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I'm in the 5th sector playing Zoltan. What's my play here?
  • You should, if all goes well, be able to win. I'd look for a defense drone, I'd upgrade shields to at least 3 bubbles (I know you have the Zoltan shield, that helps, but still, for the flagship you're going to want more shields), and I'd maybe swap out a beam for a pew-pew if you can find a decent one. Or upgrade your hacking. That works too. And sell some stuff. I'd sell both the system repair and the anti-drone, but that's just because I find the anti-drone downright useless. Sell one of your missiles, probably the breach, and sell a beam, you absolutely don't need 3 of them. With that cash you can buy some upgrades, I would prioritize hacking and oxygen. A helm upgrade also wouldn't hurt, but only do that if you have the cash for it, I wouldn't make it a priority!

  • Games Aren't Good Because They're "Addictive" (The Jimquisition)
  • So you're using some weird definition of "skinner box" where you simply mean "human inputs lead to various outputs". Why use this definition? By this definition a fucking mathematical function is a skinner box.

    I simply do not understand, in general, what you're trying to say.

  • Games Aren't Good Because They're "Addictive" (The Jimquisition)
  • Goosebumps choose your own adventure novels.

    But to take you a tiny bit more seriously, ok? So what? Why does "I have some agency in this story" make a story bad? What actually are you getting at here?

  • Games Aren't Good Because They're "Addictive" (The Jimquisition)
  • All Vidya Gamez are fundamentally Skinner Boxes.

    No they are not and I will fight you. If you mean multiplayer online games, well maybe, you might have a point, but I don't play those games and so I will make no claims about them.

    However. If you call Outer Wilds or Pathologic/Pathologic 2 or Disco Elysium or A Short Hike or Journey skinner boxes, well, you're just wrong. Games are experiences, they're stories that can be more immersive than a movie or a book and if they're done well, holy shit are they good!

    Games are (can be) amazing, and I'm sick of pretending they're not.

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    Bloodborne Trailer | PC
  • i hate you

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • Don't pretend to have empathy for me, shithead

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • This is such a shitty "joke". Fucking hell. I hope you experience even half of the suffering a dairy cow experiences during their life. You won't, because the world isn't fair, but if I could imprison you and exploit your reproductive system until you're too old and worn out to be worthwhile and then kill you, I would do so.

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • You are a disgusting human. I'm actually appalled reading the shit you're writing. It's not often that I read such concentrated evil. You don't think death and servitude cause suffering? You think domesticated animals choose to stay in factory farms? You're a fucking ghoul.

  • The Real Reason the Democrats are Attacking Jill Stein "is because they don't want voters to know that there can be a worker-centered party to the left of the Democrats"
  • You'll find that it's not possible for the US to completely pull out of supporting them with military aid.

    Why not? The US has supported Israel since its formation, no arguments there, but so what? Why couldn't that change?

  • The Real Reason the Democrats are Attacking Jill Stein "is because they don't want voters to know that there can be a worker-centered party to the left of the Democrats"
  • Am I reading the article right? My understanding of what I just read is that in 2016 some social media accounts with ties to Russia put out some pro-Stein statements and then a year or two later Stein was photographed sitting at the same table as Putin.

    Neither of those two facts suggest to me that she is, as you put it, "another Russian tool". Especially since the article itself says that there's no evidence she knew about the Russian social media accounts boosting her and there wasn't an interpreter sitting at the table with her and Putin.

    Can you please tell me what I've missed? Is there more evidence that she's a "Russian tool"? Because the evidence in the article you linked seems extremely weak.

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • Oh my, I literally read the comment you're replying to backwards! I thought they said that carnists hate vegans. I'm glad you're here to read properly and give a great response!

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • Yeah, good point! In a world without intellectual property rights, of course there would still be large projects, they'd just be, well, actually good and not shitty focus-grouped sequels.

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • Oh my, I literally read the comment you're replying to backwards! I thought they said that carnists hate vegans. I'm glad you're here to read properly and give a great response!

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • I agree we probably wouldn't get any more Assassin's Creed or Deadpool and Wolverine. Very likely those kinds of media would die out in a world where no one pays for media. I have a hard time saying that's a bad thing. We'd instead have more weird little indie projects, which are so, so much better in every way. But sure, if you feel morally queasy about "stealing" (it's not stealing, it's copying) from giant corporations who make artistically bankrupt crap, I'm not going to convince you otherwise, and it would be a waste of my time to try and do so.

    Maybe I should point out here that sometimes I do go out of my way to pay for media (especially games) when I don't have to. I bought Dwarf Fortress on Steam, even though the devs give it away for free and I donated to them a couple times before they released it on Steam. They are living off the money people pay for Dwarf Fortress and I'm so glad they're able to do so. I also bought my sister a copy of Pathologic 2 she has never (and probably will never) play because I bought my copy on sale and loved it and felt bad that I hadn't paid full price to a dev team that put their heart and soul into the game and had it sell abysmally for some reason. (Side note, play Pathologic 2, it's good!) I bought the Celeste soundtrack from Lena Raine's bandcamp because I love it so much, even though it's extremely easy to find and I've actually lost access to my bandcamp account.

    I guess I'm saying there's nuance here and I like it when actual artists who make good art are paid. It's just that in our current society, buying a DVD or paying for Netflix or paying for Xbox gamepass or anything like that doesn't benefit the artists, the vast majority of any money you spend to acquire media goes straight to wealthy executives and I just don't see anything wrong with not giving them more money than they're already getting.

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    Trans Megathread for the Week of 10⁄28 to 11⁄3)
  • Mine is pretty similar! It just looks so very weird. Dates aren't supposed to look like that!

  • Why do anti-piracy people often treat us as the "villains" of the story?
  • That's a common misconception. But it's not true. Artists will keep making art whether they're paid or not. Anti-piracy rhetoric tends to come from large corporations (AAA game studios, movie studios, publishing houses, record labels) who demand ever-increasing profits, not from the artists themselves. The people who actually do the work to make games, movies, songs, books, whatever are basically never well-paid, instead their corporate overlords make all the profit and pay the people who actually make the art you enjoy as little as they can possibly get away with, just as with every other job under capitalism.

    Pirating media does absolutely no harm unless you're pirating from a small indie creator. But if you just want to play the latest Ubisoft slop or watch the latest Marvel movie, go ahead and pirate. The money you'd spend on them go straight into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the artists who do the work.

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    Trans Megathread for the Week of 10⁄28 to 11⁄3)
  • I don't know why I hate that the dates in the title are written as fractions. It's fine, it's very clear that they're dates but I saw them and was instantly like blob-stabby meow-knife-trans

    I don't understand why I have such strong feelings about such an extremely unimportant stylistic choice, but here we are!

  • So about Papers Please

    I've always heard this is a super good game and I finally started playing it and I enjoyed the first little bit (heavily eyerolling at the, uh, "evil soviet" aesthetics), but that was ok, not enough to ruin it for me.

    And then the day rolled around when you have to use a scanner on people. It's basically a creepier version of the TSA body scanners, and I must say I'm really not into that. Also, and this could have just been RNG, but all except one of the people I was supposed to scan were women, and I found that a bit off-putting, honestly. But anyway, I finished the day, and was like, well, maybe I'll get used to this, it's only a game, these aren't real people I'm creeping on.

    But then, the next day, the second person to come up to my window "looked like a man", but their passport said their sex was female. Now on an earlier day, I had gotten a violation for mismatched sex marker, which should have been a hint I was going to be in for a bad time later.

    Well, the bad time was here, because I decided to flag the sex marker discrepancy, and wouldn't you know it, the option to scan them came up. So I guess I get to decide on whether someone's sex marker is correct based on their genitals.

    I quit the game right then and there. I'd like to ask all of you whether you've played it, and whether it's worth pushing through this very serious discomfort I feel. I'm a little worried that all the "tough moral choices" are just going to feel contrived and shitty, what with the "evil soviet" aesthetic and the pretty massive oversight on gender. Not to mention we've already an as introduction to a plot about a brothel, which I'm kind of also not into, unless it's done well, but at this point, I don't trust the game to do it well.

    So what do you think? Anyone played it? Is it actually worth playing?

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