Oh man, when Tommy Hilfiger finds out I’ve been stealing his undergarments, I am gonna be in so much trouble …

Ah, I see! I figured that’s likely what you meant, but I wasn’t certain.

Careful, I hear the local wildlife is murder…

I’m not sure by which definition of “small” you’re judging the Owlcat games, but, if anything, I felt like they were so overstuffed with content that they would have actually benefitted from reducing their scope. I think I was like 25 or so hours into Rogue Trader and was still getting tutorials for whole systems.

Fwiw, an Afghani is a unit of currency. An Afghan is a person from Afghanistan.

Saṃsāra (Devanagari: संसार) is a Sanskrit word that means “wandering”[1][2] as well as “world,” wherein the term connotes “cyclic change”[3] or, less formally, “running around in circles.” In the context of Indian religions and philosophies, saṃsāra is the concept of all beings experiencing an ongoing cycle of death, life, and rebirth.

10 comedy points.

If this idea appeals to you, but you don’t know where to start because you’ve never tried your hand at gardening before, it’s possible your local university will have information tailored specifically to your region and growing conditions. At least, my state’s university extension website has a whole section dedicated to tutorializing every stage of the process and suggested plants by type. Very helpful if you don’t know your zinnias from your azaleas.

Really nice colors! Everything pops without going overboard. Out of curiosity, how did you approach the detail work on the body of the staff? I’m impressed at how neatly you traced the raised sections without spilling into the recesses.

Man, I sunk a lot of hours into both 1 & 2. They were great for scratching the survival crafting zombie defense itch without having to delve into the “pick up sticks and stones to make an axe to chop trees to build a base to house forge to make metal tools to…”-type gameplay loop of many other similar games. I hope the third is successful enough to keep the studio in the black, if only because that will mean the game is good and I’ve done pretty much everything in vanilla SoD2.

Including an indicator that this is a character’s first go at a dungeon is an awesome design element. It’s kind of like an icebreaker which invites the (presumably random) group to ask what experience that player wants, or a shield that the newbie can point to if they’re getting lost in the sauce.

Lol, I didn’t include it in the post body since it strays from the typical MMO structure I was referring to, but Warframe is definitely a big culprit in the “I loaded into the mission and my teammates cleared it before the intro VO wrapped” space. No shame in that game, if I had the frame and mods to do it, I’d likely do the same. Instead though, I’ll take 45 minutes on a Spy mission because I’m playing it like Sam Fisher instead of Cyber Ninja. Of course, unlike SWTOR, where I feel my focus on story and world is encouraged by the game (or, at least, not punished), with Warframe I do feel like my approach is contrary to the design.

Still, love the game, and I’ve had mostly positive experiences with the community, even if I’m inevitably bringing up the rear in group content.

Depending on how old you like your old school, you might enjoy Spiderweb Software’s games. They (mostly just a guy and his wife) have been cranking out RPGs since 1994. While all their games are superficially similar, there’s an impressive amount of narrative and mechanical variety. If you’re a D&D fan, especially the Forgotten Realms setting, you might enjoy the Avernum series. You’re a prisoner, banished to the underground realm of Avernum , never to see the light of day again. However, you are not alone, as the ruthless Empire which sentenced you has long enjoyed sending its dissidents into the subterranean realm. In fact, there are several factions which vie for influence, and the player can throw their lot in with any or all of them. In some ways, it feels like an old school Underdark module for DnD.

Their other series are worth checking out too. In Avadon, you play a party of inquisitors (essentially) for a tyrannical, immortal overlord who exercises nigh totalitarian control over an alliance of 5 nations. Over the course of the game, your party uncovers a far-flung conspiracy against your boss for his abuses of power, and you are free to RP your characters’ reaction to this in a number of ways. Even further afield of that, the Geneforge series is set in a science fantasy world which blends magic with bioengineering and genesplicing. As an apprentice of the Shapers Guild, you have the power to change (or even create whole-cloth) life forms to suit your purposes. Brings created in this way are programmed (for lack of a better word) to be completely obedient to their Shaper, despite otherwise being sentient, free beings. The ethics of this form a large part of the tension in the plot. Mechanically, though, it means that the game is like a weird Ultima/Pokemon hybrid, where your party consists of your mad scientist chimera creations, who will protect your squishy gene wizard until their dying breaths.

I first came across their work when I watched Jeff Vogel’s GDC presentation several years ago. It’s an hour long, but, if you have the time and interest, it’s a very candid look at how the sausage is made in indie game development. In particular, I appreciate that he is very conscious that the games’ visuals could at best be described as “quaint”, but that just encouraged him to lean into the writing even harder to make up the difference, since that cost almost nothing.

Agreed! I don’t know if this perspective is the minority, or if it’s just that the chronic tab openers are overrepresented in meme communities, but I am flabbergasted by the folks who have dozens of tabs open at a time, if not more. Like, I’m ADHD as all hell, so I get that angle, but do these people not have anxiety as a co-morbidity? Once I stop being able to tell from an immediate glance which tab belongs to which train of thought, I have to nuke it and start over.

Agreed! Admittedly, my handle on the contemporary world of art is tenuous at best, but this very much felt like that 1900 ± 15 years sort of style.

I don’t disagree with you in any particular part, and almost wrote a paragraph clarifying that the swastika and fasces are not 1:1 equivalences specifically because the Nazis divorced the swastika from its original meaning for their own purposes, while the Fascists selected the fasces as their core symbol because of its already established symbolism.

However, you can understand that the circular logic of calling something “fascist” which predates the codification of “Fascism” is doing my head in. If you want to counter that that’s a semantic argument which doesn’t invalidate your point, I tend to agree, with the significant caveat that this entire discussion is semantic in nature, so it’s more relevant than usual.

Long story short, I don’t equate every example of a state using violence to achieve its purpose as fascism, though it’s certainly a necessary ingredient, so I won’t yuck your yums if you do. To me, a war memorial is an appropriate venue for the fasces to appear, given its martial and reflective nature (as in, reflecting on the past), whereas including a fasces as the centerpiece of the nation’s diplomatic emblem is significantly more concerning as a forward looking statement of intent (so to speak).

I feel like there’s a term for this sort of backwards misattribution of a symbol’s later meaning onto examples which predate their modern connotation, but I can’t think of what it would be. The war memorial you’re referring to was dedicated in 1920. Considering fascism as a political ideology had just started coalescing around Mussolini in Italy circa 1919-1920, it strains credulity to link the two. In a similar fashion, you wouldn’t suggest the presence of swastikas outside a Hindu temple indicates support for Nazism by default.

Fasces have represented the strength of the state dating back to the pre-Roman Etruscan kings. Therefore, seeing it on the national architecture of a Western nation which fancies itself as a descendent of Greek and Roman civilizations shouldn’t be that surprising, nor taken as a tacit endorsement of capital-F “Fascist” ideology. Case in point, do you know what’s prominently featured on the cover of every French passport? It ain’t a baguette, I’ll say that much. Heck, in 1953, France elected to keep the fasces as part of their diplomatic emblem, despite their very recent experiences in WW2 under Fascist rule. If we can give France a pass for continuing to use the symbol after post-war, surely that can extend to a 1920 Revolutionary War memorial in America. Unless every example of nationalism is equivalent to Fascism (and I readily grant that nationalism is a core tenet of that ideology, but allowances should be made for nuance), sometimes a fasces is just a fasces.

All of which is not to say that America is fascism free. Obviously not. Just that the above comment made me roll my eyes when there are so many better examples to cite, like the roving gangs of brownshirts disappearing people into nebulously legal holding centers.

Hey! I’ve been to that bar! Cool shot, he’s definitely grooving!

Okay, this is news to me, but it friggin rips. I don’t even like EDM that much.