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I think the borders between Nordics and Sweden are open now, yes. A friend of mine who lives in Norway recently traveled there (non-essential) and told me she didn't have to remain in quarantine. I think it's region-based at the moment, looking at daily cases and all that. That's not a Daily Mail link, btw. It's a Sri Lankan government-owned paper with no obvious links to the Viscount Rothermere. And as a curiosity, masks outside were mandatory here until this month.

Imagine letting decent working conditions and living wages get in the way of productivity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/reagan-vs-patco-the-strike-that-busted-unions.html Clinton's deregulation did the rest. D and R: joining forces to **** workers over since before many of you were even born

Jon Travolta as Forrest Gump has to be one of the most disturbing applications of technology since that MS AI went full nazi and had to be shut down in less than 24 hours though.

Heh, Trump referring to Pharma Bro as a "spoiled child" for bragging over making money. You don't read that every day.

Not bad? Sounds very much like your typical B sci-fi/action tracks, but I think it would work well enough in the background for the kind of gameplay I've watched. Heh, I was hoping to grab that for like $10 in the summer sale, but no dice. Maybe for Christmas...

You personally may not make any distinctions, but anyone who has to make decisions when judging violence rarely has that luxury. Which is why content has different ratings based on what it is depicted, why mitigating and aggravating factors exist for crimes, why there are different penalties for different kinds of violence, and so on and so forth. On a personal note, I find that reasoning suspect in any case. For example, a bunch of grown men fighting over a slice of pizza is certainly nowhere near as serious, objectionable or appalling as an adult beating a dog. Both are violence, but I'd hope you agree that they aren't equal. Food for thought.

Canned the Russian fisticuffs post. This is the Weird, random and interesting thread. A couple beating the living **** out of each other may be random, but it's mostly just sad. Post better content, please.

Heh. The realization that I don't really need to keep paying sub even if I don't ever clear every instance because there's more games out there than I'll ever be able to play was liberating, to say the least. What's currently in PTS in addition to the standard fare marketing pitch seems to be giving people serious WoW BFA vibes. I wouldn't know because I never played WoW. However, the actual gameplay is the only thing that's keeping me playing currently. So if they finally manage to screw that up too...

I really liked the Witcher soundtracks... all 3 of them. Though that one in particular is missing my favorite track, Lakeside & Black Tern Island Day. I've been playing a bit of BATTLETECH lately. The game has some nice music as well, but they made it kinda hard to listen to because every time a sound effect plays, the music is muffled. This includes the radio squelch sound every time you click on a 'Mech. Oh well. Soundtrack is by Jon Everist, who also made the Dragonfall and HK music.

Yeah. Credit sellers are a big problem and have been for a long time. Various exploits introduced a lot of credits into the economy as well, and only Bioware knows to what extent the damage was mitigated. The fact remains that the entry barrier for new players is impossibly high unless they want to spend real dollars in the cash shop. Ironically, Bioware has always been reluctant to introduce a more or less direct way to convert real currency into credits -even going so far as removing pvp and ops passes which were always top sellers- both cutting themselves out of a potential revenue source, and making people turn to third parties to buy credits anyway.

I've made several billions by flipping items in the last few months alone. Insane inflation is definitely a thing and I have no clue what's driving it. I suspect that the removal of referrals has caused a decrease in the overall supply of CM items, but I doubt that's the only factor. In other news, PTS is up for testing a super early version of what 7.0 disciplines may look like. In short: it's downright terrible (and it's not just me being a Negative Nancy as usual, check out the feedback thread if you don't believe me). Apparently Bioware designers, in their infinite wisdom, believe that the game is too complex for us smooth brained plebs and is in need of a serious ability pruning so it has way less buttons to press. I haven't been confounded by the game's systems or mechanics for a long time, but I will admit, their design decisions rarely fail to leave me scratching my head in bewilderment. This may finally be the end of the game for me. I only need one or two more NiM achievements anyway.

I mean, it's sorta weird that people need to be given reasons to wash their hands, but hey... Rona isn't one, though. Evidence of fomite transmission is weak at best. This doesn't mean it's impossible, but estimated to be unlikely in the order of 1 in 10,000. You can get some really nasty antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections from **** on surfaces though, so wash your hands despite the small risk of rona infection. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

I think the idea is that you can mechanically play as any Advanced Class provided it's still a Force or Tech class as relevant, while going through the Class story of your choice. So for instance play a Sith Assassin while going through the Jedi Knight story. The game would be significantly harder to balance otherwise and they moved away from skill trees to put a stop to hybrid specs. I don't see them going back to that now. It's an interesting idea, and the class stories are still the best part of the game, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's still ten year-old content. The loadouts sound good. It only took them ten years, but a win's a win. And of course I fully expect a ton of bugs for at least 1-2 months after launch, as is custom after every expansion. And yeah, they explicitly said no new engine.

I don't know if there is. However one is a heavily scripted experience with a focus on jump scares, and the other is a more sandbox, free-form, atmosphere based game. I was frequently frustrated by Exodus' faux-open world, in the sense that levels don't even try to conceal the fact that the player is being constantly funneled to where the designer wants them to be in order to trigger the next cutscene or QTE. I'm not saying it's bad design, just that it's not for me and not what I was expecting when going in. Not sure the chart you posted is on point regarding the fans, but it kinda is when it comes to designing a survival horror game.

Death Trash got a playable demo.

I didn't call your thread garbage. I called the greater issue of culture wars garbage, and asked why you believed that that particular story merited its own thread outside of the politics thread -- for which no adequate answer was given. Regardless I did not take any action as the thread did not break any rules per se. As I recall, you admitted that you had fundamentally misunderstood your own story and admitted it could have been posted in the politics thread in the first place. And that's as far as I'm willing to take take this tangent about moderation in public. Any further questions, please take them to PM.

I see your "triggering" and raise you some "projecting". I simply pointed out selectiveness and seemingly arbitrary thresholds for accepting something as "science". Your reactions and obsessive editing betray way more "triggering" than anything I've said.

To be honest, I don't have an issue with the paper in general. However, that last bit seems to be both a tangential footnote, and poorly substantiated, seeing as how it's entirely based on a rather suspect application of the transitive property. The paper cites another paper to support this, which says PR remains "a salient factor" for psychopathy. And this study shows PR plays an important role in anti-mask attitudes, therefore anti-maskers are psychopaths. Neither paper does actually study the correlation between psychopathy and anti-mask attitudes. Seems like someone went fishing for "anti-maskers are psychopaths", found this paper and just ran with it. Because, science. yeahsciencebitch.jpeg

That's a laugh, coming from you.

Good to know that the official threshold for science is 10 citations. It's a pity that the paper we were discussing at the start of this thread only had 9. Just one citation away from being science -- alas, it will instead languish next to the likes of phrenology, the luminiferous aether and bloodletting, forevermore. I mean, I guess I could dismiss it out of hand because it could be argued that that one sentence is meant to draw headlines, but I'm not going to do that. Because it's science.

Wait. Is this science now? I'm asking because I can't tell, what with all the cherrypicking going on regarding scientific papers.

The designer's penchant for taking control away from the player to force Artyom through increasingly predictable and contrived situations was detrimental to fun, imo. Too much Resident Evil, too little STALKER. Also, QTEs were getting old by 2010 already. Do we really need them? I did enjoy the world building and story quite a bit, though.

https://thepostmillennial.com/father-who-was-jailed-for-violating-gag-order-about-childs-medical-gender-transition-pleads-guilty "a) CD shall be restrained from: i. attempting to persuade AB to abandon treatment for gender dysphoria; ii. addressing AB by his birth name; and iii. referring to AB as a girl or with female pronouns whether to AB directly or to third parties; "b) CD shall not directly, or indirectly through an agent or third party, publish or share information or documentation relating to AB’s sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental or physical health, medical status or therapies." It's in a linked article in the piece Bruce posted.

Way to miss the point. He was found in contempt for disobeying a previous ruling which compelled him to use a certain pronoun and, more to the point, shut up about it. Heh, "heavy on the bias" alright. edit: why is this not in the politics thread with all the rest of the culture wars garbage?