Arc Raiders’ Rattler was built for these folks. Automatic rifle, loads bullets two at a time into its bolted-on magazine.

I think when the policy is well-made, it would fit with security camera workings. When you go shopping at the mall, pay for your stuff and leave, you’re recorded, but the running footage is erased every 48 hours or so. It’s only when the mall has a major shoplifting incident, or a mass shooting, would someone tag the period of the crime and save it all for review. Similarly, police would only need body camera review if there’s a report they discharged their weapon, made an arrest, etc.

There are so many family caretakers that have a similar unfortunate dichotomy in their minds. Like everyone else is mourning at the funeral, but they saw that person “die” a decade ago, leaving behind a husk of hate, forgetfulness, or missing energy.

It starts to feel a bit like going to university. Maybe 10% of the ones you try out will be total misses, maybe even discourage you on the search. But chances are, 90% of the options are perfectly suitable for your uses, and everyone will end up feeling a bit of faithful loyalty to their destination of choice.

I wonder if there’s a name for the behavior where no “alt word” is created.

“Bread” is “pan” in Spanish. We had cultural exchange, both had bread, and related the word. But America didn’t have tacos. So, we use their word.

If you imagine an industrialized nation meeting with a basic hunting tribe, the latter is going to be missing a LOT of words, and hence no matter the origins of their linguistic structure they’ll call a satellite a satellite.

I avoided that game based on the name, but from what I gather, it was misleading; pretty much every sect of that school is full of jerks (sadly including the nerds, who often cater to their own victim complex), and your character is just facing the larger of them.

I can give my historical experience. Early 2025, I saw horrific articles on Copilot and decided to switch early. I had a bad distro hopping experience. First tried Linux Mint, might have been a slightly old install, but even my wifi didn’t work. Tried a later install, and it was much better, but game performance wasn’t great. Hitman WOA didn’t even load levels. Helldivers 2 had an annoying white border (I eventually fixed this a year later using an odd hack)

I then tried Bazzite. I didn’t quite like the layout, but it functioned. I had a hard time installing apps; it tried to simplify this with various virtualization/containerized solutions, but it meant so many tutorials for basic native-Linux apps didn’t work.

When W10 EOL came around, I tried another distro well touted: CachyOS. It was very smooth. I learned it’s Arch, same as the Steam Deck, and does have some “technical complexities” which I felt I wanted to avoid, but I guess in the end it’s been nothing I’m not a little used to from my work as a programmer. It mostly uses okay UIs for system settings, and some programs require you to use another package installer rather than their default “Octopi”. Some of my early issues came from installing Flatpaks rather than Arch User Repository items.

Games have been fantastic. Rarely when something uses video I need ProtonGE, which is an easy toggle; I should probably just make it default. Helldivers 2 and Division 2 seem to run better than on Windows.

The biggest decider has been: Changing to Linux was NOT annoyance free. There was transition, there was fiddly configuration, and I replaced some apps I use. A key thing is, Windows was quickly moving away from being annoyance free - stuffing Copilot and OneDrive ads into EVERYTHING. So, even accepting a few Linux struggles ended up being an overall lesser frustration.

At thte very least, the GOP has been losing some key elections in 2025, some they didn’t even expect to lose. Maybe some people could theorize these as “tactical losses”, but you may be better off not incorrectly viewing these idiots as masterminds. They bank on complicity, not tactics.

The main thing I think is a valid fear is losing things necessary to reinstall Windows in case of emergency.

With 11, they tie it to MS account which makes a reinstall easier. Some devices, I think it’s tied to the hardware though? That’s actually something I’d like to learn more about so people doing Linux tryouts have a safety net.

I’m curious if a dev that carefully manages placeholders could at least garner interest from artists this way. Clair Obscur’s debacle with their Indie Award demonstrates how horrible this can turn out if they miss even one asset; but sadly, I empathize coming from a position where I devoted my studies into learning coding and writing techniques, not artistry.

My space game was cubes and cylinders colliding.

The police are hundreds of years old. They still need warrants.

The silliest ones I’ve seen now are ads for mobile games that put censor stickers over the “parts” of fully clothed women. (Yes, even in the game, they’re fully clothed)

I like my idea for a Factorio movie.

An engineer crash lands on a planet during a corporate visitation to another planet. Desperate, he finds his company’s schematic drive on factory creation. He builds his way up to a satellite, which is preprogrammed to beam his SOS home. Relieved, he hits the button to launch it, watches it go up.

Then, looks down at everything he got to build on his own, with no oversight, no managerial correction, all his own efficiency. He’s even made his own greenhouses to make his own food. Automated a logistics bot to attempt a new mix of coffee each morning, warmed by residual nuclear reactor heat.

Something stirs in him, and he “accidentally” veers the satellite 8 degrees off course. It sheers against the atmosphere and burns to a crisp, its wreckage destroying his semiconductor production (which is then rebuilt automatically within the hour). The engineer resumes his next project.

From there, eventually a passing ship does a scan of the planet, curiously finding it inhabited and very industrialized. They send a lander to the surface to investigate. It’s shot down by a fleet of hundreds of missiles.

The issue goes to Earth’s military command. They have no idea who is on this planet but need to take the threat seriously. Another scouting contingent is deployed, able to land on a safer side of the planet, but on the way down, they spot a “city” in which buildings are arranged in the words “GO AWAY”.

Landing, the scouts work out that the nearby bots are from the corp’s schematics, and slowly work out what happened. They attempt a few more efforts to extract the engineer, now as a prisoner for shooting down a craft, but the “war” continues.

Eventually, a psychologist is able to ask the engineer about his feelings of loneliness on the planet. He replies that he’s been alone for far longer than his space flight, and even on Earth no one connected with him - machines just made sense. He curses his company’s greed for infinite growth, and declares the planet is off limits.

The psychologist accepts his terms - but also ridicules him, since his factory exhibits the same pointless growth as his company. And so, he remains, a prisoner of his own planet.

Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.

I recently had a long opinion post I made get downvoted. What upset me wasn’t that someone disagreed with me, it was that they didn’t take the time to explain their own contradicting position, because I wanted to figure out if I had something to learn there.

Totally agree with this one. I just posted about Quake Brutalist Jam 3, but it still annoys me that any use of the multi-missile launcher cuts into my time with the grenade launcher, and so on.

Dead Space 3 gave me an aneurysm because they just have one resource: “aMmO”.

I don’t even mind the oft-irritating “Ammo full for Pufferfish Launcher” notification, because it’s at least a reminder I should use the Pufferfish Launcher more often.

As long as people are able to stay civil, I’m definitely happy to dive into this subject, because it interests me a lot and I’m eager to see if anyone feels they learn something from it.

if the creator wants his characters to look a specific way then so what?

Valid sentiment, but it gets weird when “the creator” is not just one auteur, but a big network of interconnected developers. One may “really want a hot springs scene with detailed looks at the female lead’s boobs”, while much of the rest of the devs are uncomfortable with it, think it will hurt narrative pacing, or even think it could hurt sales.

I do think it’s hard to argue that sex un-sells, but there’s at least some slight data to suggest it. Two games come to mind. One is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the other is Nier Automata. Both games sold well and had dedicated fans - but both also had a decently large number of players that saw what they viewed as “cringey anime hornbait” and decided to ignore it - even if the game would’ve readily contained other features they might have enjoyed - intricate JRPG mechanics and DMC combat. I don’t even view that audience as “prude” - they just generally held the sentiment that the sexiness was so out of place, it was distracting from the core themes of those games. In N:A’s case, it was a much smaller minority, but you could see in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 it kind of toned sexualization back.

if you’re upset that there’s an unrealistically attractive male or female in a game, respectfully, go fuck yourself. There’s millions of video games that you can also enjoy without your weird preconceived notions that video game characters need to be as attractive or less attractive than you personally are. Video games are a fantasy for a reason.

THIS, I think, is the biggest misconception. Although this is hard to cite with data, I feel reasonably confident in positing a theorem: Aside from an absolutely tiny, vanishingly small base, many of whom don’t even play games, I don’t think anyone * is upset at game characters being “too attractive”*. I watch quite a few female streamers, and by and large, they’re happy and eager to play games with gorgeous women in them. On many occasions, they don’t even care too much about sexualized outfits.

Where I think there’s the most silent sensitivity, and perhaps game publishers haven’t quite parsed this thought, is in objectification. captainlezbian kind of covered the thought - how sex should be humanizing and treat the sexy characters as people, with agency. When an attractive character is an “award”, or never speaks, or their decisions/actions have no effect on any story events, that can go from losing people’s attention to even making them feel uncomfortable - like their gender is “not allowed” in the medium.

Dead or Alive: Sexy, not always quite objectifying. The large-breasted characters range from master assassins on missions, to secret weapon projects, to girlboss CEOs bent on world control.
Bayonetta: Quite the opposite of objectifying. Bayonetta’s domineering personality, even when she’s stripping nude, evokes control over the characters and space around her.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: VERY objectifying - would be even if Pyra had smaller breasts. Pyra is cute, but she’s incredibly subservient, and basically relies on Rex, the male lead, to take charge as leader and protect her. She’s constantly oblivious to the more pervy characters in the cast. A lot of classic anime at least skirted the latter issue by having female leads highly aware, and beat up the lechers near them (even if the viewer benefited from their exploits). I don’t mind saying this was too much for even me. Again: Agency.

get some massive bodonhonkaroos in there, give that guy a massive bulge and a 18 pack, who fucking cares it’s a video game.

I think where this can get confusing is that, by and large, women aren’t quite seeking the same overtly excessive appearances in games as men. If you want some examples, search on Steam for what “Otome” games look like, and picture your male leads in a superhero game looking like that - complete with open button shirts and pensive, slightly-girly attitudes. Uncomfortable? Yeah - that shows what you said, about how not everything will appeal to everyone.

We’re lucky in that women generally are not sorely offended by women in games having breasts (Le Gasp!) but there’s neat ways of making them attractive for all players that don’t instantly produce an “ICK” from a sizable number of players.

The real silver bullet I’ve seen is customization, which is often a win-win. I often point to Stellar Blade as a good example; the default outfit for Eve fits the sci-fi fantasy very well. Then, you unlock a LOT of extremely sexualized, even objectifying, outfits, as well as other “cute, functional” outfits. I don’t mind saying I dived into the former, while many people less interested in sexualization enjoyed the latter. Generally, all parties involved appreciate Eve’s attractive figure and long hair.

Unions decided on four panel structure. What are you, anti-union?

This is why I’d almost rather linear games that teach one core mechanic rather than “Build your character the way you want them”.

I’d really like to see a set of publishers/creators that take a hard line stance on this, and reject contracts with, eg, Speedtree, if they insist on a dedicated startup video.

Kudos to Arc Raiders. When I boot it up, aside from an EAC launcher logo, it goes straight to Speranza.