azertyfun

Cobblemon is a pokémon mod for minecraft, and definitely has a charm to it and fits weirdly well into the minecraft-pixel-art-with-shaders esthetic IMO. Plus the "gotta catch em all" basic gameplay loop meshes well with Minecraft's incentive to explore the world.

Of course it's a free mod so it's a bit rough around the edges and there doesn't seem to be much to do beyond collect pokémon and build minecraft houses, but in my online circles it certainly has captured a lot more attention than any pokémon game released in the last forever. I would like to think Nintendo is taking notes, but we all know they Don't Give A Fuck. They'll pump out any asset flip and people will buy it because they're nostalgic and Nintendo has a legally enforced monopoly on the franchise.

It was with Biden, in 2021. He truly went dark Brandon on that one, Macron and the entire French government learned about it through the news.

Though the Australians did stiff themselves spectacularly. They will have to pay billions to the French with nothing to show for it, then billions more to the Americans for nuclear submarines which they could have gotten from the French if they hadn't told them to design a diesel submarine based on their own nuclear design!! Except now Australia is tied to American nuclear fuel and maintenance, further vassalizing themselves. 5000 IQ move.

Plus now the project is in the hands of Trump and his fox news host of a defense minister so uh good luck with that. By the 2040s I project they'll have been officially integrated in the Russian chain of command and the submarines will be delivered to Australia in the form of perfect replicas of the Moskva.

You're thinking about it in-universe. But Batman wasn't revealed to the world through an act of God. His nature, his limitations, his friends and enemies, his entire city were all constructed to enable the fundamental narrative of a billionaire in a suit indulging in violent vigilante power fantasies.

Of course you're right that within that particular framework "giving away all his money" doesn't make narrative sense. That's the frustrating part; not that a character is arguably acting "irrationally" (that happens all the time), but that the stated reasons for their irrationality are convoluted and clearly backtracked from "well without it the story doesn't work".

The end result is that Batman is basically John Wick but depicted as a hero which I've always personally found very gross. This criticism is applicable to most superheroes but the dissonance is especially strong with Batman.

I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power

I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it's a cultural divide and I'm not American so I don't view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.

If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn't obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.

Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.

Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What's next, we can't make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin's feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?

There's plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I'm not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That's newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.

The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it's satire of public figures and – I can't believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.

Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn't belong in moderation decisions, but that's a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.

I've mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you're getting repeatedly killed by "campers" you're playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from "camping spots". The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn't generate any benefit for either team. I don't care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and "you would have gotten more if it wasn't for the campers", you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I'm concerned you're dead weight.

... Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol

An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance).

I think you're overplaying the distance part a little bit. America was "discovered" in the Age of Exploration right on time for distance to be an increasingly less important factor. Hence why America could sustain a federal state made up of an almost entire homogeneously WASP population, and Europe could not (and the idea of a "federal Europe" is still a pipe dream at this point). There's more of a cultural divide by every metric between two cities 100 km away on either side of a linguistic border in Europe than there is between Boston and Los Angeles.

while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French

You're over-exagerating. Heavily accented Texans have little to no trouble being understood by a Bostonner, but a heavily accented older Québécois is nigh impossible to understand for the unattuned French ear. It's like the Hot Fuzz "sea mine" scene.

I appreciate that the US obviously doesn't have a fully homogeneous culture (especially in cities with immigrant backgrounds), but it's nothing Europe where Brits can tell which village someone comes from just from their accent. If I were to drive to Riga (which is actually barely as long of a drive as Boston to New Orleans) I would have to go through five sovereign states, each with their own language and variety of minority languages, their own idiosyncratic laws and justice systems (to the point that unlike the US the EU never make laws, it makes directives for EU states to implement individually), a completely different set of TV shows and radio shows and literature canon and more local food specialties than would be possible to keep track of. I'm sorry but going from Boston to New Orleans is nowhere near as much of a cultural shock. The only thing comparable to going from Belgium to Latvia is going from the US to Latvia.

Anyway it's not a competition. Taking pride in our ancestors' achievements is a dangerous road to go down, and anyway if we look at modern achievements then the entire developed world has unfortunately coalesced towards a very globalized (often american-centric) set of values and esthetic sensibilities. You can take a random new condo built in Phoenix, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Bratislava and not be able to tell which is from where, and the people living in them are probably all watching an American TV show anyway.

I'm as basic-white-belgian as they come and even I have a little bit of Italian and Eastern European (IIRC) somewhere in there. "Pure" (ew) lineages are actually quite rare in Europe, only the most remote places were spared the millennia of warfare (and the grim reality that soldiers, uh, move genes around) and the urban flights of the industrial revolutions. The average European's background isn't as diverse as the average American's, but a lot more than one might naively assume.

What is striking about North America though is the anglo-saxon cultural homogeneity, especially considering the diverse backgrounds. Besides Quebec there's virtually no language barrier anywhere, and an almost entirely homogenous culture. You could probably raise a kid in 6 states and 3 provinces without any major issue. All North Americans eat Mac and Cheese and they all watch the Superbowl and all American children stand up for the Pledge. Meanwhile the only cultural references I am likely to have in common with the average Pole is American TV/movies/music and depending on their English skill having a conversation at all may be a major challenge.

There's not a bunch of full frontal nudity or raunchy sex scenes, that's true.

But the game is shamelessly horny. All characters were designed to be maximally fuckable and they're all desperately tryna fuck. The sexual tension is palpable and several of the MC outfits wouldn't be out of place at a sex party.

Don't get me wrong I wouldn't call the game softcore porn by any stretch, it's just... canonically horny. Which is perfectly fine.

MAGA against who exactly? There don't seem to be many high ranking Democrats willing to call out Trump on his bullshit, and none willing or capable of leading an actual separatist movement or insurrection. They're actually even more subdued and helpless than they were in 2017.

I'd love to be wrong but I'm calling it now; when (blue) "states' rights" get de facto dissolved and/or their midterm elections are obviously rigged, they will buckle silently and proceed with a Peaceful Transition Of Power™. Maybe their attorneys will send a Strongly Worded Letter to the Trump-appointed federal judges in charge of their case, but that's about all the political violence the American Left has an appetite for.

States being stripped of their independence is exactly what happened to Germany in the '30s and I don't see why the U.S. would suddenly deviate from the script. Your country is way too morally bankrupt to even entertain the idea of a popular uprising.

I've always despised teen drama in media. Back when I was a teen, and now. Can't stand it. For that reason, I have zero interest in playing the sequels. Furthermore, some of Life is Strange's writing is downright amateurish.

But somehow, the game threads the needle of the formula in a way I can't explain (and from what I read the developers weren't ever able to fully replicate it either). The gameplay, the themes, the great acting/directing, the amazing soundtrack, the perfectly paced escalation of the stakes... It all works together to attach the player very deeply to the characters. I played it a decade ago and the ending absolutely shook me to my emotional core. To this day one of my favorite works of fiction.