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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I never owned a NES, but had a SNES and my brother also borrowed his friend’s Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you in the US) from time-to-time. All of us would blow the connectors on the cartridges, regardless of console. If anything went wrong with a game, the first step to troubleshoot was to take the cartridge out and give it a good blow.

    It was never about how the console actually worked, a five year-old isn’t going to logically think about that. It was all about a perceived performance increase by doing it.



  • If it helps, there’s very little that carries over between the two games. Without any spoilers, you lose your gear at the start of the BG2, most of which doesn’t carry over anyway. You will start with the level you finished BG1 with, but BG2 boosts brand new characters to a certain level anyway. And I don’t think the games track decisions made throughout like modern RPGs do.

    That said, I played it years before Beamdog released that interlude DLC, so maybe things have changed in their Enhanced releases of the games.



  • That’s an oversimplification. All works are derivative to some extent. There’s a huge difference between taking inspiration from something, to taking the characters and setting from something. Particularly if you’re intending to make a profit.

    If an author makes something that a large number of people enjoy, why shouldn’t they be able to make money off it for the rest of their life? Why exactly should an individual give up the rights to their creation simply so that someone else can use their characters and their worlds?

    To be clear, I’m talking solely on an individual level. I think the system we have where a corporation can own an idea is very broken. I’m also talking about this from a perspective of the world we currently live in. In an ideal world where money wasn’t the endgame for survival, ideas would flow more freely and nobody would need to care. But that’s not the world we live in.






  • I appreciate where the author of this article is coming from, but I think they’re being a bit too one-sided.

    For example, they make the point that zoos don’t contribute enough to conservation, donating only around 5% of their spending, as if the millions of dollars given doesn’t justify their existence. But if zoos didn’t exist, that’s a big chunk of money that wouldn’t be going towards conservation at all.

    They also talk about the education aspect, that visitors don’t necessarily read the information about the animals and instead go for the spectacle. But a child isn’t going to read those plaques regardless, but seeing animals up close might ignite an interest in conservation later in life.

    And one thing that the article doesn’t really go into is the fact that humans are still actively hunting animals in the wild, and destroying habitats for profit. And while I think zoos are a bit of a band-aid fix when it comes to endangered species, I’d much rather see an animal in captivity surrounded by zookeepers that care about it rather than extinction.

    In an ideal world, zoos wouldn’t exist. In a slightly less ideal world, only open-plain zoos would exist. But we are a very long way from that, and I personally believe that reputable zoos are a positive in the world we currently live in.