Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.
Counterpoint: All the origin characters have bespoke side stories and dialogue, and one of them is a chaotic neutral rogue who is also a bisexual vampire twink.
(Given Sven’s advice here I’m probably just going to go with a drow or tiefling warlock, but Astarion is absolutely on the table for the second playthrough.)
The problem here will be that Elon’s new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It’s appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn’t like the golden arches - there’s nothing novel there to trademark.
I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.
Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.
People like you are why AdNauseam exists, FYI. If you make the non-adblock experience intolerable and then ban adblockers, people have a nasty tendency to fight back rather than knuckling under. I say that as someone who’ll whitelist ads - or donate to - sites I use regularly that aren’t run by shitheads throwing video ads in my face and selling my data to the highest bidder.
I mean, let’s not forget the whole sex predator thing. Their image is going to be faeces smeared on a bathroom wall until Guillemot goes.
Gay people in Malaysia are imprisoned for up to 20 years. This is not a law that deserves respect, and anyone who believes otherwise is a monster.
A tip isn’t a story in itself, it’s a suggestion of where to start looking for one. “Hey, I’m off the record here, but some shady shit is going down at my job and you might want to fire off a Freedom of Information request for x, y and z or talk to a and b” is a pretty good tip.
Quite a boring answer from me:
There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.
Have you tried Shelter 2? It’s not quite the same thing, but you play a lynx with five adorable cubs trying to survive in a wilderness setting. (Warning: your playthrough will likely involve some or all of your adorable cubs dying.)
Putin’s now fled Moscow to Tver. He’s made himself look weak and scared, which is incredibly personally dangerous for any strongman dictator and IMO completely rules out a trick. He might well have sanctioned Prigozhin’s earlier outbursts - he certainly kept to the rule of pretending that Putin himself was infallible, and only being given bad advice by Shoigu - but the only way this ends now is with either Putin or Prigozhin dead.
Russia has already instituted conscription and civilian terror tactics and done everything they really could do to win the war - there’s no further escalation available to them except into the realm of chemical weapons or similar, which would trigger further escalation from the west. And in the long run, NATO can outspend them - Russia’s only real source of aid is China, who will be demanding greater and greater concessions in return. On a strategic and geopolitical level, Russia lost a long time ago, and the only reason they haven’t withdrawn already is that it wouldn’t be survivable for Putin personally - he’d get couped the moment he showed weakness.
Don’t get me wrong, Prigozhin is an irredeemable monster who’s been at the head of some of the worst atrocities in Ukraine and who has based a lot of his appeal on his pyrrhic victory at Bakhmut (while also attacking Shoigu’s failures). But if the coup succeeds, he’s a monster with the political wiggle room to withdraw Russia’s dick from the Ukrainian beehive by blaming all failures on Shoigu and Putin destroying the great and powerful Russian military through their corruption and incompetence and blah blah blah stab in the back blah blah western decadence blah blah blah. And he will have significant political incentive to do so, since it will clear the way for the oligarchs to start making money again as sanctions lift.
If you want to discuss something specific, IMO the only thing out there that beats a forum megathread is a very large community/subreddit dedicated to the topic. Now that Reddit is dying and Lemmy is still growing, that means if you want a place to discuss something like a specific tabletop RPG system then a large forum’s your best bet. Thankfully there are still a few of the ancient giants left around…
This is absolutely a real and important effect, but we should bear in mind that this poll isn’t the thing proving it so it’s kind of a bad headline. In particular, the headline suggests that this is a new and tentative finding rather than something that’s been known for ages, and that it’s possible to disprove the effect by knocking down this survey. Intergroup contact theory actually goes back to the 50s and AFAICT is incredibly well-established.
To prove the effect exists with a survey like this, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who “don’t know any trans people” because they don’t know any trans people from the people who “don’t know any trans people” because all the trans people in their life are terrified of coming out to them. Conversely, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who “know a trans person” because they know someone who’s out to the world from the people who “know a trans person” because they know someone who’s out to only a very few people who they already had good reason to believe would be supportive. There are ways of doing this for people who are better at statistics and experiment design than me, and as I understand it there are studies which do it carefully and do prove the effect, but this isn’t one of them and doesn’t try to be. (And why should it try to be, when the effect’s existence has already been established and studied separately, and when the raw data on a large current sample is useful without reinventing the wheel?)