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princecoo posted:I was interested to learn when I visited the states earlier this year that the price of a Big Mac meal was only slightly (by like 50 cents or something) cheaper than a pub burger that was twice the size, included chips and was by far superior in every way. In the states at least, a pub burger would include an extra 15% for tip plus probably $1 to $2 for a drink. That's not to say the nice burger isn't worth the money, but add a wife and couple of kids and the price difference becomes more apparent. And in defense of McDonalds, they are making some strides when it comes to food quality - at least in the base ingredients. My kid's basketball coach this summer was an exec at the company that supplies chicken to McDonalds and he went on and on about their new antibiotic-free birds. While we were in line at a McDonalds. Because that's where the coach says we go for after-game celebrations.
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Oct 19, 2015 13:34
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Simply Simon posted:I will remember in disgust forever how we were on a class trip to Greece via Venice (from Germany, before you assume I was on the finest of private schools - it was sweet nonetheless), and we had to wait three hours for the ferry in Venice. I've been to the Venice McDonald's, but only to use the bathroom. I will say this, in a lot of non-US countries, a public bathroom can be hard to find, and McDonald's always has one that's clean and available to the public.
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Oct 19, 2015 15:42
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Armyman25 posted:I've been to the Venice McDonald's, but only to use the bathroom. I will say this, in a lot of non-US countries, a public bathroom can be hard to find, and McDonald's always has one that's clean and available to the public. Also a fairly reliable source of free WiFi too.
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Oct 19, 2015 16:19
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C.M. Kruger posted:It's kinda amazing how they've bungled it. They could have probably waited until the end, or right after, and then announced it and I think people wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as mad about it. You're even managing to short-change how badly they handled this. Taking it back a step: The game is at the tail end of what most games would consider their lifespan - it's doing fairly well in spite of that, which is great for them. Two years is a solid run. So they chose to introduce a new monitzation scheme, which isn't a huge shock for an older product that's probably trying to squeeze out a little extra income. Problems with how they did it: 1) It was a 'community reward' for the customer base's support on the game's second anniversary. Literally, it was a "Thank you for two years of support! As a reward, we are now instituting an additional method for you to give us more money!". This was what they chose to headline ten days of content - stuff that would normally build up good will and enthusiasm. 2) They chose very weirdly to give the cosmetics stat boosts - which infuriated the pay to win crusaders. However, only some of the cosmetics have stats, only certain boosts are available for certain weapons, and nearly all the boosts are either in undesirable areas or are so small as to be insignificant - meaning all but the most extreme min-maxers don't give a poo poo. So they created a problem for nearly zero benefit. 3) It was chosen to launch this on the same day as a game-wide rebalance pass that not only altered how nearly every weapon in the game performed, but changed the scales that measured that performance so it took days to even figure out what the changes meant, let alone how it affected balance. 3a) Oh, and at the same time they managed to break 90% of the game's mods, including the HUD program that they outright branded as company-endorsed. It took them three days to state that it had been by accident and at this point none of it works again yet. 4) In a stroke of brilliance, you can have a cosmetic drop for a weapon that is DLC that you don't even own. Making something that's of already dubious value absolutely worthless. 5) Their pricing structure is completely off. For $2.50, you get one random cosmetic item that not only might be something you don't like, but could be for a weapon that you don't use or that you don't even have access to. Meanwhile, the game's DLC packs cost $5 (before sales, and this is a product that is 75% off on a quarterly basis) and include vastly more content (the most recent one included seven weapons, four masks and eight cosmetic customizations for said masks). Even if you like playing Pretty Princess Dress-Up, the value ratio there is incredibly skewed. 5a) Keep in mind, as well, that this is a product that normally racks in at $20 for the entry cost, plus has thirty $5 DLC packs and now wants an additional $2.50 for a single random cosmetic. 6) To this point, now five days later, they have remained utterly silent on the subject. Not even a "We are aware of the complaints" statement. Again, this is their big second anniversary event which is coming out after multiple weeks of build-up and coincides with a major sale and a player-grabbing free week. And they have been almost entirely silent. To cap it all off, this was chosen to be done right alongside a major up-tick in the game's compeition as several major releases within the same sub-genre have just come out or are about to come out. I'm hard pressed to come up with a way they didn't mis-handle what should have been a fairly reasonable microtransaction launch.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:11
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:I don't get the big deal about pulled pork or any pulled meat. It ruins the cut and is just flavourless stringy rubbish most of the time. Freshly made pulled pork is glorious, but mass produced/ready made stuff is indeed pretty dire. There's a certain amount of cargo-culting that goes on where people (particularly outside the US, but also in parts of the US that don't have their own barbecue culture) see "hey pulled pork is pretty popular" and just shred up a bunch of meat in sauce without understanding how pulled pork actually got to be that way. Proper pulled pork is made from big, tough, fatty, garbage cuts of meat cooked at low heat for long periods (often up to 12 hours for traditional smoked barbecue, and even quick and dirty crockpot/roast recipes will cook for 6-8 hours.) Cooking for that long breaks down all of the stringy connective tissue that makes low quality cuts of meat such tough, chewy nightmares, rendering it into gelatin. This makes pulled pork incredibly flavorful since it is, in essence, bathed in concentrated pork stock the entire time it's cooking. It's also probably the most tender meat you will ever eat since literally all the connective tissue is all gone, bringing new meaning to the term "fork tender." It's not shredded just as an affectation, it's shredded because it's so soft and yielding it falls apart under its own weight. If you need a sharper implement than a spoon to shred it, you've done it terribly wrong. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 18:55 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 17:29
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Gabriel Pope posted:Freshly made pulled pork is glorious, but mass produced/ready made stuff is indeed pretty dire. There's a certain amount of cargo-culting that goes on where people (particularly outside the US, but also in parts of the US that don't have their own barbecue culture) see "hey pulled pork is pretty popular" and just shred up a bunch of meat in sauce without understanding how pulled pork actually got to be that way. I do the same thing with large cuts of fatty beef, cooking it for two to three hours in some water and spices. It's an Indonesian recipe called rendang and it's one of the tastiest thing I know how to make.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:48
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Choco1980 posted:Haha no way, I have Pandora on right now and an ad for Trader Joe's came on. The entire premise was trying to sell people on the idea of giving out julienned, seasoned carrots and parsnips to trick or treaters on halloween instead of candy, and sincerely acted like the little kids would be over the moon for this. Terrified parents will throw anything not in an original plastic wrapper directly into the garbage anyway, Trader Joes might as well run an advertisement telling people to buy carrots and parsnips and throw them away for Halloween.
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Oct 19, 2015 18:03
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Gabriel Pope posted:Freshly made pulled pork is glorious, but mass produced/ready made stuff is indeed pretty dire. There's a certain amount of cargo-culting that goes on where people (particularly outside the US, but also in parts of the US that don't have their own barbecue culture) see "hey pulled pork is pretty popular" and just shred up a bunch of meat in sauce without understanding how pulled pork actually got to be that way. This is exactly how I feel about 'brisket' outside of Texas or the South in general. People don't want to understand that it takes a lot of effort/time to make it right, they just see 'garbage cuts of meat + sauce = tasty' and want to sell that at their restaurants, leading to a lot of absolutely terribly cooked, flavorless, tough beef being marketed as 'brisket'. Same with Mexican food north of, say, Oklahoma or east of Mississippi.
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Oct 19, 2015 18:35
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Every region has its own special snowflake food that nobody else can get right. To be honest it's baffling; it isn't hard to find somebody that knows how to make it and ask "hey you know how to make that?" then do what they say. With stuff like pulled pork and brisket that's recipes on the level of "OK we're hungry and all we have is the worst meat left, how do we make it not bad?" Properly made pulled pork is, in fact, fantastic but yeah...it isn't just shredded pig with barbecue on it. Here in the PA we have cheesesteaks. A properly made cheesesteak is fanfuckingtastic but good luck getting one anywhere else in the country. A poo poo load of other places you'll see "Philly cheesesteak!" when really it's just shredded beef put on a bun with some cheese. Yes it is similar but that is not a cheesesteak.
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Oct 19, 2015 19:22
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http://www.ispot.tv/ad/AL8x/papa-murphys-pizza-re-bold-your-man Here's a stupid ad. If a father is playing dolls with his daughter, his masculinity is diminished and you should purchase a buffalo chicken pizza so he can become a macho football fan dad. It's a collection of so many stereotypes in one.
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Oct 19, 2015 21:07
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canyoneer posted:http://www.ispot.tv/ad/AL8x/papa-murphys-pizza-re-bold-your-man And he can stop interacting with the kids. Something about the "Real Men eat greasy terrible food and only women watch what they eat" trope drives me up the loving wall. It's as if advertisers are in cahoots to make sure that all men will have the appropriate physique for Walmart clothing.
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Oct 19, 2015 21:13
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Oct 19, 2015 22:27
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I don't know what you guys are talking about, it looks like advertisers can reach millennials just fine
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Oct 19, 2015 22:40
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 I really want to try them but they won't be as good as they should be
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Oct 19, 2015 22:47
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Captain Monkey posted:This is exactly how I feel about 'brisket' outside of Texas or the South in general. People don't want to understand that it takes a lot of effort/time to make it right, they just see 'garbage cuts of meat + sauce = tasty' and want to sell that at their restaurants, leading to a lot of absolutely terribly cooked, flavorless, tough beef being marketed as 'brisket'. Same with Mexican food north of, say, Oklahoma or east of Mississippi. I live in Michigan, I had no idea the Mexican food was a problem until I got a significant other of Latin heritage from California. Then she showed me what real mexican food tasted like and it blew my mind. I tried to tell family members that their hard shell tacos and wet burritos were no more "Mexican" than pizza is "Italian" but they just thought I was being snobby or something. Luckily, in the last 8 or 10 years this has started changing in this state and you can start getting the good stuff at places now. Unrelated: Choco1980 posted:Haha no way, I have Pandora on right now and an ad for Trader Joe's came on. The entire premise was trying to sell people on the idea of giving out julienned, seasoned carrots and parsnips to trick or treaters on halloween instead of candy, and sincerely acted like the little kids would be over the moon for this. I went looking, and you can find this ad on their website here. Trader Joe's posted:Halloween is just around the corner, and that means you’ll soon be faced with the dilemma of what to give your neighborhood ghosts and goblins for trick or treat. I think they're actually trying to push to have you give whole frozen bags of the stuff to the kids. I can't possibly imagine what the people who wrote this were thinking.
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Oct 19, 2015 22:55
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I think it's more than likely a joke.
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Oct 19, 2015 22:59
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theironjef posted:Terrified parents will throw anything not in an original plastic wrapper directly into the garbage anyway, Trader Joes might as well run an advertisement telling people to buy carrots and parsnips and throw them away for Halloween. Why would a grocery store chain care what happens to their food after people buy it, as long as it's not something that causes some sort of liability. "Buy this, then throw it away" is something almost every retailer secretly wishes they could say. Teriyaki Hairpiece has a new favorite as of 00:08 on Oct 20, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 23:35
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I mean, call me crazy or cruel or whatever, but the thought of a kid trying to be polite after getting a handful of parsnips on Halloween is pretty hilarious.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:50
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Fo3 posted:Yeah, but with a beer to drink. They actually did serve cans of Super Bock beer in Portugal when I was there in 2006. But I'd probably just go to the pub anyway, as opposed to having to encounter the bogan battleground / occasional breeding centre that is my local Mickey D's. EDIT: Not to mention that most McD's customers are already falling down drunk past 8PM, anyway. Sic Semper Goon has a new favorite as of 03:39 on Oct 20, 2015 |
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Oct 20, 2015 02:51
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Tempest_56 posted:You're even managing to short-change how badly they handled this. Taking it back a step: The game is at the tail end of what most games would consider their lifespan - it's doing fairly well in spite of that, which is great for them. Two years is a solid run. So they chose to introduce a new monitzation scheme, which isn't a huge shock for an older product that's probably trying to squeeze out a little extra income. Problems with how they did it: Thanks for expanding on this. I was tired and getting more and more  about it as I was writing my post.Forbes has picked up the story: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2015/10/19/payday-2-community-should-be-upset-by-absurd-micro-transactions/
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Oct 20, 2015 02:52
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I wouldn't buy them because I ain't much of a chips guy these days, but there's something... weirdly charming about these? I'd probably grin/grimace if I seen it in the supermarket.
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Oct 20, 2015 02:57
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Well, I'm sure they're very happy hitting that valuable 40-year-old facebook moms demo. The ones sharing highly artifacted Grumpy Cats and rickrolls to eachother. At this point boardrooms must be filled with accusations that millennials exist just as much as bigfoots and draculas.
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Oct 20, 2015 03:22
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There's some energy drink or something that comes in a pouch that has a paragraph of 4chan memes printed on the packaging for no reason. Like, just an incoherent wall of text reading "I can has cheeseburger? It's over 9000!" and poo poo. Of course I can't find it on GIS because "meme" means "reaction image with text pasted on top of it" now.
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Oct 20, 2015 03:28
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C.M. Kruger posted:There's a video game called Payday 2, which is a co-op shooter where you and three other people play masked gunmen robbing banks, jewelry stores, armored transports, and engage in other criminal activity such as transporting drugs and so on. Tempest_56 posted:You're even managing to short-change how badly they handled this. Taking it back a step: The game is at the tail end of what most games would consider their lifespan - it's doing fairly well in spite of that, which is great for them. Two years is a solid run. So they chose to introduce a new monitzation scheme, which isn't a huge shock for an older product that's probably trying to squeeze out a little extra income. Problems with how they did it: I went out of my way not to buy Payday 2 because they spent their entire marketing budget on "viral" marketers to spam Reddit, Tumblr, et al so for a month I couldn't go anywhere without being bombarded by various image macros imploring me to play now and that there would be no microtransactions, I'm glad they got greedy and it blew up in their face because gently caress that noise.
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Oct 20, 2015 04:36
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is it really that hard to read /b/? Like I mean internet meme culture is basically loving everywhere, that's why they call the poo poo viral.
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Oct 20, 2015 06:02
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Full Battle Rattle posted:is it really that hard to read /b/?
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Oct 20, 2015 07:14
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Gabriel Pope posted:Freshly made pulled pork is glorious, but mass produced/ready made stuff is indeed pretty dire. There's a certain amount of cargo-culting that goes on where people (particularly outside the US, but also in parts of the US that don't have their own barbecue culture) see "hey pulled pork is pretty popular" and just shred up a bunch of meat in sauce without understanding how pulled pork actually got to be that way. Gotcha. It's like the difference between a cut of home made silver side that's been steeping in herbs all day vs the dry and tasteless corned beef that cafe's will put on their sandwiches and rolls.
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Oct 20, 2015 07:45
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Gabriel Pope posted:Proper pulled pork is made from big, tough, fatty, garbage cuts of meat cooked at low heat for long periods This bit is important. If you try to use 'good' cuts of meat for that kind of cooking it'll come out dry and horrible.
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Oct 20, 2015 09:35
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The White Dragon posted:I wouldn't buy them because I ain't much of a chips guy these days, but there's something... weirdly charming about these? I'd probably grin/grimace if I seen it in the supermarket. I've tried the chili and Cheezeburger variants. the chili one is bland and boring. The cheezeburger tastes exactly like that mcdonalds cheeseburger you forgot last night and then eat, without reheating, the next morning.
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Oct 20, 2015 10:51
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Tempest_56 posted:6) To this point, now five days later, they have remained utterly silent on the subject. Not even a "We are aware of the complaints" statement. Again, this is their big second anniversary event which is coming out after multiple weeks of build-up and coincides with a major sale and a player-grabbing free week. And they have been almost entirely silent. To be fair, they did make a statement. It was pretty much "wow, you guys seem kinda mad, but we have 10 days of patches to push, so let's talk later maybe?". On the one hand, I can absolutely understand that they don't want to derail the entire event in order to run damage control (or literally can't in a all-hands-on-deck kind of way), but on the other hand the studio seems to pretty consistently lack contingency plans and has brushed things off before by promising to re-examine them in the nebulous "later" so people's expectations are already low. This is on top of the fact that they're plainly struggling to push 10 consecutive updates, even with easy filler days. Game's been outrageously buggy and the massive weapon rebalance is a nonsensical mess. Those two issues are being largely overshadowed by the dumb microtransactions, but it means that even if you don't care about that shitstorm, the game is still in a bit of a sad state.
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Oct 20, 2015 11:20
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Captain Monkey posted:This is exactly how I feel about 'brisket' outside of Texas or the South in general. People don't want to understand that it takes a lot of effort/time to make it right, they just see 'garbage cuts of meat + sauce = tasty' and want to sell that at their restaurants, leading to a lot of absolutely terribly cooked, flavorless, tough beef being marketed as 'brisket'. Same with Mexican food north of, say, Oklahoma or east of Mississippi. Yeah, the first time I had Texas BBQ I said "Holy poo poo, this is delicious and it's not drowning in HFCS; how did they do this?" Here in the Midwest, BBQ brisket is cheap meat + Kraft BBQ sauce + slow cooker
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Oct 20, 2015 14:24
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C.M. Kruger posted:Thanks for expanding on this. I was tired and getting more and more Hell, I had most of that already pre-prepared. I was going to be bringing it to this thread after Crimefest finished just to see what other developments came up. It's really stunning how much they screwed the pooch. (Then again, the players are being goddamn retards about it too, but you expect players to be goddamn retards.) John Murdoch posted:To be fair, they did make a statement. It was pretty much "wow, you guys seem kinda mad, but we have 10 days of patches to push, so let's talk later maybe?". On the one hand, I can absolutely understand that they don't want to derail the entire event in order to run damage control (or literally can't in a all-hands-on-deck kind of way), but on the other hand the studio seems to pretty consistently lack contingency plans and has brushed things off before by promising to re-examine them in the nebulous "later" so people's expectations are already low. Did they give a statement? I'm guessing Twitter? (Should really get one some day.) Still, that's not much of a response. And this is a situation where they should be running damage control. They've at minimum had weeks to prepare, even best-case scenarios for introducing new monetization schemes are rough, and... just wow. And yeah, the bugginess has been an issue. And the rebalance is... wonky and nonsensical, yeah. (Then again, I'm barely playing because GoonMod is down. Holding down interact and turning my gadgets back on all the time is disorienting. So I can't speak as strongly on those.) I'm hearing about other changes that've been slipped in as well that aren't exactly smart - like vehicle breakdowns. It's fascinating to see what should have been a well-planned anniversary celebration turn into a clusterfuck.
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Oct 20, 2015 14:56
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I think this is the statement, stuffed into an update announcement for that event http://steamcommunity.com/games/218620/announcements/detail/85925484545347979 Some are hoping this is all one elaborate joke, in the sense of creating outrage as a way to get free publicity because everyone's talking about it, like we are now. This seems unlikely, but even if it is, it's still a dumb move.
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Oct 20, 2015 16:27
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Yeah, the first time I had Texas BBQ I said "Holy poo poo, this is delicious and it's not drowning in HFCS; how did they do this?" I don't know what the gently caress you call the Midwest, but here in KC, bbq brisket is not that. And pulled pork is food for the gods.
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Oct 20, 2015 16:35
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Tempest_56 posted:Did they give a statement? I'm guessing Twitter? (Should really get one some day.) Still, that's not much of a response. And this is a situation where they should be running damage control. They've at minimum had weeks to prepare, even best-case scenarios for introducing new monetization schemes are rough, and... just wow. It was part of Day 4's announcement in the Steam group. I'm willing to cut them a tiny bit of slack for a genuine bottleneck, but I suppose one could also just as readily point out that they seem really tangled up by a 10 day event that they were solely responsible for planning in the first place. There's also a remote possibility that they scheduled things in an exceedingly dumb way and there's more coming in future days that might change the picture. LMGs were rebalanced on the first day with the rest of the weapons, but they didn't add the bipods that gave some context to those changes until Day 5. And not directly related to that, but there's also the weird situation going on with Ulf Andersson. He left the company months ago, but was staying on to keep voicing Wolf (though he hadn't contributed new lines in a while due to the physical stress of doing them). Then it quietly came out this week that he was no longer going to keep voicing Wolf after all. At the same time, due to a "bug" with their merch store, Wolf's mask was no longer available for purchase. And now they have the character on the Road to Crimefest page walking along with a bindle.
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Oct 20, 2015 16:43
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porktree posted:I don't know what the gently caress you call the Midwest, but here in KC, bbq brisket is not that. And pulled pork is food for the gods. KC is drat near the south and don't you deny it. GSF's concoction sounds more like an Iowa or Ohio concoction.
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Oct 20, 2015 18:00
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Kansas fought for the North though
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Oct 20, 2015 18:14
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porktree posted:I don't know what the gently caress you call the Midwest, but here in KC, bbq brisket is not that. And pulled pork is food for the gods. KC is an oasis of well done food in the vast culinary desert that is the Midwest, and you know it.
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Oct 20, 2015 18:15
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Greatbacon posted:KC is drat near the south and don't you deny it. GSF's concoction sounds more like an Iowa or Ohio concoction. Iowa brisket is good. Just don't get it from a chain
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Oct 20, 2015 18:17
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Since we're on about McDonalds advertising being awful for the bulk of our living memory... the worst ads are the ones where they're trying to suggest that people are making their poo poo food a part of their identities. Radio ads with monotone soccer moms describing the chores of their banal existence and McCafe being a critical part of it. Their ridiculously racist 'urban demographic' ads with minorities in low riders babbling in trendy slang about McD cheeseburgers are how dey roll. Nobody is going to wear a shirt with a McDonald's logo on it, just around. Nobody is going to make that brand part of their every day wear, even hipster-ironically (though I bet it has been tried / done). I don't think they'll ever stop trying though.
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Oct 20, 2015 18:56
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