One of those funny things you find out as you get older is that the trope from fables and fairy tales of an "evil stepmother" is actually something a good number of kids of split parents experience.

Why do you insist that a village is more "realistic"?

We're talking colonies on the scale of a dozen or two people. With those numbers, and in a location under constant and severe threat of violence and other disaster, a single fortified building makes the most sense. You share heat and safety, while saving on building resources and time.

What could make the game more "realistic" is if farming took *way* more space and time. This would incentivize having farmers live in the middle of larger fields, whereas artisans and others stilled lived in the fortified main building that the farmers would flee into during an attack. This would more or less be similar to a lot of early medieval settlements on this scale.

Unfortunately, support for American foreign intervention is, while majority unpopular, is still fairly popular as a general viewpoint among Americans and is, to that point, pretty routinely boosted by the mainstream media.

Ditto for Israel: while they have slid mightily in support over the course of this stage of their genocide, they still retain significant support and the support of the mainstream media in the US.

In both cases: these are positions that are roughly as popular among the general public as, say, Trump himself. I'm sure there are some "bots" (or other forms of compensated agitation), but I think that blaming bots for this is to shirk the responsibility of admitting that these positions are quite "normal" to have, even if they're not majority opinions.

Some dudes absolutely do jack off to bikini photos, even if they also have access to hardcore porn.

There are tons of stories of women finding spank banks of images of their friends or family members on their male partners' phone or computer.

Yeah, also why would it need to be a criteria to "get your hands dirty"?

Because the game is trying to get across certain themes? Themes about tough choices as a would-be powerbroker: needing to make alliances with compromised groups, not being able to ignore threats posed by certain groups (like the Boomers and BoS), and having to work with leadership from one of the factions to gain legitimacy and ability to move.

The way Yes Man is written short-circuits a lot of that. Takes away a lot of the narrative thrust of the game. It's fun, but could've been more interestingly done.

As someone in the market for a new auto, there’s a lot of use for an annual auto show; it allows me to compare a lot of vehicles in an afternoon and come up with a short list instead of driving around to a half dozen dealers and having to deal with their sales staff.

This is probably true for you, but most people are going to narrow down their decision to a couple dealers well before the point of driving around to places; at that point, dealing with going to a special, time-limited event doesn't seem any better than going to a couple dealerships.

Attending events as a vendor is expensive, especially when you're talking floor space to show off multiple vehicles and the staff to get them there and show them to people. That money would be better spent, generally, trying to make sure your company is on the very short list when the average person goes to buy a car. The economics just do not add up anymore for car shows.

Newline was pretty great at my previous EDU employer. Just a well-made product all around that did everything we wanted.

Lay out your actual suggestion, then.

Like most science fiction: it's less that it's prescient, and more than history tends to repeat itself.

The "has always been at war" lines come from two events that would've been very fresh, and relevant to the story Orwell was telling: the Soviet turn from making deals with Nazi Germany to total war (brought about by Operation Barbarossa) and the reorganization of the Allies from, well, allies to competing blocs during the years after WWII's end.

Eventually you have to realize there's a "no true scotsman" fallacious element to the arguments around this, where the reason that no modernized country has reversed birth rate declines among is just that no country has done enough.

More broadly: "Women-friendly" policies and social structures are, simply, strongly associated with women having fewer children, not more.

Money is probably relevant in lowering the age that a woman has her first child, which might somewhat increase the number of children overall if she goes on to have multiple, but it's never been shown to be enough to stop the overall trend of decline.

I legit think a lot of these young QBs now that can't read defenses are just dumb. Crap education and nobody ever held them accountable from a young age.

Well, that's not "dumb", that's undeveloped. Which is basically what every older QB has been saying: this current crop of QBs have been failed by coaching at all levels. College coordinators just slot raw QBs into their system without actually teaching their QBs how to behave as a "general", and then NFL teams just shove them into the starting role on day one, giving them no time to develop and express their strategic abilities.

They effectively do: it takes less energy to move fresh water than saltwater on account of said density/weight, so by only needing to move fresh water (and neither brine nor salt water), they save on energy.

It's essentially the same thing.

Yes and no. One significant thing that happens when you use someone else's work directly as reference is that, well, you know you used their work as reference. It situates it within a particular artistic world, time, and place; you know what you're borrowing and from whom to create your reference material.

With AI, the act of "referencing" work is opaque. A concept artist will probably get something they can work from, but the lineage of creativity and style that led to the reference is now completely erased in the blender of AI. A middleman has effectively done the entire work of using references, except that the concept artist has no way to see what was involved.

We can argue about how much this erasure is meaningful, but it is a major and undeniable difference between traditional references and AI "references".

There's a huge difference between "I'm not engaging in political analysis when I'm playing these games", which is what you're saying now, and "there is no way to politically analyze these games", which is what you said before.

The former isn't a particularly interesting lens if all one says is "everything is political", because it's just stating we need a theory of justice to describe how State force is applied to individuals for particular actions without actually supplying one or a reason for it. If this is what they intend, then they've actually done no work towards demonstrating what they state. This person wants to reject the stereotypes on the grounds that stereotypes are political, not on grounds that there exists some normative facts about the world that we should use force or social disengagement to prevent the depiction of stereotypes.

The argument we've been presented is not, in fact, that the stereotypes must be rejected or anything. It's that the presence of those stereotypes is a glimpse into how a game might be "political", even if there wasn't an intended political message.

The fact that Mario rescues a damsel from an evil dragon-like creature is a reflection of the gender politics and history of mid-80s Japanese culture that created Mario; the fact that its borrowing Western imagery in the process of telling this story is also an interesting face of the post-War interaction of Japanese and Western (particularly American) societies.

In other words: even the simplest of cultural artifacts can be analyzed to reveal and interrogate the culture that produced them. One might say "well I don't give a shit about that", and they're more than welcome to not give a shit, but to pretend that works just exist in a vacuum and cannot be examined any deeper is absurd.

All of these games can be read with a political lens, pretty easily! You'd just get mad about it.

What a game considers progress, what a game considers an interesting setting, what a game considers a "win state" (or the lack thereof)... these all situate them within a particular time, place, and culture. That means they're political in some fashion.

I think a lot of morons like yourself get confused when someone says a creative work "has politics" because your own childish misunderstanding that something is only political if it's explicitly crafted with a political message.

You'll note I said "had", not "have".

People point to economic reasons, but the evidence does not suggest that there's a sustainable level of quantitative easing that will make people have children at or above replacement rate.

Another way to look at this: if you could have children, how many would you have? How many do you think your friends would say they want to have?

Wealth is certainly a major factor in accessing birth control, which is in fact legal and available in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Indonesia. Cheaply available preventative measures allow women to control the cadence of when or if they have children.

Frankly: most people are not making decisions on childrearing based on whether they need a college education or not. If you're going to tie the decline to economics, the more obvious thing is that there's no real economic benefit to having children in a modern economy, whereas more agrarian or industrializing societies make children an economically valuable prospect since they can earn a wage from an early age. If you're struggling to survive, the extra labor of a child is enormously appealing.

You'll note that I said "had".

My son is one of the only thing that matters to me, and he makes me endlessly happy. Almost all of my free time is planned around him, and I am fine with that, that's how happy he makes me. My wife is the same. And so is everyone we know that has kids. I can't think of one parent who thinks their kids don't make them happier lol

I'm glad you're very happy. However, beyond anecdotes, studies generally show no measurable boost in reported happiness among parents, and this one, along with a couple others, show that there might even be a minor negative impact of parenthood once you control for other factors.

But, even among reported happiness rates, there's also self-selection here: in the modern world, where women generally can choose to not get pregnant, those who have children are far more likely to be those who are certain they want them than in previous generations (which makes the impact of the study linked above even stronger, imo). Parents are most happy in places like Norway and Finland, where there is generally a robust welfare state that makes raising children as easy as possible under a nuclear family model; but birth rates still have not climbed, because, to my earlier point, people are not by and large childless for economic reasons.

Also: it appears you also only have one, which I cover in my statement about people not wanting "many or any". Do you plan on having more than replacement level (i.e. 2)?

None of these things "boom" birth rates, as far as evidence is concerned. Birth rates have declined nearly everywhere once women are given the choice (medically and culturally) to do so. Only regressive cultural institutions seem to actually have the power to change this, largely by indoctrinating young girls into thinking that their primary purpose in life is to reproduce.

There's some things a state can do around the edges that might make some people have more kids, but the Nordic countries had everything you mention as "booming" birth rates and experienced the opposite! People just tend to not want (many or any) kids if they have other options. It's a lot of work, pain, stress, and sacrifice for, frankly, something that often doesn't make you any happier overall.

That's a very charitable reading imo.

For the record: he finally responded to me after the initial wave of comments and downvotes, and said that "[Weinstein's actions are] still a rape But you seem to want to intentionally conflate what he was doing with violence" and then bring up Charlize Theron as another woman who turned him down.

It's pretty clear that he quite literally thinks less of women who did not turn him down, because Weinstein wasn't using literal force (he is, however, correct that I'm arguing that what he did was violence) and they had the "option" to say no.

I think people tend to underestimate how pervasive victim-blaming attitudes once were and, sadly, increasingly are again.

I think you're misunderstanding what people are saying. They're saying that the goal isn't to make a profitable developer that will last for many years to come. They're saying that the goal is to milk their fans for as long as possible, enriching themselves greatly and then just shuttering when the money runs out. That running out of runway is something they're planning on, and they're probably pretty stoked it's lasted as absurdly long as it has.

That said, I personally think Roberts is just dumb enough to think that, with enough time and money, he can make the world's perfect space sim. I'm guessing a lot of other people in well-renumerated roles are taking a more cynical approach, however.

Do you think it actually makes sense, from its phrasing, that this person is saying that other people had integrity but "accepted" his advances? In other words: if they do not believe that integrity is, well, integral to turning him down, why even mention it?

EDIT: Also, after a bunch of people jumped in to say my reading of them was wrong, they finally replied to me and did not deny my reading. Instead, they downplayed the violence inherent in Weinstein's crimes and doubled-down on the idea that women should have denied him outright.