• Do what thou wilt
• This shall be the whole of the Law
• This space intentionally left blank

https://youtu.be/4nyHPIcbn88 (nsfw lyrics)

I think you’re right, it must have been the sequel!

Is this the one where I kept trying to go visit my mom (as part of my belligerent insistence on looking for stuff to do in the open world after every mission), but the game wouldn’t let me go into any building that wasn’t the next story mission, and then later the main character got chewed out by his mom for never visiting her? I did find that annoying.

It doesn’t bother me so much when a character in a show has to take a turn with the idiot ball, but when a video game wants me to hold the idiot ball it really makes me want to stop playing. Recently I was checking out Fallen Leaf and the very first level ends with a character politely but firmly indicating that I can’t go further in this random cave I’m exploring, because there’s something dangerous stored there… while standing under a stalactite that the game clearly wants you to drop on them. No, god damn it, I am not going to commit murder just to unleash the ancient evil that I would clearly spend the rest of the game stopping. I can just quit here and not be a murderer and the world can stay safe.

I did not even humor it by hitting the stalactite to see what happens, I just pressed alt-F4 and went to play something else.

The problem with this one is that, as a reader/watcher/whatever, it affects your experience even when it doesn’t happen. I was so convinced that Dumbledore was alive at the end of book six. Fell off a balcony? Point of view character gets dragged to the infirmary so we can’t see what happens after that? There’s a phoenix, a bird associated with healing and rebirth, conspicuously singing? That guy is pulling a Gandalf in the next book for sure.

So I spent the whole next book waiting for the dramatic reveal that never came…

In the opening sequence of Final Fantasy XII, two separate characters get stabbed through the “stylish” gaps in their armor… and somehow this doesn’t prompt anyone else to reconsider their armor choices.

“The mentor/parent has to die so that the hero can prove they’re self-actualized” or whatever. It’s okay for your hero to have living parents, even if their parents are also heroes. I promise your story won’t be less interesting if your character’s mentor figure survives.

“Real world politics”? Did I miss the news that Undead Demon Margaret Thatcher is running in the next UK election?

Open-ended, “sandbox” style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than “theme park” style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

For a “sandbox” style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions… and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can’t guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from “how much PvP should there be” to “how much grinding should there be” so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.

This is my second favorite solution!

My favorite solution is fireball.

https://meetunmeat.us/product/luncheon-style-meat/

Water, Non-GMO Soy Protein, Palm Olein, Seasonings (Onion, Black Pepper), Natural Flavors, Potato Starch (Thickener), Modified Vegetable Gum, Wheat (gluten and fiber, Sugar, Yeast Extract, Vinegar, Potassium Salt and Paprika Oil (color)

In Oldschool Runescape it’s pretty common to see characters that are just blatantly bots. If they had plausible usernames and picked a random appearance it wouldn’t even be that obvious, because it’s a whole game about repetitive actions, but a lot of them have the default appearance and gibberish names.

Botting is sort of a different problem because it’s often related to real-money trading, so there’s a more obvious incentive to cheat: running bots generates gold that can be sold for cash.

In addition to that, many people run bots as a sort of side hustle, either to fund their main or just to fund more bots. And I suspect many people use scripts to automate tedious tasks on their main accounts as well, although that would be hard to notice unless you directly interacted with them while they were AFK.

My last character who was getting well known in the local area was also well known for blowing his gold on booze and gambling at every available opportunity, which is a good way to deter the money-seekers!

All, top 6 hours.

Much safer than fidgeting with your actual switchblade, which is extremely tempting, lmao.

I don’t understand the chart in this article about body type vs. underwear style. It doesn’t relate to the question that it’s located directly under, and it makes no attempt to explain why, for example, thin men shouldn’t wear boxers.

I can’t tell if this article is AI generated or just rushed out by someone trying to meet a quota.

Okay the image is messy but the snake coiling around the scales is actually a sick concept.

That’s not what the article is saying though? It doesn’t say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn’t have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).

Is that bad? I love almond milk but I feel like it deserves its own word. :P