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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: May 22nd, 2024

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  • I dunno, any attempt I ever made to engage in the discourse around her stance on Gaza was tiring and alienating. Even stating that she was the lesser of two evils and that I’d vote for her didn’t stop people from dismissing me as a Russian bot, or a bad faith actor who’s merely trying to hurt the momentum of her campaign.

    The ‘swallow the genocide or democracy gets it’ crowd didn’t make the issue go away; they just made it silent.

    Gaza is not a small topic right now. In a political landscape where Donald Trump thinks it’s important to make a pretense of being anti-war, the democrats genuinely supporting the worst kind of war was always going to be bad for them.


  • I have only ever played the game once, so it was my first playthrough.

    I still oriented myself with the map of course, but checking your route on a map is a much different gameplay experience than having the minimap on your HUD. It means you’re actually engaging with the game’s geography and its landmarks rather than just looking up from the minimap occasionally to see if your character has run into combat or got caught in some stray geometry.



  • I did play the Witcher without a minimap and it was excellent. It was a well designed game with good landmarks, good geographic flow and useful dialogue that communicated through the game world and characters itself.

    Other games aren’t as well designed and are literally impossible to play with the minimap disabled.

    And for sure, I hate dumb fetch quests as much as anyone, but having meta-game direction techniques like highlighting and minimaps/compasses makes it far easier for designers to get away with poorly designed dumb quests of zero consequence because at no point do you ever need to think about what you’re doing.


  • You’ve described a single potential alternative to not highlighting interactivity. One other alternative would be designing the gameplay and the game’s world with enough gestalt that heavy handed direction and pacing tactics aren’t needed.

    For a lot of games, functional and immersive dialogue would go a long way to addressing this. It’s why, for instance, the Witcher 3 can mostly be played without the minimap enabled while Watch Dogs 2 cannot.




  • Some people are active in their own political communities without needing the likes of their online meme communities and other peripheral interests being flooded by political discussion from Americans.

    An important step towards reducing America’s tremendous influence around the world is to divest ourself from participation in their political sphere at a cultural and national level.

    We don’t need to constantly validate Americans that their country is the political centre of the entire world. That’s part of the problem.