Hello book club readers!

This month we are reading a classic, the Metamorphosis by Kafka. How is it going? Have you started?

I'm finishing up some other books but will start soon. I've never read this one and I'm looking forward to reading it.

I liked playing Ace Combat since I've been a kid, Ace Combat 2 was one of my favorite PS1 games alongside Crash Team Racing at the time, and I did play AC3 as well but don't remember much of it.

I completely skipped PS2 generations since I was on handhelds instead, so my first interaction with Ace Combat since 3 was ACAH(Yuck) on PS3, but I ended up buying Ace Combat 7 since that was actually a good game, but being bad at committing to one game hasn't allowed me to finish it, with AC8 being announced to come out soon, I decided I should try and focus on clearing AC7.

I never gave it a mind at the mind but since now I'm aware of what Lockheed Martin is, I noticed it when I started up the game the past few days at one of the splash screens at the start of the game, and given that Lockheed Martin's involvement with the current ongoing wars, it's safe to assume that Bandai Namco have had an agreement that most likely has had financial and monetary incentives to license their planes.

licensing weapons and arms aren't particularly a new thing afaik in games, I'm not much of an FPS person myself since I stick with Doom and Bioshock if I want a more "traditional" FPS experience (But prefer things like Ultrakill or Metal Hellsinger) and never been into CoD or other military shooters.

So depending on their license agreement, they either have paid the royalties upfront(Unaware of how licensing typically goes but I assume it's most likely to be this one?) just to have their arms in the game, or they get a portion of their sales. If it is the former then sales of the game do not directly(as in unless sequels or relicensing occur) contribute to their bottom lines, if it is the latter then every sale contributes to wars.

Posting this in places like reddit or other gamer spaces I'd imagine would elicit a "Don't bring politics to my games" kind of response.

I'm curious what Tildes users would think of this, I think that would make pirating these games or buying them secondhand(impossible on Steam though Steam family could count) be more ethical than buying them in a way, though I imagine some may advocating for separating the art from... whom the artist pays?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Something I'm wondering about: since COVID, I just don't seem to get colds anymore.

Before COVID, I recall that I very regularly had some kind of minor cold – it felt like it was about 50% of the time, realistically let's say maybe 20%? But of course that's just my recollection.

I then caught the original strain of COVID in March 2020, and suffered fairly badly from it for 3 weeks – definitely the worst illness of my life, though I was very lucky not to need to go into hospital. Since then I've had 3 doses of the COVID vaccine, and had COVID at least twice more, both times very mildly.

Since then though, I've noticed that I almost never have any sort of cold any more. I think my partner and I had some kind of brief minor flu back in September, but I've not had anything since, and I remember thinking that it had been a long time since I'd had anything like that.

For reference, I don't wear a mask nowadays, or otherwise do anything much different to my life before COVID.

Does anyone have any thoughts on why this might be?

Uneducated theories on my part:

1. Somehow having COVID made me less likely to catch colds
2. Somehow having the COVID vaccine made me less likely to catch colds
3. During COVID I got used to holding my breath around people coughing, and that's surprisingly effective towards not catching colds
4. I'm now mostly around people less likely to pass on colds for some reason

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially those who have some actual knowledge about this topic!

I've had a thought bouncing in my head today and I want to give it some air and let you folks at it to see where it takes on water.

The theory is that there's a contradiction, or misalignment maybe, between how most people feel about the philosophical concept of free will and how time travel and time loops are portrayed in media. Here's the premises I've landed on to arrive at that:

(1) The vast majority of people believe in some form of free will. (Fairly non contentious, I hope. A lot of resources back this up.)

(2) For free will to exist, if a person is repeatedly prompted to make some sort of decision under the exact same circumstances (time, place, people, etc) there must be a non-zero amount of times that they will arrive at a decision different from their initial one. For example... lets suppose you walk into the room and ask me what I want for dinner. I chew on some options for a moment then decide "chicken and rice". Then my memory is wiped and we repeat this over and over. After a few repeats of this I end up settling on a steak burrito instead. This is the only way free will could work imo because the opposite result, if given the same input you always arrive at the same output, is no different than determinism. Plus it implies, much like the time loop/travel media show, that from the start of the day we can know exactly where we will end up at the end if nothing is changed- which leaves no wiggle room for free will.

(3) The people in time travel / time loop media who are not your faithful protagonist or otherwise aware of the time based shenanigans going on always do the exact same thing every time (at least, in the ones I've seen). It's only the ones who are aware of how events have already unfolded who can make new decisions, everyone and everything else plays out the same.

Thus, virtually all media portray time travel/loops in a way that doesn't jive with how the vast majority of people perceive free will.

So, what do you think- Do you agree with the conclusion? Do you disagree on the definition of free will? Should I have gone with my alternate title? (12 Deterministic Monkeys starring Bruce Free Willis)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like grapheneos, ali khamenei and english. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was asking.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.