Until they change the name and voice and have a whole fleet of elderly AI chatbots.

80’s’n’t

I think Kamala could have been the perfect candidate and she still would’ve lost.

The economy being in the shitter under the Biden-Harris administration killed any possibility of either of them winning another term. The economy ended up being the single biggest issue for American voters. Way bigger than bodily autonomy for women, LGBT+ rights, or Palestine.

Depends on how one frames it. It’s not the Stallman-defined “GNU+Linux” pureblood OS, but it nevertheless is built from a modified version of the Linux kernel.

And like any OS it can be made private and secure with the right components…or it can be cracked open like a data-farming egg without them.

I guess I can just take the low-hanging fruit and invoke Ubuntu as an alternative example, which was once something of a Linux entry point but has become more than fine collecting user data.

Ironically a Linux-derived OS.

It’s always good practice to be careful who you trust with your data. Open =/= private. More choices helps, though.

TSMC hates this one easy trick!

I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

And don’t forget to do your dailies!

If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.

But then those sorts of countries usually have law enforcement that likes taking large amounts of “financial incentives” to do whatever a company like Nintendo wants them to do.

Taking a look at their website, I don’t think so (thankfully).

It’s an all-boys center based on how it’s described, but it doesn’t seem to make any mention of conversion therapy in explicit terms, nor does it imply that it is a type of program they offer. It doesn’t seem to display any overt religious messaging, either.

I see that they are also accredited by the Joint Commission, which is more reassuring on that front. Not to say there might not be some hidden skeletons they keep from the accreditors, or that they don’t have rogue staff who might try to push their own agenda anyways, but it means there are industry standards they are following well enough to pass accreditation, which most conversion camps would not even put in the effort to attempt.

Given that it’s a mental health facility for troubled teens, I’d guess this was most likely a tragic but otherwise unsuspicious suicide.

Well…you’re not wrong.

It’s the specialized tools you’ll also need to do all of that that’ll get you, though.

Just build one, cheaper to boot.

That doesn’t seem to apply to what you quoted, however. The section you quoted framed sex as a transactional obligation on the part of women, asserting that if women refuse to sleep with men who support their views and rights, they’ll become radicalized and turn into incels.

The logic in that statement is that men who care about women are entitled to a bit of quid pro quo, “I support your rights as a person and you have sex with me” even though that is entirely antithetical to the point.

If men care about women’s issues, then they are inherently fine with women making a conscious decision to not have sex. Otherwise, it means they don’t really care about women’s issues, and likely never did.

No one is shaming women for choosing to have sex with people they want to have sex with, just that the decision of those women who wish to stop having sex be respected.

No, I think the reply is appropriate enough. The comment you quoted is an extremely mysogynist take, falling right into the incel perspective of “if women refuse to have sex with men, they are inconsiderate.”

The value of women is not just for men to have sex with them—they have the agency to decide for themselves what they want to do with their own bodies. This is basically what the downvoted post is saying. Women choosing not to put out doesn’t “radicalize” incels any more than women showing a bit of skin creates rapists.

If there are men who can’t get over the fact that some women might choose not to have sex with them for political reasons, they can read Lysistrata or something.

I ended up binging it today. I do think the pacing was a bit quick, but I don’t think it was too hard to follow.

Mainly I think it helps if you’re coming right off of season 1, since it plays out almost like an act 4 with how immediately it just keeps going with the plot.

I loved the music choices, too, for what it’s worth. It does a lot visually/atmospherically that exposition alone wouldn’t be able to cover. But I guess it helps more if you like the actual music.

All good. Admittedly weird times we’re in, like his presidency never even ended.

Coming into a thread that has nothing to do with politics and using it to soapbox your political superiority is still kinda cringe, ngl.

In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.

If only I knew what that censored word was supposed to be. Flaking? Fracking? Flocking? Forking?

The world will sadly never know.

2022 doesn’t sound right for Trump to be hosting anything at the white house. Was this at Mar a Lago or was this earlier during his presidency?

Caught me before I was able to edit! I thought about it for a second and decided that estimate was too high.

10 people is what I would usually say is a normal amount, maybe variable depending on how hungry people arrive and if there are any other dishes to snack on at whatever hypothetical party this is.

I can only eat 3-4 slices at most before I get full, but my appetite isn’t the biggest.

Usually what ends up happening is that I still order a party pizza for a group of 5 or so people and then end up with leftovers for a few days. Just can’t beat the surface-to-crust ratio.