If anything gaming culture has regressed, at least in this aspect.

Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be ridiculous?

There’s a clear cause:

In addition to the rating it should have an ugly warning on all its promotional material, like cigarettes.

“Warning: this game requires additional in-game purchases and gambling to access all of its content”. On the screen for the entire duration of any trailer.

See, this is something I think I might be too autistic to understand.

I’m supposed to welcome people to niche communities, which I assume includes helping people with their problems, or else I’m being exclusive and elitist. But also sometimes people post about their problems without actually wanting help, and if you try to help them you’re being annoying. So, don’t help anyone unless they explicitly ask for help, even though in 99% of other situations someone implicitly asking for help means they want your help and its extremely rude to ignore them. I sure hope nobody having their problems ignored takes that as rude or elitist or exclusive.

If you’re annoyed that people keep complaining, express that you are annoyed instead of trying to point to what you think is the solution. You might be wrong about problem or even the solution, but you won’t be wrong about your emotions.

The emotion I get as an autistic person trying to trying to interpret people saying the opposite of what they mean then being considered an asshole when I’m neurologically incapable of interpreting coded messages is that I want to kill someone and then myself.

And remember, these are statistics for New York […] I used the word “inherently” above for a reason.

Did you read my comment?

These articles reference New York specifically because it was considered to be so notoriously dangerous in the 80 and 90s. It hasn’t gotton any less urban since then so what else has changed? And I bring up cities that are even safer despite having a comparable or higher population.

Again, I use the word “inherently” for a reason. I do not think that it is impossible for a city to be bad, you can fuck up a city like you can any community. But I don’t think there’s anything about urban areas that makes the people there violent just as I don’t think there’s anything about rural areas that makes the people virtuous. It mostly has to do with how many people are poor and desperate enough to turn to crime and miserable enough to turn to hard drugs.

IDK, apply that logic to anything else.

Suppose someone says “I hate having to change my car’s motor oil and I hate the effect oil dependency has on the world”, then I say “you should consider getting an electric car, they’re way cheaper and better than they used to be”.

Am I now on the hook to solve that person’s car troubles forever? Do I have to plan every roadtrip for them so they can hit the necessary charging stations?

Likewise, if that person has a problem or it turns out that an electric car can’t meet their needs and they have to switch back to gas is it my fault? Is it the fault of every electric car owner for talking about them and advocating for them?

I don’t think you should be an asshole to someone asking for help on a forum (though that’s not what the tumble post above is even about? They just seem to be complaining about their technical issue being too hard or the explanations being too verbose?), but I do think that if someone went onto the electric vehicles community and posted “I live in the middle of Alaska and drive 400 miles uphill through the snow at -40 every day! How DARE you think EVs are ready for the mainstream!?!” once a day like people do to Linux coms the EV people would start to get annoyed pretty fast.

You are generally less likely to die from homicide in NYC than you are in rural areas, and the worst states in the US have rural counties with homicide rates more than 3 times greater than NYC’s.

And remember, these are statistics for New York, not Vienna or Tokyo. US cities are far from the safest in the world. I used the word “inherently” above for a reason.

That just seems like a heat pump dryer with extra steps.

It led to this crazy debate about how a city should be so safe and saccharine that a child can walk around unattended. Weird

(Emphasis mine)

TBH, I think this is a very American and kinda conservative take. In most places outside the US and Canada kids walk to school and other places by themselves in urban areas.

Now, I don’t think that means you shouldn’t be able to buy a dildo or whatever, but I don’t agree with the idea that suburbs or small towns are inherently more safe and wholesome. That’s literally just conservative propaganda.

But, if there are public spaces that are actually physically unsafe for a child to be in, that’s a failure of society IMO. For the same reason that its a failure if a woman, or a trans person, or a neurodivergent person is put into danger just for existing in the wrong place. People under the age of 18 are human beings too, just ones with different needs from adults, and like all human beings they deserve to be able to exist in public without fearing for their life.

Thanks for doing the news org’s job for them. They either don’t know how or aren’t willing to do it.

I think they’re both better and worse.

In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the blurry brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.

In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.

If you’re talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.

They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn’t, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.

It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.

Honestly “it’s this game but with that.” could be a pretty good way to innovate unless you’re totally phoning it in IMO.

Metroid was created when people at Nintendo wanted to combine the skill-based platforming of Super Mario Bros with the exploration of a Zelda game. That ended up being one of the two founding games in the Metroidvania genre.

System Shock was created by people who wanted to make a game with the same “emergent gameplay systems as a puzzle/playground” aspect of dungeon crawling RPGs like Ultima, but in a SciFi rather than fantasy setting. What we ended up with was something that combined fast paced shooter gameplay and a tight narrative presentation on the one hand, with letting the player make their own solutions to levels by manipulating open-ended gameplay systems on the other. This is very similar to the situation with metroid IMO, in how it tried to combine two very differnt styles of gameplay. Today we have an entire genre of games inspired by System Shock called immersive sims (though its more of a design ethos than a genre IMO).

The famous level design and exploration of Dark Souls was inspired by the 3D Zelda games, and while I don’t have a source for this its hard for me to believe that the lock-on mechanics and basic idea for the movement weren’t at least a little inspired by Zelda too. Or, in other words, Dark Souls is basically a 3D Zelda game but with the tone and difficulty of their earlier King’s Field series.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that combing two good things is a guaranteed way to get something good. Or even that, if you do hit upon a good combination, that that’s the only thing you need to put into your work. The games I’ve just talked about are all absolute classics and obviously a lot went into that. For example, the genesis of the iconic multiplayer aspect of Fromsoft’s games came about during the development of Demon’s Souls, when Miyazaki was trying to drive up hill in a bad snow storm. There was a line of cars, and when one began to spin it’s tires then ones behind it would intentionly push on it to help it up. This all happened without the drivers being able to talk to each other, and, seeing this, Miyazaki wondered what became of the last car in the line, but knew he would never get an answer since he would never see these people again. It was this experience that inspired the creation of phantoms.

However, what I am trying to say is that taking something you like and understanding what makes it tick, then making it work in a new context, can end up creating something that then seems wildly innovative in that context.

As an aside, both Zelda and King’s Field were inspired by a dungeon crawling game called “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord”. Both Wizardry and Ultima were derived from earlier games that were basically “Dungeons and Dragons, but on a computer”. Some of them were even named “DND” on the early computer systems they ran on.

DnD itself was created when people wanted to do wargames with a greater emphasis on unconventional warfare (such as spying, diplomacy/intrigue, propaganda, etc) that by necessity required roleplay. After one of these kinds of games was set in a half Conan the Barbarian half Gothic horror medieval fantasy setting with a spooky underground labyrinth beneath a town we got the trope of dungeon delving and returning with treasure to a (relatively) safe town just outside the dungeon entrance.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/nutrition/high-protein-foods-the-best-protein-sources-to-include-in-a-healthy-diet

Seitan is also very high in protein, containing 75g of protein per 100g compared to 13g per 100g for scrambled eggs (although its low on lysine, so it should be balanced out with other protein sources).

Yes, that’s the word that everyone uses for the large generating stations that create power on a large scale like a manufacturing plant creates goods on a large scale.

Its rare for us to have “power houses” now, and when we do no one calls them that.

What’s interesting to me about that phrase is that no one uses the word “powerhouse” for anything else any more, except maybe to call something powerful.

Since it’s not the 1920s any more and we have an electrical grid and centralized power generation. We still sometimes do use temporary off-grid generators, but we no longer have any need for a dedicated word that means “building or shed that we keep our generators in”.

Really? Everything I’ve heard about pedestrian safety suggests that its better to go onto the hood rather than be pushed down and go under the wheels.

It seems like this design would do exactly that, in addition to creating a blind spot directly in front of the vehicle. Though I suppose these trucks are so tall you’re likely to go under anyway.

No? This is a bunch of Tolkien tropes + Conan the Barbarian + a bunch of shuffled around real world cultures.

The Last Airbender continent was mostly China, with the fire nation being steampunk imperial Japan. At the poles there were the Inuit-inspired water benders and the Air Benders were Tibetan monks except spread around all over the place on mountaintops.

There weren’t any Egyptian pyramids or nomadic steppe peoples that I can remember being portrayed in Avatar, and there certainly weren’t any elves, orcs, dwarves, wizards, or barbarians from the icy north.

Reminds me of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_farm