Khotetsu

I think it depends on whether or not people are coming to games like this having played ttrpgs before. Video games often punish failure, whether by removing quest rewards, impeding forward progress, having no follow up to a failure state, or even an outright "game over." This trains a lot of gamers to min-max their playthroughs of games so as to not miss anything, as even a failure in a conversation check can lock them out of content. This was something I struggled with as well, quick-saving before every conversation in case I failed a persuasion check or something and was punished for it. Up until I did a quest in this game where a character died by accident and the game just kinda went, "That was a thing that happened. Anyways, here's your xp. Let's move on."

That broke me from that mindset because the game wasn't punishing me for screwing something up - it just changed the flow of the story. It was no longer like the game was a Dark Souls boss where I had to learn the right pattern to get the game to give me what I want, now it's play the game the way I want and see what wrenches it throws into my plans because the game won't lock me out of half the story because some kid died in a sidequest, it'll just give me a different version of the narrative.

Now I largely use quick saves just in case me and my buddy mess up an encounter so badly we end up with a total party wipe, or if we just wanna try something funny like using shrink + a potion of giant's strength to see if we can throw Kagha off a cliff in the druids grove (it didn't work).

I saw a series of studies once for HRT (not a surgery, but relevant to transgender research and major bodily changes) that said that 90% of patients reported either an improvement or at least no change in their quality of life after HRT compared to before. Of the 10% who reported a worse quality of life or stopped treatment, the majority of causes were due to external factors such as harassment/hate crimes or being disowned by friends and family. The least commonly reported cause was post HRT regret, and the vast majority of that 10% said that they would be restarting HRT as soon as they safely could.

Not only is that a huge success rate, but it also says something about the percentage of people who would respond to such a survey, as going "stealth" as it's referred to, can be a major component of transgender people's safety considerations. If people don't know your trans, you can't be assaulted for it. And considering the sexual assault rate for trans women in the US is 80%, they have reason to worry about that sort of thing. Also, a quick Google search tells me that the average response rate for medical surveys is 76% for in-person surveys, 65% for postal, and online surveys are 46% for website based and 51% for email surveys. So that 59% isn't too far outside the range as long as it isn't in-person surveys.

As I always say, we fought a war over this. The whole world was involved.

"Nobody could read one if we did. They're all digital nowadays."

And the irony is that people switched to cable for the exact same reason. They got tired of the nonsense that broadcast TV pulled with subscriptions for different channels and all the ads and everything, and went to cable because you paid one bill for every channel. Then, everyone moved to streaming because you had to buy 50 different cable packages for the one channel on each you actually cared about, and there were just too many ads to deal with, etc.

Something something, those who don't listen to history are doomed to lose profit margins or whatever.

Steam doesn't let you actually rate a game; only recommend it or not. So, a game may be a 7/10, but if people can't recommend it for something like its monetary practices or frequent bugs/crashes, then it can end up on that list. That low rating doesn't necessarily mean people think it's the worst game on Steam, but rather that only about 10% of players think it's worth playing. Though, it's also worth mentioning that it has something like a 1.2 rating on Metacritic. It's generally considered a worse game than its predecessor in many aspects (including the readability of its characters, apparently. I guess they made some changes to the original characters' models that made them less identifiable?), and the reasoning behind shutting down the first one for this new free to play model was canceled. It's also been having issues with player attrition leading up to the Steam release, so the complaints don't seem unwarranted, but this probably wouldn't be happening if these players had some other outlet for their grievances.

Even if you buy a physical copy of Overwatch 1 in a store, when you pop it in your system, it'll install Overwatch 2 instead.

I've actually considered making other accounts to separate content out by blocking different communities on them, but I've never really felt the desire to filter out the memes enough to go through with it.

"How to tell an American from an Eurpoean: An American can tell a gunshot from a firework by sound alone."

As a pro-gun girl from liberal Massachusetts, I largely agree with you but have a few caveats:

These kinds of laws always bother me due to the nebulous nature of the definition of an "assault weapon" in this country. A quick search will tell you that there is no single definition for an assault weapon from a legal standpoint, but that it generally refers to "semi-automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns that are able to accept detachable magazines and possess one or more other features." This definition includes almost every pistol ever created, as the defining attributes of a pistol that differentiate it from a revolver are that they're semi-automatic and almost always use a detachable magazine, except for some early designs like the Luger which use an internal magazine. Notably, the Colt AR-15 (the one all over the news for mass shootings) is not an assault weapon, and neither are rifles like the FN FAL, which was the French army's rifle for awhile during the Cold War. I have also seen stuff like AK-47 variants that are legally considered pistols here in the US, and even pump-action AR-15s, which would be completely legal under these kinds of bans despite being able to fire rounds almost as quickly as a standard AR-15.

It's even legal to anonymously buy the majority of parts for a gun online here, except for the lower receiver, which is a part that has a unique serial code on it that must be registered. Which brings me to my main issue with these kinds of laws: they always feel like stopgap measures which don't do anything about the actual issues but allow politicians to pat themselves on the back and claim they've solved the problem forever.

It's completely possible to have a country where you can own guns without having the issues we do, but everybody is too wrapped up in this 2nd Amendment spat. Countries like Australia have shown that it's possible. Australia used to have a gun culture identical to the US until they had a school shooting in the 70s. At that point, everybody in the country agreed to never let something like that happen again, tightened their gun laws and had a mass turn in of guns, and they haven't had a school shooting since. There's even a country in northern Europe (I wanna say Sweden?) where everybody has to do like 3 years in the army, and they can keep their service rifle after that time, and yet, they have no issues with mass shootings like we do here.

The belief that everybody in this country has a right to own a gun, whether they can be trusted to be a responsible gun owner or not, is probably the biggest problem we have towards actually solving this issue, and no one state can do something about it. These kinds of bans are always fairly easy to circumvent just by going to the closest state with relaxed gun laws, and they punish responsible gun owners who are going to freak out for suddenly being criminals for owning something that they bought legally. So we end up with these bans that treat a symptom and not the root causes while also pushing gun owners to vote for politicians who want to get rid of any regulation at all on guns.

Yeah, there's been a number on both surgery and HRT, as well as plenty of studies on the effects of supporting trans people - especially trans kids.

I even remember a series of studies that found that HRT had a 90% success rate among patients. 90% of people in the study said that there had been either an improvement or at least no change in the quality of their life after they started compared to before, and of the 10% who didn't, many of them cited outside factors as being the cause of their issues. Stuff like unsupportive family and harassment/hate crimes were some of the most common factors, and post HRT regret being the least common factor. The majority of that 10% said they would be starting HRT again as soon as they were in a position where they safely could.

I'm somehow in a similar yet completely different boat from you. My feed under all is made up of like 5 communities - memes, lemmy memes, 196, linux memes, and programmer humor - with guest appearances by politics and technology. Regardless of what I set the filter on my feed to, I have yet to see a single piece of porn crop up; and I had to specifically find a search tool on my pc to find some communities to subscribe to like an r/foodporn equivalent just so I would at least have some stuff pop up on my phone with some more variety related to my interests.

This is probably all related to Lemmy being new and not knowing how to get the most out of the app I'm using (and that being new as well), but as of right now I'm largely using Lemmy the way I used to use ~~Twitter~~ X or something rather than how I used to use Reddit. As a time waster rather than a place where I got invested in the communities I interacted with.

Yeah, anytime you see somebody making the "think of the children!" argument, look at what the possible end goal could be with that removed. Protecting kids is a favorite smokescreen because kids can't speak up for themselves in these cases.