It’s quite amazing how these people show their asses on LinkedIn and think it makes them look smart, instead of proving that they completely lost touch with reality. It fits the picture that one the very same day they laid of thousands, Microsoft also send out an invitation to hear them pitch genAI at GamesCom. That’s corpo brain on late stage capitalism.

Also Mustelids, because Mustelids are hella cute and who can blame nature for wanting to create more cute things?!

The artist is RustyAtom, u/khynra on Reddit

For those who want some context: Theosophy has always been a huge part of the New Age movement and the founder of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, was a white supremacist. She taught her followers about a “Great White Brotherhood” (aka The Masters) who were racially superior to others. She was also convinced of the existence of superior “root races” (one of them being the Aryans) and various “sub-races”…

Unsurprisingly Theosophy would (for example) merge with the Völkisch movement in Germany (the precursor of the nazi party).

Theosophy with its belief in a secret underground realms, ancient high cultures, lost continents, superior alien races and so on and so forth, was one of the big influences on the late 20th century New Age movement.

I moments of crisis, I will just start crying, but I can do that very fast.

For years on end Fox “News” told these people that they are the vanguard in the culture wars. This is the intended outcome.

The Wikipedia article about Jonathan

The Free Speech crowd will be here any minute now! /s

AFAIK the importance of the proteasome for the immune system has already been established quite a while ago. If I understand it correctly this new research digs deeper into the processes in the proteasome as “the cellular mechanisms underlying [the generation of antimicrobal peptides] are not fully understood” (Quote from the actual research paper). So this new research fills a knowledge gap and is thus very valuable, but - no - the scientists do not claim to have “discovered a new part of the immune system”. That’s just hyperbole for the sake of generating clicks for the article.

Look! It’s… Ooh, snacks!

Chanel No.5 suffers from the problem that it was originally made over 100 years ago. While the scent of No.5 did not change much, lots and lots and lots of products that came later imitated the scent of the (at the time) prestigious No.5. So it’s not necessarily a case of “No.5 smells like soap”, rather than “soaps smell like No.5”. And No.5 can’t escape the position it founds itself in without becoming something else entirely.

It’s quite easy to understand: If you aren’t white and successful in sports, you are not a real woman™.

Hello, friend! Have some 🥜 🌰

“Nothing Is More Powerful Than an Idea Whose Time Has Come”

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.

Visual agnosia?

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.

This is the result of a long-term, political strategy.
Anyone remember GamerGate? There has been an extreme backlash against feminism since the mid-2010s which GamerGate was a part of. (GamerGate in itself was part of a wider strategy that the far-right began to use on 4chan in the late 00s.)

Steve Bannon (then EIC at Breitbart) pushed GamerGate’s anti-feminism into the mainstream right-wing politics because he saw it as an opportunity to recruit young men. Unfortunately he was right and his strategy has paid off, forming an anti-feminist alliance that has become a core belief of right-wing parties all around the world. It has creeped into the mainstream with figures like Andrew Tate who fulfill the role of recruiting young men for even more extreme anti-feminist, far-right content.

This was the background noise that these young men grew up in. Many of the influencers they followed would tell them endlessly how feminism is to be blamed for bad games (during GamerGate) and - in general - how feminism is to be blamed for most ills of modern society. That young men were effed over by capitalism and patriarchy was - of course - deliberately omitted.