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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • According to the definition posted above, the cultural expressions of biological sex are only one dimension of gender, and you’re ignoring the other aspects. I’ll accept fish don’t have culture, though I bet someone more knowledgeable than I could argue that point. However, let’s look at social behavior via a vis courtship rituals. Like birds, some fish develop pretty incredible displays for getting it on. If a fish which has changed its biological sex then changes it’s behavior during courtship, that would seem, to me, to indicate a different expression of biological sex independent of genetics (i.e. gender). Unless there is a genealogical basis for courtship displays, which I don’t believe to be the case.





  • Dis u?

    I’m not comfortable with companies using any kind of marketing tactics.

    Now, I felt like I was fairly gentle in pointing out the absurd nature of that statement. I even readily acknowledged what I assumed to be your intent, i.e. there are absolutely marketing tactics which go beyond the pale. But, as I, and others, have pointed out, you’re the one operating on your own personal definition of marketing here, which is in contradiction to what that concept actually is. Any intro to business class will tell you that marketing is, essentially, ANYTHING an entity does to inform people of its services. It’s an enormous umbrella, which includes tactics both odious and innocuous. It is as readily applicable to the gal who posts on Facebook that she’ll do your hair for $20 as it is Facebook selling that information to a third party so she can be served targeted salon equipment advertisements.

    All I’m saying is, if you say “all marketing is bad”, you need to be prepared for people to call you out on the hyperbole of that statement. Therefore, you might consider arguing the point you actually intend to make (which is good and I agree with you about!), instead of leading with a statement which you don’t actually believe.

    Calling you Chicken Little was facetious, but meant to be a gentle dig at the hyperbole. Still, I shouldn’t have said it, and I apologize.


  • Take it easy there, Chicken Little. “I’m uncomfortable with any kind of marketing” is so hyperbolic, it’s almost parody. Putting the name of your business above the door? Thats marketing. Creating a website where customers can find and engage your services? That’s marketing. A minority-owned business proudly owning that status? That’s marketing. A friend telling you about the great meal they had the other day from a local restaurant? Believe it or not, that’s marketing.

    Marketing is not evil in and of itself. Unless humanity returns to a tribal social structure where you can count the number of non-related acquaintances you know on your fingers, it is a necessary component of operating a business. Of course, you’re 100% right that there have been dubious applications of the principle, but again, you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water, and it hampers the salient point that you’re trying to make.





  • I figured, but I’m incapable of letting an opportunity to make a bad pun pass me by.

    Tangentially related book recommendation for folks wandering through the thread who are disappointed that AOC isn’t announcing she’s taking over the role of Storm for the X-Men: The Power by Naomi Alderman. They turned it into a TV series, though I don’t know anything about the adaptation. The premise is that women across the world all of a sudden develop the ability to generate electric fields (like an electric eel) powerful enough to stun or kill. The book then details, through a variety of narrators, the social and political ramifications of this across a variety of cultures. I thought it was a fun yarn, at any rate.





  • First and foremost, I understand and share your skepticism, but I attribute it more to Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast being terrible stewards of the brand moreso than the game’s genre. They’ve proven to be anti-consumer ghouls with nearly every decision they’ve made (many of which have needed to be walked back or apologized for in the wake of massive backlash) over the past couple of years. So, in light of that context, it’s only natural to assume this game is being made to chase some “casual gamer” money, rather than passion for DnDs various settings or mechanics.

    As a counterpoint to the above, however, turn based gameplay is an abstraction used to make running the game easier for DMs. In the “reality” of the game world, all of the actions taking place in a round occur roughly simultaneously within a 6 second window. While my meat-based brain can’t handle adjudicating multiple dice rolls a second, my CPU absolutely can, and therefore you could, potentially, play a highly faithful version of DnD in a real time environment if the CPU is just rolling the dice in the background. In fact, this is basically what Real Time with Pause systems offer, such as the first couple Baldur’s Gate games (or many other cRPGs which emulate those).

    Furthermore, the Dark Alliance games (1 and 2, not the recent live service game which is emblematic of the exact sort of decisions by Hasbro et al which leads us both to be highly suspicious of this project) are a lot of fun despite only being tangentially related to DnD. Getting something of comparable quality (with minimal GAAS nonsense), would make me pleased as punch.





  • Idk about that, I heard a fair number of folks who were less enthused with Eternal vs 2016. The general sentiment among those folks was that Eternal skewed too far into “combat puzzle” territory, where encounters felt like they had prescribed “solutions” that you needed to perform to succeed reliably. This iteration being less about resource management and high speed encounter flow seems to be a reaction to those critiques.