makeshiftreaper
@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
- Comment on Discussion - what is the last movie you couldn't finish? 2 weeks ago:
Arthur (1981). I really like the theme song when it comes up so I thought I’d give it a go, especially considering it won an Oscar. The titular character sucks, which I’m aware is the point but it’s just aged so poorly. I have no sympathy for this effective billionaire, I don’t care that nobody loves him for his personality, I don’t care that he’s drowning himself in booze, and frankly, he annoys me. I’m sure he gives up the money and booze for love at the end but that still doesn’t redeem him being so fucking annoying. I’m predisposed to dislike him and nothing he does in the first 45 minutes changes that
- Comment on Just read an article somebody stole 40k from an atm. How is that possible that an atm carries that much? And is it even possible to get inside an ATM if so? 4 weeks ago:
This is what 100k in cash looks like:
A pile of mixed bills on a table
It’s not that tricky to fit all that in an ATM. ATMs are built to be difficult to remove and get open but with the right tools anything that can be closed can also be opened. The trick is to do that without damaging the bills inside, which I imagine the news wouldn’t report on
- Comment on Tencent collaborated with Snoop Dogg for Fortnite, officially adding the 'C-Walk' as a dance, a notorious gang sign for the Crips. 1 month ago:
I imagine Epic cares less about what the ESRB thinks and more about what the CCP thinks, seeing as Tencent has a major stake in Epic. China is generally anti-death in games
- Comment on Tencent collaborated with Snoop Dogg for Fortnite, officially adding the 'C-Walk' as a dance, a notorious gang sign for the Crips. 1 month ago:
Epic’s official language for the game never features death. Characters are eliminated, you can meet the god of the underworld, but no character ever actually dies. Apparently the ESRB says it’s ok
- Comment on Tencent collaborated with Snoop Dogg for Fortnite, officially adding the 'C-Walk' as a dance, a notorious gang sign for the Crips. 1 month ago:
Yes but a big difference is Call of Duty is an R rated video game whereas Fortnite is rated T. Fortnite doesn’t feature blood, death, or swearing. Does it matter that the same kids probably play both? That’s for the parents to decide
- Comment on If I wanted to die in a viking funeral, like getting put on a boat and set ablaze while I am in the middle of the see can this be done? Or is it even legal? 2 months ago:
Generally speaking in America it’s very difficult to obtain custody of a corpse after the authorities have it in their possession. While there are many types of funeral options viking burials are not one. Regular fire does not burn hot enough to fully burn a human body, which is why cremation uses special equipment. Generally nobody wants partially burnt corpses in their river, so you’re either going to be illegally polluting or going to international waters. Generally you’ll need to convince some combination of funeral director, medical examiner, coroner, hospital director, and the police to give you custody of the body. It seems unbelievable to me that you’ll be able to convince all those people to give you a body for a viking funeral
On to illegal ways you could accomplish this: not reporting a dead body is not only a crime but also makes you incredibly suspicious for fraud at a minimum and murder at the max. Not acquiring a death certificate will make dealing with any estate very difficult. Stealing the body from wherever it is located will likely get you charges for defacing a dead body. You could bribe some people to look the other way but if that fails that’s also a crime
In short, no you can’t really do it. However, this is America, so presumably with enough money to the right people you could probably work it out. But we’re talking .01% level money and connections
- Comment on I don't understand why underbaked borderline raw cookies are such a popular trend. 2 months ago:
One thing to consider is that delivery and takeout are significantly more popular than they were 4 years ago. Some of these chains either anticipate or encourage you to heat your cookies just before you eat them and halfway cooking them gives the best results. A place just down the road from me encourages 1 minute on high in the air fryer or 3 in a toaster oven before eating
- Comment on if you ever traveled 1K miles by bus, would you recommend it? 3 months ago:
I agree that this is a bad idea. Bus travel sucks. It has basically all of the downsides of air travel with basically none of the upsides, minus cost obviously. Without knowing what countries you’re going to be going through it’s harder to say. Bus stations in my experience can be difficult to navigate in my language, in a language I don’t know I’d be even more concerned. Usually you can eat food, but like airplanes try to be considerate about what you have. Avoid fish, common allergens, smelly food, etc.
Finally consider that over those 36 hours you’re going to have to either bring food, or buy it, you’re losing time wherever you’re transit, and are at the mercy of the bus time tables instead of waiting on a single flight
- Comment on Reagan is the Worst Movie of the Year: Review and Breakdown 3 months ago:
Clearly you don’t go to the movie theaters very often. There’s been big ass marquees for it for over a month now
- Comment on "It's Communism": Kamala's First Economic Plan Proposes Price Controls To "Combat Inflation" 4 months ago:
- Comment on [Discussion thread] Borderlands 4 months ago:
I haven’t seen it but I really got the impression that this was like Doom, Rampage, and Monster Hunter. The studios got scared of making the movie actually like the game instead of following their standard formula for a movie. Then they compromise so hard that the video game fans don’t like the story and the regular viewers don’t have any attachment to the characters. All that’s left is IP soup and if Marvel can’t make that successful how can a video game franchise people haven’t cared about since 2012 pull it off?
- Comment on Balatro celebrates 2 million sales, will feature major gameplay update in 2025! 4 months ago:
Conversely the worst is when that happens and a bad boss blind screws your run
- Comment on is it possible to be married and still feel lonely? 4 months ago:
Yeah, have you ever had an annoying roommate? Isn’t it so much more frustrating and isolating than living alone? You don’t even have your own space to get away so you just become more irritable all the time. Now imagine if you wanted to not live with that person that you need to get lawyers, your family, another family and the government involved
A lot of people get married because “they’re supposed to”, “they’ve been dating for a while”, or because it’s arranged. Is it shocking that those people don’t have the foundation for a good long term relationship? Is it shocking that every day is a little bit worse for them?
- Comment on Balatro celebrates 2 million sales, will feature major gameplay update in 2025! 4 months ago:
It’s hard to offer strong heuristics for Balatro because you could theoretically build up to a point where you’ve got a crazy high multiplier but if your chips are low it doesn’t matter.
For example let’s say you’ve got a face card 4 of a kind build going with: Pareidolia, Zany, Smiley, Trio, and Family jokers. These give you (respectively) all cards are face cards, +12 mult for 3 of a kind, +20 mult for each hand (all cards are face cards), x3 mult, x4 mult for a total of 384 multiplier! On base 4 of a kind this is
60x([7+12+20]x3x4)=28,080
However if you were to drop smiley face (+5 mult per face) for scary face (+30 chips per face card) which by almost every heuristic is a bad decision your score becomes:
(60+120)x([7+12]x3x4)=41,040
Which is a way bigger score!
So while people can offer general advice like stack high chips on plasma, always go for total score multipliers, etc. sometimes you just have to evaluate your specific build and figure out the best play
Finally outside of decks like abandoned and checkered which are specifically made to get certain hands, there isn’t a “best” hand to go for. The highest possible scores I’ve seen all come from high card builds but most normal players won’t get those. I’ve won two of a kind runs, flush 5 runs, straight runs, flush runs. You just have to evaluate your deck and tarot cards to see your options
- Comment on Balatro celebrates 2 million sales, will feature major gameplay update in 2025! 4 months ago:
Generally some good advice is that Balatro is a math game first and foremost so you want to focus on things that raise your score the quickest. So adding chips is ok, adding multiplier is better, and multiplying your total is the best.
For example let’s say you are playing straights and you have a 10-6 with level 3 straights. So you’d have:
10+9+8+7+6=40 (40+90)x10=1300
So let’s compare how jokers impact that score:
Devious joker: +100 chips if you have a straight
(40+90+100)x10=2300
Crazy joker: +12 mult if you have a straight
(40+90)x(10+12)=2860
The order: x3 mult if you have a straight
(40+90)x(10x3)=3900
You can see those are very big differences! It’s also helpful to pay attention to the order of your cards. Generally Balatro cards are scored left to right. The most important thing is to take any card that multiplies any part of your score on the right so you can add as much to the score as possible, then you multiply that number
So in short: multiplier jokers are best, additive multiplier jokers are good, additive chip jokers are ok, and pay attention to the order of your jokers/played cards
- Comment on Balatro celebrates 2 million sales, will feature major gameplay update in 2025! 4 months ago:
For plasma specifically I’d focus on high additive chip jokers. While that’s normally bad advice, consider how crazy good a card with +50 mult on it would be. Now consider that a +100 chip joker is effectively a +50 chip/+50 mult (I know that’s not technically true but I’m illustrating a point). Also eventually you do hit a point of diminishing returns because plasma prevents you from having a super high multiplier or chips, so like every build, total score multipliers are the best
- Comment on The problem with sleeper ships 4 months ago:
Not really, the Angara, Kett, and Remnant were already there. You’re just showing up in the middle of their dispute. The comment was implying your own people developed FTL and fucked everything up, not that you landed in a shit show
- Comment on GTA 6 may "disappoint" players hoping for a technological "jump", says former Rockstar North tech director 4 months ago:
Have you played a GTA game on PC? They’re all so poorly optimized to the point some are unusable. Not to mention bizarre choices. GTA IV used games for windows live which became its own shit show when it went EoL. GTA V/Online took forever to get to PC and didn’t even have all the features when it did release. Also minor gripe but I think it shows how little they thought about PC: the default controls for flying a helicopter (required in several missions) use a numpad. Numpads aren’t even popular on keyboards anymore, let alone the fact that nobody will ever intuitively guess those controls. RStar doesn’t care about PC at all, and even further, Linux/steam deck support is a pipe dream
- Comment on Good game soundtracks? 4 months ago:
I prefer Sci-fi background noise so Surviving Mars is my favorite. Mass Effect is ok but I find it gets a little too cinematic and bombastic at times. FTL and Into The Breach, or really anything by Ben Prunty is good too
- Comment on Gen Z job seekers should be willing to work for free, long hours, ‘willing to do anything,’ says Squarespace CMO 4 months ago:
I just started calling companies and asking
Immediately I don’t trust whatever advice she’s dispensing. You can’t just “call places” or “walk in with a resume” anymore. The phone numbers are all automated systems that will never put you in front of people who can hire you. You need a badge to get in anywhere that’ll give you an internship which you can’t get if you don’t work there, and if you did somehow talk to someone they’d just shrug and say “I don’t know how that works, just go to our website and apply there”
Even ignoring the “let them eat cake attitude” it’s obvious she doesn’t even realize how hiring works at her own company. I guarantee you that her advice would not work at Squarespace
- Comment on M3GAN Gets Her First Spinoff With Android Horror SOULM8TE 5 months ago:
I think the hardest I laughed in a theater that year was when the in movie commercial says “imagine what it can do for kids whose parents aren’t dead!”
I don’t if they can thread the needle again but I’ll give the sequel a shot
- Comment on Is someone safe if they report income from illegal means to the IRS? 6 months ago:
I mean if you’re stupid enough you could try to claim a donation to the Taliban as charitable contribution for a deduction. And never underestimate the stupidity of people
- Comment on Is someone safe if they report income from illegal means to the IRS? 6 months ago:
American tax forms have an “other income” field. That’s where you can report any money you’ve made not covered by the other fields including any ill gotten gains. That section doesn’t require you to list a source, and even if it did nobody expects you to list “$7,800 - meth sales, $32,200 - crack sales, $50,000 - robberies”. You’d just say “Other income - $90,000”
The logic being that if the government never gives you the opportunity to pay taxes on something, then they can’t charge you with tax evasion. Plus there’s a lot of money in crime! If the US can get a piece of that pie they will!
Finally, the IRS is an already underfunded organization and contrary to the popular narrative, is very easy to work with. If you make a genuine good faith effort to pay your taxes and they find issues, an agent will work with you to resolve it. They’ll set up payment plans, defer payments, and more if you’re cooperative. All this is to say that reporting people for crimes besides tax ones and terrorism (the only one they’re legally required to report to outside agencies) just makes their job harder, so they don’t
- Comment on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - Rerelease 8-9-10 of June - Is anyone going? 6 months ago:
Each movie is on a different day, so you won’t be sitting for 12 straight hours. However Return of the King does not have one and is over 4 hours long. So either pre plan a bathroom break or don’t drink too much water during the movie
- Comment on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - Rerelease 8-9-10 of June - Is anyone going? 6 months ago:
I did this when Rings of Power came out. Full transparency, I’m pretty mid on LotR in general. With that said, this is a very cool experience if you’re a fan of the work or have never seen these in theaters. Some criticisms I have: you can really tell that the scenes in the extended cut were not intended for a large format, high fidelity screen. You can tell which specific cuts in battles are extended and which ones are theatrical. Additionally they use greenscreen for Hobbits more in the extended cut and it looks bad. Also, if you haven’t seen LotR and aren’t a huge fantasy nerd, I’d have a hard time recommending this. 12 hours of movies is a whole lot of time and the the theatrical editions are great! Return of the King won more Oscars than any other movie in its theatrical cut!
Overall, very fun if this is for you and even if it isn’t these movies are great. Whatever you think your opinion about this is going to be, you’re almost certainly correct
- Comment on AI Fakes in Highschool and Middle School (USA) 6 months ago:
The short answer is that we don’t know. It has long been a legal grey area when depicting porn of underage characters that are clearly not real. There’s the classic “she’s actually 1000 she just looks 6 years old” and “all characters depicted are at least 18 [despite all of them being in various stages of high school]”. American politicans are by and large way out of date with modern technology and cannot be expected to rule competently on the subject. Is the AI nude of a real person “revenge porn” or constitutionally protected free speech? People have been drawing fan art of underage celebs having sex with high detail for a long time (see Harry Potter/Twilight rule 34). Ultimately congress will need to make laws about this or courts will have to interpret a previous ruling as applying to these images. Unfortunately due to the Streisand Effect whomever is at the unfortunate center of this shitstorm will be forever made into pornographic material so we understand the general hesitation to get involved
- Comment on Anon has a pet peeve 6 months ago:
In that very specific scenario I’d almost prefer Vader to be unbeatable. Make it so he always perfect blocks you, he prevents you from getting close, he interrupts your combos. I almost feel like making the boss actually impossible sells your point harder than making them “beatable” but you lose in a cutscene anyway
- Comment on What would you consider to be the greatest action movie of the 2000s so far? 6 months ago:
I know it’s cliche but John Wick 3 just has incredible choreography. They take the stunt people from The Raid, the budget of a huge series, and the gunplay that Keanu has spent 3 decades working on. It’s just incredible all around
- Comment on The later books are really something 9 months ago:
Sorry but that’s not accurate. It is definitely his son. There’s evidence Paul considers it but Leto II is the one who actually merges with the worms
- Comment on The later books are really something 9 months ago:
Major Dune spoilers:
Isn’t that pretty explicit in Children? Leto II frequently chastises his genetic memory father/actual father for being a coward to afraid to commit to the golden path. Paul saw where the golden path led and couldn’t do it so he becomes the Preacher whereas Leto saw what was needed to guide humanity and thus sacrificed his to become The Tyrant
