Thanks for the link. Some big parties seem to have hundreds of thousands of members. Didn’t see much for 2024 other than:

Zu Beginn des Jahres 2024 meldeten mehrere Parteien einen starken Mitgliederzuwachs. Bündnis 90/Die Grünen berichteten von 8.000 Neumitgliedern in den ersten beiden Monaten des Jahres.

In any case, considering the political context of our times, AfD’s growth is nothing to scoff at.

Since not everyone is expected to become member of a political party, a more apt comparison would be to membership numbers (and changes in those) for other German parties.

I don’t think they’re infogrames either

Ah sure I was afraid I might have forgotten something. Though again a very different category and not the kind of game I’d play. It would be more accurate to say I guess that Black Myth is the first game out of China that seems like it could make it big in the full price AAA single player action market. I can’t recall another Chinese game of this type that has held similar promise.

It’s the most impressive video game to come out of china, the first that seems poised to generate significant buzz internationally. Whether it will be any good I do not know, but early demos had been very impressive. So I’d say it is hotly anticipated, you were just late to the party. It may not be that original in gameplay but how many AAA productions are strikingly original nowadays? None that I can remember.

I dislike most if not all party members. Like not always actively dislike, but don’t care much what happens to them. Even if the writing and voice acting is more than decent. Too grimdark and fucked up is how I would describe it. It’s like Larian took all the criticism about previous games being too lighthearted and overcorrected. And not in particularly relatable ways, feels more like they sat down and brainstormed intensely in nerdy excitement and with little depth or restraint about what would be cool and extreme and fucked up, and oh wouldn’t that be awesome… creating freakish caricatures with oh so dramatic and cursed backgrounds rather than you know, relatable flawed characters. Of course I only feel like this because much is done very well and so any missteps are more striking.

I love the turn based combat but sometimes it does feel like a chore, I wish I could do real time sometimes or purely rules-based AI, and switch to turn-based only when shit goes wrong. For those fights that really do not pose much of a risk and are not that interesting. Someone might say on the difficulty so no fight is trivial, but that can tire one out as well as now every fight can be a major obstacle and sometimes you just want to move the story on a little.

Although I disagree that the main problem is politicization, a lot of what you said otherwise concurs with my experience. The depth just isn’t there. Maybe it’s a numbers thing. You’d see many simplistic takes left and right on Reddit too, but given the sheer volume of contributors, more often than not someone would have some true insight to share, a well thought out rebuttal, a reasoned argument, or just some humor to lighten up the conversation, and that would rise to the top. So top comments were usually guaranteed to be worthwhile and low effort comments would become easier to ignore. At least in the better subreddits. Not so much the case on Lemmy. A lot of low effort sarcasm, political slogans, and tribalism in the comments. I do like Lemmy on the whole though, so sticking with it for the time being.

So there is no evidence, just speculation. Nothing to see here then.

You may be forgetting that Kaliningrad is another Russian harbor in close proximity. Don’t know if there’s any credence to assertion that Gotland is in danger, but just saying.