Maybe it’s horny, but this picture of Malenia, Goddess of Rot is now my phone background.

Remember folks: China is communist in the same way that North Korea is democratic and the Nazis were socialist.

It’s just a smokescreen.

Like, I’m in that position too, except I have a touch of the 'tism to go along with it. Not so much that I can’t function, but enough to the point that socializing is exhausting. I get nothing but bots when I try online dating, and going out mostly just results in people asking me why I’m always just standing in a corner by myself.

Really, I just need a wingman, but I don’t know anybody who would be willing or able to do it; my brother and both of my closest friends live an hour-and-a-half away and my BIL has very young kids.

I’m at a point where I’m not sure if it’s ever gonna happen.

As someone who grew up in a conservative household in a deep red state, I think that part of it is that a lot of people are letting Lizard Brain dictate their response to transgender people.

Let me give you a personal example. A while back, I went to a social dance, and there was a trans woman there. Before the dance starts proper, the couple that runs it will teach a dance lesson, and we rotate partners while that’s going on. Eventually, I was rotated into being her partner. For some background, she was obviously early on in her transition; she still looked like a dude in a dress, she didn’t quite have the appearance down yet. But she gets huge props for not only having the bravery to go out as herself, but doing it in fucking Arkansas.

So I rotate over to her, and it dawns on me that she’s trans. In my head, Lizard Brain immediately starts screaming. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY A DUDE IN A DRESS, HE MUST BE UP TO SOMETHING IF HE’S DRESSING AS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HE IS! RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE”

Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn’t see trans people, and even now, it still tickles that primal part of my brain that was trained to be uncomfortable around people who aren’t white and straight.

The difference between me and many of the people I grew up around is that I recognize that it’s happening and try to tone Lizard Brain out when it starts screaming. A lot of other people listen to it and don’t care that the person that it’s screaming about is exactly that: a person.

That shouldn’t be surprising, given his history.

When I was in college, I found a hand-bound report from the Department of the Treasury, written in 1939, about the financial situation in Nanking during the Japanese occupation. I was writing a report about the Rape of Nanking for a history class, and I stumbled upon it while searching the university library.

I was shocked that it wasn’t in their archives, and even more shocked that they let me check it out.

“It is not the severity of punishment that deters crime, but the certainty of punishment.”

Both things can be true.

The plot badly needs some pruning shears taken to it; to say that it moves at a snails pace is an insult to snails. Like, why did we need an entire faux high school arc? There’s plot-relevant stuff there, but they can cut most of that and the game would be better. Filler arcs in a story that’s…what, ten games now? That’s why this series is still obscure, despite there being a lot to like here.

If you need something to scratch that JRPG itch, you can do a lot worse, and there’s a reason this series shows up on “hidden gems” list. But…damn. There’s so much content and story, and a fair chunk is little better than filler.

and the story takes a while to get started.

That’s the problem the game has always had, though.

I played for a bit right as Endwalker came out. I went in blind, played consistently for two months, and by then, I had just finished the first third of Shadowbringers. In contrast, it took me a month-and-a-half to level my first WoW toon back during Wrath of the Lich King.

People may praise the story, but while there was a lot of great stuff, it just takes so loooooong to get there. They really do need to go through and prune the filler quests or boost experience gains.

In DA2’s defence, the game went from concept to release in 16 months. With a development cycle that fast, it’s a miracle it was even playable; I wouldn’t call its rampant copy-pasting “lazy”. I’d call it many bad things, because that game had tons of problems, but that’s what happens when the beancounters have an unexpected success and want to capitalize on it yesterday.

instead of just playing the game as intended.

I feel like you just unwittingly hit on the problem many series veterans have been having.

People are approaching bosses in Elden Ring like they’re Dark Souls bosses, and in my thousands of hours across the series, the only bosses I summon help for is Sister Friede and the Demon Twins. Everyone else I was eventually able to defeat on my own, because that’s how they were balanced.

But in Elden Ring, you have the open world to grind in and Spirit Ashes and crazy weapon arts that are far beyond any that were in Dark Souls 3, and the bosses are balanced around these things. It’s harder to make a good guess at how powerful a player is at any given time in Elden Ring, so in order to counter the player’s bullshit, the bosses need bullshit of their own.

This, naturally, throws a wrench into the plans of veterans who are used to bosses that are tough but fair and approaching them in that manner. They then promptly get their shit pushed in because they aren’t using the things the encounters are balanced around having simply because they didn’t used to need them.

It makes the bosses binary. Either you get your ass kicked, or you summon help, use a Mimic Tear, and run a train on them. They’re either frustrating or boring, and fights that are frustrating or boring just aren’t fun. I’m not having fun getting comboed to death or just pelting the boss with spells while my goons beat them up.

The magic is gone. Bosses used to be the highlight of Souls games, and now I just want them to be over.

The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player’s settlements.

It looks to me like they’re reusing the Link’s Awakening map, like they did for BotW.

I’m gonna pick it up, if only to encourage Nintendo to give Zelda her own full-size, mainline game.

That is a pretty good explanation of money laundering, actually.

I hated X because I found most of the characters sans Auron and Lulu to be incredibly obnoxious.

X-2 just made those problems worse by largely getting rid of the few characters I could tolerate, and somehow making Rikku even more annoying.

It says something about how good the combat was in those games that I managed to power my way thru X and a fair chunk of X-2 before it just got to be too much for me.

I hate X-2 with the burning fury of a thousand suns, and I’ll still praise the combat.

Thing is, all the other major manufacturers are just as bad or worse.

As a PC technician, HP still somehow has the best service and support, which speaks volumes about how bad everyone else is. Dell’s support tools are a generation behind HP’s, and Lenovo’s build quality is atrocious. Not to mention Lenovo’s technician support is so badly fragmented and poorly run, they default to having the customer send the device in for repair and avoid sending an on-site technician just so they can avoid dealing with technician support. Speaking from personal experience, getting to the right person when I have a problem or need to order additional parts is like pulling teeth, and even if I manage to reach someone, they’re usually equal parts incompetent and unhelpful.

And Apple doesn’t even want to service their stuff.

These days, you have to pick your poison.

Do it.

See what happens.