No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.

Nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.

So said bacteria was already present in the environment, but conditions are now favorable for its rapid growth.

To be fair to Nintendo, they painted themselves into a corner.

The first game was supposed to capture the feeling Myamoto had when exploring the woods near his home as a kid, so it has an excuse plot about collecting magical plot tokens on a quest to rescue a princess from a monster. It did well enough to get a very dissimilar sequel, because Nintendo also hates sequels. Myamoto always wants to do something new, he always resists making more of a good thing.

The third game, A Link to the Past, returned to the top-down dungeon crawl, but there was room on the cartridge now for some NPC dialog, so they wrote some backstory. And they got a little carried away becuase they wrote a creation myth, a deep backstory of the kingdom, a villain, and the design document of the rest of the series. The fourth game, Link’s Awakening on Gameboy, is canonically a dream. It all happened in Link’s head.

The fifth game, Ocarina of Time, is a prequel, they made a game out of A Link to the Past’s fluff text. Fans went fucking nuts for it. The sixth game, Majora’s Mask, is a game made on a strict one-year deadline, it has themes of constantly ticking clocks and impending doom. Write what you know, boys.

The Oracle games are side stories that don’t effect the overall story, Wind Waker is the way it is because Myamoto went on a vacation to the beach and liked it, see also Mario Sunshine. Minish Cap is a distant prequel that takes place before OoT, and then Twilight Princess came out, made almost entirely to address the backlash against the cartoony art style of Wind Waker and to a lesser extent Minish Cap.

Nintendo sold the Wii on its motion control gimmick. Twilight Princess was a launch title for the game, but TP was designed for the Gamecube and they just mapped wiimote swipes to button presses. They took the rest of that long console generation to develop Skyward Sword with actual motion controls, and it was yet another distant prequel even predating Minish Cap.

It’s the 2010s by now. Youtube exists, and fans are starting to make video essays about the sprawling, self-contradictory series and trying to form it into a cohesive whole. Detecting a merchandising opportunity, Nintendo releases Hyrule Historia, a nearly 300 page hardcover book that among other things contained the officially sanctioned timeline of events: The timeline splits into three separate parallel realities at Ocarina of Time, meaning some of the biggest entries in the series to date: A Link to the Past, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, had nothing to do with each other.

One 3DS sequel to ALttP later that largely takes place in yet another alternate reality, and they come out with Breath of the Wild, which is deliberately nowhere on the timeline and contains details established in all three split realities, followed by Tears of the Kingdom which retcons even Ocarina of Time out of existence.

TL;DR: The story of the Legend of Zelda series is best summed up by its main character, Link, when he said “Hep! Hap! HEEEEEYAH!”

Would have been a funnier joke if the bottom sentence was written in a different handwriting.

Cows eat a lot of grass. They shit like a cement mixer.

Red or white?

Each game can stand on its own. Nintendo is well aware that its audience will always include children playing their first Zelda game on their first console.

If any of the games refer back to a previous one, it will almost always be Ocarina of Time. OoT depicts the origin story of the series’ main villain, so the boss fight at the end of that game marks the “Year Zero” for the series kind of the way the Battle of Yavin does in the Star Wars fandom.

Because Ocarina of Time involves time travel, it actually forks the timeline into three paths: Link is defeated, Link defeats Ganon and the timeline continues from there, Link travels back in time to prevent Ganon from rising to power in the first place. Later a fourth branch was established: Prequels, set before the events of OoT.

At least one game is a fever dream, at least two games take place in other, faraway kingdoms, at least one game can be interpreted as a fever dream or a faraway kingdom, and then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom seem to be a reboot of the series because ToTK retells OoT’s story and retells it wrong.

There is something to be said for being difficult to enBritish.

Okay so. A primer on the Zelda franchise:

Nintendo dislikes video games with stories, and they nakedly hate video game franchises with overall lore. Nintendo wants to make video games that are mechanically fun, “it’s fun to jump on the thing.” “It’s fun to swing a sword ad the thing.” “It’s fun to throw a ball at the thing.” Look no farther than their primary flagship franchise, the Mario series, for games with an excuse plot and highly polished primary gameplay loops. You can tell they truly, madly, deeply resent their secondary flagship franchise, the Zelda series, for being a more narrative driven adventure saga that attracts gamers who like deep overall lore.

Ocarina of Time is the most important game in the Zelda series’ deep overall lore.

I’m gonna say no it wasn’t expected. I’d expect toxic chemicals, heavy metals etc. I would expect a data center to discharge water that is unsafe and damaging, they are after all being run by Captain Planet villains…but bacteria? I wouldn’t have called that one.

You’d think it’d be India. It’s actually fascinating how a nation of their size and population does such a good job of maintaining their own irrelevancy.

I’m guessing the 80 year old dementia patient didn’t crack open the Adobe Creative Suite on this one.

Arch has good documentation. Read it and you’ll be ok.

The NES had a bunch of garbage software anyway. Look at Hydlide or King’s Knight.

I have a copy of The Hunt For Red October that was taped in December off of HBO, and it’s got this ad before it for…you know those children’s games, it’s a plastic enclosure, you fill it with water, there are like little plastic rings or balls, and you like push a button to squirt water around the enclosure to move the rings around, it’s like if you explained the concept of Pinball to someone, and the only language you share in common is Klingon? I have a late 80’s early 90’s ad for that.

You know, I read these as a humorous juxtaposition between the style of (apparently unironic, posted in earnest) “girl dinner” pictures which are usually just a few small piles of whatever from the fridge, with the r/malelivingspace attitude.

Vodka is meant to be colorless and flavorless, ideally pure water and ethanol.

Whiskey is made to retain flavors from the grain it isade from, and aged in charred oak barrels to impart flavors from the wood. The region of the world and the process used causes a variety of flavors.

Scotch, from Scotland, is made primarily or entirely of barley. The malted barley is toasted over a peat fire, which is where scotch gets its peaty or smoky flavor from, and that flavor often depends on where around Scotland the peat is sourced from, Islay Scotches are noted for rather aggressive flavors. Scotch is aged in used whine, sherry or bourbon barrels, so they often take on characteristics from the barrel’s previous contents.

Irish whiskies are made of partially unmalted barley, which lends a unique kind of floral note.

American Bourbon is made of at least 51% corn and aged in new white oak barrels. The United States is almost all warmer than the Britain and Ireland (not a lot of whiskey is made in Alaska) so the booze interacts with the barrel differently and extracts different chemicals. Bourbons are noted for cherry, apple, vanilla and caramel flavors. Not all whiskey made in the United States fits the definition of bourbon; there’s a lot of interesting things happening in the American “Single Malt” category which is Let’s Try To Make Scotch, But On A Continent. Not a lot of peat bogs in the US, so hardwood charcoal is used to smoke the malted grain instead, and again America’s climate means it ages differently, so the result is quite different from Scotch but still quite interesting.

Canadian Rye whiskey is often citrusy or spicy.

I’ve heard a story about some king who wanted to establish potatoes in his people’s diets, but nobody wanted them. So he decreed potatoes a royal food, banned peasants from having them, and then paid guards to guard them very very poorly.

Other way around. Beach sand is new and this rough. A surprising amount of it is parrotfish poo, chewed up coral. River sand, and desert sand, is weathered and smooth.

I’ve seen a machine for pulverizing glass bottles into basically sand. Smooth desert sand > glass packaging, used for food, glass packaging > concrete aggregate?

Elsewhere as in the companies and idividuals not employed by Apple that actually invented the things Apple sold? Correct.