dreadgoat

This comment will include a lot of spoilers for the yokoverse. Continue at your own peril.

Anyway, just to give you an idea of how little any of this matters to Yoko Taro, here’s how his stories have developed:

Drakengard: Ends with absolute apocalypse, total destruction of the world, no coming back.

Nier: Let’s go ahead and change the name and say that all the Drakengard stuff has now entered a new dimension. Our dimension! The story technically goes on, and THIS time we’ll have the absolute apocalypse of OUR world.

Drakengard 3: Where do we go to continue the Darkengard name? Make it a prequel! Ezpz. Also we already did interdimensional stuff so let’s add time travel why not.

Nier Automata: Okay the world basically ended for humans, but who cares? Just make it all about legacy of humans.

You know what, we can do even more already. Why not pepper in some mobile games, like Nier Reincarnation and SINoALICE (yes, this is still Nier universe). Why keep it to games? Let’s write light novels (YoRHa, Drakengard 1.3) and a stage play (YoRHa Boys). I am not even the biggest Yokostan so this list is probably incomplete.

My personal take is that this methodology is all very intentionally tied to the main theme of the Yokoverse, which is that no matter how dark and hopeless the situation may become, there is always a future; a new opportunity.

Homelander will definitely be a zoner, Omni-man is a bruiser.

It’s the same basic gamefeel NRS has been doing for a while now. If you’ve played MK11, Injustice 1 or 2, you can expect pretty much more of the same baseline experience with new characters, moves, fatalities.

Story is a solid new entry if that’s what you’re going for.

You are underestimating the type of people this law is targeting. Nobody who is just stressed out is going to be forced into an institution (although I agree the law should be carefully written to guarantee that). This is meant to get people who are full-on batshit insane off the streets and in an environment where they at least have a CHANCE of getting sorted out.

For example, I have a friend who is psychotic. No, I’m not misusing the word or exaggerating, this is a person who is sincerely and obviously psychotic, diagnosed as such by a psychiatrist, sees and hears things that are not there, believes that the government is all rape-demons from hell that are out to harvest our sanity.
When unmedicated, that is.
Once medicated, she is like “holy shit clarity thank god, keep giving me the medicine.” But if there’s ever a lapse, we go right back to the rape-demons from hell trying to force pills down her throat and the only way to save her is to, essentially, violate her by being the rape-demon from hell that forces pills down her throat. Which is of course very illegal but people care enough about her to do it anyway.

It would be very nice for it to NOT be illegal to save people from the rape-demons from hell, to have a support system in place aside from what is basically a secret cabal of friends and family as a safety net should this person end up somewhere alone and unable to access their meds.

You’re missing the scale.

Everyone knew BG3 would “a success,” but it hasn’t just been a success, it’s been a nuclear bomb of a success.

Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the “hope we get there” number.

Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It’s that level of joyful shock.

The determining question for whether or not it’s the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn’t death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you’re closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

But REALLY it ultimately doesn’t matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.

It’s strange, people can’t seem to help themselves.

Even the Star Citizen community was full of people talking about how Starfield was finally going to deliver as the superior sandbox space sim.

Space Game is not a genre, it’s a setting. Bethesda RPGs are gonna Bethesda RPG, no matter how you flavor it.

You don’t need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and “die” for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn’t altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who’s to say you’re really the same person?

In practice, employment contracts are always good for employees and usually bad for employers. You don’t want to be locked into a job? Then don’t sign a contract that locks you in. Just refuse, as just about any sane person would.

Employers WOULD refuse to be locked in, except sane governments force them to. Sane governments do not force regular citizens into indentured servitude.

If you’re a skilled salaried worker the law doesn’t really consider you to have work hours. Furthermore, you aren’t required to be compensated for time you are on-call unless you are required to physically be present.

US labor laws are truly horrifying if you start asking yourself a few “what-ifs.” The entire system is built on good faith.

This seems like a marketing move. When the Parental Advisory Label was created for the music industry, some bands and labels went out of their way to make sure they got it put on their albums, sometimes even altering their content just for that purpose, because it would actually drive sales. Of course every kid listening to rock and rap wanted “the real shit.”

Here again we are being promised “the real shit” by a meaningless content warning.

It also helps Konami keep its distance from Kojima, which is probably what both of them want.

It reeks of immaturity in general, or maybe more cynically, the perception of a bunch of nerds that have never had a sex life. There are so few games that handle sexual and romantic relationships realistically, and now that we have one nobody knows what to make of it.

Some characters take things slow. Opening up gradually, sharing some wine, holding hands and enjoying a single kiss on a night alone together. Eventually this ramps up naturally.

Some characters on the other hand are like, “you ready to fuck? I’m ready. Love? Never heard of it.”

Both of these are normal and it’s cool to see both represented in the same world.

Instead of removing two instances of S and replacing both with an X, you could simply remove the first S and replace it with a K. This would provide a functionally identical output with less code changes, and would preserve arity. Provide comments explaining the reason for the unintuitive implementation of the “fixes” interface so that future maintainers don’t mistakenly rewrite it. Pull request rejected.

Ada has been fairly aggressive in shaping her community on blahaj, so I think we’ll see some splintering soon.

Logically there are two positions one can hold as a public LGBT (or any marginalized group) community:
Either we are first and foremost a safe space for our members, and will moderate aggressively to keep it that way
or
We are first and foremost the public face of this community, serving as a place for us to stage the culture war for our own safety and acceptance

Both of these are cool and make sense, but blahaj kind of fell accidentally into the second role due to the massive popularity of 196, while Ada really seems to want to cultivate the safe space instead. I’m sure the community is split, but time will tell just how deeply.

My unqualified prediction is that blahaj will intentionally obscure itself, get out of the limelight and try to focus itself more as a community of internal discussion and camaraderie for LGBT folks, and those who are unhappy with that will attempt to build a new 196 on an instance that is less curated.

AKA Absurdism

The world is less frightening if it makes sense, even if the ways it makes sense don’t make sense.

I’d say Windows you expect to get a Honda Civic but instead you get a Toyota Camry. It’s not what you wanted, but it does everything you needed it to do, but also nothing really cool.

Linux you expect to get jalopy held together by duct tape and dreams, but instead get a juiced up supercar with manual transmission and a bunch of supercar fanatics as friends. unfortunately it is not street legal

Mac depiction is accurate.