Id pay special attention to Study 4 which seems to really hit my key points of criticism as a layman. Study 4 controlled for census region but I’d really like to see this controlled for rural vs urban populations at a finer scale. Without that adjustment I question the validity of other studies included.

That said study 4, if I’m reading it right, still found a correlation with happiness in conservatives but that correlation did not survive when religion was accounted for. Which tells you everything you need to know.

The conservatism isn’t the primary ideology, this is just a roundabout way of asking if religious people report being happier and having more meaning and of course they do. The religious aspect almost overrules the political angle entirely.

If they fail to elect a speaker, we’re screwed. This causes a constitutional crisis.

That’s basically what was being said and it’s not functionally different because the vast majority of the public does not work in elections or their verification. In essence if 99% of the population does not have access to data or cannot interpret said data, trust is needed.

You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.

Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.

Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.

I think my feelings are mixed in that aspect. I used to really love Bethesda games but after playing 1500+ hours of Skyrim and many hundreds of hours of fallout now, I think I see it for its limitations as well. And the mods end up highlighting shortcomings. The vanilla games are still a fun time I think.

Also other games have just come in and created much better story arcs and characters that highlight how bad their writing tends to be. Skyrim was written okay but even then it never did anything that felt like plot development. Instead everything there goes as expected, you’re just wowed by the scenes and dragons.

And yeah I think Bethesda continues to lack polish in what they do and it’s really showing. Even when fallout 4 came out all those years ago, every piece about it felt dated. It felt more like it dated back to Skyrim in ways, so I can see why Starfield failed even if I plan on playing it. I just hope Bethesda fix their issues because Elder Scrolls 6 can’t have this many loading screens, this many bugs, or this flat of a story. Sadly they have a trajectory on all of those things.

That’s what I did. Played it once with no DLCs on release, then ignored it. But with mods it’s actually much better. And if you like the difficulty of New Vegas, the extended mod pack I used helped a lot with that.

I really missed the grit and dark tone of new Vegas and while it doesn’t live up to that, mods get it much closer.

That last part I especially agree with. It’s not really the fallout game I expected when it first came out and some where in this play through I gave up taking it seriously. It’s fun for what it is but I think the mods really highlighted how lighthearted and shallow most of the game is. I mean hell, Heather uses the conversation wheel I think and she even ends up a decent companion with actual development.

Bethesda needs to get away from the companions just randomly coming up to you to spill their life story now that you reached enough XP. They can do better and the mods I’ve used show how simple it would be to do so

This isn’t a review of the vanilla game, but I get your point. I was mostly just debriefing after the long playthrough after going back to it all these years later.

I think it’s less that the mod lists don’t work together in Skyrim and more that I just never felt cohesion the way that FO4 modders appear to have worked out.

For instance, this mod pack has several moments that modify the main quest. And other mods work with that. Or there’s mods that interconnect beyond basic dependencies and assets, creating quest lines that play nicely together.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist in Skyrim mods, I’ve done a lot of that as well. It just seems like there was coordination here by the community more than in Skyrim from what I’ve seen. Personal experience, could be wrong.

You might give Fallout another go though and do what I did and choose the modded endings. Far more interesting and I engaged with the vanilla story very little. DLCs are also worth it

I think the game is good/fine without mods but with mods it’s absolutely a great game. I would absolutely recommend the mod pack that I used. I paid for the nexus pro membership thing to have it all auto-installed for me, it was a breeze. Cost me $10 or whatever but it’s worth it to not have to spend the time installing everything. And I liked the ability to install the add on mod pack for added difficulty but honestly ignore the needs system entirely.

I played using the vanilla survival mechanics and it was fine. Food is easy to find and so is water but it just gets annoying at some point if you just want to adventure. Survival does limit you to saving at beds though, which are common 90% of the time. The other 10% it either creates some good tension as you actually fear for your life but also some annoyance having to retry stuff and wastes time. Up to you.

As for recommendations, just realize that the mod pack I used did indeed take 150+ hours to complete most of the quests. That being said, even if you did a fraction of that it’s not a waste of time. You will have to get a little further into the game for the mods or DLC to really hook you. Do Nuka World DLC sooner rather than later.

I mostly ignored the settlement stuff entirely. I did a little bit of what it asks and tried to get into Sim Settlements but I just didn’t care.

I think what I would mainly say is don’t make the game too tedious for yourself and feel free to focus on the mods. I actually didn’t complete the main story until the very end of my play through and I’d recommend that as well. Also, just do the Fens Sheriff stuff. It’s really that good and the vanilla stuff is very boring.

As for add on mods, I think an unlimited carry weight is not a bad idea to enable. Inventory management is hell in this game even with the backpacks. Other than that you don’t need to add much at all. If you need any help my DMs are open

Really it depends what you care about. From my perspective, I call it great as a synonym for good but really I don’t think any other game has threatened to steal Fallouts thunder. I’m not sure how to give an overall sentiment for a game that has such highs and moderate lows though.

Well now I’m hoping that the Switch 2 has a working emulator within a handful of months after release.

Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.

Andromeda and the Milky Way shall merge in the most beautiful sex display you’ve ever seen, they will become one in the flesh and yet over millions of years bangin it’s unlikely a single ball will touch. Therefore my thesis of galactic homosexuality is false and our merging is not gay and the socks can be removed.

Thank you for coming to my defense, boring questions will not be allowed.

Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.

This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.

For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.

Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.

Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.

And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.

Exactly. I remember this really being an issue with Far Cry 4. The villain there had me on the edge of my seat since the intro and I still think FC4 was one of the best far cry games to exist. The setting was amazing, mechanics worked really well, and the vehicles rocked.

The thing it flopped on completely was interactions with the main bad guy and any semblance of story development. It wasn’t nonexistent, but the main villain is criminally underused in that game and is on screen for maybe 15-20 minutes total.

But now we have the issue of far cry doing the Ubisoft signature multi-zone storytelling thing where the story is not linear and it’s completely wrecked by that. This game has the same exact issue that’s been here since FC5 and I hate it. I’d rather they keep the lookout points around and have a worse world and a better story with actual progression and characters. It’s like they’re determined to make games at a 6 or 7 out of 10 level.

One of the best explanations of this and an actual demonstration of the technology to do this was done In this video on curing lactose intolerance (not permanently).

Whats even crazier is that this video was published 6 years ago and the paper you referenced is 4 years old. With the speed that genetics research is going, both of these are certainly very outdated resources even if the background is mostly the same.

I really cannot blame anyone for the confusion because a lot of this comes from the LDS Church itself and their often confusing clarifications of their positions. Like with caffeine specifically they have a long history of forbidding its use and then suddenly they reinterpreted it the way you’re suggesting. I’d say that’s fairly atypical for most religions nowadays and it’s a unique aspect of the LDS church that their interpretations are fluid like that.

The alternative for most other religions in the US is just that they never get specific and so most members hold conflicting views and interpretations. Both of the techniques I find very odd since you’d think that these differences would have faith based answers, but instead appear almost bureaucratic in nature

The first one definitely felt more balanced and I think your observation is what I meant when I said the second game is lighter on story. I think if the game were longer, just another hour or two, they could’ve done more with the story. Gameplay is good for both though!

You’ve spelled out the entire problem but have come to incorrect conclusions. If you’re directly behind a car, it becomes hard to sense acceleration or deceleration of other vehicles. More importantly, the brake is often used to decelerate on highways and not initiate a stop. This all leads to a lot of confusion and ultimately crashes every year.

The situations you mentioned are exactly the problem areas. Not accelerating it slowing down, often quite quickly, to make an exit. Dangerous. Going up a slope may or may not change speed, which needs to be known. Again dangerous. Same with downhill which is actually more dangerous not knowing how hard braking is happening.

So we have the technology to fix this. We can invent either variable break lights that change brightness or zoned lights that tell you “I’m slowing down” versus “I’m braking hard”. We could fix this because cars are dangerous enough as is