Khrux

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.

My friend works in their engineering department, he lost a ridiculous amount of his close colleagues today and my heart goes out to him.

That said, I’m always blown away by the incredible R&D he’s up to, and the genuine passion for innovation and quality him and his team had. I genuinely think their quality good, even if they frame it as the apple of vaccums while actively pulling shit like this.

Oh no, I hate this art and design style:(

I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.

Charles has literally lobbied ministers to change spending plans to go against the NHS in favour of homeopathic remedies. People have likely died from cancer directly due to his decisions and in my opinion, lol is a suitable response to that karma.

Oh it may have been, I totally wouldn’t be surprised if every time I read Team Fortress, my brain just interpreted it as TF2.

TF2 source 2 totally makes sense as although TF2 gets no updates, it’s still a popular game and valve can’t totally take the idea of upgrading it to source 2 off the table themselves.

This one is a shame that I don’t really understand, I wonder if it’s related to the fact that it’s for the GameCube and that’s Nintendo’s territory. I’m curious to see if this activity continues and expands, as even on steam there are remakes of half life in source and basically fan expansions to portal being sold for profit, among other products and projects.

I should say I’m actively opposed to anyone gaining control of the fediverse but when I started using Lemmy, Masterdon and Peertube, (until about an hour ago) I was unaware that it would be this easy for a big company to just engulf it if they wished to.

If I knew that the fediverse could be controlled and then drained like every other internet community, I would have approached it differently.

I’m don’t totally understand the fediverse and how it works. How does meta making one of their options federated harm the rest of the fediverse?

I’m sorry if I’m not being very clear, I’m never the best at presenting my points clearly.

I do try to cater do all neurodivergent people, using your example of assuming gender, it’s a very small fix in language to get that right, and day by day, I’d say I do unfortunately assume the gender of strangers more than I wish I did, and it’s only when someone presents themselves in a way that gives the slightest inkling that they may be transgender or genderqueer that I actually catch myself and ask them their preferred pronouns. If someone ever corrects me when I’ve got it wrong based on assumption, I’m going to try to hard to get it right from then on of course. I sort of approach neurodiversity similarly, and I’m trying to change that mindset but it does come slowly.

I don’t want autistic people to mask and act neurotypical infront of me or anyone else, but unless they let me know how they need to be communicated with, I can’t implicitly get it right, and plenty of neurodiverse people either don’t know how they need to be communicated with, don’t want to be treated differently or would rather not let strangers know they’re neurodiverse.

If someone needs to be communicated with in a different way, they need to let me know, because any other approach may do more harm than good. Of course I’m always trying to communicate in a way that allows people to communicate back to me, but for anything specific, you need to let me know.

I’m not sure if this analogy will land but in a restaurant, it’s great for the restaurant to cater to many dietary requirements but if you have allergies, you really should let them know.

Apologies if anything I’ve said here is unclear (it probably is), I’m not great at expressing complicated thoughts.

Oh yeah I know I’m in the privileged position, and that’s exactly why it’s important to me to read articles like this and communicate with autistic people. But I also feel like it’s the wrong decision to approach strangers in a way that’s harder for them if they’re neurotypical but easier if they’re autistic.

As soon as I know somebody is not in their comfort zone while communicating with me, either from a neurodivergency or anxiety or anything really, I’m happy to change my communication style to be better, but I can’t make presumptions about people before I’ve learnt that, so I need to talk to them like they’re neurotypical.

This is a really really interesting article, I do have one thought though.

I’m not autistic, but my partner is, hence the fact I frequent autistic spaces to help myself understand her better. If someone asked me Who are you? I’d want to answer I am kind, social and insecure, but I wouldn’t because I’d presume whoever was asking implicitly asking about my social intersectionality, because from there, they can map where we fall on wider topics, so I’d answer "I’m a D&D player and general RPG designer, I’m bisexual and living in (trendy UK city).

From this, I’d assume that they would think, well he’s bisexual, so probably progressive and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community, into D&D so probably nerdy and social, and lives in a city which is welcoming and like-minded, so probably supported in his beliefs.

I’d hope they’d unpack my values from my social intersections, but they’d also make assumptions based on if they wanted to like me or not. Someone who would answer “football fan, rocket league player and car enthusiast” may map their network from rocket league, to gaming to D&D and find that we both loved Skyrim a decade ago, leading to a good conversation about that, where we’d then try to imply our values though our conversation. They may hear bisexual and have issues with the LGBTQ+ community and try to seperate their social map from mine, and avoid making links to me, and we wouldn’t have any conversation because it’s already clear that we could argue over something like pronouns easily by them knowing themselves and my sexuality meaning I’m likely to champion other parts of my community.

However if I’d answered kind, social and insecure, you can’t unpack that the other way. You’d never know where to take that conversation to a point that resonated with both of us.

I know this isn’t a perfect take, as to my understanding, if I told autistic people my social intersections, they’d be less likely to start to automatically make assumptions to unpack my identity from it, but in a neurotypical dominated world, I’d just default to assuming whoever I’m talking to will.

I know the article ends with Non-autistic people are likely to reject this theory as it disempowers their privilege as the superior “default” neurotype and I guess I’m doing exactly that, but I really don’t believe that my neurotype is superior, but by being more prevalent, I will with strangers in a way that’s most accomodating for people without autism.

A soon as I started typing I realised it’s probably not too exciting. I think it’s always had that mythic element growing up near it of imagining the amount of work needed for lots of cups of tea to be made at the same time.

There’s a power station in snowdonia, Wales nicknamed Electric Mountain, that just pumps water up the mountain all year round to drop it at optimum times. The cliche examples given are the world cup final half time and after a Dr Who finale. At that point they just drop all the stored water over their turbines to counter the massive surge. I’m sure equivalents of this are common all over the world but it feels so uniquely British.

I didn’t realise Skyrim blocked achievements when modding, I’d definitely didn’t back in the day, it’s one of the few games that I have all achievements on and I’ve modded it to hell basically every time.

This current wave of enshitification to online services is generally driven by said online services taking steps that they believe to be more profitable to the detriment of the people who use them.

That has always gone on but it feel like it’s everywhere at once at the moment; with the place I live in, the transport I use, the food I buy, the media and art I consume etc.

1900 years ago, the world knew that the only things people desired were bread and circuses, i.e. to have your needs met and have entertainment, a lot of people have built their modern circuses off of things that are becoming unusable or deserve boycott. It’s far better than living in a warzone or something but to have many things we rely on for satisfaction stripped from us at once.

I just wanna spend my free time entertained without having to perpetually change what provides that entertainment, is that not why most of us use this site?