Hah! What gets used for real there would have Jeep owners drooling with envy.

Wow, it’s sure smells bad out here. Is anyone >yawn< else getting sleepy?

I visited Iceland, not too long ago. The tour guides, politely, made a point of illustrating how much of a rude menace tourists can be with their rental cars. We got a pass, of course, as we were on a tour bus every time this happened. The message was clear: use the world-class public transit and charter busses/tours where possible.

My perspective as a tourist: the cops really are needed in situations like this.

I mean, it’s what you’d expect from older gen X-ers, which isn’t a bad thing. That one song sounds a lot like R.E.M., and the more popular tracks on the channel have a real post-punk vibe overall. The older stuff up there reminds me of… Tom Petty? Overall, easy listening rock.

Edit: I don’t know what I expected. Freakin’ Keanu is in the band. Of course it’s wholesome.

My favorite was the hostess who didn’t want to clean the bathroom so she would just fill the soap and and paper products and fill a spray bottle with Lysol that she would spray around to give the smell of a clean bathroom.

This is exactly the kind of BS I’m talking about. I once knew some pool lifeguards that had to rotate through bathroom cleaning duty. I overheard that their MO was to just get everything wet with a hose, splash pinesol on the floor, and call it a day.

Agreed! But “smells like cleanser” does not mean “is clean”. It jams up my radar (sense of smell) so it’s tough to figure out if anything else is up. I’d rather detect no off odors or cleansers at all to be sure.

That’s entirely possible. The problem is that with chlorine or ammonia vapors savaging your nasal cavity, you’ll never really know.

I’ve tried to push through in these situations and it’s never good.

Did not know that was possible.

Same, but I’m starting to think you need a pretty sizable infestation in a nearby wall for this to be a thing.

I’m one of these people. I can smell an apartment roach infestation from the front door, every time.

And yes, restaurants always get the “sniff check” before we sit down. No-go odors are:

• bleach
• pine-sol (amonia)
• heavy perfume (think “Glade plugin-in”)
• insects (roaches, etc)
• pet odor (wet dog, litterbox)
• sewage (usually a dry floor drain but that’s still not okay)
• dingy carpet (think: “old movie theater”)

The first two are obvious attempts at covering up something worse with “clean” smells, and/or the staff has no idea what “clean” actually means. And they obviously don’t care what olfaction means to someone trying to enjoy a meal, which says heaps about what they think food service actually is. Everything else just speaks to the “I don’t care what you smell” part, or there’s something very wrong with how the kitchen is run. /rant

An example of a top-shelf dining odor experience? I once went to a Japanese restaurant at opening time. The only smell in the dining room was that of the specific kind of imported cedar in the cutting boards. This is traditionally cleaned with boiling hot water, and nothing else. This released a gentle woody and pine-y scent that just filled the space and invited the senses. I came hungry, but I sat down ravenous. The meal to follow was something I will never forget.

Edit: some clarification since this got some traction. I know that bleach and ammonia are s-tier disinfectants and absolutely necessary for food prep, health standards, and the rest. I use this stuff at home. My issue is with establishments that utterly fail at ventilating these odor and spoil the dining experience with strong chemical odors. Looking deeper I find very strong cleaning odors (long after opening hours) suspicious since it’s very easy to splash stuff around, giving the impression of cleanliness, but not actually clean anything. Strong chemical smells also make it impossible to detect sewage, rot, mold, soil, and other things that would easily flag a restaurant. I’d rather not take the chance.

a lot of devs love watching stuff like speedrunning

True, but some of them hate it. But with the growing presence of speedrunning friendly features in new titles (looking at you, Supergiant), I think that’s becoming less of a problem.

Either way, these “devs watch” reaction videos are fantastic.

Exactly. And while we’re educating the forum here, Wikipedia has the details on the loophole that circumvents this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole#Provenance

Sometimes referred to as the Brady bill loophole,[9] the Brady law loophole,[10] the gun law loophole,[11] or the private sale loophole,[12][13][14] the term refers to a perceived gap in laws that address what types of sales and transfers of firearms require records and or background checks, such as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.[15] Private parties are not legally required by federal law to: ask for identification, complete any forms, or keep any sales records, as long as the sale is not made in interstate commerce (across state lines) and does not fall under purview of the National Firearms Act. In addition to federal legislation, firearm laws vary by state.[16]

I am not a lawyer. I do not sell firearms.

The gist I get is that this opens up enough loopholes to permit unlicensed mules/fences on either side of the transaction. Depending on what political leanings and circumstances are in play, this legal framework might actually encourage that behavior.

To be fair, I think this is for gas engines and not jet engines. So big commercial airports, and the con chem trail generating traffic, are in the clear.

No, it’s just the smaller airports and tiny fields used for crop dusters. You know. The ones that are literally everywhere. :(

Wait, what?

lead in fuel that airplanes are still allowed to use

Oh shit.

So this is really more heeling than healing.

After completing all these steps, the result was a little anticlimactic and disappointing. But still, I realized there was one thing left to do: taste it.

I found that the clowning/assholery in Seinfeld was just too close to plausible to clock as humor most of the time, while picking on small and petty things; it’s a little too real. I don’t think that comes from conceit, but rather, a generation gap and all the insensitivity that comes with it. Just add a little casual violence and it’s peak boomer-era humor. That said, Seinfield was its best when the stories were less believable and cruel.

The other shows you cite put these humor beats way over the top which is far more paletteable, IMO.

It makes a lot of sense. It also presents an opportunity to hand off such filtering to a more responsible entity/agency than media companies of the past. In the end, I sincerely hope we have a huge number of options rather than the same established players (FANG) as everything else right now.

Easily better than all the other options.

It’s even easier than that. Both of these genres have design features that require minimal balancing, making for an even faster dev cycle.

Roguelikes side-step the need for traditional game balance by providing meta progression and building inevitable-death-by-impossible-odds into the core game. For Roguelikes that actually have an ending, all the developer needs to do is provide enough meta progression perks to overcome the game’s peak difficulty, for even the worst of players. Everyone else gets bragging rights for beating the game faster than that. Either way, the lack of balance and “fairness” in the core design are features, not flaws.

Deck builders follow in Magic The Gathering’s footsteps: you never need to fully balance it. Ever. The random draw mechanisms, combined with a deep inventory of resource and item/creature/action cards, make it unlikely that a player gets an overpowered hand all the time. Pepper a few ridiculously overpowered cards in there, and it just feels more fun. Plus, if you keep the gravy train going with regular add-ons, the lack of balance is even further masked by all the possible choices. And yes, some player will min/max a deck at great personal expense and wipe the floor with their opponents because it was never fair in the first place, and doing so is a feature.

The real question then becomes: what would you trust to filter comments and information for you?

In the past, it was newspaper editors, TV news teams, journalists, and so on. Assuming we can’t have a return to form on that front, would it be down to some AI?