Yes. From the article:

Ethiopia: […] It is one of the few African countries that enacted its own anti-gay laws – most others inherited those laws from Britain.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

AI execs: Our AIs are going to be so powerful. More powerful than anything. Soon they could be able to destroy humanity!

Governments: Well, then we better regulate that shit and make sure that doesn’t happen…

AI execs: Nooooo! We did not mean it that way!

Your quote reminds me of one of the biggest misconceptions about Judith Butler’s work who wrote so much about gender…

People constantly misquote them and say that Butler wrote that “gender is a performance” and assume that Butler meant that gender is fake.

What Butler Butler actually wrote is that “gender is performative”, ie. it involves a performance that communicates our gender identity to others without the performance being the end-all-be-all of gender.

The “”“alpha male’s”“” masculinity is so fragile, they threw a conniption when seeing a picture of a fit woman.

No, you see it’s not like education makes you see past your own prejudices and that makes you more liberal. If you are liberal you get awarded an education by the shadowy cabal that controls the education system with DEI measures! This guy only wants a tRuE mERiToCrACy where disenfranchised, downtrodden bigots get a chance to attend university where they are taught about the superiority of their white Aryan race.

/s if it isn’t apparent.

Without doubt, it will. Though the GD party is not keen on joining the EU anymore anyway and favor Russia. Laws like this will make it easy for the GD to blame the EU when the EU makes the inevitable decision to suspend Georgia’s admission process.

Technically this year, but already after the last elections in 2020, there were credible allegations of election fraud in favor of the ruling GD party which resulted in massive protests. Since then GD has only tightened its hold of the country’s institutions and has suppressed civil society. You can see why the upcoming elections aren’t looking promising…

They did! See the article over here.

Yeah, trans people in the UK are in horrible danger.
In regards to Hillary Cass I am not even sure how much of this is actual regret and how much is her trying to save her reputation in regards to her scientific credentials. It may be politically opportune to write a report full of bigoted pseudo-science that slanders the academic community who does actual science, but it comes at a price.

The benefit of use high-end cameras (like those from Arri) is that they usually have a higher range for ISO (light sensitivity) and aperture, which makes it easier to shoot without setting up lighting for every specific shot. Most people know this from smartphone cameras: Cheap ones struggle in low-light settings while better ones will still be able to produce decent pictures.

Of course, everybody responds differently to such things. For me… (spoilered for those who still want to play it)

But ultimately everyone has to find their own way to figures themselves out. So I will keep my fingers crossed that you will find yours.

If you are in the mood for another game and have half an hour of time, I recommend checking out “What’s your gender?”. It’s a short experience that made a big difference for me.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

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Lemmy not catching on and Reddit dying aren’t mutually exclusive, unfortunately. I personally know quite many users who left Reddit, but never made the jump over to Lemmy, because they mostly stayed on Reddit due to particular communities. With those communities getting decimated during the APIcalypse and its fallout, they had little incentive to join Lemmy.

Ultimately my personal opinion is that Lemmy is going to persist, even if it doesn’t cross certain thresholds, it is still a part of the larger Fediverse and due to its interoperability, Lemmy can benefit from the success of the Fediverse, even when not being all that successful by itself.

Now that you say it… Yes, strong College of Winterhold vibes.