Christian

I did, but I completed it before the main story and actually had no idea it was the expansion. In retrospect I knew an expansion was installed and that could have crossed my mind at some point.

What does it even mean for one person to be 50% more intelligent than another person?

how much are you paid?

I don’t remember exactly, but I remember feeling insulted by the stipend because I spent more on parking in downtown Detroit and had no means of transportation into the city other than driving myself. I had such a hard time finding cheap parking spots within reasonable walking distance of the court.

I finished Outer Wilds a couple days ago, I really liked it a lot. I had heard everyone say to go in completely blind and I had the impression that there was going to be a major twist or change in gameplay, but the reason that’s good advice is the magic in the game is in the exploration and discovery. There are some moments that just made me feel awe and wonder. Progress is entirely in the form of understanding, so starting the game for the first time after reading up a lot about it could be like introducing yourself to mario on world 4.

The first few hours I wasn’t fully into it, but there was just so much to explore. By the time I actually needed to take a couple hours on something and smash my head against the wall, I was already hooked and was willing to take that time to make progress on my own.

Remember kids you can be who you are without needing external validation. Especially not external validation gotten by being against your “own group “

I don’t think it’s quite that straightforward, because they’re doing this because they’re also perceiving gamers as their own group and feeling like being a part of two groups at odds with one another demands that a choice be made. Their version of not being against their own group begins with asking themselves “which group do I identify more with”, rather than asking whether the two have to be at odds with each other in the first place. The lesson is that your immutable characteristics are not character failures, and if you’re starting to feel like they are it’s really important to introspect on where that’s coming from.

I know people generally look at this kind of gatekeeping from the outside and write it off as a repressed self-hatred, but I’m kind of inclined to think of it the opposite way. If your immutable characteristics are a handicap to being a part of something important to you, then actually being accepted into that group is a triumph that most people with the same handicap can’t achieve. If gamers are cool and I don’t question the premise that girls aren’t fit to be gamers, then if I can kind of sort of be accepted in this space that’s still better than most other girls. The boys fit in better here of course, but it’s not impressive it’s just normal. This other girl is just larping because she wants to be like me.

We should strive to identify cultures of looking down on others. We should strive not to participate in that. Don’t just find comfort in being who you are, but allow others to find the same comfort with more ease than you had.

Anime avatars have been a thing for much longer than that but these are clearly not anime girls, it’s the thing where people customize the reddit logo to look like themselves. I might be wrong but I’m under the impression that the culture with these isn’t one where toxic masculinity will mesh with presenting as female.

Obviously this is not a representative sample, but it’s hard not to notice that the three redditors in these screenshots that are gatekeeping gaming all have female-presenting avatars. It makes me think of an article I read two or three years ago written by a black man saying he gave his son advice that in an emergency white cops were a significantly safer bet because institutionalized racism gives them a lot more leeway to show empathy towards minorities without being ostracized for it. A woman actually trying to fit into a misogynistic culture is going to feel more pressure to consistently prove her belonging, and can end up being more ruthless in enforcing the misogyny and more effective because her gender allows a cover of legitimacy.

It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into ‘casual’ genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as ‘real gamers’.

This is a really good point and it makes me realize that “casual” as a genre translates pretty well to “games stereotyped towards women”. I’d go as far as to say most modern video games can be played casually, but if we actually put the bar at games that aren’t intended to be played otherwise we’re looking at freecell.

War Thunder is a game that I only know exists because of how many times it’s made the news from actual military vehicle schematics being leaked by forum users hellbent on winning arguments.

edit: After writing this comment I went to double-check I was remembering the right game by searching lemmy for “war thunder” and immediately found this exchange, which I find funny:

This does work for some people, but my experience was that having my livelihood depend on my passion completely killed my passion.

I beat the demo before getting the actual game, the demo was just levels 1, 2, and 10. When you beat the demo it gives you a code to skip to level 11 in the full version. I ended up beating the game after using the code, but I could never beat level 3, so I never even got to play levels 4 through 9.

multiple IVs administered

Actually yes, people being crushed under inescapable debt should get to enjoy things sometimes.

You’re right, it is.

You can try all you want, but you will never get me to read the articles before commenting.

99.9% of people using WINE/Proton aren’t going to have any idea what fsync is

Speaking, although I’ve heard the term thrown around a lot. Can I get a layman’s overview?

A friend once texted me that she really liked my writing and said “It sounds like you”, with “sounds” italicized. It was like she was just focusing on my writing and hadn’t even thought through that using “like you” as unambiguously complimentary is a bigger compliment towards me than towards my writing.

Instead, billionaires are surrounded by people who they can’t trust. Sycophants everywhere, who don’t care about who you are as a person, but what you can do for them. You’re less likely to have people calling you out for things, but you also won’t get much affirmation for the genuinely good things about your personality.

This is a really good observation and makes perfect sense when you say it out loud.

I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.

I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.

I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.

There should be an AI helper to pet and play with my cat, that way all I need to do is buy food and pay vet bills and clean the litter.

I do play some video games and I guess this is nice, but what I really enjoy is listening to music. When am I gonna get an AI helper to listen to songs for me so I can get that done in peaceful silence instead?

Monster Sanctuary is your best bet for hitting those points. The game is pretty lackluster in a few ways (graphics, storytelling) but the gameplay is really well-designed and that’s been enough to get me to come back to it a few times.