jericho
23d ago
I'll admit that's a trend, especially in the AAA open world design space, but I don't see why things have to be that way. There are plenty of other games where they're still designed for Alice, then Bob is thrown a bone by cranking his modifiers up and his enemy's modifiers down until he can faceroll it.
If you still need the Bobs to think the game is designed for them since they're your biggest market segment, just do what Bungie did for Halo 3: design your game around the "Heroic" mode, then rename your "Easy" mode to "Normal" so the Bobs don't feel insulted.
For a slightly more recent example, that's how the Owlcat Pathfinder games work as well. "Core" / "Challenging" utilizes the actual rules for the system, while "Normal" gives the player a variety of cheats to smooth out the experience.
jericho
28d ago
I think there is something to your main thrust re: locus of control, but:
Good luck finding a successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and saying "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my dad buying me a house when I was 21 and getting me an internship in Lockheed Martin because the CEO is his golfing buddy."
I have multiple progressive friends who would absolutely say that they were given significant advantages due to their family connections. I do think it helps that in several of the cases it would be absolutely ridiculous for them to claim otherwise (probably a lot easier to disavow your dad being the golfing buddy of a CEO than your dad being a CEO or if your last name is on a building at the college you went to).
Though if anything that further supports your main argument.
jericho
19d ago
Seconding the advice of swapping to black tea, with the added suggestion that I've had great success replacing half my cups of coffee per day with cups of tea.
I feel more focused and less anxious/jittery with that combination (while also being able to painlessly step down my caffeine consumption).
I think those countries generally being more affluent might help.
My parents never used corporal punishment, but we were also well-off, so they had the option of taking away things that less well-off kids wouldn't have had in the first place.
jericho
26d ago
Perhaps rephrased-
"We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where all the toppings can already be paired with just one of the two flavors"
jericho
1mo ago
Excellent story!
Was this inspired by the comment in last week's thread about what to do about low level antisocial behavior?
And stupid question, but what does "lock in" mean in this case? I'm only familiar with that term in regards to youth group stuff, which is very obviously not the use here.
jericho
26d ago
I'm going Sorcerer this time, having been a Cleric for my first go around. Going straight from 5e to a prepared caster was a bit rough last time, hoping spontaneous will be a little more flexible.
For us the main appeal was the 3 action system (which I do much prefer to move/action/bonus action) and an easier time balancing characters and encounters for the DM.
I'm glad we're using VTT for the calculations and battlemaps, but I really do think quite a bit is lost by not being in person, especially in terms of immersion. Having some kind of touchscreen gaming table in person would probably be the best of both worlds, but would obviously require quite a bit of time and space invested.
jericho
26d ago
After a long hiatus from TTRPGs, getting into a Pathfinder 2e campaign.
I'm a big fan of the system from a mechanical standpoint, and we're using a virtual tabletop which helps with some of the more fiddly modifiers / ranges.
I've been lucky enough to get to consistently "freeload" as a player- my playgroups have tended towards players itching to DM rather than DMs itching to play.
jericho
1mo ago
Aaaah, gotcha.
I'm guessing it is more common in places/times where the legal closing hours are/were earlier- I see the article mentions 11pm, which would be quite early by the standards of places I've lived (usually in the 2am to 4am range).
More credit to you for it, but often the target audience for these games is teenaged boys who tend to be less comfortable choosing anything easier than Normal (speaking from my personal experience of having once been one). If shifting around how things are named allows devs to target a higher skilled audience with their design while still making money, I'm all for it.
jericho
4mo ago
I wonder if this is the first generation appearing that way in the Disney parks - surely there weren't 40-year-old fanatical Disney moms in the 1980s or 90s.
I can say they for sure existed by the 90s as I interacted with some of them at that time. The "Disney Renaissance" coincided with making Disney versions of damn near everything and really pushing it into all corners of life which made this a viable archetype. Annual passes, especially those for Florida residents, were also cheaper at that time so that going to the park multiple times a year was a lot more accessible financially. In 1997 an annual pass was $269, inflation adjusted to $513 while in 2019 it was $1,119, inflation adjusted to $1,340. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the current crop of "Disney Moms" are the children of the initial crop.
I would not dispute, of course, that their numbers have increased greatly over time. I think the increase in prices and wait times along with the variety of schemes (fast pass, fast pass+, genie, apps, etc) to bypass these wait times has led to a lot more people planning their visit in the sort of obsessive, regimented way that those "Disney Moms" were in the 90s-early 2000s rather than just showing up and making their way through the parks, which used to be how almost everyone handled it. I think once you've spent however-much-time looking into different attractions and prioritizing them it's a lot easier to put disproportionate importance on the parks themselves.
jericho
5mo ago
Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?
Almost certainly the former. If these screenshots had been dug up and passed around by someone with progressive bona fides as a result of some internecine dispute, this would have gone done much differently.
jericho
1mo ago
I've met a couple, though it is unclear to me if they were truly pagans or just atheists who liked the aesthetics.
Not beyond what is covered in the document itself, but yes any survey like this is going to be biased because at the bare minimum the respondents are cooperative and capable enough to answer a survey instead of stabbing the person attempting to administer it or simply staring into space when asked questions.
Here is how they said they got responses:
Surveys were conducted by peer survey workers with lived homeless experience who were referred by local service providers. Training sessions were facilitated by ASR, City staff, and community partners. Potential interviewers were led through a comprehensive orientation that included project background information as well as detailed instruction on respondent eligibility, interviewing protocol, and confidentiality. Peer survey workers were compensated at a rate of $7 per completed survey. It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered to respondents in appreciation for their time and participation. Socks were provided as an incentive for participating in the 2019 homeless survey. The socks were easy to distribute, had wide appeal, and could be provided within the project budget. The incentives proved to be widely accepted among survey respondents.
Based on a Point-in-Time Count estimate of 8,035 homeless persons, with a randomized survey sampling process, the 1,054 valid surveys represented a confidence interval of +/- 3% with a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The 2019 survey was administered in shelters, transitional housing facilities, and on the street. In order to ensure the representation of transitional housing residents, who can be underrepresented in a street- based survey, survey quotas were created to reach individuals and heads of family households living in these programs. Strategic attempts were also made to reach individuals in various geographic locations and of various subset groups such as homeless youth, minority ethnic groups, military veterans, domestic violence survivors, and families. One way to increase the participation of these groups was to recruit peer survey workers. Since 2009, the ASR survey methodology has prioritized a peer-to-peer approach to data collection by increasing the number of currently homeless surveyors. In order to increase randomization of sample respondents, survey workers were trained to employ an “every third encounter” survey approach. Survey workers were instructed to approach every third person they considered to be an eligible survey respondent. If the person declined to take the survey, the survey worker could approach the next eligible person they encountered. After completing a survey, the randomized approach was resumed.
And their self-admitted problems with their methodology:
The 2019 San Francisco Homeless Survey methodology relies heavily on self-reported data collected from peer surveyors and program staff. While self-report allows individuals to represent their own experiences, self-reported data are often more variable than clinically reported data. However, using a peer-to-peer interviewing methodology is believed to allow respondents to be more candid with their answers and to help reduce the uneasiness of revealing personal information. Further, service providers and City staff members recommended individuals who would be the best suited to conducting interviews and these individuals received comprehensive training about how to conduct interviews. Service providers and City staff also reviewed the surveys to ensure quality responses. Surveys that were considered incomplete or containing false responses were not accepted, the process for which included reviewing individual surveys submitted by surveyors and assessing patterns in survey responses for inconsistencies. It is important to recognize that variations between survey years may result from shifts in the demographic profiles of surveyors and accessibility to certain populations. Survey confidence intervals presented indicate the level of variability that may occur from year to year when interpreting findings. While every effort was made to collect surveys from a random and diverse sample of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, the hard-to-reach nature of the population experiencing homelessness prevents a true random sampling. Recruitment of diverse and geographically dispersed surveyors was prioritized. However, equal survey participation across all populations may be limited by the participation and adequate representation of subpopulations in planning and implementation processes. This includes persons living in vehicles, who are historically difficult to enumerate and survey.
Edit :To your point:
Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police.
I am not sure how this would be a more representative sample of the homeless population as a whole. I do think that for many matters involving the homeless it would be far more useful to drill into the disruptive + perennial homeless population rather than those who are unobtrusive or temporary. Though there are obvious difficulties in collecting data on those actively working against you doing so.
jericho
4mo ago
While in some cases I'm sure some people are taking "conservative" and "edgy 4chan humor" to extrapolate to "actually a Nazi using the pretense of irony to cover for it", for others "conservative" + "edgy 4chan humor" = "Nazi", no further layers needed.
Radical Feminism is (and especially was) primarily defined in contrast to Liberal Feminism and Marxist Feminism. While Liberal Feminism is primarily concerned with women gaining equality before the law and Marxist Feminism is primarily concerned with dismantling capitalism (as it sees oppression of women as downstream from exploitation of labor and the ownership of private property), Radical Feminism holds that the oppression of women is part of a broader system of patriarchy where women are dominated by men and that equality cannot be achieved by equality before the law or the dismantling of capitalism as the patriarchal social structures would still remain.
Most modern western Feminists who actually actively call themselves Feminists are in fact Radical Feminists, though they usually identify primarily with one of its offshoots. Think of like how a wide variety of different Christian denominations are still Nicene Christians, despite their other disagreements on matters of theology and identification. Someone specifically identifying themselves as "Nicene Christian" or refusing to get more specific than "Christian" probably tells you they have some theological disagreements with other people who would also be accurately described as "Nicene Christians", but they agree on some key elements.
Arguably a lot of Marxist Feminists are more "Radical" in their beliefs/methods than actual "Radical" Feminists, much like "Gay" Republicans are probably not that much happier (if at all happier) than straight ones.
jericho
3mo ago
That seems to fundamentally misunderstand how words work together? That's like someone linking to an organization for self-identified gay Republicans and someone else replying "There's nothing gay about being a Republican". Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't gay Republicans.
People are perfectly capable of being both gay and Republicans and identifying with both those labels, just as they are perfectly capable of being both radical feminists and anti-trans and identifying with both those labels.
jericho
6mo ago
Also my experience. Even Newt Gingrich, possibly one of the least charismatic politicians I can readily think of, was quite a bit more charming than the average Joe when meeting him in person.
jericho
5mo ago
I agree with you broadly but:
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean all of their social/political/economic views are suspect as a result?
I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.
jericho
7mo ago
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
I suppose if you do not consider new weapons for the culture war to be part of the culture war, it would be unrelated.
My impression is also that the user base for video games generally trends less woke than the developers, so I would predict this particular weapon getting pointed one way more often than the other, but that remains to be seen.
A distinction I often see made online, though I'll admit this might be like The Simpsons Jealousy vs Envy distinction (that is to say, not actually a distinction consistent with current or historical use), is that a fetish is required for arousal/climax while a kink is not.
So someone who gets off on feet would have a foot kink, someone who needs feet to get off would have a foot fetish.
jericho
3mo ago
Not really, no.
In terms of most convincing, the first time I had sleep paralysis it was preceded by an erotic dream. I was having the dream and then "woke up" to the feeling of something sitting on my chest and having the image of a black demonic creature with red burning eyes (similar to this painting, which I believe I had already seen at that time). I mumbled my way through the Lord's Prayer until I woke up fully.
After waking up, I fully understood how someone could genuinely believe they had been visited by succubi / incubi. For me, it was sorted by continuing to have instances of sleep paralysis (usually not preceded by erotic dreams and with a whole menagerie of creatures of different forms tormenting me) that did not conform to that pattern until I improved my sleeping habits, at which point the sleep paralysis became much rarer.
jericho
3mo ago
Depends on how clear the memory is.
Some are like clips, with some being closer to full color and others being more faded. Some memories are more like still images, once again sometimes the colors are retained sometimes not.
For any memories that are just words, it's either a case of it literally being a memory of something heard or read or it's something that I used to have a more vivid memory of, but can now only recognize as a factual statement about my past.
Saint Basil's Cathedral, might be pleb tastes but I just love the textures and colors on the domes.
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