Maybe some mental mixup with Snowpiercer, which does take place on a train surrounded by snow?

I think it’s worth playing the first because it’s a much smaller scale and sets up the world. This one is set 30 years later so the society from the first game has significantly grown and expanded, with a lot of the evolutions in gameplay stemming from that. You probably could jump right into the second, but you may feel like you’re missing something at the start.

One of the few series that I love for making me want to be a better person, then hate it because that’s hard, then love it all over again because it’s worth it.

Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.

There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.

And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”

I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.

It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.

I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.

I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.

You know, that would make it a lot easier, but he’s not a loser, or at least he wasn’t for the longest time. He’s done well for himself career-wise, even if it’s not exciting. He has a wife that cares about him and who he cares about. He’s the type of charismatic guy who meets someone and gets to know them, whether they’re a customer at work or the guy that helps him at the cell phone store. I have learned a lot about how to treat and respect the people I meet from him.

He’s just really bad at taking care of himself. He’s been treating his body like it’s 20 for the past 30 years and it’s catching up to him. While he’s good at making and keeping acquaintances he’s failed to keep many close friends to confide in. When Covid hit he started drinking to the point he was hospitalized and in the years since I don’t think he has ever learned to forgive or love himself, and as long as that’s the case there is nothing anyone else can truly do for him. Which really sucks. The only hope I have is that he lives closer to family now which will make it easier to offer opportunities for him to be loved and maybe realize he can be better toward himself. But until that happens yeah he is a bit of a loser right now. I just tell him I don’t care if he is.

I agreed to fly across the country to drive my dad’s car back home while he drove the uhaul with his stuff. The day I fly out, he calls and tells me he’s been drinking again, the movers canceled on him, and he’s a loser.

I get there and he’s puking up blood as he detoxes, hasn’t eaten in days, and I’m stuck with one driver and two cars. I had to ask my uncle to fly out to help instead of spending time with his son who was on military leave while my stepmother called around to find movers last minute, all while my dad complains about the pain he’s in and how he can’t sleep while taking constant naps and he’s such a loser.

Halfway back he has a seizure in the car I’m driving and I have to help him get the bile and blood he’s choking on out of his throat while operating a vehicle at 80mph to the next exit. Afterward his memory is frazzled and it takes a couple hours for him to remember where he is and what we’re doing.

We get home, I tell him I’m never helping him move again, his response is “but we listened to your music 90% of the way here!” This was three weeks ago.

Wow, I’ve never seen someone try to link bidet use to intelligence before. It’s almost impressive.

I think what they’re implying is that it would not be feasible to seize or remove properties already owned by corporations, and by the time reforms are actually attempted they will own a significant portion of properties, making it extremely difficult to get those already-owned houses in the hands of first time buyers.

UFO, not that that’s a super relevant question if we’re already admitting that our opinions are “just cause.” I think at that point the better question is “if just cause, why is there such a split in opinions?”

I think the reason GIF is so contentious is that if we can there’s a tendency to make acronyms sound like words if possible. FUBAR and SCUBA are pronounced the way they are because we’re trained from words like tuba to see the UBA and use a long U. Something like “oofo” (or “uh-fo” as you would likely argue) for UFO sounds like half a word, hence pronouncing the letters individually. The thing about GIF is that both pronunciations sound like a word, and so both feel valid enough that there can be a split in opinions. Any arguments one way or the other is just trying to justify a gut feeling about which way is “proper.”

What do you call a pirate’s finger stuck to the bottom of a sailing ship by a metal rod through the joint? A Barrr-knuckle!

Let me spoil part of the Foundation series for you. In one book, the cast visits a planet where they encounter one person with psychic powers surrounded by robot servants. He reveals that the planet is evenly divided by I think 128 people like himself who want for nothing and live comfortably. They only reproduce asexually, and only in preparation for their own death or when another dies.

What this illustrates that’s relevant for you is that yes, not hitting the replacement rate could lead to significant population decline, but only until people are comfortable enough and want to have kids or feel it is the best way to maintain their way of life (think farmers having kids to help on the farm).

If you’ve had poems published without really understanding poetry itself, you may naturally have an intuitive grasp on poetry. I think it would be interesting if you continued writing and reflect on what you write, how you write it, and how you feel while writing it. Maybe write a poem expressing your feelings on poetry!

Then again, studying could give you better means and terminology to express your internal understanding. Either way, I wish you well!

My rule is that pets are not allowed to outnumber humans in the household.

There would definitely still be people that want the money/authority that comes from a CEO position, they would just be held to a standard. A company is not an organization or the processes that it follows, it is the people that create and carry out those processes. If you separate the responsibility for the company from the people that make up that company you allow mistakes without real consequences for those that had a part in causing it.

Based on what I have heard the last day, the CEO of Crowdstrike created a culture of cutting corners in the organization he is responsible for that led to a reduced focus on QA testing which in turn let this bug slip into the production machines of a significant number of other companies and organizations counting on that not happening. If the responsibility for that mistake lies with something as nebulous as “the company” then the organization may close, but the people that were responsible would be separated from the consequences of their negligence and free to move on to any other company having learned they can do the same things without being harmed personally. That sounds less than ideal.

I think the CEO should have some consequences. Maybe not jail time (although maybe if there were people in medical situations that died because the machines being used to keep them alive were bricked) but a real fine that impacts him personally may prompt a greater drive to organize the company to avoid the issue in the future, or prevent it at future companies.

It’s a 3D first person game instead of a 2D isometric, and most of the differences stem from that. More manual building (they added blueprints but I don’t know how good they are), infinite resource sources which means setting up a mining outpost is permanent. Much less focus on fighting wildlife, though that is present.

Overall, it’s a much more relaxing, slower paced game than Factorio. Both are good at different aspects of the same thing.

In terms of gameplay I think the Sheikah Slate functions were mirrored on the Wii-U pad (at least that was likely the original intent.

The Wii-U emulator was also a lot more developed when BotW released, so if you pirated it at launch the Wii-U version was the one to go with.

It looks a lot like Dying Light in terms of parkour. If it has an open map/open world design, I hope it scratches the same itch.

I’m not too surprised. The last show of theirs I heard about was a generic magical girl show, except it was sponsored by some car company so their broomsticks had tail lights and blinkers on the back.

The legacy of Evangelion is in Studio Khara ran by Hideaki Anno, and the legacy of Gainax has been in Studio Trigger since 2013 when Kill La Kill came out.

There are several good total conversions for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. Star Trek Armada 3 is the most complete overhaul I’ve played for it. I’m a big fan of Halo spaceships and the Sins of the Prophets mod is the closest thing I’ve seen capture the asynchronous battle between UNSC and Covenant ships. There are others for Star Wars and Stargate that I hear are good, but I have not tried them.