Middle-aged gamer/creative/wiki maintainer
FFXIV, Genshin Impact, Tears of Themis, Rimworld, and more
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  • 2 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • While absolutely too many things are charged for in gaming today (exp boosts? skip potions? cheat armor that was already fully developed at launch? all ways to get your company on my high seas list)… in the specific case where (1) new content is continuously being developed AND (2) the game is not asking for mandatory spending to continue playing (e.g. no expansion pack to purchase, no subscription fees), I don’t think the concept of charging for in-game content at all is abusive.

    If I buy once and then a year later some optional paid cosmetics or other goodies are added, I think that’s permissible. And if I’m in a free to play live service game, I recognize the ongoing dev costs need to get covered somewhere.

    I do vastly prefer those companies that give their games TLC and updates for free, and I’m not saying the standard pricing for optional purchases in the modern market are reasonable. But I think the existence of in-game purchases, if not their current state, can make sense sometimes.




  • I don’t think the fediverse has this, but I’m a bit confused why so many of these comments are puzzled at why you would want it. We have fediverse twitter, fediverse insta, fediverse reddit, fediverse discord, etc – why not fediverse facebook/myspace/carrd? Where users could just have small personal (or corporate) pages about themselves that aren’t as blog/news focused on the main(user) page.

    I don’t even think it would be a huge stretch to implement: a big focus on user page customization with a small microblog interface taking up a portion of the screen would do it. (Disclaimer: not saying easy to create, just not that far out of reach vs everything else the fediverse has).


  • Are there some women who have higher standards than they, themselves, live up to - sure. But that’s not what makes an incel.

    An incel is someone who believes:

    1. People of my preferred gender kind of suck, mostly
    2. Despite mostly sucking, people of my preferred gender tend to have high standards <-- you are here
    3. Those high standards exclude me, and I think that’s unfair; it makes me angry that they won’t give me the chance I deserve.
    4. I’m tired of playing nice when none of them will give me the chance I deserve. I’ve written their entire gender off as trash, and my new hobby is constantly berating them.

    People rarely say #3 and #4 out loud, so once you’re at #2 – which you are – people are going to start making some assumptions.

    And yes, there are some women past #3 and #4 themselves, sure. We’ve all heard the occasional “men are pigs,” and that kind of intolerance shouldn’t be accepted no matter who it comes from. But it’s absolutely not many/most of us, and if you think so, you’re either being overly critical or surrounding yourself with the wrong kinds of friends - both of which are on you and show you need to de-incel your thinking before you go off the deep end.




  • It’s a slow and difficult process, but yes. There are certain personality disorders that can be provably put into “remission,” and if people with conditions that severe can change their personalities, anyone can.

    You have to learn how you’ve been conditioned to think and feel the way you do, and get a lot of self-discipline re: stopping to notice your feelings, figure out why they’re arising, think through the consequences of acting on them, and choosing a better way.

    I hate to use terms like this since they’re so often the territory of conspiracy nutjobs, but you’re basically deprogramming yourself. For example, a sensitive person who’s been exposed to a lot of bullying might have learned some pretty intense defensive reaction, so you’d have to stop every time you think “what did he mean by that?” and think of why that’s your first reaction, then choose to believe the best possible meaning even though your feelings scream at you not to. And you’d maybe keep a journal to remind yourself of all the times you were right to assume the best, since a defensive mind discards the positive and overemphasizes the negative.

    This sort of thing is best accomplished with the aid of a mental health professional, but there are workbooks you can get if that’s out of cost/feasibility reach for you. You’d need to know your deal to know which ones to focus on.





  • You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don’t think it’s a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a “thank you” - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of “YOU’RE the problem” response?

    I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you’re not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There’s data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you’re just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.

    That is not good faith.


  • Do you think maybe being from “one of the whitest states” is why the people you know still track their descent so carefully? I’ve lived all over North America, and your experience definitely doesn’t match up with anywhere I’ve lived. Which is not to invalidate your experience, but I would strongly caution you against assuming it’s the norm. Most people I knew when I was still in the US pretty much settled on a color or just plain “American” for anything past about the third generation.

    Using a color descriptor like “white” or “black” isn’t inherently racist for those who don’t care so much about which boats all our very distant relatives were on hundreds of years ago, and it definitely doesn’t preclude empathy for those who are different from us.


  • I feel like you’re describing a pretty EU point of view here. Which is fine!

    But please understand that across the pond, we’ve been mixing people of various descents for so long that “white” is honestly the best descriptor many of us have. I allegedly have 5 different EU countries in my lineage and ain’t nobody got time to get into all that, especially when my ancestry isn’t interesting enough for me to know, let alone for me to inflict on others. Those details are just not that important to who I am today, whereas the experience I had over here because of my skin color had more sway over who I am now.


  • “Ginger” as a term is not, in itself, derogatory or hateful in my experience.

    Describing gingers as soulless or hot-tempered is about the same kind of destructive as describing blondes as stupid, which is to say it’s a silly stereotype that’s often the territory of playful insults between friends, while some small minority of people do run it into the ground and cause real hurt.

    (This might be exacerbated by tensions between England and Ireland in that specific area, but… for most of the world “ginger” is a pretty harmless thing.)