We like to think we have rule of law, but in practice that is a fairly flimsy concept that ultimately depends on how many people in power are willing to adhere to it. Something could be against the law, the Supreme Court could rule that it’s against the law, (although with all the right wingers they stacked the court with, even that’s not gonna happen often.) the legislature could object, but at the end of the day, if the executive instructs the government workers to do something and they’re willing to do it, well… they can do it. So the politics of those government workers ultimately determines what can and can’t be done. And since those workers are downstream of appointments made by the executive… they’re likely to agree with them. And we see that bear out especially in the military and law enforcement agencies. The culture of these institutions is fairly right wing and the people in them have demonstrated a willingness to follow illegal orders and commit some truly heinous acts, even if they rationalize it as “just following orders.”

It’s not just under Trump either. The government has been acting in ways that violate our own laws for a long time. Every war we’ve been in since WWII has been an illegal act since they were never formally declared as wars and many of the things done in them have violated various international humanitarian laws. Police have straight up killed people without trial and were protected by their fellow officers and the government. And of course now we see ICE agents be more than willing to commit crimes to pursue this anti-immigrant agenda, whether they are just following along or they’re also ideologically committed to this.

So yeah. The answer can be anything as long as he find enough amoral right wingers or pushovers to staff the administration.

Ah. I didn’t know they said that. It’s definitely shitty to go back on that promise. Although in a vacuum, I think this is the kind of non-cosmetic content that’s somewhat acceptable to me as paid DLC. It’s not a competitive game and assuming the class is balanced, it’s just adding content that gives more variety. I’ve been fine with paid DLC in other big games as long as it’s a worthwhile amount of content for the price and it’s sold in a straightforward way without any funny business. Given that this game has online co-op, I think it makes sense that they’re gonna keep the content expansion free so it doesn’t divide people who would want to play together (also I guess there is trading, but I’m a CoF player so…) and then this is something that mostly just affects someone’s individual experience. Like if you were going to be happy enough to keep playing the game with existing classes, then this doesn’t really affect you.

So in principle I’m ok with this… but like I said, the bigger issue is them going back on their word.

Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.

I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.

Personally I enjoyed Nier Automata’s story, but I think that’s mostly because I enjoy camp/anime trash. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t be appealing if you went in looking for a more well put together story. That said, I don’t really remember the gameplay well enough to have an opinion on it.

To the point about being more granular with the difficulty settings: I’d definitely like that if it were done well. There are some types of gameplay I really enjoy and some which I don’t and depending on how intrusive the parts I don’t like are, I either put up with it or it’s enough to make me abandon the game. For me, while I like games that make me think and make decisions like RPGs, card games, strategy games, etc, I get really overwhelmed by too much complexity. I like games which enable me to make deep decisions using relatively simple interactions. So there are almost certainly some games I’d play if I could flip a switch that hid/automated all of the stuff like making complicated character builds and just let me do the parts I like. The game that actually prompted this thread was Expedition 33. I really wanted to play it because of all the good reviews it got and I enjoyed the combat, story, setting, etc. But I just got exhausted by having to mess around with the character builds. I supose I could have just looked up some builds online and who knows? Maybe I’ll go back to it some day and do that, but it would have been nice if there were a difficulty option that just said “Choose my skills/passives.” That way I could still engage with the combat at a level that was challenging for me without getting overwhelmed by the build stuff.

Unfortunately this is the movie. So it’s longer and we have to pay for it.

Something a bit like this happened with me. Apparently we did get an autism diagnosis sometime when I was a younger child, but we didn’t ultimately do much with that. I ended up in a social group or two in school for a little while, but they sucked and I eventually left them and we kind of just forgot about it. Fast forward to grad school when I burned out and got diagnosed with pretty severe depression and it came up again that I was autistic and that at least some of the depression probably came from the frustration that comes from the friction between my differences and society. It got so bad that I dropped out of grad school mere months before graduating and I’ve been moping around at home bouncing from one ineffective psych treatment to another.

I think this sub may be wrong. There are some stupid questions.

Man now I can’t watch Seinfeld anymore? Why people got to do this?

I played BG3 twice but I bounced off of E33. But I’m not as much of a fan of JRPGs so /shrug. I might go back to it at some point though.

I’ve never heard it called that before, but I like it.

I don’t know what to expect with this. Probability of it turning out good feels low. It looks like it’s just gonna be a lot of action. I didn’t get much personality from the trailer. I’d hope they add in the weird stuff. Although I guess Sekiro had less of that than Souls or Elden Ring.

We can all lie and give some cultural sites that you should totally go see but… food. All my real suggestions are food related. If you’re not from the immediate surrounding area, you absolutely have to get at least one slice of cheap pizza. Not from a fancy tourist place. Just literally find some random thing on a corner selling it for like a dollar or two and you will have the best pizza you will have had in your life (again if you live outside of the NY metro area).

After that, look to see if there are any street food festivals happening. Might be some interesting stuff.

There are quite a few touristy restaurants in the middle of the city that are going to be expensive and crowded, but they can still be fun to go to once if you don’t mind the cost and can get a reservation.

For actual activity suggestions… highly dependent on what you like. Museums? Parks? Shows? They’re all there, it just depends on what you want. I guess one recommendation in that regard is that if you want to see a broadway show and are willing to be flexible, there is a ticket counter in Time Square that you can go to day of to get discounted tickets for a show that day.

Nah. First question is “do you have insurance?”

I think the difficulty and motivation are related. A lot of cool, creative things I want to do are difficult. Not just to be the best or professional at them, but often to even get any personal value out of it. I might want to play guitar, but it’s not really fun to just randomly strum and not get any music out of it, so before I can even get that basic enjoyment out of it, I need to spend a lot of time being bad to learn and practice. And that takes a LOT of motivation. Meanwhile I can get moderate enjoyment out of something simple like watching a show or playing a game I’m already familiar with without much effort or uncertainty, but there’s kind of a cap on how much I can get out of that.

It also doesn’t help that I have a few of these skill heavy interests and they don’t necessarily overlap in skills. So I have trouble picking anything because all of them take commitment to spend time and effort on uncertain, unfun work, with no guarantee of payoff. How long do I give to something I’m not enjoying before I give it up to try something else? If I do that for all of them I’ll end up not getting to the fun part of any of them. It’s paralyzing.

It’s impressive how much the show can mix up its art style and level of detail. Lower res for the anime bits. Super high detail/realistic lighting for the camera bits, etc.

It’s been interesting getting to see more of Marin’s life/friend group and how they look in on their relationship. There’s that contrast between Gojo’s fears of how people judge his interests with how relatively reasonable everyone has been. It feels like that girl from his childhood was the anomaly, although it could also be that it was more common and most people just grew out of it after a certain point. That was kind of my school experience. By sometime in late high school the people who used to be bullies just kind of stopped. We didn’t suddenly become friends, but they didn’t go out of their way to cause problems for me either.

It makes me wonder if that girl is going to show up again for some character arc that reckons with their past or if that’s just not something the show wants to tackle now that it’s settled into a groove.

At this rate Gojo is going to be the last person to know that they’re dating. :P

Personally I think they’re still playing catchup from their launch commitments, but what’s been added so far has been pretty good. Season 2 expanded out the endgame content and crafting loop by a lot. This season looks a bit tamer in the grand scheme of things. A relatively smaller endgame content system with some new loot. Some class reworks. A new chapter in a still unfinished campaign.

Tech-wise I haven’t really had problems with it after the first few days of s2’s launch, but new patches always come with new bugs, so I’d expect some instability at s3 launch.

Also like others said, they got bought out so………………. Yeah… we’ll see what happens with that.

Not Christian, so take it with a grain of salt, these are just my observations:

These are people who thought that public schools not actively supporting their religion was the same thing as religious persecution. If “woke” stuff represents their shrinking influence over public life, then a government being “anti-woke” lets them go back to asserting themselves over others, or at least not having their views challenged. So even if the leading guy isn’t a moral paragon of their religion, the fact that he’s giving them permission to go back to their old ways is probably good enough.

Also, not really relevant, but the last bit about the Pope is funny to me. Most American Christians are Protestant. Evangelicals specifically are Protestants. While it probably isn’t a big deal anymore, tensions between WASPs and the more recent Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland were a feature of early to mid 20th century politics. It was actually a pretty big deal when JFK was elected because he was Catholic. So I really doubt Evangelicals care much about the Pope other than when he happens to agree with them.

The same way people go on knowing their president is a war criminal. We’re so far past the line that this doesn’t even register.

I tried it out when the testing started. It’s… fine. I’m not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it’s hard to find the time and motivation I’d need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.