Sometimes I make video games

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • I’m sure it probably varies geographically, but when the plastic ban came first came into effect for us you’d see a lot of reusable shopping bags that were made from plastic.

    I remember reading a study that suggested the typical reusable plastic bag used as much plastic as two-thousand disposable bags. So if you had one of those bags, you’d have to use it once a week for forty years to offset your plastic karma burden.

    But anyway, as they say, you should bring your own bag because otherwise they’ll make more disposable bags. It has to be legislated, otherwise corpos are going to corpo and we’ll continue drowning in plastic.

    These shopping bag bans don’t go far enough imo. The amount of plastic in packaging, shipping, medicine, fishing, whatever industry you choose - it’s just mind boggling.

    Here’s a funny plastic quibble I have: a store near me sells bread which comes in a plastic bag, but the little clip/tag to tie off the bag they recently switched to cardboard. A token gesture, but hey, it’s still nice to see. Now if you want to buy in bulk, you can buy a bag of bread with two bags of bread in it. The outer bag is tied off with a plastic tag.






  • When you consider that a lot of their customers are pretty entrenched in Amazon’s services, “Boycott Amazon for a week” is more achievable than, “Boycott Amazon forever.”

    Now don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see people give up on Amazon forever. But sometimes taking a week off is long enough for people to change their shopping habits.

    Although I suppose the insidious thing about Amazon is that they only offer an annual subscription so I doubt people are cancelling their service for a week.


  • Hmm, I’d probably call it PG13.

    The prologue has some fantasy violence / gore, and the main side plot is lesbian romance. Some sexual tension, and I think a fade to black, but I don’t remember anything explicit.

    I don’t know if this would bother you, but the language was like fantasy blue-collar. The protaganist is an orc and curses a lot, but I feel they were fantasy swear words and I don’t remember seeing any F-bombs

    The book’s main appeal is this wholesome, cozy vibe though. Even if some of the elements are for adults, it’s got good morals and a heartwarming message



  • I can’t find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

    Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich’s lair before they may fight.

    “Prophet” being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

    “Squeeze” where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they’re also useful for dealing with the lich’s zombie army.

    “Monster” where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

    I’ve never heard this trope named this way, but it’s how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won’t be having that fight at full strength.



  • Y’know, I’m someone who gets unreasonably annoyed when encountering an unfamiliar acronym, but even I think banning someone for using one is going too far.

    That said, none of these acronyms are without enough context to figure out what they are. Everyone knows what LOL means. USAID is an acronym where the acronym describes what the organization does. CJR is present in a thread about Columbia Journalism Review.

    As a general rule, if you define your Three Letter Acronyms (TLA), then they’re no longer a barrier to understanding. And then you can use whatever TLA you like. See how easy that is?

    Where they banned LOL and a reaction gif, if I had to guess the rule being violated would be about low-effort discussion. And again, I kind of sympathise with the desire to have meaningful discussion and I see where getting a message that just says “lol” could take the wind out of your sails. Banning is still overkill and alienating to your users though.

    There’s a certain amount of irony if you consider a rule against low-effort discussion in a community that was made with such low-effort that they didn’t define and publish their rules




  • I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.

    I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it

    If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win




  • Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

    My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

    For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking


  • I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

    If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

    Example:

    Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

    Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

    New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

    The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.


    I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

    Good luck out there, partner