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So to recapture the original intent of classic CRPGs like FO(2)(?), we need a sandbox-ish experience with emergent properties, that isn't all combat-centric in a world that doesn't revolve around the player. Sure, I'll buy that for a dollar. Don't think that such a thing is realistically doable though -- the closest to what he's describing would be the sales pitch of Star Citizen... and we all know about that. Back when the Gold Box games were made, designers were mostly just testing the waters and seeing what could be done with the tech they had. 30-odd years later, the tech has advanced a lot and now one guy just can't make a game in his basement anymore and expect to push the envelope. It's also better understood what actually works vs what just sounds good on paper, design-wise. He does have a point about games becoming streamlined consumer products designed around mass marketing checklists, though. But really, light gray font over a white background. WHYYY

Fuehrerprinzip much? Gotta love how this logic only seems to apply when it's the esjaydubyoos doing it though, but otherwise it's healthy free market ingenuity that drives up competition and is good for society at large by virtue of based trickle-down economics, and so on and so forth...

I used to dislike Anomen too, the petulant twerp. His arc is one of the best, though, and it's the reason he needs to be an insufferable brat when you first meet him. After all, it's hard to develop someone into a honorable and reasonable adult if they are already honorable and reasonable. Mechanically he's fantastic. Cleric is already a pretty broken class, and the dual classing rules used in BG whereby his fighter levels don't matter at all XP-wise make it even better.

404 is bad alright, but I don't know about it filling the Wish Granter's shoes.

What Trump "knows" at any given point is always better taken with a grain of salt. I just wish people were more consistent about it. CDC, as of 9/5/2020, lists a grand total of 377 dead aged 0-24 which represents about 1% of total dead from all causes in that age bracket, with 90%+ of fatalities involving rona being people over 55. So yeah, technically deadly for young people (as in "someone died of it ever") but not really remarkable in a public health discussion context.

That's fair. I only boycott companies that have ****ed me over personally, and those that from research I've found have skeletons in the closet, so to speak. It is not possible to boycott all companies ever unless you're willing to go full Kaczynski. That'd be pretty pointless as a means to put consumer pressure on them as well because you're not giving your business to the competition either. Likewise, I wouldn't expect you to avoid all social media ever, only those whose corporate guidelines you disagree with. Ubiquitous as Twitter is, it's hardly a monopoly though. Facebook is a different animal, and there have been calls to break it up. I think it's needlessly complicated that you'd ask the government to regulate alleged social media monopolies so you don't have to rely on state-run systems like WEA when you could simply push for local authorities to get their ducks in a row and make electronic PSA systems work, when the people appointed to make sure that kind of thing runs in the first place are directly accountable to their constituency, i.e. you. And in any case, whether one company or other holds a monopoly is a digression from the original question -- whether the state has any business getting involved every time someone in some corner of the internet claims they are being oppressed. Yes, monopolies are often bad, and unchecked monopolists are almost invariably bad.

Pretty sure that Amazon IaaS doesn't fall under what most people would consider "social media", and for the most part, VoIP and IM apps, and Google's cloud services aren't either. Zoraptor mentioned that it's hard to completely avoid anything owned by the megacorps and he has a point. However WhatsApp on your phone is not the same as having Facebook profile, and you can have one without the other. And hey, maybe not everyone needs or wants a "high profile well paid job" that entails bull**** such as fake social media posturing in addition to the fake office posturing that is standard fare for 95% of jobs. Shocking, to be sure, but I have no interest in being a S&P 500 CEO. As for "living in bubbles", welcome to, uh... pre-2004 Earth, I guess? I don't know, I may be getting old, but it wasn't so bad. Hell, the world seems closer to imploding now than it did back then.

WEA et al. You don't really need Twatter for that. And yes, boycott is a perfectly reasonable reaction because you do not need social media to survive. For instance, I've been boycotting certain airlines, banks and ISPs for years and am still quite alive and well. You can too. I can't believe I'm arguing that government doesn't need to step in and override corporate decisions, with you of all people, but I guess we really are through the looking glass in 2020. Is Josh your name by any chance? edit: saw @Malcador mentioned WEA before. Beaten to the punch.

Yes, that's why I used quotation marks. I do not believe for a second that it was an honest mistake, but that's beside the point. It is their platform, you don't pay to use it, and they can shut you down at any time for any reason -- Constitutional protections probably don't extend to that barring some landmark case or other. If I had to guess, I'd say the lawsuit will be more along the lines of potential lost revenue than breach of his 1st Amendment rights, as it happened while he was doing promotion for a fundraiser. It's nobody's fault that there is no alternative platform... except the very users' of social media. And I guess there's nothing stopping them from starting one themselves. One that is strongly committed to diversity of opinions, free speech and all the good stuff (yeah right). The problem with your analogy is that there is no government mandate to restrict the social media platforms that people can use. You could literally set up an alternative to YouTube tomorrow if you had the financial and technical clout. Of course this is false and ignores how leverage and market shares work which is what I've been arguing until going blue in the face here, but we can't have the government regulating the market to break up monopolies we don't like, while taking a laissez-faire approach the rest of the time. I agree, though. It's too much power to have for someone who is essentially unaccountable. You can stop it today, though. Delete your social media accounts. You'll be happier too!

Lightning strikes are indeed terrifying. There's always a risk with new vaccines, but the risk is even lower than from rona itself. The board that's to sign off on the vaccine and decide whether to end tests early* is made up of scholars and not government officials, so it's supposed to be as free from political pressure -of which you can be assured there's bound to be a hefty amount- as can be. Honestly, the problem with the vaccine is likely to be more the effectiveness than the safety. Flu vaccine is something like ~50% effective. *Considering that there's a, IIRC, ~30% of Americans who are unwilling to get the vaccine, if anything pressure would be for not ending tests early even if data coming in is overwhelmingly positive.

He wasn't banned. His account was "mistakenly" suspended for a few hours, and then reinstated. I'm not sure a lawsuit about that will get very far. I also find accusations of "Orwellianism" odd. This isn't the government. It's a private business -- you know, the same whose freedom to do whatever within the confines of the law you usually defend. When something like this comes up, I'm immediately reminded of the go-to response to left-wing social commentary: "You don't like it? Go live in Iran/Venezuela/NK". But when similar logic is used to suggest something as trivial as creating an account in a different social network, folks lose their ****.

I'm also mildly miffed that this is apparently only becoming an issue now because the measures are sweeping. A few years back, our government decreed a state of alarm -the same executive tool they used now- to militarize air traffic control after a particularly devastating strike orchestrated by their syndicate in the middle of the holiday season, which forced the airspace to close briefly. The decree was used to just abrogate their labor rights and subject them to military authority, but no one gave a toss because people just wanted to be able to fly. And because the government wasn't taken to task for their frivolous use of emergency powers back then, when the rona thing blew up, they did as they pleased even if the Constitution didn't really allow them to do what they were doing because they know there are no consequences for executive overreach. Many of the same who are now vigorously protesting were instead cheering when the government came down like a ton of bricks on Catalan MPs and civil servants for "disobedience and sedition". It's great when the authoritarian boot worn by incompetent piece of **** politicians steps on those you don't much like. When it's on your neck, it's nowhere near as fun, it seems.

Well, if you don't want to buy oil from Saudi, there's always Daesh. They have raving reviews from Assad and Erdogan's son, so obviously that shows that they are prospective trade partners worthy of allying with, and committed towards the stability of the ME, and not at all radical islamists bluh bluh bluh let the mental gymnastics olympics begin!

In principle I agree. But the real world question is actually twofold. First, what is the death threshold we would be OK with. And second, to what lengths are we willing to go to prevent deaths beyond that. The implications are not academic because there are myriad public health problems causing thousands of deaths every year, and interventions are not without costs. Ultimately, any public health policy question comes down to settling for an acceptable number of deaths, usually in the thousands. I have no answers myself, and I guess I'm thankful that I don't have to decide. I failed to find this... guess my Google-fu is weak. But I did find an analysis of an international survey of cardiologists about results for some 1,200 patients that found evidence of myocarditis in 3%. Evidence of severe cardiac disease in patients without known pre-existing conditions was ~13%. Which one is right? Further compounding the matter is the fact that heart disease is (was) the #1 killer in developed countries before this started, so you'd have to find a similar pre-rona analysis to put things in perspective. As for the people constantly preaching about "science", it pays to remember that a large amount of the body of the "science" being used to inform public opinion and political decisions actually doesn't meet the standard to be deserving of the name, not having gone through independent peer review -- either because there hasn't been enough time (preprints), or because it was never meant to. In the latter category is the famous Imperial College report whose conclusions were not reproducible (even by its main author, because of his black box mathematical model), and yet was both taken as gospel and missed the mark egregiously. A scientist's opinion is not automatically "science". It's often just an educated guess. In a sense it's amusing how scientists have become the new priests and so many people just parrot whatever they have heard one say... or think they have, because they literally cannot read and interpret the source material. Alternately it's evidence that the age of reason is well and truly dead.

Do you know if there is branching design from failing skill and dialogue checks or it's just a typical "[FAILED] → combat" system?

I don't think that's terribly useful counting, though. Attributing to corona the deaths due to electives being delayed, not seeking medical attention for unrelated problems due to fear or official discouragement and, well, general healthcare chaos doesn't seem very rigorous and may even be counterproductive -- because to a degree it's conflating the problem with the "solutions". To continue with your fire example, you may not be able to completely prevent people from dying in fires, but you can largely prevent trampling deaths by having unobstructed access to well marked emergency exits and trained personnel. This requires that multiple causes and circumstances are well identified and understood. The excess mortality figures are interesting because you can see there's more going on than just people dying from rona. For whatever reason there's a considerable increase in excess mortality from dementia and Alzheimer's and a significant decrease from ordinary respiratory diseases. I don't rightly know what's the post-mortem study situation in Britain, but I do know that here there are serious restrictions on them due to biosafety regulations, so I'd assume similar conditions. Looking at excess mortality can certainly be useful to get an idea of the overall impact of phenomena as you said, but it can be a stretch when figures are being touted to push -not necessarily by the government- for NPIs and authoritarianism. I can understand that the excess mortality method was used to estimate deaths from an epidemic a hundred years ago, but I'd like to think that our ability to convey nuance to the masses has improved. I remain staunchly hopeful, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the opposite, you see. I'm taking this reply to the other thread, by the way.

I am largely immune to MTX schemes, but I had already written this one off once I learned that you need to make yet another account for a "service" I don't really want. I guess it's just a matter of time before companies require you to connect through Elon Musk's brain chip to get access to some great features and deals that you really don't want to miss out on. **** that ****.

So we're chalking up all excess deaths to rona, now?

An AI that doesn't abandon its last city to take to the seas, doesn't demand resources from you as part of a peace settlement for a war they are losing badly and uses an approach to army composition and research different from "eeny meeny miny mo" is not particularly marketable, so they'll continue to focus on sexier features instead because that's what you can take pictures and make videos of. Paradox is in the same boat. I mean, they tried to build something resembling a competent AI for Alien Isolation and make it a central element for the game's marketing. It was both a commercial failure and a victim of IGN's notorious inability to fight their way out of a wet paper bag. It's something of a cult title now but that alone doesn't seem to warrant a sequel. You simply aren't going to find good AI in mainstream games because there is no real market pressure for that. It is what it is.

Even leaving aside that a defendant would have to be nuts to accept such a "deal" that involved harsher punishment than what's prescribed by the Code for the offense in question, I was under the impression that prosecutors aren't at liberty to "offer" worse terms than maximum sentencing either in fines or imprisonment time. Different punishment, yes -- one could agree to plead guilty to a misdemeanor rather than facing felony charges in a dubious jury trial. Worse, no.

Well, duckduckgo tells me that a Class E felony carries a maximum fine of $3,000 USD in TN. So, again, no. Neither for "their entire lives" nor for "the next decade or two". It's hilarious because it almost looks like I'm defending this POS governor, when all I'm doing is adding some context to the latest instance of Outrage From Twitter. This is a forum, not a court of law or a peer-review journal. When people post stuff, you can expect that there will be irrelevant details left out because people rarely want be hit with walls of text for 999 damage. For instance, I also omitted the fact that in order to regain the right to vote a convicted felon needs to be current on all their child support obligations. Because I judged that it would merit at most an asterisk next to the "automatic" regaining of rights that I didn't say happens, rather than a full bullet point in a list of immaterial facts.

Did I say it was automatic? Convicted felons do need to go through an administrative process whereby it is checked whether restitution and/or court costs have been paid in addition to having served the sentence. It is a detail which I omitted because it is immaterial to the point I was making -- that except in the case of serious crimes, disenfranchisement is not permanent, as you stated.

Felons losing their right to vote while serving their sentences is a fairly common punishment, and it was a thing also in Europe until relatively recently -- when it was ruled that automatic disenfranchisement of offenders was a human rights violation. The loss usually isn't permanent and a quick duckduckgo search tells me that in TN, the felon can vote again after doing their time, except if the conviction is for serious stuff like murder or rape. Not cool that just camping on state property can land anyone in jail, though, but unsurprising that governments turn to harsher measures to crack down on unrest.