoutout to 凸 meaning convex, 凹 meaning concave, and 凸凹 meaning bumpy (not sure if this is true in Chinese). There’s thousands to choose from so of course there are a lot of other handsome one-character words, but those are the first few I thought of.
A bunch of other people have mentioned Ghibli movies and since I’m in the middle of a binge through every Ghibli movie I think I’ll recommend one that I hadn’t seen before a few days ago: Only Yesterday or Omoide Poroporo.
It’s Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki, but it’s easily my favorite Ghibli movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. It feels so real and relatable, the whole movie is essentially a really slow-paced series of flashbacks to the main character’s 10-year-old self and every detail is so well-thought-out and interesting.
Very worth watching, although I’ll mention as a disclaimer that all the friends I was watching it with thought it was super pointless and boring.
I’m with you on the Gamecube controls, tank controls are awkward but Wii pointing is more awkward. Although the best control scheme I used was a Steam controller on Dolphin (for the Wii version).
I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ.
There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.
I did a search on GSM Arena and if you lower the battery capacity to 5000 then there’s a single result. If you change some of the other spec requirements there’s some other stuff available but nothing that matches what you want one-to-one.
Chinese characters were also used in Vietnamese and Korean until surprisingly recently.
Source Film Maker, 3D animation software based on source engine which was used for games like Portal and Team Fortress 2.
Yeah if anything I’d expect a coal mining museum to be way more aware of the impact of their energy source and be more likely to switch to solar.
Phantom Hourglass was my first but Spirit Tracks is my favorite. I actually really like the stylus DS controls (and it’s not even that bad using a mouse on an emulator either) but the main thing I like is the music and story. Music and story I would say are both better in Spirit Tracks than any other game in the series. It also is one of the few games in the series that you can really call a legend of Zelda. She’s there the whole time and the main story focuses on her character arc.
Just overall an amazing experience with some really dramatic moments, if I had to summarize what I like about it more than the other games in the series I’d say it’s the most “cinematic & dramatic”
Sorry for rant
There’s a thing in sociology (or social psychology? I don’t really know the difference) called “identity salience” that I think explains gender really well. Basically, people have any number of identities that describe them and they are of varying importance/salience. For example, it can be a big part of somebody’s identity that they are a “father,” but not a big part of their identity that they are a “driver” or “consumer.” Maybe all those words can objectively be applied to this person, but he would likely identify strongly with one over the others. Similarly, right now I’m a “commenter” because I’m leaving a comment. That’s something that objectively describes me, but I don’t consider it to be an important part of my identity at all. Gender is just like any other identity; it’s more or less important to different people.
There’s already a distinction between sex and gender, even colloquially to an increasing extent, and gender is widely understood to exist as a spectrum or multiple spectrums. It’s reasonable to believe that people who don’t consider a traditional gender to be an important part of their identity could consider themselves non-binary.
It’s true that gender stereotypes exist, but there are plenty of positive characteristics that are also associated with gender like “men are confident” or “women are understanding.” If somebody doesn’t identify with any of those characteristics or even stereotypes, then they might just feel like they’re not accurately described by gendered words. Of course, somebody who doesn’t fit the stereotypical idea of a certain gender can still be of that gender; it’s all subjective.
If you’re interested in simple, objective, binary gender, it’s called sex, not gender. And even sex isn’t simple, objective, or binary when you really get detailed.
The first game goes on sale pretty often (it’s about $5 right now on Steam and GOG) so you could also try the first game if you’re interested enough (on PC).
I’ve stopped using the word “roguelite” because most people who play roguelites just call them “roguelikes” and adding “lite” to the end makes it feel like those games are “lite” versions of roguelikes.
When I play Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Cogmind, Brogue, etc. I call them “classic roguelikes” or “traditional roguelikes” which feels a lot more precise than having a distinction between “like” and “lite” and it also feels a lot less combative to “roguelites”. It feels like the term roguelite exists mostly to just correct people who incorrectly use “roguelike” and be like “unm, actually that’s not a roguelike 🧐 only my game is a roguelike 🤣”
Most people call roguelite games “roguelikes”; it should be on the fewer people who play traditional roguelikes to change what they call their oddly specific genre.
Also, for those who have never played a traditional roguelike, I highly recommend Brogue. It’s free and has much easier controls than most other old roguelikes, and the graphics are also pretty good for ASCII.
What in the world is Rob actually tangibly observing? The inside of Bob’s brain? Is Bob wearing a sign that says “my current emotion: happy & content”? The point stands that Rob does not see everything and isn’t necessarily correct about what he thinks he sees.
About the homophones, it’s also worth noting that English does the same thing. It’s why we have “to, two, too” and “right rite wright write”.
Just instead of having inconsistent memorized spellings, Japanese has memorized symbols. 同, 銅, 道, 動, 堂, 胴, 洞, etc. all being pronounced the same way = way more need for complexity in order to tell them apart.
Golden Sun is probably one of my favorite RPGs, very deep combat system where in the lategame you will be modifying your character class in the middle of battles to change your movesets and other cool mechanics. Fairly interesting story as well. It has great GBA pixel art and it does have random encounters.
Persona 5 is a turn-based RPG that lots of people who aren’t usually into turn-based RPGs tend to like. Simple but satisfying battles, and a story that would have seemed mediocre if it wasn’t for great music and some cool moments which make it really stand out. No pixel art and also no random encounters.
OMORI is pretty good and has a really good art style. The story is also very good with some very memorable characters and moments, and pretty good music. The combat is simple and probably best described as “not bad”. The biggest downside of the game imo is that despite not being very long (<20 hours) it felt like it dragged on close to the end. It might have random encounters? I don’t really remember.
Overall I recommend Golden Sun if you are able to emulate it or something (not on steam or switch)
I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.
I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.