loobkoob

"I can't find a source because the government and [[[globalist]]] mainstream media is covering it up. Do your own research"

I have the theory that vampires hating garlic is a rumour spread by vampires themselves because they really love garlic. Getting the humans to season themselves is a genius move.

Must be nice to never have to worry about defending yourself from attackers who overpower you or who have weapons.

As someone who lives outside of the US: it is nice. You guys should try it.

It’s better to be remembered as being good from the start.

I think NMS is an exception. If it released today, I think most people would end up feeling that it's just kind of "fine" and it'd die down somewhat quickly. It's managed to get a lot of goodwill because of how they turned it around and I think it gets a lot more publicity and positive attention because of that.

I'd generally agree, but one huge exception that comes to mind is No Man's Sky. It feels like its updates get far more attention than most games' just because they did manage to turn it around. Even though it was generally considered "redeemed" years ago, it still gets credit and publicity for its redemption every time there's an update, to the point where I think it does far better today than it would be doing if it had released in the state it was supposed to.

It's not a strategy I'd recommend other companies try to emulate, though. I think Hello Games got very lucky with people letting them redeem No Man's Sky, along with it taking them a lot of extra time and work. It was a phenomenon, not something that can be worked into a strategy.

You only get to make a first impression once, after all.

Yeah, I really liked the premise. I never got into Game Of Thrones purely because it felt to me like it relished the violence, gore, sexual abuse, cruelty, etc, too much. I'm not some puritan who's against stories featuring those things, but I don't enjoy seeing them constantly depicted in detail.

Anyway, the idea Shadow and Bone being this fantasy show with in-depth politics without leaning too heavily into all that stuff was appealing to me. But yeah, it ended up just feeling rather tropey, flat, and very "young adult" (in a bad way).

Also: hell yes to Andor! It's easily my favourite show from the past few years.

I don't think it was just poor acting that did it. Even Ben Barnes, who I think is a really good actor, couldn't make up for the poor writing and direction. He was definitely still the highlight for me, but watching him in this versus The Punisher or season 1 of Westworld really showed how much the material was lacking here.

There certainly were some actors I wasn't particularly enamoured with, but I think quite a few of them did as well as they could with what they had to work with. I think fairly flat direction and undynamic scenes were the biggest issue, even more so than the not-so-great writing.

In general, though, I found it just felt very "young adult fiction", and not in a good way. I never ended up finishing the first season either.

If everyone's super(rich), no-one is.

But the issues for men are largely being done to themselves by themselves. Suicide and drug addiction are self-inflicted. Women can’t stop men from harming themselves any more than they can stop them from harming women. It’s not an equivalent problem.

My (male) friend has just, at my insistence, permanently cut ties with a woman he'd been having an on-again, off-again situationship with because she's just chosen to go back to her (violently and sexually) abusive ex. I'm not going to say the abuse itself is self-inflicted, because obviously that's on him being a truly terrible person, but she absolutely was the one responsible for going back to him, to the point where one could easily argue it's no less self-inflicted than suicide or drug addiction.

I told my friend to cut ties with her because, frankly, it's not healthy for him to try to take on her burdens when she's not in a mental/emotional position to help herself. It's been messing him up for too long already dealing with trying to be her emotional support through her lies and her traumas she refuses to see a therapist about. And he's had a really shitty year outside of his issues with her anyway.

I mention all of this because it inverts your examples. Do you feel this woman deserves no sympathy because she's chosen to go back to the abusive ex, and therefore it's self-inflicted? Does the fact that she's a compulsive liar who struggles to open up properly - to be honest and make herself vulnerable - mean she doesn't deserve support? Or would you still say she's an abuse victim struggling with trauma who needs all the support she can get? Neither framing is inaccurate, but one is certainly far more sympathetic than the other.

Ultimately, her choosing to go back to her abusive ex is a result of her traumas. She feels lonely and worthless, and being wanted even just a tiny bit by her abusive ex gives her enough of a feeling of validation that she's willing to risk being abused again. She's chasing a high that isn't worth it at all, just like people who are addicted to hard drugs. It's all just people seeking a way to escape their reality if only for a moment, even if that comes with a huge cost down the line when the high's no longer there. It's all people struggling to deal with their traumas.

Framing it as "men versus women" isn't healthy - it needs to be "society versus the problems". It's not a zero-sum issue; men having issues doesn't invalidate women having issues, and vice versa. And there being societal advantages for men doesn't mean men don't also have issues, just like there are societal advantages for women but also plenty of issues. We can, and need to, care about multiple issues at once and work together to solve them.

It's not just a thing in fiction either; I've seen plenty of threads and discussions over the years where real-life sex workers have essentially been saying the same thing. A lot of men are lonely.

I think they're just the Western publisher for it; they didn't actually have a hand in developing it as far as I know.

The big thing that was missing for me was culture. And it made me appreciate Cyberpunk 2077 that much more. There are people everywhere in Starfield, but the only real differences between them are that they're generic American with cowboy hat versus generic American with business-casual clothes versus generic American with streetpunk clothes stood under neon lights. There's no difference in how people talk. Even the people who'd never interacted with anyone outside of their own community before - who thought they were the last remaining humans - felt the same. There are people everywhere but no real personality.

Versus Cyberpunk 2077, where CDPR created so much culture. There are hours and hours' worth of original songs for the game. There are adverts everywhere that really capture the feeling of the world. People from different parts of the city and different groups have their own dialects. There's so much slang invented for the game. Even the architecture and design of the city tells stories. Sure, the average NPC has no real personality or routine on an individual level, but the world and culture are so well fleshed out. Starfield has none of that.

I also did seem to get hit with quite a few game-breaking bugs in Starfield. I couldn't progress the temple questline - they gave no no powers and the quest didn't advance properly. I had some terrible bugs regarding ship ownership that resulted in me having to load a save from 20 hours previous. It was just a disaster for me, and really killed any enjoyment I may have been getting from the game.