I think a sizable portion of the Republican voter base are those whose family have voted Republican for generations and they haven’t thought enough about it to change their vote out of habit - or even worse, they’re voting because they value group cohesion over truth and everyone else around them is Republican and speaks in their rhetoric. Why else would they vote for a party so wildly against their own best interests?

Can’t be a billionaire if you pass a certain threshold of self-awareness, it’s the rules.

Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don’t trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.

How does one know if they’re demiromantic or just aromantic? I know I’m demisexual because I can sort of “simulate” having an emotional connection to an imagined fantasy, but romance doesn’t have a space we’re expected to intentionally simulate, and I’ve never experienced any sort of romance (though I haven’t been close to that many people).

I’m not sure where I saw this life hack, but I’ve heard people suggest responding with something like “I’ll pray for you, seeing as the devil has entered your heart and made you hateful” to short-circuit conservatives.

That is valid, thank you for your response. I want to offer a sincere apology for causing any discomfort; I misunderstood GNC as an umbrella term under which NB falls, similar to how “queer” is an umbrella term for LGBTQIA+ in general. Now I understand that GNC is more a lifestyle rather than an identity, and not a superset as I initially thought.

Regarding my own identity, I don’t outwardly present as GNC, but despite having masc pronouns, being referred to as a “man” makes my skin crawl, and I’m not fond of having facial hair. I don’t feel comfortable identifying as “trans”, and as a counterexample, that would suggest not all NB are trans and thus it isn’t a strict superset. However, this is just my personal experience and understanding, and I acknowledge that others might feel and experience their identities differently. I know there’s a diverse range of experiences and identities within the NB and trans communities, and it isn’t my place to define who should or should not identify as trans.

Also for what it’s worth, I’m not deeply engaged with NB communities, so my knowledge is lacking. Please correct me when I’ve used inappropriate language or expressed misunderstandings. I am here to learn and understand better. I appreciate your patience and willingness to correct my misunderstanding, and am glad I can be more sensitive and informed moving forward.

Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it’s because NPCs are shallow enough that I don’t see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they’re inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I’m really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they’re more shallow than real people.

Weapon durability becomes a lot more bearable when you streamline the decision-making process to “do I want this stick” and “which stick do I want the least to make room for this new stick” and/or treat it as an exercise in zen. Leave your burdens at the shore of the dao, dear Bandicoot.

I went from trans-tolerant (“do what you want it’s none of my business”) to trans-supportive largely because of parasocial relationships with trans creators: PhilophyTube, ContraPoints, JessieGender, Jimquisition, Chipflake, Jammidodger, and NOAHFINCE. Then there’s nonbinary and trans-adjacent creators like Thought Slime (some kind of nonbinary?), CJ the X (nonbinary presentation?), Mother’s Basement (gf is Yazzie, trans woman), and Shaun (has entire hour long campaign videos about the BBC’s transphobia). Point being, knowing a trans person IRL is much less of barrier than you’d think since parasociality seems to cover it, and trans and trans-supportive creators have gotten a lot more open about being on the internet.

(yes NB is considered trans but 1. people don’t generally think of it that way and 2. I’m an AMAB demiboy and feel like that me being “trans” would appropriate the struggles of “real” trans people when my own identity is a “rounding error”, and to a large degree feel like gender nonconformity is less stigmatized than out-and-out binary trans people. I’m not transmedicalist, NB are still valid and may or may not want their own gender confirmation stuff, but feel like “trans” as a label is too broad an umbrella, since it basically covers all gender nonconformity)

Biphobia is a pretty big turn-off ngl

It’s a good precedent but very weird because it means the US becomes a checkerboard where people have rights in some states but not others. Not a bad thing that some places have rights but I wish they could do something more federal

I had a surprising amount of fun with the Dragon Quest games, DQ Builder I/II and Treasure Hunters. Squeaky clean polish and very focused, nearly arcade-like gameplay. Don’t forget the various Marios and Kirby Forgotten Land.

Cadence of Hyrule is a bit of a weird departure but very fun and replayable with a kickass track. You can get the Binding of Isaac physically, as well as the Ori collection which is incredible and Stardew Valley. Moonligher is a bit repetitive but that can be good comfort. Celeste, if you’ve never played it, is potentially life changing if you struggle with perfectionism and/or anxiety.

For a very obscure digital game, Chasm was an amazing randomized full-length metroidvania.

To be honest I suspect any estimates of queer demographics are going to be dramatically lower than the actuality in part because things like gender and sexuality are fluid and heavily influenced by culture and upbringing. There may be several orders of magnitude more people who might otherwise identify as bi or some kind of genderqueer but not enough to justify investing in the self reflection, identity crisis, and social capital it would cost.

I most associate web3 with decentralization. That includes the Fediverse, IPFS, and (begrudgingly) crypto. Of these, crypto seems the most like a solution in search of a problem - Bitcoin had a problem, centralized currency, but fintech got ahold of it and treated it like a stock asset instead of a currency.

It seems a bit like the toxic hype is paralleled with true hype in a weird way, as if astroturfing was trying to draw attention towards their perversions. For instance, edge computing (true decentralization) is hyped as cloud computing (centralized services which are somewhere else). Language models (which can act as general-purpose inference engines) are hyped as chatbots which replace humans (very, very poorly). Or heck, crypto as a means to make money rather than a way to coordinate trustless actors - best use-case I’ve seen is FileCoin, which incentivizes people to host IPFS chunks, a measurable good to society which gets compensation.

This is a very good point - it isn’t (and can’t be) a feature, it will only ever be an implementation detail unless you’re selling snake oil.

Capitalism wins again!

Could you detail what negatives come with blockchains in games? I’d like to better understand your perspective and position. I don’t know of any games that use blockchains and aren’t some kind of scam, but then again it’s not a hammer’s fault if it’s used to bludgeon someone to death. If a hypothetical good dev somehow put a blockchain in, what negatives are there due to that specific inclusion which aren’t the result of malicious intent?

Or better yet, games where you get monopoly money for pretending to do a job in the game

What do you think about arguments for using it in cross-game “metaverse” type trading? It’s another buzzword but it would make centralization of the data hard to impossible.

My intuition is we’re seeing the first wave of snake oil salesmen adopting Animal Magnetism Quantum Whatsits to Manifest your Holograms who poisoned the well and drove everyone away, then in 10-20 years someone will have a good idea using it at which point the scammers are no longer around to ruin it for everyone. What do you think of that idea?

Can you unpack this? Not saying you’re wrong, I’d just a clearer idea of what it demonstrates.