makes me think,

for thousands of years all of our cooked meats would have been roasted over open wood fires. they’d be smoky delicious barbeque. I’m sure some ancient people were even covering it in making it intentionally smoky.

do you think the first stoves got pushback from people that liked the smoke? i mean it must have been weird the first time they tasted things that weren’t smoky… then again, I’m sure there was plenty of stuff that just didn’t get that smoky on the open fire. and the convenience of not needing to go outside was absolutely worth it. and we eventually figured out that some things are quite a lot better without smoke…

i suppose all of this is why we still have grills and smokers today, even though most people also have a stove. people really like that taste. so yeah, i guess everything was bbq before a more convenient option became avaliable. we all know how much people love convenience. I’m sure that was just as true 1000 years ago as it is today.

some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it’s the country it started in, but it’s not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don’t break down the age demographic by region, but I’d bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it’s similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s… meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they’ll see maybe 8% user growth and that’s pretty optimistic.

so we probably won’t actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s… the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I’m sorry to hear that for them.

it’s it’s gotta be something very difficult that no one has ever fund before.

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.

it’s not a sign of quality, it’s a sign of what’s to come. these companies will keep putting out things that work. sadly these live action Disney remakes sell very well even though everyone seems to hate them. that’s what this tells us. if not for this info we’d all just be sitting around scratching our heads over why they keep doing them. this at least tells us why.

yeah, quick psa for passing readers.

never plant bamboo unless you either want to live in a full on bamboo forest and drown out every native plant around you or are ok With spending the rest of eternity fighting for you life to stop it from spreading.

from Wikipedia: “The name “cockchafer”[22] derives from the late-17th-century usage of “cock”[23] (in the sense of expressing size or vigour) + “chafer”[24] which simply means an insect of this type, referring to its propensity for gnawing and damaging plants. The term “chafer” has its root in Old English ceafor or cefer, of Germanic origin and is related to the Dutch kever, all of which mean “gnawer” as it relates to the jaw. As such, the name “cockchafer” can be understood to mean “large plant-gnawing beetle” and is applicable to its history as a pest animal”

kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.

then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.

as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.

no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?

can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.

oh yeah, it’s been a while. details at foggy.

anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::

ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.

the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter

to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”

my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.

tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent

i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.

also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.

aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.

is corpses and the diseased. something that looks almost human but not quite is likely going to get you sick.

there’s a reason why waxy skin that doesn’t quite sit on the body correctly sets it off so hard.

redux is a synonym of remake and remaster.

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could you perhaps be a little more descriptive? what is a jelly?

what exactly am i looking at here?

hmm, i find burritos keep fine if you freeze them fresh then brown them in a skillet when reheating.

that’s fair, but all the equipment and scales in their gym will be labeled in pounds.

i could see it in a dosage situation. like grams of steroids per pound of user. sure, it’s goofy to mix metric and imperial, but that’s just what those two things are commonly measured with in America. time spent doing unit conversations is time spent not lifting.

there’s always handheld gaming pcs being released and going nowhere. the current generation includes the rog Ally and the Lenovo legion.

if you don’t follow this stuff religiously you’ve probably never heard of them, but they are out there. it’s just that no one really buys them.

the steam deck is the first successful one, but companies have been trying to make something like this for years.

haha, that’s why I’ve put almost 10 hours into it.

i suspect most mini games start to show their problems and biases when you spend 10 hours playing then lol. like, gwent was sick, but it really was just about stacking the most strong cards intoa single deck as you could.

caravan though… that was a great damn mini game. the interactive and believable element of needing to go around and collect old world playing cards to build out your deck did a lot to extend the game into the broader world. more than that though, it’s a genuinely playable and relatively balanced game. i happened to have a lot of incomplete card decks lying around when i grew up. eventually i repurposed those into one big deck that would get split in half to play with people irl and a randomized deck. only fantasy card game I’ve ever been able to recreate and play at home without buying anything. and it even played pretty well.