I actually don’t think this is true. I used to think it was true, but after seeing more and more people I think it’s simpler than that. It’s a belief in the justness of hierarchy— the “great chain of being” from medieval thought, where people on the top both deserve to be there by right of being there, and it is right to submit to them.

On a certain level, I even see the point. Despite anarchist clams to the contrary, leaders are important, necessary even to accomplish anything greater than a single person can manage. Even kids can see this first hand the first time they get assigned a group project by their teacher, or try to win a game of sports. But it’s too easy to twist “we need a good leader” into the tautology of “the leader is good, right, and justified because he’s the leader”.

If everyone rebelled against leadership all the time, there’d be no leadership, and people do need leaders. But at the same time, leaders can be or become shitstains that need to be rebelled against. It’s difficult, and I don’t think being reductive about the difficulty is right.

Demonstrably true. Try saying anything contrary to a tankie talking point on .ml and see how long before you get banned. May I suggest “Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine” for starters, or “China committed unjustifiable atrocities against peaceful protestors”.

My dad was NSA. Why does that make him any different regarding privacy at home than any other dad? The experience of having an NSA dad is that he doesn’t talk about work, and otherwise is just a dad. Any issues I had with my dad are utterly and completely unrelated to him working for the government. My dad was fine in terms of having privacy.

I keep following it, it keeps looking awesome, it keeps not being done. :(

Enshittification does not mean making things suck in general. It specifically means the business model of making a good product for users, then making the product bad for users and good for advertisers or data purchasers or retailers or whatever, and then when you have a captured market, making it worse for everyone to squeeze more money faster.

Microsoft is not doing this. They might be sucking, and making a worse product, but it’s not following the enshittification playbook.

A boy and his blob. They made a modern sequel which lost a main gameplay component— puzzling out the puns for the various abilities, or at least making a hand written lookup chart. Just telling you that a punch jellybean makes a hole isn’t quite the same.

I agree with the person who said it’s not a bad idea to learn the language of your enemy. And Russian culture is fascinating and worthy of study, even if the country is currently being run by a fascist dictator bent on world domination, at the expense and destruction of his own people. But then, that has been a trend in Russian history.

If this bothers you enough to ask about it, have you considered learning Ukrainian instead? You’ll get many of the benefits of learning Russian, and my understanding is that the two languages are mutually intelligible with some difficulty despite the differences.

I mean, on the one hand, one of the key features of autism is that they make people feel uncomfortable. This isn’t bigotry, this is the reason autism was investigated and studied in the first place. People on the spectrum make other people uncomfortable by a wide variety of mechanisms— not understanding social cues and not understanding body language being two big ones. That’s practically the definition of autism.

I wouldn’t say that this, alone and isolated from everything else makes her a bigot. But everything else absolutely does.

Yes, I genuinely enjoy the flavor of celery and distinctly miss the flavor when it’s absent. I grew up eating it raw with peanut butter, or melted/spreadable cheese. I grew up thinking it mostly tasted like water and was just a good vehicle for other flavors, but as my palate developed I noticed, and loved, the flavor more and more. In soups especially.

They say it takes something like twelve tries of a new flavor for your body to stop being afraid of it and actually enjoy it, and that most disliked foods are this kind of instinctual rejection. Maybe just try to force it a dozen times? I know that’s not pleasant advice, and I only recommend it if avoiding celery is something that will cause you life difficulties, such as in social situations.

Not quite. The bug chain went like this.

They added cats. Because the dev has a cat, he had the cats have some catlike behaviors, including licking itself clean. This tied into the ingestion code, deliberately.

The ingestion feature hooks into the new syndrome system. There are all kinds of procedurally generated poisons that can do all kinds of nasty things, mostly for the “forgotten beasts” that dwell in the caverns to make use of. While he was at it, he added the syndromes for a couple of canonical substances as well, primarily alcohol, inputting the values for a serving of beer, whiskey, etc, that a dwarf might drink, so that they can get drunk, and even sick if they overindulge. This is calculated by body weight.

Elsewhere was included a contamination feature, so that walking through puddles would get mud on your dwarves boots and clothes.

Then he added bars for the dwarves, and gave them carousing features such as quaffing, which would end up with spilled drinks on the floor.

Result? Cats walk through puddles of beer, get it on their paws, and lick it off. The syndrome information of the beer or whiskey or whatever is then applied to the cat. This is not a bug, this is intentional behavior.

The bug was that the full dosage of the syndrome was applied upon ingesting a contaminant. So the few drops of beer or whiskey were being treated as if they were full servings, so when the alcohol was applied to the cats’ body weight, which again, was an intended feature, it absolutely overwhelmed them and the cats started dying of alcohol poisoning. Just from the smattering on their fur.

It’s an awesome series of steps and combinations of systems to get this bug, and 99% of it was fully intended. And that’s all you need to know about dwarf fortress.

You’re being downvoted because there is contemporaneous historical evidence for their existence as people who existed and had a large following at the time, and in fact, as much or more evidence exists for them as exists for a lot of other historical figures. You can disbelieve claims about them, but it isn’t particularly rational to disbelieve they were actual people that attracted crowds. Likewise, it would be irrational to call Uri Geller a fictional character, even if its rational to disbelieve he had psychic powers.

To each their own, but I’m perfectly happy with romhacks and emulation for that. I like the original pixel art/animation, hacks can get me orchestral sound tracks, bug fixes, and rebalancing.

Reinserted US propaganda? Like the ability to talk about Tianamen Square? Man, Chinese propaganda is the worst. Fuck off back to .ml with that.

The 3d Ninja Gaiden games (not the NES ones). They are unfairly hard, in the sense that they don’t really teach you how to play them before throwing you at massive problems. There are the people who find (or are told/shown) various cheese strats and thus say the game is easy (“git gud, scrub!”) but without using degenerate strats the game is nigh-impossible. I’ve heard it likened to bringing a brand new player to a fighting game tournament and making their first match against a mid-tier opponent— there’s literally no chance of victory.

At some level, it’s because each platform costs a lot of money. If a game is not available for your platform, it’s super expensive to get another platform. So other platforms having fun games your platform doesn’t can mean losing out— either you won’t get to experience the game, or you’re going to have to shell out, and either way hurts. Thus, it is actively in your best interest if the other platforms fail, thus encouraging devs to spend more effort on your chosen platform.

I can’t comment on Nier, as I’ve never played it. But I did notice the reverse situation— after beating Final Fantasy X, I replayed it with a “no sphere grid” game… and suddenly found a lot of these scenes far more impactful. What used to be a “meh, another stupid boss fight, whatever, no big deal…” suddenly became impactful fights to the death that carried emotional weight for me. So I think you have something there in your hypothesis.

Did you know that elevator operator used to be a job that people had to be employed to do? No one says hiring a person to operate an elevator is more cost effective than installing a push button system for people to do it themselves. The cost really wasn’t prohibitive to move away from human labor here.

This is not the only case, I’m just bringing up an example. The thing is, when a job is replaced by technology, you don’t even think about it anymore. Yes, there are also jobs that CAN be replaced by technology, where the tech is more expensive… but that’s not the rule, that’s just the leading edge.

Some key software I need to use doesn’t work on Linux, and is unlikely to be able to in the near future, sorry. I did use Linux for a while, mind you, and I more or less like it… but a computer is only useful if it runs the software you need to do the things you want to do with it.

I don’t want to downgrade to windows 11, but I’m going to be forced to. And to even do that I’m going to need to bypass the hardware authenticator, as I’m apparently ever so slightly behind their so-called minimum requirements, which aren’t really minimum requirements but just a push to get me to buy a new PC I don’t need.

Why do Japanese people use umbrellas when it’s sunny? Because the sun is fucking hot and painful and shade is good for survival, you morons.

Why do Shinto priests and adherents in the middle of religious ceremonies use umbrellas when it’s sunny? Read the article.