I finally finished the third game after all these years. New playthrough of the legendary edition. Femme Shep, but not the new default skin. Something about the face shape looks weird to me.

Also, I’d avoided spoilers all these years. The ending was as bad as everyone said. I’m late to the party , I know.

When I play RPGs, I don’t make myself. I don’t see the character as an extension of myself. I’d much rather watch a woman do cool stuff than some dude. So I usually make women characters. Maybe some part of my brain sees some cool dude doing cool stuff and goes “great. Now I’m competing with him” and is stressed.

One of my friends would always try to make himself in games. Skinny white guy with short hair and minimal facial hair. He saw himself in the game and liked it. I don’t really want to see myself get blown up or stabbed or eaten by a demon, but to each their own

In multiplayer games where other people might see it as an extension of real me, I more often play male characters. In tabletop, I’ve never played a woman PC. None of the reasons I do so in a video game really apply. (I’ve played plenty of woman NPCs, but that’s different)

I was showing my girlfriend the game a little and she said that the default male Shepard looked like an asshole. Shaved head no facial hair looks like a skinhead, I guess.

Seems reasonable, but Republicans would have spent decades capturing that system and we’d end up in a similarly bad position. The problem is conservatives have shit ideas and want them to be law. Unless we fix that, any system will be corrupted.

If someone writes a complicated work of fiction, is it gate keeping to not also include an explainer in simple prose?

Someone might but Finnigan’s wake and be completely baffled by it. Is that an accessibility problem? Is the author in the wrong?

Why or why not?

Note this is distinct from publishing it in braille or audiobook format

Difficulty is not the same as accessibility.

Remapping the inputs so they can be done with one hand is not the same as “you get twice as much health and mana”.

That grand jury should have refused to indict.

In crawl stone soup I had a win with every species and every background. They added more and I haven’t kept up, but it was a pretty big deal.

It’s a good rogue like. Recommend checking it out if you like the genre.

'm about two hours in. Taking my time. Seems good so far. I went in with my NG+ faith character. It’s a strong build.

Did some coop against a side boss. Community hasn’t changed much - saw some hosts just eat his attacks and die, get greedy and die, the usual.

It does have some sort of bug where it says “illegal activity detected” or something and kicks me out of multiplayer, but I haven’t done any mods or anything. Verified game files. Kind of annoying. Hopefully patched soon.

That’s what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.

If I’m on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don’t need to know anything about me specifically.

We’d still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement

Accessibility like controller input options is not the same as “you have more health and can dodge more”.

Language is what is spoken/written.

I don’t think any serious linguists are prescriptivists.

There are agreed upon standards for some contexts (eg: academic papers, newspaper articles, legal texts) but for casual conversation that doesn’t really apply.

Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.

You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.

Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.

I don’t think this is a safe assumption. The victim may not have free access to hardware. The police/etc may not believe them. They may be afraid of being murdered if they try to record something. Just off the top of my head.

You can read “why does he do that?” by Lundy Bancroft for fascinating and depressing information about abuse. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_That_Inside_the_Minds_of_Angry_and_Controlling_Men

the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.

This is false.

Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.

Using AI seems extremely excessive compared to a regular interface or human.

I mean this is kind of true of all people everywhere. The marshmallow test has flaws but I think it’s still revealing. A lot of people are really bad at self control and delayed gratification.

What an extraordinarily bad take.

RPGs are not required to have loot, so that line is just nonsense.

Baldur’s gate 1 and 2, for the bulk of it, let you revisit previous areas.

“Explore it all in one shot” is not the only kind of exploration.

Only the third game does that, I’m pretty sure. It’s not a terrible solution, though it can be annoying when money is finite.

At least you can go back to previous areas

I kind of hate the thing in games where it’s like “you didn’t look in the second bathroom so you didn’t get the staff of mega fireballs. No, you can’t go back to the house. It’s still there but you can’t go in.”.

That and the common “no matter what the game says, do the quest objective last because that might move you past something important” thing.

Playing Mass Effect 2 and there’s a lot of “go fight them and save the day!” And I’m like hold on I need to check every corner for upgrades real quick.