The question is: can you turn it into a product? Would people be willing to pay $100/lb for hand-pollinated almonds? It’s potentially something to explore on a small scale.
I would love to know how many vegans would pay that much for an ethical product.
Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?
I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.
One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.
You definitely could bring the wild pollinators back. I do that with my own garden in my backyard. But that means you’d have to remove parts of the orchard to provide a habitat for the pollinators, lowering the density of the trees. Lower density => lower production => smaller crop => more expensive almonds (or peaches etc).
If we want everyone to be vegan that’s gonna mean mostly giving up the luxury products that many vegans currently enjoy and switching to staples (beans, squash, corn, root veggies).
Manually pollinating thousands of almond trees is definitely possible. But then you should expect almonds to be in the same price range as vanilla pods, another manually pollinated crop.
The ones I always come back to are pollinator-dependent crops such as fruits and tree nuts. Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops. Presumably, if more people were to become vegan then we would demand them even more.
From what I know, vegans oppose the transportation of pollinators for pollinating these crops. Yet it seems most vegans eat plenty of them (apples, peaches, plums, almonds, avocados, etc).
Respect is a weird word. It seems to have 2 nearly opposite meanings (kind of like literally):
So the first one implies that respect must be earned. The second implies that everyone must be respected by default (their due regard), thus respect is unearned.
Believe me, no one gives a damn about a critic.
The game is deliberately pretentious? Okay. Then the negative reviews are justified.
Yes, it seems we do have different ideas of the word medieval. To me, medieval is not an abstract idea, it’s a specific period in European history. To be medieval a setting has to bear significant resemblance to that period.
This is not medieval. It’s very ornate but it bears no resemblance whatsoever to medieval art or architecture. If anything, it’s closer to Victorian than medieval. Everything I’ve seen in HK screenshots tells me it’s a fantasy pastiche of elements. It has no affinity with any particular period in human culture. Rather, it’s a cut-and-paste construction. (I hate the word appropriation because it implies theft. I do not want to imply that).
Like if a fantasy game is set on Mars with a bunch of green skinned Martians as characters then it’s not medieval even if the characters use Anglo-Saxon instead of English. It’s a pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, and medieval elements and it suffers from the same issue that a lot of bad Star Trek episodes had (see: planet of hats), which is verisimilitude:
Why did this society, which otherwise seems completely alien, just happen to evolve a conspicuous element that’s uncannily similar to an element in human history?
HK games are not set in China, but they are both firmly set in a medieval fantasy world
??!
I guess we have completely different ideas of the word medieval. This to me looks like a completely separate, unique fantasy world with no resemblance whatsoever to a historical medieval setting of the sort that games like D&D are based on.
It’s fine if they have created this wonderful unique setting of their own, but then it leaves me with the question of how the language aspects of medieval society ended up there despite all the other differences. I mean these characters don’t even resemble humans!
I have played plenty of other games where characters speak in a classical style. Unless it’s being done to mark the characters as old fashioned (or the world is literally set in medieval times) then it comes off as extremely pretentious.
Edit: I know Hollow Knight is sacred in the indie game community. I’m just saying this is something that annoys many people (including me) who prefer verisimilitude and authenticity.
It’s not about liking/not liking poetry, it’s about credibility and verisimilitude. When a character says something, is it credible for the character to have said that? A guy walking around in the Harry Potter wizarding world speaking Shakespearean English is not credible, he’s a laughingstock.
I don’t know much about Hollow Knight but from what I can see it is not set in a fantasy Classical Chinese setting. Having characters in the game speak in the Classical Chinese style is not credible. It does not fit the setting, regardless of the broader similarities between Hollow Knight’s setting and Wuxia novels. It’s culturally tone deaf.
I’ve never played either game but I’ll be honest: that English text looks really pretentious to me. I can imagine how bad things could get if that were carried over into the Chinese translation.
Everyday Chinese speech is very plain, blunt, and utilitarian. The Great Classical Chinese novels are anything but. They are as important (arguably even more so) to Chinese as Shakespeare is to English. Speaking in that style should come off just as pretentious in Chinese as a video game character speaking Shakespearean style would in English. Generally, in English fiction (especially TV shows), characters are brutally mocked for speaking in that style unless they are literally reading, rehearsing, or performing Shakespeare.
Entertaining sure, but entertaining for a specific (albeit large) audience. There are countless other audiences for movies that are just being increasingly ignored by Hollywood for the past few decades.
I’ve been accused twice so far! I never use that AI slop!
Besides, it took off after I turned 35. I’m officially in “get off my lawn” territory on this one.
That’s only half of it. The other half is staying in power and dealing with all the people under you.
The problem is that the dictator is never the only “evil shit” in the regime. Dictators are evil shit magnets for entire bureaucracies full of ladder-climbing sycophants.
Then comes the long-term problem: information and trust. When you’re the dictator everyone wants to be your best friend. They will tell you anything to get what they want. You will soon realize that you can’t trust anyone. That’s when the paranoia sets in. You’ll reorganize your entire government around loyalty to you, not beliefs or abilities, because that’s the only way to survive.
This is why all dictatorships end up looking the same over the long run. They have only one goal: continued survival of the dictatorship. Anything else leads to collapse and death or exile of the dictator.
Well the other thing is that design work doesn’t scale the way art does. You can’t throw 1000 game designers at a project and expect them to create a coherent game design.
So you end up with one or a small team of game designers and they need to get the major parts of the design done early since everyone else follows from that. This leaves you with so little room for experimentation that you end up with a cookie cutter game design.
Sorry dude, but cars are technology too, not just self driving cars. Every death due to cars is a technology death. You can’t escape the reality of tradeoffs.
You can rotate the bullet to add multiple lines.