- 0 Posts
- 165 Comments
I’ll respond because it seems like you’re trying
Most guys have in mind with some gay twink trying to Hit on any guys they can.
I’m not sure how common this mental image is, but try to get it out of your head. The fact is there are some people who just want to have lots of sex with lots of people, some of these people happen to be straight, some happen to be gay, some happen to be guys, and some happen to be gals and some happen to be anywhere in-between any of the above. And that’s okay, because different people are different and who cares what happens between consenting adults? And you know what else is okay? Some people don’t want to have sex with anyone, some people only want to have sex with certain people, and some people are anywhere in between.
Most gay people are just normal regular everyday people with just a different preference in people that Theyd Date
All. All gay people are just people. Sexual interest is a spectrum, some people are only interested in other people of the same gender, some people are only interested in people of the opposite gender, and some people are somewhere in between, maybe mostly-straight or mostly-gay. And that’s okay no matter where on that spectrum you fall.
On top of that both romantic interest and ones own gender are spectrums as well. These spectrums can have very different settings from each other and that’s okay too. On the subject of gender, people have a physical and a mental gender, and sometimes those don’t match. That’s okay too (y’know as in it’s okay to have that problem and be working to align the two in whatever way that makes them happy)
Most cis people totally envision either some annoying gay twink or a drag queen
First of all, don’t use that slur. Full stop.
Secondly, drag is not a gender nor a sexuality nor a sexual or romantic interest. People who do drag are just people who do drag. They can be anywhere on the various spectrums I already outlined.
I have a feeling though that nowadays regarding representation, people that are pro gay & lgbtq do not really help at educating unaware cis people
They are trying to educate unaware cis/straight people, its just between algorithms, echo chambers and those who wish to eliminate everyone who isn’t white straight cis, there’s plenty of corners its not reaching.
This is not a failure of gay people, and this isn’t any one gay person’s job to educate the world. This is the world trying to pretend that gay people don’t exist, when in fact they do exist and have existed for as long as gender and sexuality have existed
The reason we have pride is because we are in the first time in human history when anyone who isn’t cis, straight, etc. isn’t forced to ignore or suppress those feelings but can actually go be exactly who they want to be and be with whoever they want to be. Even now, as kids start to realize there’s something different about them, they’re first led to believe it’s because there’s something wrong with them. This might last a short time, this might last a lifetime, but pride is about squashing those self-doubt demons and shouting out to the world “I AM WHO I AM AND YOU WILL DEAL WITH IT!”
The importance of representation is in helping put the image in people’s heads that it’s okay to be different and that you don’t have to be a white cis straight male to do certain things. Whether it’s Mr Rogers sharing a pool with a black actor on a hot day, or Lt Uhura being played by a black woman in Star Trek, or Kora kissing Asami in Legend of Kora, or anything else, it’s about showing and helping people know that they can be who they want to be and they can be happy about it. Media drives a sense of normalcy, so what’s normal in media becomes normal in society. If it’s normal for gay people to exist in media, people will see it as normal for gay people to exist in society.
Now, more on topic, Kingdom Come Deliverence is in a weird spot because it sets out to be the most realistic representation of a specific period and place in medieval history as possible. In the medieval period (and for most of history for that matter) people didn’t really have an individual identity, so the idea of gay or straight people didn’t really exist. They were however extremely sexist and mostly considered whoever did the penetrating to be powerful and whoever is being penetrated to be weak (and there’s some hilarious historical texts where people are just generally confused about what to think of lesbians because there’s no penetrating going on so did anything actually happen?) so CK:D in being an accurate period piece happens to place itself right in the crossroads of this culture war, as it presumably depicts gayness as many conservatives would prefer, something to be hidden away and ignored and maybe prosecuted if it gets too inconvenient for them, but CK:D depicts it this way not as a handout to conservatives but as an accurate depiction of history without commentary.
So TL;DR: gay people are people and different people are different and that’s okay
I said vintage in reference to Runescape Classic, so the version of Runescape that was live from 2001-2004. When I played RSC (back when Jagex stood up an RSC server around the early 2010s) it really reminded me of trying to play DOS games in terms of the lousy UI, lack of QOL fixes, general jankiness and unforgiving gameplay. It felt like a game that was about a decade older than it actually is because of that.
Personally as much as I enjoy playing various older games, I’ve found there’s absolutely limits to what’s still enjoyable and for me it’s around the mid-90s where before that point the gameplay is too unforgiving for my taste, and the controls and UI tend to be way too janky
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
Grand Theft Auto 4 - wasn’t fun to play, though I keep trying since I want to see where the story goes but get too jaded to make it far.
Around the time GTA 5 first released for console I was playing the (terrible) PC Port of 4 and I got pretty far but ended up stuck at a specific story mission where you need to fly a helicopter and no matter what I just couldn’t get the helicopter to fly fast enough to the point where I was either missing something or it was bugged out. Honestly both are solid possibilities. I’ve never felt the need to return to it and finish that story.
I did like the relationship building aspect and how folks would randomly call you to hang out. Honestly I feel like that was something 5 should’ve kept, it definitely made the characters feel a bit more alive and slightly less 2 dimensional
I mean defining “active users” is an inherently political choice in any metric. You’re ultimately choosing how to slice the data for analysis, so if you adjust your metrics on customers who only claim free games vs customers who actually spend money on the platform the data can tell completely different stories.
I suppose the point is, collecting the free games probably creates non-negligable costs for Epic, and how that looks on their released metrics is entirely up to how the data gets sliced
I keep a separate savings account for things like that. I just call it “upgrade” in my banking app. Its money specifically earmarked for any kind of entirely-optional big purchases, like computer upgrades, server upgrades, home theatre upgrades, etc. I also have one earmarked for replacing my current cars and one for vacations, plus of course my emergency fund
The only problem with this approach is I tend to hoard my money and want to see my savings account go up, so I really don’t end up spending as much as I could on myself. Like I have an entire computer’s worth in the “upgrade” account right now
That certainly changes the calculation quite a bit, but how many people can be anticipated to claim a given free game is definitely going to be a point of negotiation on how much to pay the publisher to giveaway a given game, so in a roundabout way it does ultimately cost Epic more money if you do claim the games without downloading them
Honestly interest rates dropping might be ultimately be a good thing. The job market is so tight and most recession indicators have already been blazing. I doubt they’ll do the same hard drop they did in Q2 of 2020, but I do think more aggressive rate cuts might alleviate a lot of the burden consumers (especially young adults and anyone unfortunate enough to have been/be jobless over the last couple of years) have been feeling. A big chunk of the inflation consumers were seeing on goods in 2024 was just companies making opportunistic price increases, as evidenced by the heavily advertised price drops afterwards.
Additionally there is the statistic that nearly 50% of all retail spending in the United States is made by the top 10% of earners which is a heck of a dangerous tightrope for the economy. I do think that’s the other shoe waiting to drop right this second. If the wealthier Americans get spooked and start to pull back their spending this economy is going to tumble
A 5 year DRAM shortage is pretty hard to imagine. I have to suspect that’s a projection that assumes no AI bubble popping (which given how insanely over-leveraged basically every company involved in the bubble is, its inevitable. They’re literally spending more building these datacenters than they can ever dream of recouping once built!) The last DRAM shortage (around 2017-2019 by memory) was only really bad for about a year or so, getting gradually better until it became an absolute glut of DRAM supply that lasted until…well about 3 months ago. $60 per terabyte of SSD storage was glorious, and hopefully I can afford to benefit from the next DRAM glut in 2-5 years
Its almost like half-assing a store front that runs like shit, lacks the most basic features and is generally perceived to be user-hostile is a bad way to attract business. When the freaking open source Heroic Game Launcher does a better job hooking into Epic’s servers than their own damn launcher its time to do something. Take one of those millions of dollars you rake in every year and actually invest in the platform for cripes sake!
- Reduce auto-signouts. This creates friction and forces users to take extra steps to access the game they wish to play. This causes users to go “nah I didn’t really feel like playing that right now anyways”
- Embed system requirements for games into the launcher. Users want to know if they can even install a game before clicking install
- Show details about a game that a user has clicked on. Seriously if you’re going to give away a hundred free games a year, folks aren’t going to know jack shit about 90% of the indie titles you’re surfacing. Most of the free titles I’ve actually played I’ve played because the marketing screenshots and description sounded cool, and I don’t want to cross-reference between a web browser and a web-browser-wrapped-into-an-executable-that-runs-like-shit-but-installs-my-games-sometimes
- SHOW THE GODDAMN DOWNLOAD SIZE AND INSTALL SIZE BEFORE BEGINNING THE DOWNLOAD!!! My god this is not rocket science, its barely even computer science. Its literally the most basic feature of any software installer developed in the last 50 years, show an estimate for about how much hard drive space is needed. If I have 50GB free on a laptop with a 256GB drive in it, its just russian roulette for if I’ll install a game or have to manually sort out my drive being filled to 0 bytes remaining by a game download that never would’ve completed anyways.
- Stop forcing updates. If someone’s launching a game that needs an update, let them launch it without updating. Also make it easier to force it to check for updates/apply already released updates. The background polling has entirely missed major game updates for my wife’s Fortnite, and since those can be 30+GB downloads we’d really much prefer to run those updates when she isn’t sitting down to play a bit of Fortnite.
- Actually enable user reviews. Yes this requires moderation which requires workhours and therefore money. This is the kind of thing that that 10% cut of all sales you take is supposed to pay for. Users want to know what they’re getting into before buying a game and committing to installing it and trying it out, let them!
- Optimize the crap out of your launcher. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can’t be gestures wildly at everything this. Reduce the filesize of the webpages, run a few fewer javascripts, use better image compression, just most importantly make the launcher not run like its full of molasses
The part that annoys me the most is Epic could simple reduce the free games to bi-weekly and rebudget those same dollars into platform improvements and actually create a viable platform that people don’t hate. Just look at Steam, its got some glaring issues (online DRM, massive illegal gambling problems, cyberbullying, unclear & inconsistent policies on adult content, rampant shovelware, etc. etc.) but by not being a pain in the butt to use, and having some decent company policies that aren’t obviously anti-consumer they have an entire fandom devoted to them. Its just wasted potential. If Tim Sweeney felt like it he could actually build an incredible platform and actually compete with Steam, but instead they just engage in the most disjointed corporate bullshit possible
Epic pays some amount of the price of the game to the devs for every free game claimed, so it costs Epic money and makes money for game devs in exchange for a bit of your time. Sometimes you end up trying a game you never would’ve purchased and end up loving it. For example, I snagged Sable a few months ago for free through Epic and was absolutely blown away by how good that game was. It wasn’t even on my radar but I saw it come up as the weekly free game and thought it looked neat so I downloaded it and booted it up
My approach was simply to setup Jellyfin in an unprivileged container that way the GPU can be shared with other services setup similarly
Really it only got left behind because of its 4C/8T limit as everything started supporting lots of threads instead of just a couple, and just being a 2nd Generation i7.
Past me made the accidentally more financially prudent move of opting for the i7-4790k over the i5-4690k which ultimately lasted me nearly a decade. At the time the advice was of course “4 cores is all you need, don’t waste the money on an i7” but those 4 extra threads made all the difference in the longevity of that PC
When I updated my wife’s computer for Windows 11 I went AMD for that reason as well. They released 2 generations in a row with now well-documented hardware bugs that slowly kill the processors. 13th and 14th gen CPUs simply will have zero resale value if they last long enough to hit the second hand market. I briefly worked at an MSP at the beginning of last year and the amount of gaming computers that came in via noncommercial walk-in customers for stability issues that ultimately turned out to be the Intel CPU bugs was incredible
I think RDR2 was so memorable because the Western genre is so underrepresented these days. Sure it was such a popular genre with ton of movies and books for a while decades ago before video games were really a thing, but what was the most recent Western movie or TV show any of us have seen? I think the newest one I’ve seen was 1999’s Wild Wild West. Maybe 2004’s Home on the Range if that counts?
If we were getting 3 AAA titles released each year that fall in the Wild West genre RDR2 would just fade into the noise. Its a brilliant game but the only thing it notably did differently from any other open world RPG was unabashedly be a Wild West game that hit every possible trope of the genre including the silly ones like dueling quick draws
This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.
I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later
It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it
Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap
Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.
Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!
Complete with microtransactions and a horrible lack of customizability! Seriously I just wanted to play some Minecraft in RTX but you literally can’t use the nVidia RTX stuff outside of the demo maps, otherwise you have to purchase a different texture pack with real money. And basically everything in the Bedrock Marketplace costs real money, and very little is free.
Meanwhile Java edition doesn’t have any paid content in part because the original Minecraft license specified anyone was free to make mods and custom content but were explicitly restricted from charging money for it
I’d say its more like going to a fancy ice cream shop with amazing ice cream and ordering vanilla (hehe see what I did there?) or a fancy pizza place known for their amazing topping combinations and just getting a slice of cheese pizza. Its perfectly fine and probably better than some other places you’ve had vanilla ice cream or cheese pizza, but holy crap are you missing out!
Back when I was first getting into gaming and learning about this Steam thing a friend told me I needed to play the Half Life games. I snagged them on sale started playing and every one I tried I ended up putting down pretty quickly because I’m just not a shooter fan.
Funnily enough I actually like more combat-oriented games more now but I’ve played too many newer games that were at least partially inspired by Half Life so I have a feeling I’ll go play it and find it’s too unpolished and not aged too well
The Anno games always had really good music. Anno 1602 for example had this as the title music
Anno 1503’s title music is engrained in my memory as well
Windows bloat does a pretty good job of making fairly recent computers feel sluggish though. I just updated my work laptop with a 12th gen CPU to Windows 11 and things are noticeably more sluggish immediately following applying the update. Which is sad since its about 8 years newer than my Linux laptop with similar (but older of course) specs and the Linux laptop is significantly snappier-feeling when in use.
The big benefit of linux servers for most businesses is that they tend to be configure-once systems, where you set it up, verify it works then no further maintenance is needed beyond applying updates in line with your update schedule and downtime windows. Sure there will every once in a while be something that changes but far less than you see with Windows Server where some registry values stopped working with a recent windows update without warning so now you have to track down new registry values to recreate the behavior. That and tracking down why Windows decided to ignore all of your settings and reboot this time (and how to stop it again)
Dude I played Minecraft as a teenager and now my kids play Minecraft with minimal encouragement by us. It’s got hella staying power