Rexxitor. Biology nerd. Roguelites, indie games, and TRPGs. Drowning in unused yarn, unread books, and mandatory cat hair.

  • 0 Posts
  • 70 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • From the US: I’m over 30 and this is the first time I’ve heard surrogacy referred to as human trafficking. And now I need to sit and think.

    It’s always felt a little bit creepy to me, but I’ve also never wanted kids and the idea of pregnancy for any reason would be traumatic. So I’m starting out heavily biased. I think if you take the money out, it no longer counts…?

    But the idea would be so out of left field that it would mostly be dismissed out of hand, probably even by most women.



  • It’s really a mix of both. More heavily the way the site has been for years because people love drama more than anything else. If you want the sweet serotonin of karma, you’ve gotta be simultaneously the funniest, meanest, and most jaded person in the room, and everyone is jockeying for that position.

    It just breeds assholes by design. I’ve noticed my own behavior has changed, too, since leaving that place, although partially that’s because I just didn’t want to be like that anymore.

    But it really has been noticeably affected since the protests. I was originally trying to stay for one single sub I was in, because they were the kindest, calmest community I’d met since back when forums were a thing.

    Just the best group, for reasons none of us really understood and some of us kept trying to find psychological commonalities to explain. Truly 98% of them were people I’d chill with irl and I still know a few on discord. And also here. If you’re reading this, hello!

    But the migration away was enough to completely alter the atmosphere imo. A lot of the more conscientious users left for other pastures, leaving behind those that were more neutral or even openly hostile about the protests.

    There began to be fights and insults thrown where before this, any aggression had been unusual. The posts took a turn that reflected that feeling and I really stopped bothering with the place after a few months. I’m still a bit sad about it and there are things that I miss, but there just wasn’t enough to hold me anymore. It seemed to increasingly echo every other part of the site.

    For the moment, this place is quieter but better. We still get dumb shit every now and then, but it’s not to the same degree and hopefully never will be. As above, I blame the demographic. We’ve grouped all the people with stubborn morals into a little room and it turns out they have things in common. I do miss a couple people I used to see everywhere all the time when kbin first ramped up, but we run in different circles and they’ve gotten lost in the crowd.

    And yes, btw, I am also going to name you one of my favorite users to see around. You seem as kind as you are prolific.






  • I think we very much do understand it’s a problem and there is not a whole lot women can do about it that we aren’t already doing. The majority of feminists would love for men to see a fucking therapist. They keep fighting it tooth and nail, though.

    They’ll either not open up at all for fear of being judged, or they’ll ONLY lean on the women in their life. The one or two women in their life, because in my anecdotal experience they don’t seem to stick around women they can’t sleep with.

    You guys want and desperately need actual emotional support, but you seemingly refuse to support each other. When we tell you to so much as just give each other the compliments you’re looking for, it’s met with whining because the respondents want women to do it. Even though mainly the compliments we get are…also from women, and going along with this request puts us in harm’s way.

    A lot of men are so beat to shit from such an early age that they can’t even put a name to a lot of emotions besides anger. Which causes them to be both unable to manage what they can barely explain, and to feel significantly uncomfortable (outmatched) in marriage counseling, watching their wife run circles around them.

    But biting the bullet and improving on emotional literacy via counseling and/or self-study and deep reflection never seems to strike the fancy. Their date has to teach them. And they WILL be fighting every step of the way.

    I would love to date someone who doesn’t define their entire existence through their job. That’s nearly the entire reason two out of my four relationships fell to pieces.

    -I- didn’t give a shit. I met one of them when we were both homeless and said yes anyway. But if I made more money or they got laid off at any point, both of them would have a months-long binge drinking breakdown regardless of what I said.

    You know you could just stop, right? That’s what’s incredibly frustrating about this for me. A lot of problems that are specific to men seem to be an issue of self-image, and are thus self-imposed, and you could just. Stop.

    I can’t make anyone not pick me up by the throat, but any day you could just wake up and decide your paycheck doesn’t actually fucking matter and never date someone who thinks it does.

    You could be excruciatingly nice to people for no reason instead of demanding women do it, work out what’s going on with you and tell people about it, and give them both barrels if they think a human being needing help is gay.

    As much as I feel for men as a group, it’s the empathetic part that makes me want to hold them upside down and shake them till the sense falls out. Take. Care of each other. Fix the thing.






  • Up til now, we’ve had:

    • The sudden realization that you can bathe and don’t have to crunch around in weeks of dried gore

    • The further realization that at least one npc mentions you stink and should probably do something about that

    • Standing relatively close to a waterfall for a few minutes if you can find one, or perhaps walking at a normal pace through a really deep puddle.

    • Sophisticated method — stealing a water bottle, throwing it really hard at the floor, and hoping the splashback is enough

    After months of steady work, we can use the soap now, but you’re going to have to give your fellow gamers a minute to get used to things before you start making other suggestions



  • AI-generated maps and NPCs might be ok. Ditto fights, though there would have to be playtesters whose job it is to make sure the result is something winnable and acceptably fair.

    The main issue there would be that there IS no continual certainty of that. You’d have to either be able to rerolled entire encounters — which would be jarring — or force the AI to DM what happens when you lose an impossible battle — far more rewarding, provided it doesn’t keep doing it. But it may keep doing it. This would be impossible to ever test adequately. Every game on the market may be a hard mode Bethesda game.

    I personally really don’t think I’d enjoy something with a randomly generated cast/main story for the same reason I wouldn’t be interested in owning one singular book whose writing changes every time you read it. I don’t play to kill time; I play for the stories and I get attached like hell to the good ones. I replay them ad nauseam because I miss the characters.

    I think it would be an intensely entertaining idea either as a New Game+ or for those games to have a wildcard setting that you could turn on and off. That way, there’s no lack of devs who get to tell the tale they wanted and players can mix it up when they’re bored. Otherwise, you’ve downgraded the job of the entire company to filling the AI in on background lore and nothing else.

    Other aspects:

    • for those that do get attached and wanna re-experience it, you’d need a way to save the information behind the game you just played. That file might be fairly gigantic?

    • Would also lead to a weird market for other peoples’ saves. The way modders already make quests, but for an entire plot.

    • NPCs and party members that all look like randomized sims.




  • If I understand, the argument is that someone who doesn’t want to be spoiled for endings should…look at a headline purported to be specifically about endings, and then read the article to see if it’s about endings, which they are not going to do because there is an extraordinarily high chance it’s exactly what it says it is in big letters, and any failure to voluntarily read spoilers they don’t want to be spoiled for is then a failure on the part of the player?

    That feels like reaching. Would rather not be mean. I think people stranded on top of zombie infested buildings whose only method of escape is a single in-use helicopter have reached less.

    This is just a justification to brush off anyone who opens their mouth at all, because were there a reader who did for some reason want to click on every headline they didn’t want to know about in order to make sure they shouldn’t have clicked on it, that would definitely still be something that is their fault once they saw anything they shouldn’t.

    Even leaving aside why someone would do that, the OP made the conscious decision to post it like they did.

    They could have tipped everyone off to the clickbait. They could have used a spoiler tag if they didn’t bother reading it or wanted to play into the clickbait. They chose to do neither. That has nothing to do with the journalistic integrity of online gaming mags. This was a personal mistake.

    I have seen communities be shockingly good about respecting this. The Hades community especially is amazing and, though the game has been out now for so many years the sequel is nearing completion, they’d probably still just give you what bare advice they have to based on your current status and tell you to keep playing because “trust me.”

    I don’t know why the bg3 community wants to pretend it’s impossible and out of their hands, while swearing it shouldn’t matter anyway. It very well is, and for a game this stunning, it absolutely does.


  • Unless you’ve forcibly seen most of them and you can pick out what moments go where because x action, or you have this one singular shred of information that happens to be the integral piece to draw together an entire arc.

    Earlier this week, I was listening to music on YouTube and saw a thumbnail that told me exactly what was up with the tadpoles. Not even the title. I don’t remember what the title was. It was written on the thumbnail in giant glaring yellow letters.

    If I am to play this game. I cannot have access to the internet in any conceivable way. I had thought this problem only extended to forums and news sights, places that were fairly obvious and thus easily avoided, but it’s the entire internet when you least expect it.

    I’m a third of the way into act 2 and the only teammates whose important plot moments and/or multiple endings I don’t know are Wyll and Lae’zel, and that’s only because nobody likes them enough to be talking about them.

    I have tried to avoid this shit at every turn. It’s still a great game. It’s fantastic. It would have been in my top 3 if I could have played the damn thing on my own. I fucking love picking things to shreds more than anything else and there are so many pressing unknowns and conflicting motivations that I’d be having the time of my life. You don’t understand. I could write a whole thesis on any one of them.

    But I know the answers already. I’m kind of convinced the reason I’ve found myself so much more attached to side characters like Mol, Oliver, etc. over most of the main story npcs is because they weren’t important enough for anyone to ruin them for me.