They can argue all they want. I really don’t care.
The legal definitions of genocide are only difficult to meet because they were written by countries with their own histories of genocide. That’s why it’s so hard to prove.
That’s not a standard we need to hold ourselves to.
Out of curiosity, what is the actual limit for an acceptable quantity of genocide? Like, I’m trying to understand if there’s a hard number of murdered civilians that Isreal has to reach before we can make comparisons to the holocaust, or if it’s more just a vibes thing?
Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it’s hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it’s still on Aspyr that they used someone’s work without permission. There’s no real justification for that, even if you’re in a bind.
+1 for Insurgency. It’s more “mid shelf” than “indie”, but either way it’s an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they’re not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they’re in. No one ever yells “Allah akbar” or whatever.
There’s a lot I could list here, but I’ll focus on a few that I’ve played recently, that don’t seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There’s not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There’s really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It’s super cheap, it’s super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you’re telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don’t actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated “city” (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age… And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You’re a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 (“The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia”), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say “solve crimes” I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There’s no Arkham “Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues” going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it’s all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you’re the brains. It’s on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I’m slightly scared of the people who made it.
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.
Genuinely, The Unnamed is still a more logical extension of the Willy Wonka lore than the actual sequel book, which involves a plot by shapeshifting aliens to take over a space hotel, Willy Wonka being declared an enemy of the state by the president of the US, and confectionery that can alter time itself.
French President Emmanuel Macron met with parliamentary parties on Thursday. During the meeting Macron said he was open to the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine, as announced by, according to French newspaper L’Independant....
I mean, NATO already does this. NATO countries have troops stationed in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. It’s a mixture of forces from different NATO countries spread all across the Russian border.
This exists because none of those nations want to be invaded by Russia, so we keep troops stationed there to protect them from exactly what happened to Ukraine. If Putin wants to go into any of those countries he has to take on fully modernised western militaries to do it. And attacking any NATO member would also lead to a wide front invasion across the board, which the Russian military is not equipped to counter.
The difficulty, in this particular case, is that the alternative is a President who will even more aggressively support Israel’s genocide.
Like, I get it. The idea of voting for a party and a president that are actively supporting genocide feels morally reprehensible.
But the alternative will, without question, be so much worse. At least the Democrats can, to some degree, be pressured on this issue. Trump will take the opportunity to murder Brown people and gleefully run with it to the ends of the earth, and along the way he’ll burn down what’s left of American democracy just for good measure.
This is, quite literally, the trolley problem. You either have to be actively complicit in some amount of horror, or a passive bystander to an even greater atrocity, placating yourself with the knowledge that while more people have died as a direct result of your choices, at least it wasn’t your hand on the trigger.
There is no good option here, and there is no morally clean option here. It’s awful, it fucking sucks, it’s not a choice anyone should ever be forced to make. But for every American, it’s the choice in front of them now.
No, it’s a still a binary choice in the end. Whatever people do before election day or after it, on election day their choices will be “Vote for the less bad genocide enabler” or “Vote in a way that ultimate helps the much worse genocide enabler gain power” (and that includes not voting).
None of which means that people should stop putting pressure on Biden’s government to end the genocide. Part of the argument for why Biden is the less bad choice is precisely that it is more likely that he can be affected by public pressure on this issue. So yes, absolutely, apply that pressure. But be careful how you do it, because the danger, as others have pointed out in this thread, is that once you create this mini-avalanche of “Genocide Joe” negative publicity around Biden, you won’t be able to stop it before November.
I don’t know where the line is there. It’s a very difficult path to tread correctly.
And what happens if, as a direct result of the way this campaign was conducted during the primaries, Biden ends up losing? (say, because the GOP somehow latch onto this Genocide Joe thing and turn into a Swiftboat that drags his whole campaign down just enough for Trump to squeak a win).
In that hypothetical scenario would you feel that the right choices were made?
See, no matter which way you come at this, in the end you’re still stuck in the trolley problem.
The point is, if you’re not considering these actions now in the context of what impact they might potentially have when you get to that in the end point, then you’re driving at night without the lights on.
That’s not me saying “Don’t do it.” That’s me saying “Think very carefully about how you do it.”
Seconding that recommendation. In addition to being very, very gay, it’s an awesome show in every other way too. Funny, weird, beautifully animated, and will hit you right in the feels.
Yeah, I know this is supposed to be “uplifting” news, but the fact that children’s lunch debt is a thing that exists in the richest country on earth is absolutely insane.
Speaking as a bi man… I really couldn’t care less if bi women have it better or worse than us, because discrimination fucking sucks for everyone and we’re all in this together.
Yeah, at this point you gotta figure a lot of publishers are looking at Marvel’s Avengers, Redfall, Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones and getting major cold feet.
What people always forget about the CIA during the cold war is that it was staffed exclusively by the kind of people who genuinely believed there were reds hiding round every corner. This is not conducive to high levels of competence at spy craft.
Then again, the KGB weren’t much better. After several failed attempts to kill Tito, he wrote Stalin a letter, which read “Stop sending people to kill me… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.”
The last game I played was Insurgency, and I was playing as the “Security” side, so I’m golden. I could commit genocide and they wouldn’t fucking touch my ass.
Here’s the good news: Airfares have declined in Canada. The bad news? You might wind up paying more in added fees. WestJet, along with several U.S. airlines, recently hiked its checked-bag charges. And Flair Airlines has a new fee: a charge for paying for your flight with a credit card.
These are the same airlines that now have multiple announcements per flight begging people to please check their bags because there’s no room left in the cabin. These idiots keep firing into their own feet and wondering why it hurts.
All of Canada's ambassadors and heads of mission have signed a letter to senior Global Affairs Canada officials warning that Canadian staff abroad are struggling to access health care coverage.
Healthcare in Canada is deemed a provincial responsibility, but that creates kind of a grey area when it comes to things like soldiers or diplomats deployed abroad. Which province foots the bill?
So, the fed just puts every federal employee on a private insurance plan. I believe it’s Blue Cross right now. This applies if you’re in Canada as well, that way wherever you get posted, the fed is footing the bill. Plus it means we get eyecare, pharma, some limited dental, stuff like that.
Thankfully we’ve never had to deal with overseas claims (at least, not yet, sooner or later my wife will almost certainly be doing a tour in Latvia), so I can’t comment on how that works. From the article it sounds like there’s some kind of separate group that does the processing? It’s not really clear to me.
Real talk, cooking for two is much more efficient than cooking for one.
The part where that work is assumed to be the woman’s job? That’s patriarchal misogynistic bullshit, obviously.
In my case, I do most of the cooking because I enjoy it and I’m good at it, whereas my wife finds the kitchen intensely stressful, and would much rather be outside making things blow up. But she makes a point to either cook a meal or order in for two nights of every week so that it’s not always my job.
Like basically everything in relationships, the solution is “Fuck societal assumptions, come to an agreement with your partner that you both feel happy with.”
I saw people going on about how great BG3 is on this site, so I thought I’d check out a let’s play to see what all the fuss was about. I immediately fell in love with the graphics and the mechanics, such as the classes, races, spells, dice etc, but I disliked the emphasis on gore/horror in the game, and I know I wouldn’t...
Divinity: Original Sin 2! It’s by the same devs and it’s absolutely incredible. Different classes and spells and stuff, but you’ll pick it all up very fast, and I actually think character building in Divinity is a lot more fun than D&D, because there’s a lot more flexibility about how you choose powers and abilities.
If you’d prefer to stick with something based on the D&D mechanics, Owlcats games are excellent (it’s Pathfinder, but Pathfinder is just a lightly modified D&D 3.5)
I don’t see any real hope for change. We have no good leaders in this country, and it’s been the same throughout our history. So many people I know have either totally lost themselves in drugs and alcohol (understandable tbh) or offed themselves (also understandable). I’d like to think I could make a difference and try to...
And yeah I’m involved locally, but so what? Do you think I only care about myself? Does that help the Palestinians, or the innocent people in those concentration camps? Does it help the people being tortured?
Over a long enough timeline? Yes.
The more we can build a movement for progressive change, the more that change will filter up from the small things to the big things. The more we improve the lives of the people around us, the more energy those people will have to improve the lives of people far away. The more we can work to educate the people around us and help them break down regressive thought patterns and throw off centrist and right wing propaganda, the more receptive they’ll be to talking about progressive global politics as well as progressive local politics.
Yes, this sucks. We want to solve the big scary problems right now. We want everything to change right now. But that’s not going to happen.
You eat an elephant one bite at a time. You can despair at the things you can’t change, or you can focus on the things you can change. Those are, unfortunately, the only real choices.
And I do understand the despair your feeling. Please trust me on that. I say all of this from a place of sympathy. It’s really difficult right now, and finding hope is a battle every day.
Apologies that this is not a pure gaming question, but I’d really like to hear people’s opinion on the Borderlands movie trailer and especially from people who have played the games. That’s why I’m asking here, I hope that’s ok.
Why, in the love of God, would you look at Roland, hulking, dour, tough as nails veteran soldier whose main character trait is being completely unflappable, and think “Kevin Hart”?
What were these people smoking?
Also the bits of writing we get in the trailer are just bad. Tina doesn’t even manage to feel like a poor imitation of herself. Even with better casting (seriously, you could literally just have Ashley Burch play Tina, you’re up-aging the character anyway, what’s the harm?), there would still be none of the vibrancy of the scripts from 2 and Pre-sequel. I’m not saying those games had flawless writing, but it was fun, funny, and generally managed to land on the right side of transgressive.
Honestly, the whole thing has this really awkward “We really wanted James Gunn but couldn’t afford him” feel to it.
This is what happens when you have some combination of bad casting, a bad script, and bad direction. Even good actors have a hard time producing good work in a bad environment.
(“bad casting” in this case meaning “casting an actor who isn’t well suited to the role”)
Oh, yeah, they completely failed to get what makes Tina an interesting character. She’s constantly putting up this mask of being the toughest, meanest badass who’s seen it all and done it all (all of which is an attempt to hide the fact that she’s a scared, traumatized child).
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stepped into the debate over trans rights on Wednesday, saying “biological males” should be banned from women’s sports, change rooms and bathrooms....
So our most likely next PM is going to be a massive transphobe. Great.
My sister literally just moved here so that her daughter wouldn’t have to suffer this shit in Britain, and it turns out the same bullshit is waiting for her right here.
Why do Conservatives have to live their entire lives finding new groups of people to hate for no good reason? There are actual problems in this country that need solving, and instead you want to put your energy into being mad that someone decided they weren’t comfortable in their assigned gender?
(and no, it is not new to me that Pollievre has transphobic views, but he at least wasn’t being so utterly blatant about them before. The fact that he feels comfortable saying this stuff so openly is fucking terrifying)
What could have ruled (lemmy.ml)
Not seen: the 100,000 USD bill for the Apple Car...
Bungie's Marathon reboot gets new director as part of creative leadership shakeup (www.eurogamer.net)
Netanyahu snaps back against growing US criticism after being accused of losing his way on Gaza, says Israel won't stop until 'total victory' is achieved (apnews.com)
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection used modder's work without credit (www.eurogamer.net)
How does this KEEP GETTING WORSE??
Rule - Hopeposting (youtu.be)
What are the best indie games you've ever played?
Fantastic titles made by people in their bedrooms.
What are y'all buying on the steam sale?
Let’s share some good deals!...
Classic Marathon on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
For the first time in decades, Alberta's electricity grid has gone without coal power (www.cbc.ca)
Saber Interactive still working on a number of titles, including Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando, and Jurassic Park: Survival (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/35b6d1fd-607f-4173-a2ca-9f1967844f3a.png
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Launch Is a Disaster - IGN (www.ign.com)
RE: Wonka, Willy rule (i.ibb.co)
Macron Ready to Send Troops to Ukraine if Russia Approaches Kyiv or Odesa (www.kyivpost.com)
French President Emmanuel Macron met with parliamentary parties on Thursday. During the meeting Macron said he was open to the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine, as announced by, according to French newspaper L’Independant....
Jokerule (i.ibb.co)
Genocide Joe Rule (midwest.social)
How was this a real rule (lemmy.world)
Over 7,000 students see their lunch debts wiped after $1 million donation (www.goodmorningamerica.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/11260815...
Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Rule (lemmy.world)
Canada to start airdropping aid into Gaza within days: source (www.cbc.ca)
As part of today's mass layoff, Sony has canceled a Twisted Metal live-service game that was in development at UK-based studio Firesprite, Bloomberg has learned. Firesprite will also have layoffs.. (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/1b0d20e0-6250-49cd-b4b8-15f981f133ce.png
Castr(ule)o Cat (midwest.social)
Games rule (lemmy.world)
Watch out for flying fees: WestJet hikes checked-bag cost, Flair adds credit card fee (www.cbc.ca)
Here’s the good news: Airfares have declined in Canada. The bad news? You might wind up paying more in added fees. WestJet, along with several U.S. airlines, recently hiked its checked-bag charges. And Flair Airlines has a new fee: a charge for paying for your flight with a credit card.
Supporting the Rules (pawb.social)
alt text: “the state of the animation industry”...
Google rule (files.catbox.moe)
Ambassadors raise alarm as government staff abroad struggle to access health coverage (www.cbc.ca)
All of Canada's ambassadors and heads of mission have signed a letter to senior Global Affairs Canada officials warning that Canadian staff abroad are struggling to access health care coverage.
DayZ 1.24 rolls out, 2024 will also see 'significant departure' from usual update model (www.destructoid.com)
Pellet and Wet Food Rule
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/747ac363-3d36-449e-bf09-e172904a55f2.jpeg
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ‘Has Fallen Short of Our Expectations’, Warner Bros. Says (www.ign.com)
What game do you recommend someone who likes the mechanics but not the setting of Baldur's Gate 3?
I saw people going on about how great BG3 is on this site, so I thought I’d check out a let’s play to see what all the fuss was about. I immediately fell in love with the graphics and the mechanics, such as the classes, races, spells, dice etc, but I disliked the emphasis on gore/horror in the game, and I know I wouldn’t...
Pic unrelated rule (i.ibb.co)
I don’t see any real hope for change. We have no good leaders in this country, and it’s been the same throughout our history. So many people I know have either totally lost themselves in drugs and alcohol (understandable tbh) or offed themselves (also understandable). I’d like to think I could make a difference and try to...
Borderlands players - what is your opinion about the new movie trailer? (piped.kavin.rocks)
Apologies that this is not a pure gaming question, but I’d really like to hear people’s opinion on the Borderlands movie trailer and especially from people who have played the games. That’s why I’m asking here, I hope that’s ok.
Poilievre says 'biological males' should be banned from women's sports, change rooms and bathrooms (www.cbc.ca)
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stepped into the debate over trans rights on Wednesday, saying “biological males” should be banned from women’s sports, change rooms and bathrooms....
Helldivers 2 Devs to Begin Rolling Out Updates to Fix the 'Most Serious Issues' on PS5 and PC (www.ign.com)