Blackbeard in particular was all about the aesthetics. He’s the archetype for a damn good reason: theatricality makes legends. There’s no historical account of him ever directly killing anyone until his final battle, but that’s not what the outfit says. He’s basically pirate Batman.
am I the only one who finds extremely funny when people ask for directions with their smartphone in their hand
Depends on the context.
If I’m hanging out with friends, in a city or area I’m relatively familiar with, and somebody suggests going to a restaurant or something I don’t know, I might just casually ask “Where is it? How are we getting there?” or something like that. Because there’s a good chance I don’t need to pull out my phone, open an app, type something in, make sure it’s the right location (being buried beneath the ad results), and following the steps the whole time, when a simple “just head to where the BDSM dungeon is, it like 2 doors down”
I get being annoyed by the excuse when your kid, but it’s bizarre seeing adults still harping on this decades later.
You couldn’t use a calculator in math class for the same reason you couldn’t use a segway in gym class. Because there’s a lot more going on in a math class than just teaching you how to enter the correct answer.
Like… presumably most people here took some college of some kind, it shouldn’t be hard to grasp that education is a complex and multifaceted thing. It was never just about getting every answer right.
Are we still acting like this excuse was the actual explanation for why you couldn’t use a calculator?
They just said this. It was easier than trying to explain the nuances of education to kids. The actual reason was “because you have to learn to use your brain to do shit, it’s kind of important.”
Like, this is the equivalent of being upset the gym teacher wouldn’t let you use a segway in class. You’re missing the point.
Google Play Music was legitimately excellent. The last Google service I ever paid for that I was 100% happy with.
It died because that style of music app wasn’t seen as “in vogue” anymore. It was much more akin to a music manager app, but also one that allowed you to manage things on the streaming service. Best of both worlds. Library management tools and options that have been a thing since iTunes popularized them a decade earlier, but all the content, suggestions, playlists, and radio functionality of Spotify.
And someone at Google decided to burn it down, make it a Spotify clone (with all the same neutered management tools), shove it into YouTube, and gave a huge middle finger to customers that paid for the app as it was (and they probably got a promotion for it).
Don’t ever trust Google. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good or bad service, it means nothing. They’ll fuck it up eventually.
Mine are all super specific to sites I use and various elements of them I hate.
Just little things that I don’t want to see. “Score” gets blocked on Reddit. Don’t have a problem with the voting, but the numbers are just distracting to me.
For a similar example, I tend to go out of my way to create filters that block random visual ratings for media. Like when you search for a movie and get the IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes scores without having asked for them.
Not that I have a problem with ratings in general, it’s that they’re effectively opinions, and when I want to hear opinions on media, I’ll go look for them. I really don’t like looking up something about a show or movie I enjoy and see a giant visual indicator “HEY PEOPLE HATE THIS”, or vise versa. Or you’re just going to OpenSubtitles or a meta data site to get something and have to be reminded how the internet feels about this thing.
One odd stand out is Sonarr/Radarr. I can’t create a filter for those search results, because they’re not elements on the page apparently, and there’s no setting to turn it off.
You don’t have to care. No one does. No one is blocking this from working.
It’s just not being listed on Nexus.
Moreover this mod wasn’t giving options to players to choose how they wanted to play, it was changing very specific things and advertising it. Nexus doesn’t care to let them use their platform to advertise a mod made for a very specific audience of really shitty people.
I don’t see how this is any different than when straight characters in a game hit on you and you have to reject them. Why does the sexuality or gender of the person change anything when it comes to rejection? You’re either into them or you aren’t. Make a mod that eliminates awkward rejection moments across the board.
It’s a matter of targeting. There are ways to address the change you’d like to see that aren’t this focused, give granular control, and permit players to form an experience of their own. It’s not just about the mod they made, it’s about the mod they could have made but didn’t, and that reveals a prejudice.
In other words, there’s “let people mod whatever they like” and there’s mods that are effectively a statement of an ethos, and not all ethos are worth letting your platform be used to broadcast.
There’s also mods that are tools to give players more freedom, and mods that are fixes to correct what the dev sees as mistakes or shortcomings. The difference between “choose what color you want the flags to be” and “the flags are all blue now”. The latter is a statement of a belief: “I think the game would be better if all the flags were blue”.
The changes in this mod could be framed differently, like “gives player more granular control over NPC gender and sexuality”. It could have been done in a respectful and open-ended fashion that doesn’t play on harmful stereotypes. It could even be used to make the game “more gay” if the player chooses, then if some players choose to make it all “less gay”, so be it. That would be fine.
But that’s not what this mod is, and the intent behind it is fairly obvious. There’s no reason to pussyfoot around this one with arguments about player freedom, that wasn’t why it was made.
Part of it, for me, is that I still want to play games as I did when I was younger. I.e. multi-hour play sessions. To sit there and just get lost in it for the whole evening.
But increasingly that’s becoming unworkable. I got shit to do.
The solution, then, would be to adjust my expectations to like an hour of playtime here and there. But when I do that, I’ve created a schedule, and time limit, both of which really kill my personal enjoyment of game time. Playing a game while watching the clock is just not relaxing to me.
So I keep holding out for more of those evenings, those solid chunks of time when I pick up the controller and play till I’m ready for bed. But they’ve become so few and far between that gaming has become a weekend thing. That’s a problem in itself because the weekend is generally reserved for doing things with my partner or other outings.
Quarantine was probably the most gaming I’ve done in a long time. I basically got to play with the same reckless abandon as I did when I was much younger, for a couple solid months. But the chances of me being able to have that same relationship with this past time ever again appears fleeting.
The benefit of a visual medium is being able to show the punchline without actually having it spelled out in text.
It’s redundant and clunky, often using a cliche line, like “I should have known _____.” or “Really? You just had to ________?” or “wow, ______, why am I not surprised?”