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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 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.






  • Depends on how strange and impactful their choice is.

    If it’s something that I think should be in the style guide, I’d promise try to achieve consensus. I’d prefer not merging in the dubious code because then other people may take it as precedent.

    One guy really wanted to write his code differently than the existing code and how others were doing it. It kind of sucked. Not that his way was bad, but no one else on the team subjectively liked it. I relented and let it go, and then had to deal with that unpleasant code for months. Eventually he moved on and a lot of that code got replaced. I retrospect I would have preferred if we had somehow convinced him to keep in the style we preferred. I’m sure he wasn’t happy that the rest of the team wasn’t keen on his style choices.

    If it’s just a little weird, mention it as a non blocking comment. Like one guy would have weird line breaks in his longer comments. It technically followed the guide (under max line length) but it was weird. We asked him to stop, he said ok, no problem. But I didn’t block a merge over it.




  • I don’t disagree with anything here, really. As we both said, some responsibility remains on the user.

    I do think Match is aggravating the situation. Men aren’t getting traction so they search for why. They find right wing MRA stuff saying that it’s women’s fault blah blah blah, but really part of why they’re not getting hits is because Match is hiding them unless you pay (and even then maybe).

    Part of why may also be they’re creeps or bad at dating. It is not wholly the apps’ fault. But I do think they’re making it harder for people to connect, and that can be the top of the funnel for far right ideas.

    And I do think a lot of people are on the apps when they aren’t really ready. People of all genders. But that’s a separate topic, probably.

    Anyway. Good talk. Amusingly , I’m heading out to meet someone from a dating app. Here’s hoping they don’t think I’m a creep!



  • I was thinking the other day there’s probably a pretty straight line between Match group owning so many dating apps, men’s unhappiness, and violence.

    Like the apps create the illusion that you can meet someone and be happy, but their primary goal is to make money. They don’t try very hard to introduce you to good matches. They also haven’t solved the experience from the woman’s point of view. So men feel like they’re just shouting into the void, that people don’t like them, etc etc. Some of those people likely go on to become incels or do violence.

    This isn’t to say that violent men are not culpable. They are. They retain agency. But Match group (that’s tinder, okcupid, hinge, match, plenty of fish, and more) is making the problem worse.

    It’s like if there was a food shortage, and someone bought up all the grocery stores. Then they made all of them mazes and had half the cereal boxes empty.


  • Morrowind. Every once in a while I reinstall it, but I can’t get over the “it looks like an action game but it’s a stats game” thing anymore. And I never liked Oblivion or Skyrim. But when I was a kid, Morrowind was so full of wonder and stuff to discover. I also wasn’t playing with a guide, so discovering stuff like “You can enchant an item to have 1-100 strength, duration permanent. It picks the bonus when you put the item on, and it stays that until you take it off. So put it on and off until you get a big number. Much cheaper than trying to enchant it to +100 straight out” felt more personal.




  • I think we also need to put the fear into the rich.

    Like, if the result of someone having their factory dump mercury into the town drinking water was that guy was beaten to death, then the rich would maybe behave a little better.

    If the guy who steals his employee’s tips got up one morning and found every window in his house was smashed, maybe he’d think again.

    Some people operate only at the most basic level of moral reasoning: “Will I be punished?” They don’t care about other people. They don’t care about laws.

    At the end of the day, might makes right. If you can’t enforce your will, there’s no cosmic ref coming to call a time out. Unfortunately, the rich have a lot of might via the police and such. But they’re still just bags of meat like everyone else.

    We need more Luigis, and we need enough solidarity that no jury would convict.


  • 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.