Voroxpete
@Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Cruciferae 2 days ago:
Roast or saute is almost always the correct answer to the boring veg blues. It largely comes down to the addition of fat and high heat, which in turns adds the Maillard reaction, AKA flavour town. Add some salt and you’re u golden.
Even something as something as simple as green beans gets a million times better when you saute them in light olive oil and hit them with salt and pepper just before they’re done.
- Comment on Cruciferae 2 days ago:
There are two reasons why you hate brussel sprouts:
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You probably only remember them from when you were a kid. About 15 years ago a new, less bitter cultivar of brussel sprouts was developed, and is now the main the cultivar.
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Your parents (or grandparents, or whoever did the cooking at Christmas) probably boiled or steamed them, which is a perfect way to make any vegetable taste bad.
Here’s what you actually do. Dice up a small amount of bacon and lightly fry in a tiny bit of oil, just until the bacon fat starts to render out. Add a nob of butter (altogether the amount of fat should nicely coat the bottom of the pan). Cut your sprouts in half and place them in the fat cut side down. DON’T TOUCH THEM. Let them sit until a nice brown crust forms. Then add a splash of water (or chicken stock if you’re a true degenerate) and cover for a few minutes to steam. When done, a knife should pierce them with some resistance (bite into one, it should have a little crunch to it, but not unpleasantly so; just enough to not be mushy). Drain off the liquid, hit them with kosher salt and a little bit of black pepper.
Note that the bacon is totally optional. If you’re just adding a quick veg to a meal you can skip that part and they’ll still taste great.
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- Comment on Hails 5 days ago:
To Christians? Everything.
- Comment on pick your side 1 week ago:
Madness. Science and maths are clearly different colours you lunatic. Science is blue, maths is green.
- Comment on They lied to us 2 weeks ago:
Seriously underrated movie
- Comment on me too 1 month ago:
This bird deals frost damage, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
- Comment on life pro tip!! 1 month ago:
Calories are just a measure of the energy released by a material.
Normally they’re measured by burning the material, so it’s not really accurate to say that you can get that many calories from uranium. On the other hand the whole concept is fucking stupid anyway, because it’s measured by burning the material. Technically, a kilo of dry sawdust has 4800 calories (more than double the daily calorie requirement of the average person).
- Comment on Report: A Marvel 6v6 Overwatch-Style Shooter Is Coming 1 month ago:
Oh, sure, there’s basically zero chance that this will actually be good. But that wasn’t my point. All I’m saying is that the idea of releasing an Overwatch style hero shooter right now isn’t inherently stupid.
- Comment on Report: A Marvel 6v6 Overwatch-Style Shooter Is Coming 1 month ago:
Counterpoint, people love Overwatch, they hate what Blizzard did to it. There’s an audience out there hungry for this exact product if someone can do it right (or, at least, about 20% less wrong than Blizzard).
- Comment on Judas First Details: How Ken Levine Is Building on BioShock With 'Narrative LEGOs' 1 month ago:
New System Shock probably isn’t happening. Warren Spector was working on it a while back, but the project got canned and the rights are with TenCent now. Since it’s not exactly the sort of thing you can turn into a live service micro transaction generator I really don’t see it going anywhere any time soon.
- Comment on Bungie's Marathon reboot gets new director as part of creative leadership shakeup 1 month ago:
So we’re still going with “One of the most iconic story driven single player experiences of all time is now an extraction shooter” I take it?
- Comment on What are the best indie games you've ever played? 1 month ago:
There’s a lot I could list here, but I’ll focus on a few that I’ve played recently, that don’t seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There’s not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There’s really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It’s super cheap, it’s super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you’re telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don’t actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated “city” (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age… And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You’re a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 (“The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia”), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say “solve crimes” I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There’s no Arkham “Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues” going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it’s all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you’re the brains. It’s on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I’m slightly scared of the people who made it.
- Comment on What are the best indie games you've ever played? 1 month ago:
+1 for Insurgency. It’s more “mid shelf” than “indie”, but either way it’s an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they’re not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they’re in. No one ever yells “Allah akbar” or whatever.
- Comment on What are y'all buying on the steam sale? 1 month ago:
Streets of Rogue is amazing, especially with friends. Absolutely bonkers game.
- Comment on Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Launch Is a Disaster - IGN 1 month ago:
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.
- Comment on Never forget where you came from. 2 months ago:
Yeah, every time I see this meme, every person who’s ever owned chickens immediately chimes in with some version of “Believe me, they know.” Because the little buggers really do.
- Comment on It's ok, we sigma now. 2 months ago:
Absolutely. He had the courage to question his own assumptions when they were challenged by new evidence. Everyone could stand to learn from him.
- Comment on It's ok, we sigma now. 2 months ago:
To be absolutely clear to anyone who hasn’t read about this; it was debunked by the same guy who came up with it in the first place!
The dude studied wolves in captivity, drew conclusions about their behaviour, then applied those studies to wolves in the wild and discovered that he’d got it all wrong. The behaviours that he observed in captive wolves were all stress responses.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 4 months ago:
My wife tells me that Rogue Trader has a lot of difficult and unclear decisions like this.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 4 months ago:
Amazed I had to scroll this far to see LiS mentioned.
There’s a decision in the first game that legitimately made me get up from the computer and walk away. Absolutely fucking brutal game.
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 4 months ago:
Or, y’know, go with the original version of the trolley problem, where you start with the classic formulation (do you pull the lever?), then move to a new scenario;
“You’re a doctor, working in a hospital that has been cut off from outside resources by a disaster. You have five patients, one in need of a liver, one a heart, one a pair of kidneys, one a set of lungs, and one a pancreas. You have no suitable organs available, and all five patients will die without transplants, but there is a healthy young janitor working in the hospital who, by a stroke of extreme luck, is a compatible donor for all five patients. You could kill the janitor, harvest their organs, and save five people. Should you do it?”
- Comment on How Baldur's Gate 3 Becomes Game of the Year? 5 months ago:
Worthless video anyway. Bad AI voiceover reading a bad, probably AI generated script.
- Comment on **TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR Discussion Megapost** 2023-10-13 👩🎤🎶 7 months ago:
Listen, my wife is in the army. Every man - I mean every last one - in her whole platoon is a Swiftie. These are jacked up dudes who blow shit up for a living. All of them fucking love Taytay.
- Comment on **TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR Discussion Megapost** 2023-10-13 👩🎤🎶 7 months ago:
People downvoting this need to allow some joy into their lives.
- Comment on Drew Barrymore’s 3 co-head writers aren’t returning, even after WGA strike lifts 7 months ago:
You keep talking about this like it’s a boycott, but it’s not.
She acted in an incredibly shitty way towards the people who work for her, and they decided they could do better. That’s not a boycott, that’s just consequences.
What do you want to do, force those writers to go back to work for a shitty boss?
- Comment on Drew Barrymore’s 3 co-head writers aren’t returning, even after WGA strike lifts 7 months ago:
Yes, she eventually did the right thing, when doing the wrong thing blew up in her face. She did the right thing out of pure self-preservation, but she did the right thing.
And it doesn’t matter, because she proved to the people working with her that she’s a snake. I’m not surprised that they refused to come back, and she has only herself to blame.
- Comment on Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2 7 months ago:
These days you can easily find it for around $5 on sale, and it’s a solid 5-10 hours of entertainment. Well worth it at that price.
- Comment on Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2 7 months ago:
“Protocol 3: Protect the pilot.”
😭
- Comment on Having trouble deciding what game to play next . which one of these games should i try 7 months ago:
Agreed. Titanfall 2, then Horizon next.
- Comment on MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT FOR THE 2023 WGA THEATRICAL AND TELEVISION BASIC AGREEMENT 7 months ago:
Given that the summary is written by the people who wrote the agreement, presumably under the advise of their lawyers, I think I’m going to trust it over someone’s assessment of what they happen to think a single out of context passage means (and to be clear, the entirety of this MOU - if you’re trying to do an actual close legal reading of it - is out of context because this exists in relationship with the existing contracts that it is updating).