I (a guy) think I still have a small plastic off-brand Lego in my desk. I spent a weekend with my high school crush and we found a bunch of them and had goofy fun with them.

Last I heard she’d moved away, married a woman, and had a successful career in science. I doubt she thinks of me, but I’m glad she did well.

I don’t accept the premise that it’s “humiliating” for a partner to leave.

I don’t accept the premise that them leaving is predicated on sexual performance.

I don’t accept that f+f sex is inferior to m+f

I’m not even going to go on. Your world view is rigid and not healthy. Maybe spend some time with other people, if they’ll have you. Get out of whatever manosphere hole you’ve fallen into.

We could do a lot for climate change, world hunger, homelessness, disease prevention and eradication, and so on with that much money.

All of these people are doing mass murder via opportunity cost, and I hope they pay for it.

And yet when someone’s like “the GOP is an existential threat and we should treat them accordingly” it’s all “you’re being alarmist” and “murder is a crime”

I hope every member of the GOP chokes to death alone and removed from everything they ever loved.

teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying.

Was Morrigan popular when da:o was new? She’s an extremely edgy teenager.

This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.

I really don’t think queer stuff needs to be banished from the realm of RPGs.

Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.

A solid black.

I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.

The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.

The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.

Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.

I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.

Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”

Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.

I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.

I feel like as games and technology get more complex, the question of “Are we a company that makes an engine or a company that makes a game? Because doing both is hard” becomes more relevant.

I guess they have microsoft money now so they could probably hire a whole team and build a really nice engine to rival unreal, but they probably won’t. They can shovel whatever garbage out the door with “The sequel to skyrim” on it, and it’ll sell.

Also they’re kind of competing with themselves by also making Avowed.

… we should be breaking up these big companies.

Huh. That’s neat I guess.

My initial guess was it would somehow capture the energy from hitting keys. I guess that’s implausible? Too little energy without making the key press resistance too high?

This seems like obvious advice.

I mean, way back when Myspace was new (I’m old) I looked at it and thought “This is going to make me sad.” Like, if people post fun stuff without me I’m probably going to feel left out. If people post sad stuff about their life, I’m going to feel sad. If people don’t interact with me at all, I’m going to feel lonely. There’s such a narrow path forward on that kind of thing that’s a consistent, net positive.

People could keep in touch with email, or texts, or even ancient modes like phone calls and letters. Would probably be happier. The social media stuff is a black hole.

Also remember that time Facebook tried to see if they could just make people sad? And they could? And somehow no one went to jail or anything?

On the one hand, I have no interest in this. I already played the game.

On the other, as someone else said, if it makes dudebro duds mad then that might be worthwhile.

Ask them out. “You seem cool. Want to go on a date to see if we click?”. I recommend using the word date explicitly because several of my friends have “gone out for drinks” and then been uncertain if it was a date

On the date, if things are going well, just ask if you can kiss them. Some people have ideas about how you should just go for it but the error rate there is high, and most people prefer consent.

If that goes well, you can ask about what other things they like. The context and mood will be appropriate.

Don’t be a pen pal on the dating apps. Just ask them out.

I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a battle pass and I don’t plan to. I think if a game I was interested in offered one, I’d consider just skipping it.

If no one bought the things they’d stop making them, but that is an impossible idea.

Author is perhaps overly humanizing the CEO while not humanizing all the victims of the health care system enough.

One could write an article that was simply short biographies of everyone who died because of health insurance profits. I imagine, like the wealth to scale page, people would have an emotional journey reading it as it kept going and going.

I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.

I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.

But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.

Guild Wars2 is very good.

It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.

There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?

There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.

This is year 2 of my tradition of “order a pizza and play video games”

I’m not close to my family. They invited me there, I invited them here, neither party accepted.

Maybe in the future I’ll be dating someone who wants to do more. Until then: pizza and path of exile 2

I’ve been on Linux Mint for the past several months and I think I’ve needed the terminal twice?

Once I couldn’t find a GUI option to adjust the brightness/gamma, but searching found me the terminal command so I just used that.

More recently I needed newer Nvidia drivers than were available by default, so I had to add a new PPA thing. We’ll find out later today if I’m going to regret that.