squirrel

squirrel, 8 months ago

If there is one upside to the Microsoft/ActiBlizz merger, then it is that this parasite will finally get out of the gaming industry. Kotick has shown again and again that he barely knows what his studios actually did. He infamously stalled the development of games with his incompetence, burdening devs with needless extra work.

So that guy now thinks he knows what the future of gaming is going to look like? Get f***ed, Kotick!

squirrel, 9 months ago

Don’t forget their plan to allow users kick out mods and then imagine how people with monetary interests will conspire to kick out mods that stop from from maximising their profits…

squirrel, 8 months ago

I hate it too. As much as I enjoy Lemmy, Reddit was my go-to social platform thing for a long time. I hate to see it being mismanaged by an incompetent fool like Spez.

squirrel, 8 months ago

At the moment my main gripe is that people still refuse to move to other platforms despite it all. I want to scream “It’s not going to get better, folks!” at them all of the time. But I am too tired to do it.

squirrel, 8 months ago

Yes, of course. The network effect is buoying up Reddit as it is and probably will be until a critical mess of users leave it for good. Besides the obvious truth that Lemmy/Kbin are slower and that’s not what Redditors are used to who have learned to expect something new every time they update their frontpage.

squirrel, 9 months ago

I really liked the finale of that one.

squirrel, 9 months ago

Ars Technica has done an interview with Unity’s Marc Whitten and Whitten’s responses are very, very telling:

“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”

It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.

Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.

And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.

squirrel, 9 months ago

Thank you. I try to make an effort, but it is really hard to type. Humans should make smaller keyboards.

squirrel, 9 months ago

A beak or feet work too, but I get your point. Invertebrates obviously have a hard time with typing.

squirrel, 9 months ago

My sympathies. Keyboard producers are really dropping the ball for you guys.

squirrel, 9 months ago

Nippon TV has been funding studio Ghibli films since the 90s and also owns (for example) Madhouse. While I am also sceptical of where this leads, I think it’s one of the better options for Ghibli overall. At least Nippon TV has shown in the past that they understand what Ghibli is doing and isn’t just picking them up because they have the money to do so.

squirrel, 9 months ago

“My child”

squirrel, 9 months ago

Louise Fletcher was such an outstanding actress. Nobody could play a character that you love-to-hate quite like her. Just thinking of her saying “My child!” and I feel primordial rage rising.

squirrel, 9 months ago

Yes, please assimilate me. I need a nap and some snacks so bad.

squirrel, 9 months ago

It is not the strikes that cost the US economy money, it is the greed of absurdly overpaid executives who want to wring every cent of profits out of workers.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Considering that DA veteran David Gaider left ages ago, I do not have much hope left for the next DA game. BioWare may have hung on a little bit longer than other EA studios, but it looks like the notorious mismanagement by EA will get it too.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Pssst! Hey, bud! Yes, you! Do you want to buy an… 8?

squirrel, 10 months ago

Besides settler colonialism, there is something else going on with “meat and masculinity”: Hunting for meat was the favorite sport of the (male) aristocracy in most of Europe for centuries. The aristocratic desire to be seen as capable hunters had a unique influence on the development of masculinity, particularly in the 19th century when European aristocrats began to lose power to the rising bourgeois who - in turn - emulated the aristocratic lifestyle and adopted many of its habits.

squirrel, 10 months ago

XD

squirrel, 10 months ago

ShoeOnHead is rehashing the usual right-wing talking points about how man are the actual victims of capitalism and society without acknowledging patriarchy in any meaningful way is exactly the kind of laundering of right-wing opinions that ShoeOnHead has done for years by now.

She has always been a right-wing grifter who enjoys pretending to engage with leftist thought in order to grift even harder. She is a deeply unserious person and any deeper engagement with her statements is a waste of anyone’s time.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Well, there is the MetaCritic user score too. It currently sits at 1.4, so it should surprise nobody.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Tired: I am making coffee.

Wired: I am brewing a +2 Attention potion.

Inspired: I condemn these beans to the heat of hell in order to extract their powers.

squirrel, 10 months ago

A print of this painting hang in a school I went to. It gave me nightmares as a kid. Which was probably exactly the effect that de Chirico intended. 😅

squirrel, 10 months ago

As Mister Gowron used to say: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for those who seek glory. You will always find people who seek glory.’”

squirrel, 10 months ago

Origin of the comic panel

spoilerThe panel is from “Deadpool 2019/Vol 8 issue 8”. The shark’s actual name is Jeffrey and the original text only says “these kids”.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Yeah, that was my initial reaction too. Such meta jokes would be 100% in line with what current Deadpool writers do, but I guess Blahaj was not such a trans icon yet when the comic came out originally.

squirrel, 10 months ago

It’s Karl Friedrich Schinkel, not Gustav. Whoops!

squirrel, 10 months ago

Tolkienesque fantasy has become the carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy ages ago…
And it becomes even more apparent when people consider that Tolkienesque fantasy tropes aren’t even about “medieval Europe”, they are about a particular English pseudo-medieval world. Fantasy doesn’t do much exploring even beyond the English-speaking world.

Southern Europe (Italy, France, Spain,…) aren’t even featured much. The landscape may allude to it, but then the same Northern European castles sit on the top of hills, occupied by the same kind of lords that you’d find in other parts of the game map.
And other parts of the medieval world do not fare much better: Everything around the Mediterranean is reduced to stereotypes or entirely replaced by some fantasy race. Every place outside of Europe/the Mediterranean fares even worse.
It has no depth, no knowledge of particular local traditions, it is not rooted in any stories, only recalls the same tired tropes that Tolkien established.

Even inside Europe and around the Mediterranean, the medieval world was very diverse. Every region had its own traditions, stories, clothing, customs and its own mythologies with their own particular kinds of monsters and creatures.
But you’d not know through most fantasy stories which - no matter the landscape they take place in - it always boils down to a band of adventurers walking into an inn, drinking a beer and paying it with gold coins, before they go off to kill some orcs in the name of some duke. Very little thought is spend on considering if it even makes sense that a place that is akin to - let’s say - Southern France had any of these things.

When Tolkien wrote LOTR, he based most of it on ancient Germanic stories like “Beowulf”, that there are uncountable other folktales and stories from all over the ancient world which could be chosen as the basis of a fantasy setting instead.

squirrel, 10 months ago

For most people it is a matter of training.
Yeah, some people have a weaker gag reflex than others, so it’s easier for them, but at the end of the day most people need to train the ability to swallow.

The basics are: Slowly going deeper, bigger and lasting longer. Allow your body to adapt to the feeling without instantly “panicking” (= gagging). It takes time. The key is to relax, not to tense up.

If you tested your ability with a toothbrush already, you can make that a routine. Do it whenever you brush your teeth and slowly get used to the feeling.

Once you got somewhat used to that, you can move on to bigger stuff and try to take it deeper. I advise against trying to “force” it and go big too quickly, no matter how enticing it may be. You may end up throwing up.

As a safety precaution make sure that whatever you train with has something you can firmly grab onto or a flared base in the case of a dildo.

squirrel, 10 months ago

Ultimately it all comes down to how comfortable you feel and how quickly your body adapts. It is an individual thing.

In regards to depth: Simply go as far as you can before you start to gag. Over time you will probably be able to put whatever you use to train in deeper before it becomes too uncomfortable.
You may simply have to test that.

The toothbrush is a good start. Alternatively to the toothbrush many people suggest opening your mouth as wide as possible - as if you are yawning - and then stick a finger in there as deep as you can.

Some people recommend moving up to a (peeled!) banana: It has the upside that it’s soft, curved and size-wise closer to a dick. Once you can swallow that, you can move on to a dildo if you need to. Make sure that the dildo is on the softer side, because hard dildos can get you a sore throat.

Take your time with this, but keep at it. Most people do it once per day. Once again, it varies how long it takes, so don’t feel frustrated iftakes a while before you will be comfortable with it.

squirrel, 11 months ago

The simple answer is: Easy scapegoats. Blame trans people for “western degeneracy”, “gender ideology”, “enfeebling the youth” and other fascist all-time greats.

That’s far easier to do than solve the actual problems of the country.

squirrel, 11 months ago

cries in Ugandan

squirrel, 11 months ago

I agree. This is a) a PR move and b) part of their “divide and conquer” strategy: They’ll keep on schmoozing the mods who go along with Reddit’s bullshit and keep on kicking out mods who aren’t.

squirrel, 11 months ago

Not over here either.

squirrel, 11 months ago

Personality rights are already a thing. They are a mess in the US though.