Chairchucker

Did you take the Dahmer analogy as a ringing endorsement of the Chinese and Russian governments? With regards to the USA, I do not share your optimism. Several million voted for Trump the second time round, I expect several million will vote for him if he stands the next go around, and it is simply not good enough to blame people voting for Trump entirely on the Democrats not having a strong enough candidate, because at some level, several million people still have to make a conscious decision to vote for Trump./

lol 'white beta male geeks' also get the hell out of here with that 'no one outside of a country can judge that country' garbage

On the other hand, a fair bit of ink has been spilled with regards to Russia's treatment of LGBT people, or China's approach to unapproved dissemination of certain topics like for example the Tienanmen Square incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy They would! We have a long and 'proud' history of preferring immigrants from European countries over, in particular, immigrants from Asian or African ones.

Yes, a slur that has not aged well, and reflects poorly on anyone who continues to use it. Side note: does that one tiktok video autoplay for anyone else every time they get to this damn page? And, like, all three times - the original and both the quotes? I haven't listened to it all the way through and I hate it and the guy in it simply for that reason.

How many white people you know who have had credit denied is largely irrelevant. Systemic problems are not proven or disproven by anecdotal evidence of examples you know of personally. 'People you know personally' is a very poor and unscientific sample size. No, in fact the studies they've done that have found that systemic racism does exist, deal with thousands more people. Now you're right that they won't write on the application, 'loan denied on account of applicant being black'. Not since 1968 when the Fair Housing Act made it illegal to actually have race based mortgage lending as a matter of open policy, which had previously been the case. So then you have to get creative if you want to be 'picky' about which ethnicities you're lending to, as reports such as this one found: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/nyregion/hudson-city-bank-settlement.html The obvious problem with passing a law that makes it illegal for banks to explicitly discriminate based on race as a matter of policy, as they had previously, is that the people in the positions to approve or not approve lending are still the exact same people who were openly using racist methods beforehand. It may surprise you to hear that when these lenders were forced by law to stop openly doing the racist things they were doing as a matter of policy, it didn't immediately cure their institutions of the racist lending habits. There's a similar thing that goes on with voting, BTW. Now, if you really wanted to rig voting, and you were, hypothetically, a Republican, your first instinct might be to simply pass a law that says no one is allowed to vote Democrat anymore. Unsurprisingly, that's illegal, but did you know that you can look at the demographics and find that black and hispanic voters are more likely to vote Democrat? Again, though, you can't explicitly prevent people from voting based on their ethnicity. Not since 1964, anyway. But what you can do, is you can have insufficient polling booths in majority black areas to serve the voting needs of all the voters there. You can find that, statistically, certain photo ID laws overwhelmingly make it harder for black people to vote, and therefore try to legislate such laws. You could conduct robocall campaigns in predominantly black neighbourhoods telling them not to bother voting because the election had already been called. Now sure, these things could theoretically be done by black people in at the expense of white voters but since the people in those positions of power are overwhelmingly white, that's not usually the way it pans out. Systemic racism still happens a lot in the USA, it's pretty well documented. Is it worse than Russia or China? Dunno. Frankly I think the government of both those places seem pretty garbage, and we shouldn't be using them as a yard stick. It's like measuring how much of a good person you are against Jeffrey Dahmer. "Haven't killed or eaten anyone today, so if you look at this graph, I'm still on zero and therefore: good person."

I dunno a damn thing about South Africa and I wouldn't presume to know what the situation is there. In Australia, yes, all of us whiteys automatically, by being born white, have the 'privilege' which is that we don't suffer the systemic discrimination and conscious or unconscious bias that minorities will experience by virtue of not being white. That, of course, doesn't mean that there aren't white people who've grown up in really crappy situations and who might find it odd to hear that they have privilege. Nonetheless, no matter what a white person's economic or social or mental health or whatever else situation may be, it could always be worse by having, in addition to whatever else is going on in their life, the situation of being an ethnic or cultural minority in a country full of institutions and people who have systemic, conscious or unconscious biases against that ethnic or cultural minority. (Or whatever other minority, like sexuality or gender expression.)

Sure if they wanna. I think one of the reasons for not doing it last time around was reduced budget, and now they've got that MS money. Another stated reason was 'don't wanna', so I guess we'll see if that's changed.

This is not about 'the left'. The left is not a monolith. This is specifically about Whoopi and her own experiences and biases, specifically her experience of being part of the most discriminated against ethnic demographic in the country she's currently in right now. Also, white privilege does in fact benefit all white people in the countries where the dominant and 'default' ethnicity is white. We don't get discriminated against on the basis of race by the predominantly white holders of power like all branches of government, police, prospective employers... What she said was incredibly dumb and crappy, but I think it's important to note that the conclusion that you appear to have come to, 'so it's okay what happened', is absolutely not what she said.

Hmmm maybe a bit of a simplistic view tbh

The gentleman here appears to jump very easily from 'God is capable of anything' to 'anything that happens without direct intervention from humans had direct intervention from God.' That may be the position of some Christians, but certainly not all.

Did anyone say 'more like Whoopsi' yet? Freaking gotter.

OK screw it I'll install this and be v. mad at you all when I don't enjoy it

I heard Phoenix Point was not very good so even though I own it (I backed it on Fig or whatever) I haven't played it. So I doubt the DLC will change my mind.

My current run that I'm trying to actually finish the game with has reached the part of the game where often when I get into combat the game crawls to a halt, so that's fun

Yeah, and Sawyer mentioned some of the other more successful games from the same period, so I agree with you that it can't be entirely down to the top down perspective, nor to the party.

Ooof. Yeah that looks like it. An extremely disheartening post.

Hmmm maybe it wasn't Something Awful that Sawyer said that on. Here's basically All The Stuff He's Said Since POE2 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3856099&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Notable entries that are kinda about 'that stuff I mentioned'. "This is one of the causes for me being burned out on directing these games. I don't write things to be contrarian or subversive, but nor do I really have any particular interest in conforming to the way in which fantasy stories are most commonly told. You don't fight Eothas in a boss battle at the end of the game because the focus of the story was always on figuring out what he was doing and dealing with implacable gods. If I had wanted it to be sUbVeRsIvE, I would have set the player up for a fight and pulled the rug out from under them. I knew that some players might expect to fight Eothas, but what would the right course have been? To decide that the story isn't really about dealing with implacable gods, but actually about beating the **** out of them? That you should fight some other manifestation of Eothas for no particular reason? Telling the player explicitly that he can't be defeated (which we strongly suggested, but players habitually ignore anyway)? I don't think I'm particularly clever or novel. I don't make these choices in an effort to wow/stun people with my radical takes. The stories I help develop focus on exploring ideas more than they focus on big confrontations. At times, that can be against genre conventions, but I'm not doing it to blow your ****in' mind, man. In the case of Deadfire, it just didn't feel appropriate to fight Eothas. Maybe that was just the wrong story to tell or I set up to be told in a poor manner. " "And to put this all in perspective, the first game sold pretty well. The second game cratered on release and slowly picked up steam, finally becoming profitable in early 2020 (IIRC). Both games reviewed very well. Whether you think it's justified or not, they are the most (professionally) highly-rated Obsidian games to date. Professional reviews of the game were strong and it still sold poorly, both compared to the first title and compared to our competitors. Frankly, PF:Kingmaker, DOS2, and BG3 are all wildly outperforming Deadfire. I've said this before, but if we ever revisit the Pillars universe in this "style" of game, I think it will mean re-examining our approach. If the conclusion is to that we need to change the formula and the format significantly, it draws into question why we would even go back to the series. " Neither of those were quite what I was thinking of, so maybe it was in his tumblr

I don't have much sympathy for other white people whose takeaway from the news that people of colour and other minorities have been disadvantaged by the history of their country is 'man I'm tired of hearing this.' As many people of colour have said, (not me, I'm white!) 'You may be tired of hearing it, but I guarantee we're more tired of living it.' Also, in many cases developed nations have directly contributed to wrecking developed nations and causing situations people want to flee from, so no, I wouldn't take that as evidence we've 'done something right.'

While we may sometimes not like it, the bottom line is games need to make money. PoE2 didn't do that, or at least didn't do that well enough to justify a third. Also, Sawyer said something about being a little bit burned out. Would have to find the full comment, might've been on Something Awful.

Hmm I suppose that's possible or maybe - and hear me out - maybe there isn't really any evidence of Disney sanitising any franchise that wasn't already pretty child friendly. Before they acquired Star Wars, there were bumbling droids, fuzzy teddy bears, a pratfalling gungan and the closest thing there was to graphic violence was someone's arm getting cut off, conveniently by a weapon that prevents blood sprays. With Rogue One, Mandolorian and Boba Fett, Disney's version of Star Wars has been probs less 'sanitised' than it ever was. Before they acquired Marvel, the least sanitised aspect of the MCU was probably the fact that they hired Joss Whedon. Post Disney acquisition we got Helstrom which, while apparently not very good, seems to be, again, about the least 'sanitised' MCU thing we've seen. The idea of Disney being some company that will slap mouse ears on every property and dial it down to a 'g' rating is a bogeyman invented by people who want to be mad at things.

Do I? Seems like very run of the mill sarcasm to me.

Ah yes, the highly sanitised Disney, the company that brought us such family friendly films as The Last Duel, in which two men fight to the death because one of them raped the wife of the other. Extremely sanitised.

I mean, it'd probs be fine tbh. But Microsoft doesn't strike me as a company on the brink of being sold.

Well, there will be games that scratch that itch, such as Disco Elysium. J.E Sawyer's recently announced/leaked whatever medieval monk detective game will probs be similar. The thing is, you seem to be railing against the games that explicitly are not designed to be the game you want, for not going against their design to accommodate someone who wants to play a completely different game. Seems like mental energy best saved for wishing for more games that you do actually want. (Sidenote: also check out Gamedec if you haven't yet.)