CoderKat

That's what I was thinking too. I think at this point, we're pretty darn sure there's no alien civilization on the moon. For there to be one suggests very possibly it's purposefully hiding from us. That's the scariest idea, I think. If it's just a little further away, we can assume that they aren't trying to hide. But the moon is too close and too well studied for a civilization to be there without likely some advanced method of hiding.

Mods are where it's at. The AI isn't competitive when you play fair (the vanilla game's idea of difficulty is just a multiplier to the crisis faction's strength). The only way for the AI to truly be challenging is for the AI to have an overwhelming resource advantage and mods do that best. I played with the Gigastructures mod and it was amazing. I was really skeptical of that mod before I tried it. I thought it'd just be power creep.

And it does have power creep. But it also introduces really well made, unique, and unbalanced challenges. Like, the blokkats are an enemy that is impossibly strong at first. First time around, they devoured half the galaxy before I could catch up to them. It was the first time in Stellaris where I was genuinely afraid I was gonna lose the game.

Similarly, other mods keep the game feeling fresh with more events and special planets and the likes.

No Man's Sky. Game was a disaster when it came out. For most games, a bad launch would have ended the game. But with NMS, the devs kept at it and constantly added new content over many years. I believe it's still actively developed.

That's what got me to play it. I only played it maybe half a year ago. I wouldn't have bothered if not for the fact that people were mentioning how much the game had improved. I wrote the game off after the bad press when it launched, but fortunately I was wrong and they did make something good out of it.

Agreed. It's also frustrating that the labeling of anything anti-Zionist as anti-Semitism just gives actual anti-Semites the opportunity to claim their actual anti-Semitism is anything but.

If the gulf stream wants a share of the profits, it needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps and put the work in itself.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

It really is far harder to write short things than long things. I have to make conscious choices to remove things, even when it feels like "if I remove this, it's technically wrong in [niche edge case]" or "but what if it comes across as [some negative]".

Persona is definitely one of those games that really hits you when it's over. In part I think it's cause it's just so damn long. You spend a long time getting attached to characters and it being your daily activity. But also, the format of the games is just very relatable. Sure, it's got fantasy elements, but the school and calendar format grounds the game into something more relatable. The game's story is heavily focused on building up friendships.

Plus that fantasy element plays a part. It's what makes the game world something unachievable for the real you. You'll never have the grand, world-saving adventures of the video game. You could make some friends and such, but you'll never bond over saving the world or catching a killer or the likes. The end of games like Persona tend to make me think a lot about that.

I've seen this called "post Harry Potter syndrome" or "post anime syndrome" before. It's very common for a variety of works, but I think the recurring theme is usually that you invest a lot of time into a character driven work where building friendships and some kind of adventure is the key element.

Agree. It's still my personal favourite, but the forced kidnapping was really unnecessary. It wouldn't have been any worse if they just did a standard "here's your next story mission location" and the mission has a scripted kidnapping scene. Trying to force it at a random time just ended up feeling unrealistic and annoying.

Honestly, I found it hard to enjoy too, even though I finished the game. The game can be really fun, but it can also get a bit annoying to realize that you have missed something on a planet and if you did, it might take a boring amount of time to find what. The problem is that the save limitations means you basically have to waste a ton of time whenever you were wrong about something or mess up. The ship computer can hint at when a planet has more to see, but it's not necessarily easy to figure out where to go, how to reach it, or if you're supposed to do a different planet first to get a hint.

Fuck Brittle Hollow. I almost quit the game with how much time that stupid planet wasted. A quick save/load function would have made the game massively more fun for me. Replaying stuff I've already done because the game has bleh checkpointing is just not fun.

There's also that moment in No Man's Sky when you figure out what the story is implying. I'm being vague here to not spoil it for anyone. But it doesn't have a single point in time where you piece it together. There's a growing amount of evidence before the game outright tells you what's going on.

Yeah. The idea of what is bad for properties values is extremely subjective and some people take it to such extremes as to not let there ever be something they don't like.

Eg, houses can only be painted a very select few shades. Lawns have to be trimmed short and even a short vacation could get you a fine. Cars can't be parked on driveways overnight. You must have at least 3 flower beds of a minimum size. Trash bins can only be brought out in the morning and not the night before. Etc etc. Anything you can imagine a cranky neighborhood complaining about, some HOA probably has a rule for.

There's lots of common sense rules you could have. It's easy to picture a stereotypical crack den that you wouldn't want in your neighbourhood. But there's also a lot of people whose idea of a good neighborhood is cookie cutter white suburbia with no personality. If you try to have anything else, they'll fine you. If you try and fight the fines, you risk losing your house cause you can bet they'll try to make you pay any legal fees and they can probably get a lien on your house.

A sizable number of them are simply glad about articles like this. It's not about protecting children or anything. It's about punishing women. I think a lot of GOP supporters don't even explicitly think "I want to punish women", but they implicitly enjoy when it happens. It's more about imposing their religious beliefs than about anyone's life or the likes.

And another sizable chunk are just apathetic. They'll be willing to ignore stuff like this because it's worth it in their mind to hurt LGBT people or whichever other GOP policy drives them. They'll tell themselves this is just a tragic accident in their quest for the greater good, never viewing this as an entirely foreseeable consequence or even the outright goal.