Maybe one day all the human Alexas can have their name back. That would be nice.

Or they’re working class or buried in medical bills and can’t afford to be spending money on things like search engines that have a free alternative, even if it is worse.

I’m not actually convinced the alternatives are any better here, anyway.

It bothers me that they all look like they’re in their teens or 20s, when a male wizard would inevitbly be shown as anywhere from middle aged to Gandalf.

I bet it just always makes women young in every context.

Anyway most of them look like they’re from an old 3D Japanese RPG or CG anime. Round face with pointy chin, plastic-y smooth skin.

I’ll note that anime and Asian RPG characters often have a light skin tone (another can of worms there) that can cause foreign viewers to perceive them as white even while Japanese viewers perceive them as asian. Animation and similarly stylized art involves a level of abstraction and cultural interpretation that might not be there (at least not in exactly the same way) if we were talking about race (or gender, or whatever else) with regards to more realistic art.

Edit: this also reminds me of Disney’s notorious “same face, same profile” problem with female characters in their 3D animated films. Male characters can be any of a wild variety of shapes, but a Disney princess essentially round faced with huge eyes and slim. Even just looking at different slim, round-ish faced male characters, I think you’ll find more variety in their portrayals within that group than amongst the Disney princess group.

For those interested in this topic, I recommend PhilosophyTube’s videos, particularly this one: I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare System

Also… What the heck is a bioethicist? That sounds like maybe someone involved in advising corporations on ethics, not someone I’d ever expect to see involved in private medical care. Regular doctors and nurses and etc are already required to study and practice ethical medicine.

I’d also like the point out that one can go get their tongue cut in half, or their leg bones lengthened, or get hormone treatment for balding or for menopause, or get a nose job, or surgery to make their boobs bigger or smaller, all without anything like what trans people are forced to go through for the most basic of things.

Even for someone who believes that the gender assigned at birth is the “real” one, or who dislikes or feels weirded out by trans people in general, I don’t see how one could justify imposing so many more restrictions on one group of people who want or need to modify their bodies than are imposed on any other group that seeks similar medical care.

Even if we do just talk about children, the disparity doesn’t make sense. Like, hormone blockers like those prescribed to trans children have been routinely and safely prescribed to cis children, in cases such as to delay early onset puberty (which, iirc but correct me if I’m wrong, is mostly only an issue because of the social consequences surrounding it), for decades. And in many of the new wave of anti-trans bills that ban hormone blockers to delay puberty for trans children, they specifically leave a cut out for cis children to still receive hormone blockers without issue. Because they don’t really believe delaying puberty is unsafe, that’s never been the point.

And that’s not even getting into comparisons with other major medical decisions made by parents and doctors, sometimes even without the consent of the children (let alone the vehemently expressed wish for treatment like trans children), like circumcision, or weight loss treatments or surgeries, or other cosmetic treatments, or even the forced surgeries and hormone treatments that have been routinely done on intersex children (largely the same treatments as a trans person would seek, but forced, to make a person look unambiguously like whichever sex the parents choose for them). If the people pushing these anti-trans bills really cared about children and parents and doctors making medical decisions with big consequences and risking regret, they should be talking about a whole lot of other things - things much less stringently regulated - besides trans healthcare. But nope, crickets.

I presume they didn’t because that would be likely to get gamesradar sued for piracy. They can report on it, but they can’t aid it.

Also, the “whales” are by and large not unharmed rich people - it’s mostly poor people who are at risk for gambling addiction, such as many with adhd, depression, etc. The people who are targeted successfully by this model usually suffer for it.

I agree it’s murky. Though I’d like to note that when you shift hateful ideologues to dark corners of the internet, that also means making space in the main forums for people who would otherwise be forced out by the aforementioned ideologues - women, trans folks, BIPOC folks, anyone who would like to discuss xyz topic but not at the cost of the distress that results from sharing a space with hateful actors.

When the worst of the internet is given free reign to run rampant, it has a tendency to take over the space entirely with hate speech because everything and everyone else leaves instead of putting up with abuse, and those who do stay get stuck having the same, rock bottom level conversations (e.g. those in which the targets of the hate are asked to justify their existence or presence or right to have opinions repeatedly) over and over with people who aren’t really interested in intellectual discussions or solving actual problems or making art that isn’t about hatred.

But yeah, as with anything involving large groups of people, these things get complicated and can be unpredictable.

This is a great game, especially if you’re the type who thinks the beginning hours of a civ game (before you get bogged down in micromanagement and unit orders) are the best hours. It basically gives you that kind of early-game experience over and over, with plenty of variation. It’s so much better paced than most comparable games as a result. I’m surprised it doesn’t get more buzz.

I didn’t get far in it because the characters seemed very bland to me, and the story setup generic, but perhaps that could improve over time? I know some games leverage their length to pull off slow character development well, even if the basic character templates are straightforwardly tropey. But this one didn’t grab me enough at the beginning to justify investing my time in it, personally.

I’m glad it exists for the people who do like it, though!

As people already said, Disco Elysium for sure.

Baldur’s Gate 3 on the lowest/story difficulty.

The old RPG Arcanum. Great steampunk fantasy setting and story. If you play a persuasive character you can avoid combat and skip entire dungeons. The game has some balance issues (magic tree is fine, but the tech tree is underpowered, and early combat encounters are horrible to dela with). Various fan patches and mods are available, including a balance mod, a bugfix patch, and an HD patch. Since it’s an old game I recommend getting it from gog.com, since sometimes they fix up older games a bit to run properly on new systems.

Dragon Age, since you liked Mass Effect. Though, I personally found the combat more annoying in Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Mileage may vary.

The Outer Wilds (different game than Outer Worlds). It’s a sort of an archeology/space adventure game. It’s not strictly speaking an RPG, but if you want a story game it’s top tier. Please do not look anything up about the game and go in as blind as possible, as the feeling of discovery and exploration are the main draw of the game and once you have something spoiled you can’t un-know it. Also, I recommend getting the dlc immediately with the main game, as it’s a huge expansion that fits into the main story perfectly and affects the ending of the main game.

I won’t argue there aren’t some use cases for it, but it was massively oversold for what it actually is. It’s essentially just shared spreadsheets, but almost always described in a way that make it seem inscrutable to most people (further sinking any propect of mass-adoption) and cool to people who want to feel like they’re intelligent and in-the-know about tech. And it was pushed primarily for things it was unsuited for, like replacing regulated banks with FDIC insurance.

I think it has potential niche uses, though. Not every technology has to be widespread or applied to a wide variety of different things.

Tbh I think the same overselling/over-applying is happening to large language models/LLM “AI” now, though at least LLMs legitimately do have a lot of potential use cases. Just not as many as the everything people are trying to apply it to, and not as overpoweringly as many assume.

People keep saying it’s dead to them but the company’s own statements seem a lot more optimistic, imo. I think they’re just refocusing, and dumping a lot of the extraneous “let’s be an everything platform” features the userbase didn’t want anyway. Tumblr isn’t a giant cash so far as I know, but its userbase is sizable and stable, and recently grown since reddit and twitter took a tumble.

As a platform, there’s a lot to recommend it, I think. It’s one of those situations where the experience you get out of it depends on how you curate it. So like, you can go down fandom rabbitholes, or webcomic rabbitholes, or you can entirely ignore that and just subscribe to ocean science blogs, or to photography blogs, or so on. There can be drama in some parts, but that can also be entirely avoided in your feed if that’s your preference. I like it a lot better these days than I did like 5-10 years ago.

I want an alternative to youtube as much as anyone, but I just don’t see how peertube can be viable in a world where child abuse materials and nazi propaganda exist and can be posted there.

I mean, at least as of when I last looked at peertube, it works sort of like torrenting does, yeah? But it doesn’t require you to whitelist the channels or instances you seed. Therefore: random people are going to end up seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, hate screed videos, and so on, unknowingly and without intending to.

Lemmy already has had issues with child abuse materials because of federation and poor moderation tools. An image will get posted on one instance, then it automatically gets copied to other instances, and even if the original instances delete the image that doesn’t automatically delete it off other instances. Admins have to manually contact other admins, who then each have go in and painstakingly delete it manually, and that’s if all those different admins see and respond to the message. This is a problem that has been growing as lemmy gets bigger and more popular. And this is just with instance hosts - with peertube, you have individuals seeding/contributing to the hosting.

So it seems to me that peertube as it is involves a degree of moral and legal (since people can and have been deemed legally responsible for seeding torrents before) risk that is just not worth it a compared to the privacy-invading but blessedly safe option of youtube.

And even if individuals decided that risk was fine, advertisers absolutely won’t, which makes the platform a no-go for channels that depend on ads rather than patreon or merch for their livelihoods.

I’ll be happy if there’s a reliable way around this problem that doesn’t completely break the mechanism whereby peertube is supposed to work, but as of now I can’t see one.

Privacy isn’t normally my primary concern but with VR I find it to be a bigger deal than I usually would, particularly because the headsets can hypothetically gather data about what you’re looking at exactly (especially once eye tracking becomes more of a thing - then it’ll be exact, and that’s kinda terrifying at that point).

And this is Meta/facebook, so. They’ll 100% do it and say they aren’t.

I wonder if he’s actually just becoming a career scapegoat, taking the fall + a nice severance package(?) for decisions that were made by groups.

I do like let’s plays like that too sometimes - I’ll give those channels a try. Thanks! Though I may have to wait til I finish with BG3 myself, which could be a while :p

I mentioned single player games specifically partly because I personally tend to like those games best, and I like to watch let’s plays after playing the game through myself first, then seeing how different people interact with the game differently. I love watching people discover a game I enjoyed (which for me means mostly single player titles) in kind of the same way I might enjoy showing the game to a friend.

And anecdotally, I tend to feel like groups playing a single player game together tend to talk more about the game in a deep-read kind of way, or to talk about their lives, whereas groups playing multiplayer games seem more likely to talk about whatever is currently happening in the game in that instant, or it becomes mostly them joking and trolling each other. This is just my personal experience though, so it could be a function of the particular let’s players and streamers I’m familiar with. I’m sure there are exceptions to this.

Sounds good! Thank you. I’ll give them a try

Will do! Thank you for the suggestion :) I hadn’t heard of them before.

Any size group is good! Thanks for the suggestion - sounds good. I’ll give them a try :)

Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I’m curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.

I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren’t already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren’t really tutorialized well, etc.