Listen, man, I can get stuff wrong sometimes. I’m still not convinced I am in this case, but, even if I am off on one very specific niche use of a word that rarely, if ever, comes up, attacking my entire livelihood over it, as though it defines every facet of teaching English, is an insane overstep.

I am not so arrogant as to assume words can only ever have one meaning, nor to attack a stranger on the internet over a disagreement on that meaning. I have also made no such logical fallacy. You asked if I was “sure”, and followed up with a suggestion that I had never spoken with a native English speaker. I said yes, I am confident, and then offered up my background as evidence that, at the very least, your assessment on my experiences is incorrect. I can see how you could conflate that as a call to authority, and perhaps should have phrased things in such a way that doesn’t leave room for such assumptions. That said, I’d advise against jumping down people’s throats based on assumptions, else you’ll end up doing things like building a strawman argument, while simultaneously accusing others of logical fallicies.

I’m done with this. The level of vitriol the “discussion” has been laced with is in warrented and suggests that any further conversation is a waste of time. This entire disagreement should have been:

“Hey, I think X is right.” “Well, this says Y is right, so you must be wrong.” “I mean language is funky and weird, a lot of words mean different things in different spaces, so whatever.” “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

Everything beyond that was grossly unnessecary, terminally online, internet arrogance that we’d both be better off without.

I’m not sure if you found my original statements challenging to follow, but nothing you’ve said contradicts what I’ve said. Parts of the definitions I’ve provided are strewn in the definitions you’ve provided, and differing definitions of specific word case isn’t unusual, even within similiar cultures. Language is fluid, and the same words can mean a lot of different things.

There is often a gap between common-use language, and the academic function of words (see “racism”). This is why I emphasized the relation of the definitions I provided to the fields of anthropology and sociology, as well as why I stated it is a use almost exclusively found, in my experiences, in academia.

I don’t appreciate the strange, ignorant, tongue-in-cheek jabs at my background. If you think I have something wrong I welcome you to say so, but the strange sense of superiority you’ve attached to your comments is unnessecarily insulting.

I am literally an English teacher, and have spent years editing university papers for English as an additional language learners. Yes, I am sure.

“People” is a generic term for more than one person.

“Persons” denotes a singular distinct grouping of people. Ie, Native American persons.

Not part of the question, but “peoples” is used for a plurality of distinct persons. Ie, “this had great impact on the various peoples of North America” would be a sentence to lead into a discussion on how an event had varying impacts on each unique cultural group in North America. This is largely only used in academics, specifically anthropology and sometimes sociology, but understand this use helps clear up the reason for the distinction between “people” and “persons”.

While I understand and agree with your premise to a point, aren’t you advocating for the removal of all randomness in videogames? As long as random factors are tied to outcomes, games will always be playing off that desire that the Skinner Box highlights. I’d argue that the entire modern rogue-lite genre is predicated on the fact that sometimes you will get “better” powerups, upgrades, etc., which leads to better outcomes. Auto-chess games are similiar, where hitting good random rolls leads to high powered teams and easy wins.

Mastery of both these genres requires both a wide birth of knowledge, and flexibility as you make due with what you are offerred, rather than simply always having the best things at all times. These are skills that are fun to have tested and build master in, and I don’t really think we should eliminate that from games. I agree that the worst offenders are simply trying to feed off human addiction rather than build are emergant gameplay situations, but any rule that targets the addict chasers is likely to catch other games with randomization in the crossfire.

Alright, I’ll bite: what exactly is a “stonefruit” in this context? Google just says “fruits with large seeds that are basically rocks in the middle”, which I suspect is not the pseudo-intellectual flex your boss is going for?

It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.

I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.

Every single time I have played an Annapurna published game, I had a fantastic time. I won’t say that everything they did was equal, but everything they did was entertaining, and thought-provoking.

I can’t quite follow the legalese required to parse EXACTLY what this means going forward, but I am sure it is not good, and that is disappointing.

Fucking real, though. The cultural group responsible for checks notes “shaming people who have the wrong bubble color in texts”?, suddenly think they’re the one’s being unjustly preached to? The joke in this image is not the one OP thought they were making.

I’d never pay money for a porn game, but I feel if it was gifted to me, I’d play it to completion. At least for the experience to say I did. And hey, if it turns me on and I learn something about myself, win/win.

Fantastic watch that highlights the issue I am talking about. Thanks for sharing that.

The problem is we’re linking it to appearances instead of maturity.

The problem with sexual relationships between adults and minors is two fold. First, the minor in question hasn’t had time to fully develop the emotional intelligence to healthily and safely engage in a sexual relationship. Second, there is an innate power differential between a minor and an adult: usually the adult has means of supporting themselves, something akin to solidified social supports and experience, education and knowledge necessary to live without the day-to-day support of others. You put these together, and you have a relationship that, even with the absolute best of intentions, becomes inherently abusive. The adult holds all the power in the relationship, and the minor is left with no choice but to worship the ground they walk on, and worse, they have not developed the emotional intelligence to identify it.

The problem with these 2000 year old loli’s is not their body; the problem is that they’re often child-coded. They act like children. They do things that highlights their lack of knowledge and inexperience. What is often played off as a cute girl anime trope is in reality an indication that this is someone who you can conquer, dominate, and hold power over in a sexual relationship, and you can feel “good” about doing so, because you’re, with the best of intentions, just helping them learn through your loving relationship. So what if you’re fucking her while you do so. (/s on that last sentence just in case)

There is nothing wrong with finding petite women attractive. 30 year olds who look like teenagers are not a problem. Hell, as long as we’re on the topic, I’ll shock most people by arguing that admitting that a 16 year old has developed into an attractive and desirable person isn’t even a problem, as long as you’re doing so from a position of respect rather than intent. The issue is neglecting to recognize the power differential between you and that 16 year old, and convincing yourself that it’s okay to engage in romantic and sexual acts with them while uttering deranged statements like “they’re very mature for their age” or “I’m helping them learn and grow so it’s okay”.

Child coded characters are a problem, and hiding the magic number that supposidly discerns whether or not they’re fuckable doesn’t suddenly make things okay.

Not because of the content, but because of groups of men all reinforcing this behavior.

I genuinely know more women than men that act like this. I can’t say you’re entirely wrong about the problems with normalizing behaviour and the like, but simplifying it to “men are disgusting and know nothing of 'real, actual women” when real, actual women are sometimes equally disgusting is, well concerning.

This particular brand of behaviour is usually about rejection of social norms far more than it is ever about the objectification of women. People who have been rejected by society like to take back the power by rejecting the norms of that society.

Right?! Watching it get worldwide acclaim was this strange experience, because Act 3 was nearly unplayable. Meanwhile, Acts 1 and 2 were such masterpieces that it’s hard to call the game anything other than amazing. Criticizism felt misplaced, but the widespread acclaim it received was toom

I am glad it is a much more polished, finished feeling game now, and we can look back at it as the standard games should be held to, moving forward, but I’ll still be disappointed in the way we failed to get what was initially planned.

Second. The guillotine.

Leveraging the company’s vast repository of user data, the AI Brain forecasts customers’ needs based on user-product interactions and contextual learning, performs advanced reasoning processes, and generates optimal solutions through orchestrating the actions of physical devices.

This would be cute, if literally any corporate-level customer service actually understood and solved the consumer level problem. Feeding an LLM a series of your corprate-fuckery misunderstandings of what your consumers actually want is just doubling down on the end users fruatration.

We need customer service to be more human, not less. The only time it functions well is when the CSR tosses out the script and starts speaking to you like a human being. Taking this the opposite direction is a great way to sell less product.

Fucking Amen. Again, I am disappointed, but it is a great game in its current form and, particularly because WotC is involved, I do not blame them at all for their decisions regarding BG3.

It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.

I had some really, really poor experiences with Act 3, and it was only later that I learned 90% of my issues were direct results of the Upper City being scrapped.

Karlach, Gortash, Wyll’s father and Cazador are perhaps the biggest cases of this, with their stories feeling incomplete, buggy (at launch), and painfully linear relative to almost every other plot point in the game. In almost every case it’s because a series of their events, triggers and event flags were placed in or tied to the upper city, and the events needed to be replaced, rewritten, and reflagged in something of a hurry.

Larian is a great studio, and they’ve made some of my favorite modern games, but they do this with every release. I’m a little disappointed that this is the one time they’re not going back and “finishing” the final act a year later, the way they did with Original Sin 1 and 2. I won’t quite say I’ve been burnt by the purchase, or that the game is currently unfinished or doesn’t deserve the praise it gets, but seeing what the game could and should have been is a bad aftertaste after an otherwise mostly satisfying meal.

The Steam thread breaking down the cut content, for reference: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1086940/discussions/0/3812913565885064204/

Yeah, I am not sure how to let my phone autocomplete that sentence for me?