You must be referencing some stuff the developer added after release

Likely, yes. I got that game relatively late on the Nintendo Switch, and IIRC by that time it it was first released for that console, it had been availiable for 5+ years on PC already. Lots of time to listen to feedback and implement QOL improvements ;)

There is only 1 kind of bait.

There’s regular bait, deluxe bait, targetd bait, wild bait, magic bait and challenge bait.

Leveling up requires that you catch fish

You also get fishing XP by taking stuff out of crab pots, completing “fish pond” quests, harvesting fish pond produce, fishing up garbage items, reading the books “Bait and Bobber” or “Book of Stars”. Not a single one of these requires playing the minigame with the green bar, and only the “fish up garbage” thing requires owning a rod in the first place.

Food bonuses are true but they all require ingredients caught by fishing.

Gus can randomly sell dishes that boost your fishing skill, like Fish Taco or Trout Soup. The same goes for the travelling cart. You do not need to have any fishing experience to buy those. As for cooking those yourself, you can also buy fish from Krobus or the travelling cart, or find fish in garbage cans. And Linus can send you fish per mail (and sometimes maki rolls for whatever reason). You don’t need to actually use the fishing minigame for any of those.

because it requires you to still be checking the queen of sauce in mid-Summer of Year 2

The Queen of Sauce Book teaches you literally all recipes in the game. If you rush the Ginger Island questline you can get that reatively early.

Most people will have gotten too many reruns to keep checking at that stage of the game.

If you check the weather forecast each day (which I always do) you can see whether or not it’s a rerun before clicking on it. No idea why anyone would not check those then.

It took me 3.5 years to catch everything even with a guide

See other fish sources above. I regularily check all of these and usually manage to complete the community center in Winter Y1 or Spring Y2 unless I get the short end of the stick when using the remixed option and/or fail to get red cabbage seeds or enough Gold Star veggies in Spring Y1. Haven’t touched any guides until my third playthrough.

Just to add another factor to the ongoing discussion: artistic talent isn’t uniform and never was. Just because only/mostly “immature” art survived from a certain century of human history, doesn’t mean that there literally was no realistic art present at the time. Since you mentioned the statues already…

These are from the same era (around 200 BC), but as you may have guessed, made by different artists =P The statue is called The Dying Gaul by the way.

As for painting examples, I guess the Rothschild Canticles^[1] book illustrations represent best what most people nowadays would call medieval art. Not exactly realistic, a little goofy … perspective? Never heard of it. Proportions? Who cares. And who needs shading anyway?! As long as you can still distinguish a human from a cupcake, it’s “eh good enough”.

I guess that was also what you meant by “immature” art, because it is the same art style as those goofy weird pictures of knights fighting giant snails and rabbits riding cattle into battle and the like.^[2]

That book is dated to be around 1500–1520 so it would be easy to assume that people at the start of the 15th century didn’t have a realistic art style yet. But you know what else was made in that same era?

The Mona Lisa (1503–1506).

One dorky meme-esque style, and one realistic, modest and easy-on-the-eyes style in the same century, probably even the same decade. But they were used by different artists.

Now you might be thinking that those art styles might have been intended for their respective purpose or something along the lines: that the goofy, simple art style was used for nothing but amusing little pictures, and the more realistic style was for “proper” art, because noone in their right mind would spend 100+ hours painting highly detailed nonsense just for sh*ts and giggles, right?

May I introduce you to Joseph Ducreux?^[3]

I guess most of you will have seen that meme by now, but this is a real painting made by a real artist - and it is far from the only one. Ducreux created an entire series of similar self-portraits in … unusual poses and situations.

… so yes, at least that one guy DID indeed spend dozens if not hundreds of hours (plus material costs) painting amusing nonsense for his own entertainement. He was, in a way, the victorian era equivalent of a shitposter (and I mean that in a good sense!)

Long story short: one can’t just claim that “they didn’t have X art style in Y century” because the truth is much more facetted than that. It is way more likely that each and every era of human history has had people with insane talent who were able to create art as realistic as possible with whatever tools their lifetime had to offer, and also a bunch of “eh good enough” art or stuff that was deliberately stylized for fun. How we percieve said art today depends mainly on what artworks have survived up until now, and/or how popular the surviving art is. (Everyone and their grandma knows about the Mona Lisa, but how many of y’all knew about the Rothschild Canticles?)

If we don’t know about any realistic art from a certain period of time, it doesn’t automatically mean that there was no realistic art. It may have been lost, forgotten or it exists but it’s just not popular enough to be well-known.

Wikipedia claims they’re quite popular.

And one for flinching! bap bap bap

big pair of chopsticks to flip deep-frying stuff,

100% this. I have a pair of metal chopsticks that I use exclusively for frying food, especially small, super sticky stuff like nan gua bing. Most wooden ones here (Germany) have some sort of artificial coating and I’m a bit worried about it melting or releasing chemicals when it gets too hot, so I don’t want to dunk these into hot oil.

Not sure if that really counts as “a game” for this community, but I reactivated my old Neopets account after a long hiatus. The site is still broken AF but just as fun as I remembered, and there is talk of an upcoming plot across the boards.

First round of the evening and one meal per person are always free at the Cranky Cat inn ;)

My old group had the opposite problem sometimes. In one campaign, we ended up with an NPC perma-drunk street urchin who was too obnoxious for his own good, and just kinda tagged along with the actual party because it meant he could get a free meal as long as they tolerated him. He was meant to give the characters some hints for the campaign and then get chased off or locked up or otherwise removed, but the party basically instantly adopted him, tried to teach him some manners, got him out of trouble whenever he did some Really Dumb Shit™ like groping a city guard or telling a priestess to go f- herself or barfing on the druid’s familliar. I think our DM was a little frustrated for a while that the one-off character he pulled out of his ass just to deliver a message ended up becoming a full-time job for him to play, despite his efforts to get the character killed or left behind.

Fast forward a couple of (in-game) years and what was once an annoying little shit is now an resposnible adult running his own tavern, in which our party frequently resides. All is well that ends well, I guess ;)

(still, that DM never again brought orphans into the play, just in case.)

I always called it “clutter” tho I don’t know whether this is in any way official. De-cluttering an inventory means tossing the useless stuff out or packing it away.

Hmm … you’re right, it does sound a bit too rude. I hereby humbly apologize to any and all bats, flying foxes and other mammals capable of flight who might be reading this and are currently trying to figure out how to type a reply. Y’all are cool. Weird, but cool. ;)

… he sleeps all night and he works all day … ♪

(Thanks, now I have that dumb lumberjack song stuck in my head, lol)

Similar thing with “Easter”, which comes from the name of Ēostre, the Germanic goddess of Spring. The origins of that holiday have nothing to do with Christianity, but the day and name were hijacked by Christians sometime in the mid-2nd century.

“Goodbye” exists because of 15th century chatspeak. It’s a highly abbreviated version of “God be with ye”

This is absolutely inacceptable! Placing avocados that close to tomatoes and bananas will make them over-ripe way too fast. Sheesh!

But at least they have proper pest control, tho it appears to be in energy saving mode.

Have you tried vinegar and baking soda? Those are basically the default at-home stench-and-stain removers any household should have.

Yeah it happens once or twice a year, if you’re lucky … =P

But joke aside, I think he was just too embarrassed to be angry.

The only example I personally encountered “in the wild” was Disney’s Tarzan, where Phil Collins insisted on singing the songs in different languages himself. It was a bit surreal to hear him sing in German, and frankly it is very noticable that it isn’t his mother tongue.

Just in case you want to listen to an example: “Son of Man”, sung by Collins, in …

• …German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfGOohwP_4

• …Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k8NySrpplY

• …French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Oz2fBXTDs

• …Italian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NpGoEpMZh4

On the other hand, I do appreciate the effort. Letting someone else do it would have been easier for him, but instead he sat down and learned a ton of phonetical lines by heart, in four different languages - none of which he understands. For all seven or so voiced songs in the movie.

Bathroom products. In fact, they’re currently located between the TP/paper towel section and the liquid soap dispensers & refill bags.

Granted, they DO look like white chocolate or something similar, but the product placement, package and the fact that it did not taste like food should have been rather obvious hints to maybe check the package again instead of driving all the way back to the store to yell at the employees. At least he had the decency to be embarrassed about it instead of starting the usual “you lost a customer, I’ll never shop here again” shouting match, which is a big plus.

PS: he got a refund, but only because he was polite as soon as he realized his mistake. Normally, any sort of hygiene product is excluded from refunds, especially when it has bite marks.

I work in customer service. I wouldn’t say that 90% of ALL people are stupid, but an astounding number of the people I have to deal with have … unique ways of thinking, so to speak.

The most recent example was an olderly man who was absolutely furious because a box of candy he bought for his wife “tasted absolutely disgusting”. We’re talking about something similar to this but I won’t link our actual product as I don’t feel comfortable sharing that information.

Either way, those are friggin’ bath bombs. It says so on the effing package. Just because they’re labeled “vegan” doesn’t mean that they’re edible FFS!