It looks nice, but I'm feeling this weird disconnect in those screenshots. On one hand, there's this journal page talking about what good eatin' this kind of fish's tail is. The description talks about catching and selling fish, although it's unclear what gets done to them after they're sold. On the other, there's a shot where your seal is chatting with a fish. So, you're talking to fish, but you're also eating them and selling them into slavery and/or to be eaten? I always kind of feel like it's not nice to do that stuff to people who talk.

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This seems cute, but I kind of wish things like this got a little more original. Like, the people are frogs, supposedly. OK, but they're living exactly like humans--it's just a reskin of a generic human-village-maker. They're making hard flagstoned paths to walk on, the houses they make to live in are human style because of course frogs would want to live somewhere dry, they appear to be doing agriculture because of course frogs would eat vegetables not bugs, they're doing their fishing from a dock . . .

It would be cooler if instead of making farms, they were making swamps, and if their homes were built part-underwater, and stuff. If there was some effort to think what the lifestyle of humanoid frogs might be like.

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Lovely. Now if only real world cleanup could be like that--quick, effective, not leaving half the goop behind . . .

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: SnowdrakeI'm really puzzled about the state of video playout.
Why is it necessary to reencode video !?

Proprietary codec, I believe. So Valve would have to pay the license fee to play them "natively". So instead, they re-encode the movies and rewrite the "play video" calls in the game to use their re-encoded movie source.

Which is kind of one in the eye for stupid proprietary video codecs, so it's all good.

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I remember reading about this game here; it sounded very cool, but I never got around to buying it, so yeah, I guess I'll probably benefit from this.
(Goes to look -- no, wait, I did buy it. Never got around to playing it, I guess. Should give it a try)

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: Purple Library Guy. . . The whole thing? We're welcoming (if you're worth it), our souls are clean (presumably unlike you city slickers), we have more community, we apparently invented hard work, it just goes on and on. The whole trailer sounds to me like an extended summation of the American wonderful-frontiersman mythology, the kind of stuff Texan and Albertan oil men never shut up about.

Interesting, thanks. I definitely got a completely different feel from it, probably due to one side of my family being frontier farmers and having done quite a bit of farm work growing up.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs to the "hardy bunch" thing . . . poor people moved to the frontier because it was easier than city life. Fewer amenities, but much more food and shelter and less sweatshop labour. Frontier life involved hard work . . . but not a 12 hour day, 6 days a week PLUS whatever you had to do at home. And the frontier was dangerous . . . but factories had no safety standards and disease spread like crazy in the cities. So, sure, hardy, but only hardier than hardscrabble city people because they got to eat enough food to support hardiness . . .

I do have a few quibbles with this, though:

• While some people did move from city to country (some of my ancestors came over from Europe as bakers and become frontier farmers in Nebraska!), the overwhelming migration patterns throughout history have been from country to city (stretching back through pre-history to when there was first a distinction between the two). Cities were mostly population-negative prior to modern medical care and antibiotics (due to the diseases you mentioned), while family farms naturally grow over time to outstrip what the land can support, with people heading into cities hoping to make their fortune (and, much more likely, becoming the kind of laborer that ended up in factories).
• Outdoor farm work is typically done "sun-up to sun-down", which can be a lot longer than 12 hours during the summer. (Possibly shorter during the winter; to be fair, I've never lived where it snowed in winter so I don't have first-hand experience, but from what I've read the winter was spent doing indoor work in preparation for spring.) The vital importance of every single family member pitching in around the farm during summer is why public schools are off during those months; if they weren't, kids from rural populations (~80% of the population in 1800, and it's only in 2007 that the world's urban and rural populations balanced) just wouldn't come because their labor was needed to ensure their families didn't starve over the winter.
• Unlike factory workers, farmer don't get to clock off; if the animals escape in the night after a full day's work, well, better go round 'em up, because who else is going to do it?* If a storm's threatening the harvest, you do whatever it takes to get it in because the alternative is likely starvation over the winter (or at least, higher risk of dying to illness from a weakened immune system due to malnutrition). Factory workers at least got government-mandated holidays; farm animals don't care what the government says, they still need to be fed and milked same as every other day.
• Frontier farms also had no safety standards, and serious accidents were certainly far from uncommon (as accounts from frontier people recount, and even today agriculture ranks up there pretty highly in terms of most dangerous industries for both injuries and deaths).
• Disease kills as quickly in the country as in the city, and diseases like dysentery can come from the environment rather than other people…plus, the nearest medical help might be a day or two away rather than a few streets over. Though certainly disease was (and remains) easier to spread in cities.

I'm not disagreeing that the kind of laborers you've described had it rough – life was pretty hard back then for everyone compared to today – but the period of time during which such long hours were permitted is a relatively small portion of time in the grand scheme of history, and things got better with labor regulations over time; farmers were working sun-up to sun-down long before the first factory was a twinkle in a capitalist's eye, and even today if you're a self-employed farmer nobody's paying you overtime if Mother Nature's threatening the harvest with a storm.

Whether or not frontier life was physically harder than that of a blue collar city laborer**, it certainly had its own privations: isolation, food insecurity, and the constant threat of any one of numerous dangers hanging overhead like the sword of Damocles which could spell disaster.

*Speaking from personal experience, at least the part about the pigs escaping (AGAIN :angry:) on a rainy winter night. To be fair I don't remember if it was after a full day of work or not.

**And not every city worker is working a physical job; lots of skilled labor positions exist in cities that don't on the frontier.

Well, it's certainly a fact that during the industrial revolution it took a lot of dispossession and legal interventions to push people who had previously been farmers into the factories in the first place--and that's poor peasants with small holdings and heavy rent. Those people definitely thought farming was better and wished they could keep it. And I think it's actually fairly well established that in North America, the existence of the frontier actually constrained employers' ability to turn the screws on their employees--conditions were for some time better in the United States and Canada than in say England or other parts of Europe, because if they dropped past a certain point employees had the option of heading West. And many people did exercise that option, or there still wouldn't be anyone of European descent living in the Western United States or Western Canada, so there must have been some attraction to it.

But ultimately, what I was wondering about wasn't so much whether any of the spiel was true. A fair amount no doubt is, although many other areas of life could have similar things to say. The question is whether, say, New Zealand settlers traditionally had this thing where they talked about how wonderful they were. Or, have this thing now where they imagine their old-timey selves talking about how wonderful they were.

So for instance, I think there's definitely a cultural distinction in Canada even between how British Columbians talk about the frontier, frontier life and so on, and how Albertans talk about it (which is much more typically American in register, sort of deliberately so). That might really be more of a distinction between a province dominated by forest and fishing (although there was surprisingly always ranching in BC) and one dominated by prairie, ranching and farming than a cultural difference, or maybe that's what caused the cultural difference. Whatever the reason, it's definitely there--you don't get rich British Columbian executives and public figures who have never been on a farm wearing cowboy hats. Newfoundland has traditionally had this tough, hard-bitten fisherfolk culture with many features of the life somewhat similar to the prairie frontier, but they don't as far as I know have a big narrative thing to go with it. Rather, they tend to be known for their sense of humour, often self-deprecating.

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(Hugh Laurie as Prince Regent voice:)
Well, hurrah!

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Quoting: suchThey're on sheet music now, so it's clear we're way past any kind of reason here.

The sheet music biz seems to be surprisingly hardass about this stuff. Also, it's another oligopoly these days--the big labels each own a sheet music corp, and there's only like three big labels left, and that's about it.

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Quoting: whizse#DRIVE like the 1990's and pump up the jam [External Link]!

I made jam just a couple of days ago, but I wasn't planning on pumping it up.

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That does look very cool. It's funny--I was expecting an anime aesthetic, but I wasn't expecting that anime aesthetic. Makes me think of Girls' Last Tour, when from the description I was imagining of course Howl's Moving Castle.

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