only one of these could be called a hero.

leon is at BEST a very dark shade of morally gray as a former child soldier who was raised to be a hitman by the mob.

and the dude is just the dude. he just wanted his damn rug back.

some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it’s the country it started in, but it’s not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don’t break down the age demographic by region, but I’d bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it’s similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s… meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they’ll see maybe 8% user growth and that’s pretty optimistic.

so we probably won’t actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s… the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I’m sorry to hear that for them.

it’s it’s gotta be something very difficult that no one has ever fund before.

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.

i just wish it wasn’t the general direction the industry had decided to push things.

it’s become the expected norm. it’s the performance metric games are optimized to hit now, and it’s far from prefect.

i was just playing red dead 2 yesterday with dlss and i was legitimately struggling to do some things due to the artifacting. like there are some small missions and challenges that require you to find and shoot specific tiny birds with a bow, but dlss struggles with small things flying across a dynamic background. the birds would literally fade in and out of existence.

same thing with trying to snipe distant heads. the little red fatal zone indicator would ghost like hell and fade in and out.

like, it may be better than needing to drop your resolution, but it still kind of sucks sometimes.

no no silly, that’s what the private prisons are for.

they don’t want to kill us, they want to enslave us.

free slaves are cheaper that rock breaking machines.

wait, did she get pushed ahead like 2 years. why would she be graduating at 16?

a 25 year old being attracted to an 18 year old really isn’t weird to me…

edit: also, how the fuck does saying that to a graduation post even imply attraction. the critical commentor in that post is just being a dumb asshole.

idk, i looked dead at it multiple times and couldn’t see it because it’s too compressed. not because it’s actually that hard to see.

it just looked like the metal of the bench kept swirling.

i mean, this is just degraded from being reposted too much.

back in the day op would have been chewed out for it being a repost.

i mean… we saw parts of them that we don’t normally. there’s even a taboo around seeing those parts. taboo is the heart of many fetishes.

I’m not going i argue the symantics of what “intimate” means. the point is that the beach is a sexual place for certain.

i have been intimate with many of my friends. much of it starts at the beach lol.

don’t forget the shame. the wrongness of it is very much part of it. like, most people think feet are kind of gross, so it feels taboo to like them. taboo is one of the strongest things in fetishes. “this is so wrong/dirty” is a powerful thought for the horny mind.

honestly, if/when society becomes more accepting of foot fetishes i bet that will actually decrease the number of people that have one. if society stops shaming them it likely won’t get them off the same way.

yes lol. have you seen a bikini? that’s explicitly intimate and provocative. it’s the most naked you’re allowed to be in public without people calling you out.

beaches are often considered inherently sexual places. like “Beach episode” is synonymous with fan service.

kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.

then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.

as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.

no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?

can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.

oh yeah, it’s been a while. details at foggy.

anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::

ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.

the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter

to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”

my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.

tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent

i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.

also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.

aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.

miku and Vista are the same age. more like cousins or siblings. both are from 2007, just looked it up.

damn, i never knew my manhood was so attached to my fingers. if i rip my nails off does that make me an alien, a woman, or a plucked chicken?

that implies it’s the corporations that make art. the idea of art coming from corps is already a gross injustice to artists, but at least they can get paid a little. to take away what they do entirely for something that literally only remixes existing art from past and present artists is one of the darkest things we’re coming to accept in our late stage capitalist society.

we simply do not want artists anymore. we’d rather the machines preform every task that’s worth doing so that we can all go slave away at manual labor as human labor continues to get cheaper than machines.