7bicycles

Thought came to me while I was stirring a pot. There's so many ways people get into "you don't have to eat vegetables". I assume you start there and work backwards honestly.

Off the top of my head, there's:

• I'm a rich dipshit showing the poors how to eat cheap (it never includes vegetables)
• eating vegetables is gay but carbs are fine (the your da diet)
• eating anything but meat is gay
• eating carbs of any kind is bad (keto)
• appeal to ancestral diets (I imagine my forefathers only ate hunted deer and berries)
• incredibly idosyncretic appeal to ancestral diets (I imagine my specific family ancestors ate only t-bones from wild aurochs)
• esoteric woo-woo-hippyism about how onions de-align your chakra
• vegetables are singularily too expensive (excluding food deserts don't @ me)
• vegetables are too time consuming to eat
• I'm "allergic" to vegetables (my diet is so out of whack I can't process fiber anymore) (excluding actual medical conditions don't @ me)

Came out last summer and is to my knowledge basically the only bicycle game that's not exclusively downhill MTB.

I gave it about 3 hours and am now in world 2. It's an open world racing and exploration game, reminds me of Crash Tag Team Racing or Banjoe Kazoiie Nuts and Bolts in that way. You also get to swap out your bicycle parts with 4 stats, power, handling, grip and aero (as in aerodynamics, not air control). Some of them are grounded and understandable, but it does get wacky with it if you want and the ideal build at any given time is mostly some frankenstein monster. The devs apparently lurk on /r/xbiking and you feel the influence, but it's not reddit in a bad way.

It has a story to give some sense of progression but it's basically just plot for plots sake, allthough who cares. The bicycle people you race are all short, but well made pastiches of real life bicycle archetypes, which is fun.

The races themselves have some sort of soft categorization into mtb, gravel or road but it really doesn't matter much, There's both crits, so lap races, as well as point to point.

The cycling, to me, is sadly a bit lackluster. I mean I'm obviously on the deep end of what I'd like here but other than hills reduce your top speed way faster than they would in anything with an engine, this doesn't feel much like cycling. the handling is different from similar 4-wheeler based titles, but then you just have an accelerate and a brake button, both on a binary despite the game recommending and playing best with a controller. You start and use a singlespeed drivetrain for a good while, after around 4 hours I just unlocked my first two-speed gearbox. The singlespeed doesn't really act like a singlespeed, it's a CVT, as such the two-speed basically just feels like an optional "if you'd like some shifting" addon. Unless I crash I've not found a reason to shift out of the 2nd gear once I hit speeds because you don't slow down a lot.

It basically feels like a bit of wasted potential if you're making a bicycle videogame anyhow. Give me some 2x or 3x gearing, you don't usually find that in a racing game. Maybe instead of a mario-kart-esque drifting mechanic you gotta mind pedalstrokes so you don't pedalstrike the ground going around corners - you know, anything bicycle basically.

As it stands, if you're into bicycles or looking for a relaxing open world racing game for a few bucks this might be up your alley. Parts are abound, it's charming, the music is some really good english italopop that fits the setting and the riding is fun, just a bit too little of a bikeride.

Bonus points for being able to get off your bike and walk with it. You have to do it to interact with the world and it genuinely makes the place feel way less like you are a talking vehicle, despite that being true.

There's nothing new under the sun and all but what do you consider your recipe? Something you cobbled together out of scraps and it turned out amazing or maybe you started at something known and iterated on it enough to make it yours?

It's so fucking stupid. Snow removal responsibilities basically go along with property. Municipal streets are either done by the city or it just decides "nah" and doesn't do it, sidewalks and bike paths are for the residents (sometimes done by a service if it's a rental building or the owner resident springs for it). Except on city property, where sidewalk and bikepath clearing is, again, the cities responsibility.

Then there's county roads, often they go through the municipality and as such latter won't do it unless getting reimbursed by the county. Then there's state roads, same deal, then there's federal roads who as far as I'm aware just do it themselves mostly, allthough could contract it out, but otherwise same deal as they tend to cross both counties and municipalities.

Then there's train property like crossings, which is the train companies responsibility, and like bus stops, which falls on the bus company and if you have it, tramways and tramstops, that also have to be done by the operating company. Again, unless there's some contract and reimbursement shit going on.

Love to send out like 30 different groups of snow clearing people in a wild mishmash of priorities that leaves a checkerboard of ice patches in the public space

I feel like I'm reasonably good at picking at a game on the gameplay level, as per what works and does not and why and surface videogame essayist stuff like ludonarrative dissonance (or the rare examples of ludonarrative harmony).

I may offer you my finest insight into video games such as "Lara Croft has some sort of father complex going on" and "Shadow of Chernobyl is unintentionally about life in the collapse of the soviet union" which even by my own admission feels shallow and trite. You watch someone like Jacob Geller or Noah Caldwell-Gervais and they have fascinating things to say even on games you wouldn't expect it, like NCG on Quake.

How do I become that knowledgeable? Interesting? Analytical? about video games?

https://news.asu.edu/20250124-environment-and-sustainability-depending-car-could-be-impacting-your-life-satisfaction

The research revealed that when individuals relied on cars for more than 50% of their out-of-home activities during a typical week, their satisfaction with life declined.

[...]

*Answer: One way we measured car dependence was by asking respondents to estimate the percentage of time they rely on a car for out-of-home activities in a typical week. What we found is that, generally, as car dependence increases, life satisfaction tends to go up — but only to a certain point. Beyond that, we start to see a decrease.

To make sure the relationship we observed was not influenced by other factors, we used regression analysis and controlled for various external factors that other research has linked to life satisfaction. The tipping point, or threshold, where life satisfaction begins to decrease, is around 50%. When people rely on their car for more than half of their out-of-home activities, it seems to have a negative effect on their life satisfaction.*

[...]

However, what we observed is that car dependence does not just affect how people feel while traveling — it seems to have a more lasting impact on overall life satisfaction. This finding is surprising because existing studies often display a weak link between car use and broader life satisfaction. Our research suggests that the effects of car dependence go beyond the immediate experience of a trip and may influence long-term sense of well-being.

I'm not bragging here, it's a point of discussion, I feel like so many games where aim plays any role give you a smorgasboard of tools and tactics and it all pales to "be somewhat decent at mouse aim". Is it because they're heavily designed around controllers? Is it just wasted potential like so much else? Am I too dumb to do sick nasty useful combo on the AI or am I simply god's chosen gamer?

EDIT: I play on normal, usually. I know, there's my problem, but it's not like the underlying problem gets solved via requiring 3 head shots or having to interact with a half baked stealth system that either doesn't work or mostly works on "sit invisibly in a bush until the patrol walks their 30th circle on this route"

Catch up here

After some hollabaloo about whether there were any traffic simulations the situation as of now is Ute Bondes (carbrain democratic union) says there were traffic simulations, but the car drivers refuse to adhere to them.

Now you might think this is deeply, deeply stupid but it gets better: all the car drivers actually do adhere to them, because all the traffic simulations showed exactly what is happening; perma-congestion. I assume this was too woke for the CDU and as such they ignored it and opened the thing anyways. Proposed fixes now include turning a bike lane into a car lane (instantly got thrown out because it's too complicated) or turning a parking lane into a car lane (instantly got thrown out because muh parking). The solution as of now is wait for the nearby bridge to be fixed (not happening) for more lanes, surely that'll alleviate the problem.

When she's not busy fucking up an entire district of Berlin on account of carbrain, Ute Bonde spends her time proposing good things such as "building another landing strip at the catastrophe that is the BER Berlin airport" or "building a maglev tram"

I'm referring to both "lol lmao why am I putting this leaf in" posts and "omg I found a leaf in my chipotle" posts here because both have the same issue of broadcasting their confusion over the internet instead of just looking it up.

You could chalk this up to social media but even before that's advent you had Jamie Oliver showing you a 30 min dinner that consists of leftover ingredients that are not picked up by his show / cookbook and also assumes you're cooking on kitchen grade equipment instead of the landlord special like most of his presupposed target audience and feel free to swap him for any number of aspiritional celebrity cooks.

It's all showstuff. Which can be nice but let's be honest here, if you're cooking a lot at home you'll be eating slop (non derogatory) most of the time because between price and time investment that's what gets you tasty, manageable, affordable.

But that's not in the cookbooks, I'm pretty sure I own all of them because if you're a known home cook they just end up at your house. If you ate nothing but Jamie Olivers Healthy 30 min Dinners (all of them take about an hour or so because they presuppose you start with a 10L boiling pot of water and have the skills necessary to dice a large onion in a minute) you'd end up nutritionally deficient and poor.

But say you were to google lense your bay leaf and find out what it does, where does that leave you? I feel like there isn't a site in the world that teaches you home economics cooking where you concoct up something healthy, tasty and time saving out of like half a pantry and a capsicum you bought on sale. I speak two languages and I've never found one - where the fuck are they?

Picture via Wikimedia

You row to go forward but instead of water it's wheel

Fun fact: Every year about 10 randomly chosen white middle aged dads in the west are afflicted with rowbike madness and start trying to revolutionize this as the next best thing. They pull of frankly impressive engineering feats to produce the most contraption bicycle yet devised, here's an early 2020s example

Magic is real albeit reserved to semi-uncontacted tribes in parts unknown is a fine setting but a much more interesting story would be how two exiles built the 300m long switch operated windpowered pipe organ that remains functional with absolutely no maintenance

Every one of the ancient magical civilisations you encounter in Tomb Raider, besides magically never showing up on satellite imagery, are all centered around the magical thing that changes the world so nobody recognizes they're sitting on the never-failing-never-maintenance ball bearing technology

The old tomb raiders were obviously hugely based on sex sells. the ads had half-naked 300 polygon lara and all that. So for the reboot trilogy starting 2013 they seemed to have wanted to scale that back a bit, make it more "woke".

It feels so much more misogynistic to me than the old titles with her scantily clad outfits because it changes the dynamic from "Lara Croft is a badass who kickshoots a T-Rex to death wearing hotpants" to "Lara Croft ends up in weirdremovedy sex and/or torture situations a lot while wearing cargopants".

I'm not going to claim the old Tomb Raiders are like bastions of even good examples of feminist media but the 2013 Tomb Raider is especially bad at this. Lara as a charcter does beat the odds but my god is half that game women torture porn and all the payoff it might have had at the end is basically thrown overboard entirely by the time the sequel starts. I mean you end up that game showing a lot more skin than you started out with but not because Lara the character figures hot pants and a crop top is a pretty good outfit to go spelunking in old aztec temples in but because it is literally torn apart from a combination of enviromental hazards, animals and human enemies. The sequels at least turn down the gruesome death animations which in the first reboot one are insanely focused on showing Lara getting penetrated by spears and sharpened sticks. It is not at all subtle.