heh, your edits are kinda hilarious when you note that the position you’ve ‘agreed’ with has just ~15 upvotes, while the two noting its a ‘dangerous by default’ thing each have like 50 or 100 upvotes. Men gave you their perspective, and you choose to ignore it. Most guys agree on what that sort of behaviour typically is – and even if it is the left over covid habit, that’s still a “this person is wearing a mask and likely wants to stay distant from others, I should walk in the mud because they’ll think I’m a threat if I get too close”… is still in the ball park of walkin in the mud cause he wants to show he’s not a threat.

A large number of men have internalised all the negativity expressed in the media about our gender over the last few decades. Lots of the ones who’ve resisted / refused to do so, have gone the extreme right / alpha male BS route, trying to aggressively push back against it in a rather sad way. I reckon its partially because progressive / left leaning approaches don’t typically allow for any dissenting voices on things like gender, and are heavily influenced by feminist ideology: masculine sexuality and traits are the enemy. Caucasian males in specific, is one demographic that’s always pretty safe to dunk on in pretty well any scenario.

I’d phrase it a bit differently though, I think, in that its more risk avoidance than threat internalization – even if one follows the other. Like I know guys who get anxiety if they’re asked to work a shift with just one other coworker (female) on site - I’ve had the same concerns personally. It’s not because we think we’ll slip up and accidentally assault the woman or something. It’s that we’re worried we’ll say something / do something that the woman will take offense to, there’ll be no witnesses to support our side, and the standard of today is “believe the victim (if its not a male victim)”. Avoiding being in that situation/getting anxiety over it, isn’t an internalization of being a threat, so much as it’s wanting to avoid the potential risk of something that’s shown in many media circles constantly.

Nodding hello and saying good morning / afternoon is something I reserve typically for older men, usually white or asian. Any other demographic tends to net a negative response more often than naught. Like imagine if every other person you said “hello” to quickened their pace to get away from you or shot you nasty looks – you’d prolly stop doin it too. I’ve even had X’s who said they thought that behaviour was an attempt to ‘pick them up’, which I definitely don’t want to mis-convey. I still say it back if someone says it to me, but I can’t initiate without it re-enforcing a negative male stereotype. That pleasantry was killed off like a decade or more ago, in part because the onus to maintain it shifted away from men… and women didn’t really want to take the step to keep it goin. I mean, you didn’t exactly say “g’mornin” to the mud walker guy to let him know it’s all good, did you? ;p

Yes yes, tactics matter a bit, as does RNG. But it’s still a fairly linear progression line. Like it’s possible to get to the first on-land brain thing fight without hitting level 2. It’s possible to win that fight as a level 1, with just you and shadowheart, technically. But its far far easier if you just play the way they intended, get to level 2 before that fight, and cheese it.

As noted elsewhere, I haven’t even been interested enough to get to the goblin village. So Halsin, Minsc, Minthara are all people I never bothered to get to. Emo goth cleric girl is feminine, though it feels very niche – like a ‘token’ straight semi-human looking girl. So if you want a ‘traditional’ partner, you’re stuck with emo girl? meh. At least if you play as a girl you have a choice of more human looking partners.

Wyll I sorta just assumed was gay, cause all the others were already gay for my ugly little gnome – plus you meet him while he’s taking care of children in the camp, and he runs around in light armor/isn’t a ‘physical’ character class. The most physical male in the first bit is asterion, but he is more agility/dex, which are traditionally more female oriented in d&d (I think old editions gave women +1 dex, men +1 str or something along those lines) – and he’s obsessed with sucking my gnome.

In a broader sense though, its the assertiveness of the different characters that I think causes the impression on my side. All of the women are pretty direct / blunt / to the point about ‘most’ topics (outside of story elements like shadowhearts whatsit); the men are sorta coy and demure.

There’s a whole lot more they could’ve done in that space, but they left it essentially the same as previous games – while I get that it’s well executed, I don’t think of it as having more ‘depth’ in this area than anything previous. So I find it boring / unmotivating.

Progressive feet and hand numbness… sounds like untreated diabetes to me, based on symptoms I remember when my dad first got it. Definitely get checked / a docs input. Untreated, you can literally lose toes/limbs. I’d even consider starting to eat a diabetic diet while I waited for an appt, to see if it improved the situation.

As for the sex stuff, as an older guy, I reckon the bigger part is to find a partner you want to live with outside of the sexy-time stuff as a priority in general. Everyone ages and their bodies change, physical stuff is important but its not enough to maintain a longer term meaningful relationship, in my experience at least – and ultimately, the time spent boning is a tiny fraction of the time you’d be spending with the other person in the long run. To add to that, I’ve had relationships in the past where we didn’t do much of the direct penetration stuff, but I still found it really… rewarding? titilating? gratifying? … just making her eyes roll back / bite me as she climaxed and then collapsed exhausted. The endorphin release from intimacy isn’t just about getting your rocks off, in some ways the feeling of knowing you can drive your partner nuts is better – to me, that’s what makes me feel ‘virile’, more so than simply fucking/orgasming myself. Biggest issues there was just making sure she understood I didnt feel a need to orgasm myself everytime we were together, so long as I rung her bell thoroughly.

It’s strange, I still have real difficulty getting ‘in’ to Baldurs gate 3, even with all the media hyping it for a long time. And one reason for that is I don’t find it all that ‘deep’, and its linear progression makes me lose interest partway through the starting areas (never gotten to the goblin camp or w/e).

Like take the romances. Even in the little bit that I played, the way affection is handled is just boring / tired / done. All the male chars are sorta femmy, all the female chars are sorta butch, and none of them seem to care that, like, I’m some tiny scrawny gnome bard. They all want to screw me, just cause I’m nice to them – all the men turned gay almost immediately after meeting me, something I guess they had to tweak in a patch. And it all seems to happen based on pre-determined/defined relationship algorithms - be nice, gain a point towards boning NPC X, if you cross a threshold trigger an event. That’s been done literally for decades and decades in the CRPG genre.

The encounters/combats are all really rigid and essentially scripted in nature, at least the parts I’ve seen. Go to point X, encounter monster group A, which is tooled to certain party level ranges. If you can’t win, you’ve gone to an encounter out of the general ‘order’ you’re meant to do them. Go back, find the encounter you missed to level up, then return and progress further. Again, very generic and something that’s been done for decades.

Rigid party size, camp with toons you can swap in and out, complete with a skill retrainer guy. Immersion breaking, but again, a trope / mechanic that’s been around for literally decades.

I’m curious – I’ve looked at this a little in the past, but paused once the payment requirement showed up. Doesn’t feel like it really matters at all about using a VPN or otherwise to try and hide my identity, if there’s a charge on a credit card that proves I use a torrenting service… ? How are people sorting that out, or are we all just pretending you can’t get tracked through a payment?

Yeah, it’s not too surprising that it’ll have slightly different contexts in different regions.

For starters, the question wasn’t, as far as I know, asking how the ideology / stance fairs in terms of implementation / reality. Like you can give a description of what a communist believes, without having to try and explain Communist Russia / China.

In terms of medicare/dental care, yes, there are soc lib fisc con people that do believe that. Likely not people in the USA, where everything skews right wing – their soc lib is more like “I have a black friend! I’m not racist!”. In more sane countries, there are a good number of people who fall into that ideological mindset, who do support public utilities/health initiatives – it’s pretty common here in Canada, based on people I’ve spoken with.

Like a soc lib fisc con person I know, has previously suggested that we ought to change how roads / cars are handled – arguing that cities shouldn’t have anywhere near as many cars, and that common “paved” roads should be essentially relegated to highways/freeways due to the cost and ecological impact. In their take, city budgets are often bloated by road repair costs due to the over-engineering of what’s required for regular residential activity. Using other road materials would dramatically increase sustainability – and even if it results in more ‘maintenance’ cost/road tolls for car users who still insist on using cars, that’s up to the consumer. I don’t know if they were talking nonsense, but that’s the sort of thing I sometimes hear people in the soc lib fisc con camp say.

So many people with such brutal takes on it – helps to quantify who the audience is on lemmy I guess.

Socially liberal fiscally conservative, to me at least, means that the person is in favour of equality in the sense of equality of treatment from the government, but is not in favour of additional big spending projects to try and have equality of opportunity. They’re pro-choice, but likely against the government funnelling money into providing abortions for women (so abortions available, but not gov subsidized). They’re pro-trans rights in terms of being fine with whoever doing whatever they want with their body/partners of choice, but against government paying for trans-specific gender affirming procedures and parades to highlight those groups. They’re in favour of things like universal medicare/dental care, because those programs are shown to be a net benefit fiscally and socially.

In general, they support socially progressive ideas, so long as they’re fiscally costed out and beneficial to the public purse. They’re against increased government spending / reach, preferring ‘small government’, with the social components placed more on individuals to fund directly.

Thanks, appreciated.

Silly question perhaps, but I haven’t tripped across it on the site for Revolt – is there a relatively straight forward server version for self-hosting, or is it just that the source is on github and you can compile it in theory if you feel like goin through that process… ?

I’d disagree. I know it’s often interpreted along those lines, but it seems a misread on the situation to me. There are quite a few literary critiques on Hamlet that view him and his dilemma as existential angst – a hero torn between ‘duty and doubt’. I think that reading is far more apt than viewing Hamlet as a suicidal emo fop. The very next lines after the famous intro are literally:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them

So… Whether it’s nobler to sit there and get fucked by ‘chance’, or to take up arms and oppose the status quo/issue. That opening clearly establishes the two sides of his deliberations: to suffer the situation, or to take up arms and opposed it – neither of these is equated to dying until the next part, which pivots to death, because he was opposing the king / considering killing his usurper uncle. Not only would that potentially result in his death, but the act of killing in the ‘christian’ mindset would result in his soul being damned in the next life. He spends a huge amount of the play humming and hawing about this sort of stuff, like when he has an opportunity to top the guy, but stops because his uncle is mid prayer – and he doesn’t want to kill him in a way that might accidentally send him on to heaven, if such a thing existed.

Anyhow, the next part supports my read, I think, where he goes through a list of “mundane” offenses. Thees offenses are basically all sleights that someone would be ‘suffering’ as a result of actions of another - they have an external locus, and there’s no explicit reason to think that the ‘response’ with a bare bodkin (dagger) would be directed internally: the oppressor’s wrong (tyrants), the proud man’s boasting (we hear alot of boasting from certain folks…who are blind to the impact on others), the pain of being shunned romantically, the slowness of the law to achieve justice, the insolence of office (putting up with an idiot in a position of power), and the general pain of generally having to put up with those ‘unworthy’ of your efforts. His bridging line there is to finish the list with a note that you could fix most of those situations with a dagger, before finishing it off with:

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,

That’s pretty explicitly saying “why would anyone ‘suffer these slings and arrows’ (mundane offenses) if it weren’t for a fear of death by ‘taking up arms against them’ with a dagger?” (to reference it back to the earlier start for cohesion in the reading, which works just fine).

In the speech he also equates inaction to cowardice, and that to effectively being dead. Near the end:

And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Ie our fear of dying, the uncertainty of what’s next, makes us bear those problems / put up with a lot of crap – it makes us into cowards. Our resolve is diminished by the thought of the challenge / potential death, and the possibility of going to hell if you murder the source of these troubles, to the point that we lose the ability to take action.

And again, a huge amount of the play is literally all about Hamlet, trying to sort out the morality of whether he should kill his usurper uncle – an act which he knows would put his own life in jeopardy and cause potential chaos - let alone put his own ‘immortal soul’ in jeopardy of going to hell, if he accepts the idea of heaven/hell. Not so much Hamlet debating if he should kill himself, but rather if he should kill his uncle. He’s out for revenge, he’s not out to be an emo baby.

I don’t condone wanton violence either, of course… but at the same time I recognise someone like Hamlet as a tragic hero. His most famous soliloquy, the “To be or not to be” one, is largely about whether you should stand up to tyranny, even though it may cost you dearly to oppose tyrants, or whether you should try and keep your head down and try to profit personally as a coward.

Yes, it’s better to achieve those goals through non violent means, but you need to draw a moral line. Luigi drew his.