dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

What is common is the stupid meme joke of "I went to fuck this chick and when she took off her clothes she had a DICK". It doesn't matter if it actually happens or not, cis people are often obsessed with being scared by the thought and it's just pathetic honestly.

Nevermind that yes, given how close minded most cis people are, doing this would be as you say a very unsafe thing to do (both physically and emotionally) or that it doesn't really make sense to just hope that a random cis person isn't going to react negatively (especially because cis people just can't stop telling and re-telling this kind of insecurity disguised as a joke). Also if you are having sex with someone you know so little about that this comes as a surprise to you... I kind of feel like maybe you shouldn't be complaining about being surprised by details of a partner when you didn't bother to find out anything important about them at all before you decided to have sex with them?? Sure having a penis or not doesn't really define who you are in any meaningful sense (that isn't imposed by society) but if you get to the point that you are going to be intimate with someone I just really am having a hard time fathoming why this wouldn't have already come up?

Ok maybe the trans person really has fallen for you and is in denial about how close minded you are... but even in that case (which feels more like a hypothetical than an actual common scenario) acting like this is some nefarious or mean act is ridiculous. The cis person just has to see a dick for a brief second, it is no different than going to the gym locker room for fucks sake, for the trans person now they have to deal with the emotional intensity of being instantaneously and aggressively rejected by a partner they thought was in to them and unfortunately might physically be in danger from violence now. How does this make any sense at all? It is a waste of breathe to talk about this shit all it does is force the spotlight on feeling bad for how fragile cis men's identities are given their insecurities while ignoring the very real physical and emotional violence enacted upon trans and queer people every single moment upon this earth.

The only other lame insecurity that disguises itself as a joke among cis people that can give this one a run for its money is cis-men's fear of their own butt and what might happen if they realized it felt good to have something up there.

Thank you for all your hard work!

Yeah another big Spring Engine fan checking in here, the development of the Spring RTS engine and games on it has been a long road with lots of fun games played along it, mostly in Total Annihilation derivative games like BA, AA, XTA I forgot the other acronyms… and playing a TA-like game was what brought me like many others to playing games on the Spring Engine….

We wanted to play more RTS games like Total Annihilation but other than Supreme Commander FAF no game companies really seemed interested in doing anything but copying StarCraft (ughhh) or doing something totally different like Company Of Heroes. As a TA fan it felt like the RTS genre cut off its own head by treating StarCraft like it was this perfect RTS that demanded everyone copy it and I NEVER liked it. I liked TA with huge battles, the enormous amount of units with different roles not different gimmicks, the actual modeling of unit’s projectiles not some calculated MMO-like damage exchange, the fact that aircraft actually flew not just hovered, artillery had super long ranges like artillery should and battlefields could be as large and sprawling as my computer could handle.

I hadn’t checked in for awhile, but when I tried out BAR for the first time it got me really hyped again. BAR is so polished and well made and at this point just by virtue of being a TA-like Spring Engine mod there are years and years of tweaks, additions and subtractions to the TA formula that have been hammered out through thousands and thousands of games and many different mods with different ideas of what made TA good. The end result is a REALLY solid TA-like game that has the benefit of years of knowledge gleaned from tinkering with the formula of TA. This isn’t just a clone of TA, it is TA with 10+ years more of development work focused around gameplay balance and fun.

BAR is awesome! The AI got really good too at some point?

Sure Minetest and Mineclonia are great but they aren’t anywhere near as developed or fleshed out as Vintage Story. In a couple of years maybe I will agree, but at this point Vintage Story is a fully fledged Minecraft-like with a complete gameplay loop and Mineclonia isn’t. Minetest/Mineclonia are super cool though, I am not bashing them (I will bash their terrible names however).

But why would I play (and mod) Minetest, when I can play Minecraft which has way bigger community, so there are more interesting mods?

Because on a longer term scale even if Minecraft has way more mods currently there are very serious issues and limitations with the Java edition. There are also serious performance bottlenecks with the Java edition. Microsoft also doesn’t give a shit about modifying and building out Minecraft in a way that facilitates modders doing new interesting things, they are simply incapable of valuing modding given the nature of a cancerously large company like Microsoft. The point is to sell merchandise and push kids onto the Bedrock edition, that is the only lens through which the people with the power to make decisions at Microsoft will ever perceive Minecraft.

Long term, successful mod packs on Minecraft Java are on a dead end road. Maybe not everyone can see that dead end right now, but disgustingly huge and powerful companies like Microsoft only ever make one kind of choice in these kinds of situations, the dead end is inevitable for modded Minecraft. Maybe it won’t happen tomorrow, maybe it won’t happen for a couple of years but it will happen and the fact that Vintage Story and Minetest exist chugging along with small but vibrant modding communities will be the only thing that saves the creative potential of the genre at that point.

Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.

You did that shit for a job? I hope they paid you well, sounds like you could have easily died if something went wrong..

It is like how I have noticed queer people often tend to be nicer, more fully realized people than hetero people. Of course there are assholes of every type but in general hetero neurotypical people, especially if they are older men, can just behave like babies their whole life and not really be challenged to grow in any way beyond accepting whatever society hands them as part of an imposed identity and it is not a recipe for forming kind empathetic humans.

Try to find a boardgame group near you and when you hang out with those people everybody will be focused on playing a stimulating game whether or not they are ADHD!

I hate when people only talk about the executive function schedulizing and management of their life. Not only is it boring it just stresses me out. Thinking about it in my own life is already overwhelming enough for the microscopically sized executive function department in my head.

Honestly even if you don't like the specific mechanics of Vintage Story I think you have to appreciate it for being the only real alternative to Minecraft (besides the still pretty alpha stage project Minetest and Valoren which seems to be trying to recreate a different game). Which... stop for a second and think about it as gargantuanly lovecraftian-eldritch-god-sized of a phenomena that Minecraft is... there aren't any other moderately successful alternatives that really try to innovate or even copy Minecraft that have stood the test of time and attracted consistent playerbases besides Vintage Story. That is awful for the health of the genre that Minecraft pioneered and popularized! As a video game fan it is worth appreciating Vintage Story JUST on that basis as there is so much incredible potential in the ideas Minecraft clumsily fumbles at even if you hate Minecraft (which honestly has terrible core game mechanics, especially combat, see Valheim for an example of how to do pretty much everything Minecraft does better minus the whole blocks thing).

Vintage Story provides an alternative place that Minecraft modpacks/total conversions (like what Vintage Story was originally) can find a platform outside the control of an awful multibillion dollar company. It is only a matter of time before someone makes a modpack for Vintage Story that you will like even if you don't like vanilla Vintage Story. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Minecraft, even though there are countless mods for Minecraft there is no way in hell that Microsoft currently or in the future will ever truly value the role of artists and modders in evolving Minecraft. Long term as far as Microsoft is concerned the Bedrock edition and merchandising the aesthetic of Minecraft is all that is really worth investing in no matter what their PR says. It means decisions about the structure of Minecraft won't truly ever include a consideration of how it will impact modders who want to apply their own creative spark and vision to Minecraft.

It is similar to how even if you don't like the specific game mechanics of 7 Days To Die (it certainly at times has unfocused design goals) you have to respect it for being a great platform for modpacks and total conversions run by a company that isn't mono-maniacally focused on being a shitty late stage capitalist nightmare machine.

I agree with you to an extent, in my opinion the gunplay and general movement/action parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 just isn't fun or deep. Rockstar sucks at gunplay for the most part. I respect that the game is hugely admired and people love the story and open world but I just can't engage with it for very long because the basic gameplay loop is too unsatisfying.

On the other hand I think really well made point and clicks like Strange Horticulture, the Blackwell Series, Machinarium and others and "interactive fiction" esque games like Roadwarden are awesome ways to tell stories. Other ways are cool too like Firewatch, Oxenfree or Papers Please. If the gameplay is fun I like games with good stories, but I don't enjoy story focused games with mediocre but prominent mechanics.

Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.

It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.

That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.

I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?

Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.

Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).

I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.

I’m the opposite, I just don’t stay immersed in third person games, I despise third person peeking in multiplayer games, and I find it disorienting and claustrophobic when going into buildings or confined spaces in third person. I also just can’t walk up close to something in 3rd person and look at it in detail which I like to do.

Different strokes for different folks..

edit sorry I basically repeated myself in the above comment

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying but I think there is a real point to make about how Israel can't really be a terrorist state because it holds such an unequal power over its perceived enemies in Gaza both from the perspective of military might and also from the perspective of control over basic infrastructure like electricity and running water.

So long we see terrorism only through the lens of a morale choice to engage in warfare in a dishonorable way and not also as a form of armed resistance resorted to by actors who literally don't have the capacity to fight what we nebulously define as a war (which this current conflict is not, it is genocide), than we will always be unintentionally ceding the conversation to authoritarian rightwing hawks who can label anyone a terrorist for resisting a far superior military force.

Hamas are called terrorists primarily as a form of morale condemnation, and while in no way am I condoning terrorism it really has to be understood as first and foremost a military strategy undertaken by political actors without the capacity to fight a traditional war. The second Hamas amassed its troops (as required for any large military operation) Israel would carpet bomb the area. If Hamas rolled out a line of absurdly obsolete tanks with no optics, fire stabilization, night vision, or modern armor and with virtually no ammunition and tried to launch a ground war into Israel, rightwing/pro-Israel talking heads would supposedly find that more honorable than terrorism.... but obviously Israel would be able to utterly wipe that force off the face of the earth in minutes with the combined military industrial complex of the US and Israel.

Israel cannot be a terrorist state because its military can mount an armored offensive with some of the most advanced tanks in the world all the way through gaza and back while facing no serious resistance, with air superiority the whole time. When Israel commits violence, it is authoritarian state violence. It is genocide. I think calling it terrorism muddies the point. Terrorism is the attempt to create a political force when an actor does not possess control of a society, Israel possesses full physical control of Gaza.

I agree though, all the negative connotations you attribute to Israel by calling them a terrorist state I agree with!

And since the CEO said this I will literally never buy an HP product again period

These are what I consider "forgotten gems". Most of them are pretty old, some decades old, but all of them have small passionate playerbases that have stuck with them because they are good games.

Brigador - isometric blow shit up in a cyberpunk dystopia with a huge array of tanks, mechs and hovercraft. Nearly a perfect experience especially in conjunction with its banger soundtrack by Makeup And Vanity Set.

Eador Genesis (with New Horizons mod optionally) -. Like Heroes Of Might And Magic 3 with tactical turn based combat like Kings Bounty. The game is TIGHT though and very hard and a campaign consists of many shorter games instead of one long slog which is way more fun in my opinion. Hard to learn because manuals and info is sometimes sparse but well worth it. There are newer Eador games but honestly I LOVE the retro graphics of Genesis, it makes the game simple and clear to read at a glance.

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead - Simply put the best realistic apocalyptic zombie game in existence. So much mechanical depth and breadth it honestly makes it hard to return to a game like Project Zomboid because Cataclysm allows you to be so creative in your approach to situations and the enemy variety is super high. In continuous development in so many simultaneous directions it will make your head spin. Try the Sky Islands mod/mode if you want a more focused survival experience instead of a sandbox.

Winspww2 or Winspmbt - A decades long continuation of Steel Panthers 2, a tactical turn based war game. The once and future king of turn based tactics games of any genre. It is difficult to google stuff about these games because not a lot of people play them anymore and they are ancient software, but they are just such damn good turn based games with so many deep mechanics (especially scouting, artillery, speed based vulnerability and morale) that they are really in a league of their own compared to other turn based tactics games in general, not just realistic military simulators. I recommend Winspww2 because I think ww2 is more fun and suited to turn based combat but either is good.

Xonotic - another oldie, renamed from Nexuiz a couple of years ago, Xonotic runs on a heavily modded Darkplaces engine which is the original Quake engine at its heart. Xonotic is FOSS and plays like Quake but with Unreal Tournament style guns all with fun alt fires. Xonotic is a superb game, is super easy and fast to install and is an absolute blast. Try watching some high level duel videos in Xonotic, the speed and flow are incredible. Also Xonotic has hands down the best rocket launcher in multiplayer video games, no contest.

Beyond All Reason - BAR itself isn’t that old but it the latest in a long line of mods inspired by the rts Total Annihilation (which itself could arguably be on this list) and running on the open source Spring Engine (released in 2007) that have all cross pollinated ideas and balance tweaks over the years. There have been TA like games on the Spring engine for years and years but BAR is really a step up in polish both gameplay and UI wise. The AI is pretty damn smart too. One really fun addition to the TA formula is totally destructible terrain, it doesn't wildly change the gameplay but heavily fought battlefields become more and more difficult to pass through at bottlenecks and it just adds to the atmosphere.

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance Forever - Another rts inspired by TA, though this game has battles on a way bigger scale. Aircraft fly like planes, they don’t just act like a hovering land units, serious artillery can send shells halfway across the map and battles are HUGE. Forged Alliance Forever is a community project to maintain Supreme Commander. Supreme Commander 2 might as well be in a different genre, it shouldn’t have the same name.

Remnants Of The Precursor - a fanmade remake of the original Masters Of Orion, the original space 4x game. This remake has a much better UI than the classic and has many subtle tweaks that have come out of the wisdom of fans playing MOO over and over again and knowing what should be changed and shouldn't.

Panzer Marshal - a fanmade remake of Panzer General II, this is a turn based ww2 tactical game. It is MUCH simpler and more chill than Steel Panthers/Winspww2. This game is a blast and actually can run in a web browser (https://panzermarshal.com/). Also it has a touch interface, runs on Android and iOS and I think would be a blast on a tablet.

Forgotten Hope 2 - An old Battlefield 2 mod with fairly realistic ww2 combat that has very detailed and historically researched scenarios. Somehow, this mod is still in active development after all these years and at this point it is a damn good multiplayer shooter with vehicles.

Transcendence - An open world 2d top down space exploration game with a fleshed out world with factions, quests and a main story to pursue. I think it was released in 1996 so this game is pretty old but it is STILL in active development. Not very well known, but very well loved by people that know it.

Rain World - An utterly unique sidescrolling survival game where the enemies are driven by sophisticated AI protocols. Enemies just don't sit there, doing nothing but patrolling a set path and waiting to fight you, they migrate across the map searching for food and fighting rivals. This means that sometimes you get VERY unlucky and open a door into a room with a bunch of tough monsters right in front of you and die, but the game doesn't punish dying much really and the overall atmosphere of the game is incredible. This game is starting to receive more critical attention but it is criminally under appreciated for being so arrestingly unique.

Vintage Story - Not that old, but worth a mention for the fact that Minecraft is a gargantuan phenomena without really any other games trying to genuinely walk down the same path.. except Vintage Story. Vintage Story started out as a survival focused modpack, focused on working through the stone and iron age, but eventually jumped ship from Minecraft and became its own game. One of my favorite parts of Vintage Story is the chiseling mechanic. Cosmetic blocks (about the same size as minecraft blocks) can be cosmetically chipped away so that they still are just a normal block to the game engine, but visually can become virtually any shape/pattern players want. It makes building so much more fun. I am very thankful Vintage Story exists as a Minecraft-like that isn't controlled by a huge company like Microsoft.

The Original Peggle and Peggle Nights - Popcap ceased to exist the moment EA bought them, fuck EA, but all of Popcaps original games before they had their spinal cord harvested and extracted by EA execs are amazing, Peggle perhaps being the best. I feel like they should have this game running in hospital waiting rooms because it is such a calming experience to play Peggle. It is like a slot machine except if the slot machine loved you and didn't want to hurt you or take your money.

Farm Together - Not old, but demands a spot on this list for being so underrated. Farm Together is a perfect co-op splitscreen arcadey faming game. Everyone always recommends Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing but Farm Together is a much more focused game on farming. There isn't a story, tutorial, energy levels or anything else to get between the player and farming. You just pick the game up, start planting stuff and go which makes it VERY successful at roping reluctant co-op gamers in to play. What makes the game such a gem is that at no point is the game ever interested in stressing you out or punishing you and yet there is still a very real challenge to building out your farm in the most profitable way possible. Crops take real time to grow, so it plays a little bit like Farmville... except Farm Together wasn't designed like a toxic addictive drug. If your crops finish, they just wait until you harvest them, they don't go bad. Very underrated and easy to pass over because the graphics make the game look far more generic and half-assed than it is.

I think fast travel is fine. I play games to wander so I don’t get the point but whatever.

My favorite result of purposefully not having fast travel/teleporting is on the nerd.nu Minecraft server. Most Minecraft servers just have teleports set up to get get everywhere, but this Minecraft server has none so people build huge minecart subways and nether highways to connect cities and towns into an organic transit network. It is a joy to just grab a minecart and just punch random city names in to go for a ride and see where it takes you.

None of it would have happened if the server had fast travel and it just makes the world so much more interesting.

The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?

It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?

The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don't want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class...

I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don't want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.

All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.

It’s not unreasonable though that they have wanted to make sure their system of federation etc works well before they open it up, and that that has taken some time.

Yeah it must take a ton of work to make function properly but at the same time, I also think it isn’t unreasonable to doubt that a for-profit entity is ever going to willingly open up their system.

Why wouldn’t they just keep coming up with excuses for why it hasn’t been implemented yet? There is no real genuine promise here like there would be if the federation system was implemented from the start (even if it was janky) and every day that goes by the likelihood that federation/decentralization will ever happen on Bluesky becomes less and less likely.

This reminds me of an early access game selling itself on a vision of what the game will become while clearly having very little intention of ever getting there. They spend a lot of time talking about all the great features they will add like NPCs and quests but are they actually ever going to tackle the tough problems of implementing those features? Or are they just going to focus on selling character and weapon skins through loot boxes?

These losers better not do it to Monster Hunter World.

I did, my comment is that there are no good cops.