Deadpan

Didn't know it doubled those too, but I guess it makes sense. Also didn't know it worked with runes. Not pills though, right? Otherwise you'd basically just have to get the right setup for carrying both a Jera rune and and a 48 Hours Energy pill and get endless everything.

Eyup, this <3

That's not entirely what I wanted to say, but it is how I tend to encounter the argument most often. Which doesn't necessarily disprove it I guess, but the mere fact of how often this comes up by way of guys going "Man, I'd have nothing against feminists if they were a little bit nicer about combatting the massive injustices marginalized folk face" should show us that any internal discussion to happen about this should take great care not to fan that particular flame. In essence, I think that the complaint far too often borders on tone policing for me. In essence, yeah, feminism should be interested in trying to reach more people, but at the same time if it makes itself entirely unobtrusive it also becomes toothless. Meaningful change isn't going to happen without pissing a few people off. More than a few, depending on how radical your goals are. Although this is an area in which it's possible to constructively disagree about how far it should go. It doesn't change the point, but it does place it in the unfortunate tradition of men being paid top dollar (or pitiful freelance rates, but at least getting paid) to write ill-informed articles about feminist subjects. This can tilt a bit far in the direction of sounding like men shouldn't be allowed to write about it at all, but only if you look at the issue in isolation, which I think is generally misleading. If it were possible to divorce what is being said from who is saying it, the concept of cultural appropriation would not exist and something like mansplaining would just be a nonspecific annoyance. A little detail my feel irrelevant to an individual exchange, but it's meaningful in where it situates that exchange culturally. Edit: I've never quite understood that, to be honest, given that there are plenty of other situations in which we apologize even if something happened unintentionally. Never in my life did I mean to step on somebody's foot, but it happened regardless and there's no harm in telling them I'm sorry for accidentally causing them discomfort.

Yeah, I went for it because I wanted Brim, but I don't much mind what I got. Still had the original knife to deal damage with too, plus that swarm of little knives circling around the room. Another thought that happened there: has anybody experimented with or done any math on how many items you could potentiall get during a single run? A library plus a couple of batteries meant I got to touch just about every book in the game on that run and put them out of the pool, so I really got a lot of neat stuff once I got to the chest. I guess Guppy's Tail, Contract From Below and a Forget Me Now could really set you up at that stage, or it might even be possible to completely break the game with some sort of Blank Card plus Wheel of Fortune infinite charges setup.

That internal discussion was actually going on around this time last year. And then GG happened and (understandably) very quickly burned through everybody's patience. I tend to feel similarly iffy about these critiques, which I rarely see as part of intersectional bonding and frequently as part of the old argument about flies, vinegar and honey put forth by dudes who want to tell feminists how they should go about their biz (which is ultimately a way of saying "I'll hold my support hostage until you agree to play by my rules/be nicer to me") Sort of goes both ways you know? It's suggested that we should discuss issues, not people, but if any time you adress a problematic action or attitude people take it as a personal attack, that's literally impossible. So often the response to "that thing you said was sexist" is "why are you saying I'm sexist you meanie"

Since I recently got myself a lifetime account for throwing together our second office game, I could set up for the fine folk around here too, if enough people are interested.

That's how reasonable people see it, but if you're a fan of conspiracy theories it's all about Steam branching out.

Well that was the weirdest run I ever had: I thought that Brimstone would overwrite Mom's Knife, but instead it made a barrage of knives appear about a second after firing the normal one. A barrage of homing, poisoned knives. I went up to six health mostly due to freak good luck with pills, then down to zero and a few black hearts due to my greedy devil-dealing. Still, by the end of it all I was Guppy, and the Duke of Flies. Weird.

Valve is currently busy getting into politics it seems. Steam may not be your publisher, but maybe they'll be your next head of state?

The time economics are definitely a thing that needs to be worked out. The question of who gets how much affection and attention can be the spark that ignites the powder keg of different expectations, different levels of involvement,ence the incredibly important need to talk about this constantly and with everybody involved. It's most complicated, I think, when there's some sort of imbalance in how involved people curerntly are in various romantic affairs. Like, if I have several partners at the moment, but for one of them I am the only one they are currently with, that might cause a bit of tension unless we work it out. This is actually one of the reasons I was disappointed in Redshirt when I played it: the game is entirely about managing your social interactions with various people in your life, but it still included an arbitrary limit of only being able to have one relationship at a time, rather than having this be naturally determined by how many people I can keep in high spirits simultaneously, which would have been more interesting to me. For me it's like, how deep is this connection, really, if I need to be worried that they'll forget all about me just because they did a sex with somebody else? Although, I don't want to paint monogamy as a matter of jealousy and insecurity anymore than I enjoy the portrayal of polyamory as an indulgance for twentysomethings with commitment issues that sometimes happens. Both are sometimes unfairly lumped with an unpleasant thing that exists in the same general neighborhood, I guess.

It seems to mostly advocate taking a break for a while, and that seems reasonable enough. In my experience at least, it's often a mental thing. I know society builds up this image of men as always being raring to go, but the truth is we're no strangers to emotional trouble and if you're stressed, nervous or otherwise distracted it can be hard to focus on pleasure and really lose yourself in it. Naturally, your first time would make you feel all sorts of pressure that can get in the way of things. Hopefully your next time will be more relaxed and even more enjoyable.

You don't know what exactly is going to happen, but that's not the same as being entirely unprepared for it if you, as has been suggested, take into consideration that stuff might be bad for you. You may not know that a card spawns a bunch of random bombs, but you know that you don't know what it does, and that you're taking a risk by trying it. You can minimize that risk by testing it in a cleared, open room, stocking up on health, etc. or even just by plain not using it at all if you've got a setup that you don't want to lose to any kind of accident. It's pretty clear that the game just isn't for you, but I don't think it's fair to describe this as accidental or poor design rather than a conscious choice towards making people learn stuff the hard way, which you happen to think is bullshit. Besides, just because you know what the items do eventually doesn't mean you'll always know whether to pick them up or not. Since a lot of them only work well in certain combinations, you might have to weigh picking up something that's useless or detrimental to you at the moment for a chance that it'll be great later. Or you want one of the benefits of an item but aren't sure if its other effects are worth it right now, or you're unsure if picking up something in a devil room is worth the health loss, whether you want to buy that one item in the shop now or see what's on the next level and risk running into Greed instead etc. etc.

Soha's pretty great! Weird how I managed to convince her to write for me for a while. I could have sworn I saw that article earlier this month though. Or maybe I just recall the phrase "shameless buttplug" from somewhere else (Her on Twitter maybe).

I'm somewhat familiar with the scenario, I suppose, in that sometimes people I end up talking to on these sites or in general respond to me being poly with "Well, I never really thought about it." And yeah, that directly ties into the idea of monogamy as the norm: it goes unquestioned and people don't necessarily ever think about there being alternatives. However, this is not an assumption you get to make about somebody if you approach them. Until and unless you end up in a situation where they feel comfortable talking about how exactly they feel on those matters, you had better assume that what they put in their preferences was a conscious, informed decision. Because, to put it the other way around, to go into it thinking that they don't know what they want, or that you know more about what they want than they do, is more than a little arrogant.

Doesn't strike me as unfair at least. A bit more care would not go amiss on those sites in general. They're also one of the places where you can get some of the most obvious examples of men feeling entitled to women's attention, whenever women post screenshots of dudes going from flirty to gross in the span of two to three unanswered messages.

The approach of letting those relationships happen with people you happen to meet in life is probably the nicest in a lot of ways, but I feel like that one is also kind of hard to get off the ground. At least, as you say, that's much easier to do if you're already comfortable with and certain about what you want, if you have an established, fulfilling relationship that leaves you open to experiment with what else there is. I know that when I came to terms with all this, I wasn't entirely sure about a lot of things and felt like testing if this was really my jam before telling other people in my life. At that point, general dating sites felt the most inviting to me because it seemed the least likely that I would be, well, noob-shamed there. That probably explains the general trend and your perception that people who are approaching others about it there are kind of inexperienced themselves, although you also meet quite lovely people that way, in my experience. Usually it's the folk who mention feminism in their profiles. Weird coincidence!

That's a good way of putting it. And super worthwhile! Like, oh my glob how my relationships have improved since I got a little better about all this stuff. Not that it's particularly relevant. Feminism doesn't have to be sexy to be worthy of your time, and all that. But it also definitely is, like "whoaaa," like "hello, whaaaaat?" Not purposefully, but it had some "I will force you to be free" vibes about it, I felt.

I'm glad you enjoyed yourself. That's fair, I just think you need to approach those conversations respectfully. There's a point where interrogating people about how they do relationships crosses a line. EDIT: It's definitely a bit weird because the structure of these sites is about what you want and in situations like yours it's really more a question of what do we want. These sites really are more of a single free-for-all, and I definitely also get a bit wary around people who use them uncritically or a unaware of their many problems. I suppose part of the problem may also be that the intent on there is usually to find somebody you've never met before and have a completely fresh start with them, whereas for couples or groups it may be easier to expand the relationship with somebody you are all already acquainted with, friends with, etc. On the flipside though, the established poly circles, kink circles, etc. that people who don't need to rely on sites or apps move in can be a bit cliquish and weird.

You've said some good things in the Life thread. I've added some things of my own now and maybe they were also okay. I can sort of understand the desire to crack open monogamous relationship models (as an unchallenged norm, not as a concept), but the idea of doing so by forcibly confronting people with other models whether they like to or not is very ehhhhhhh. This is a very important subject in general I think. It's not as comfortably far away as stuff like the pay gap, because most people flirt with other people at some point in their lives, and that often makes it a bit awkward to talk about for them, I guess, but it also means it's not as far out of reach for changing. I can improve my approach to interpersonal stuff far easier than I could change laws or policies.

I am polyamorous, so I guess I might as well weigh in on all this jazz, and feel free to riddle me with questions if this isn't clear. Which it probably isn't. I have no doubt that the chokehold monogamy has on relationships is inspired by a whole lot of cultural baggage, but I'm not a fan of the line of thinking that suggests the desire to be happy ever after with just one partner is entirely the result of those weird expectations and norms. Even if it all were to go away and we'd all manage to, as so many people are fond of suggesting, just chiiiiiilll about relationships, I imagine people would continue to form those bonds and there's nothing wrong with that. Of course, it'd be great if we could work to undo all the damage wrought by hundreds of years of romantic fiction (etc.) telling us how wrong this is and using jealousy as their magic bullet for creating drama, but I don't appreciate that people overshoot in the other direction by suggesting that this is the more natural, better way to be. Besides, you can't be post-monogamy in a world that isn't, for the same reason that you can't be post-gender in a world that isn't. The problem with that is that even to approach them can break their boundaries. This is an area where the different expectations coming with different relationship models can wreak havoc, and that's not something they need to get over, that's something I need to keep at bay. For instance, just because it's no big deal to me to tell somebody that I love them (because I fall in love easily and want to love indiscriminately without any real expectations attached) doesn't mean that for them it's not a big deal and that they won't be freaked out by a confession like that, if they have a different understanding of what love means. And they're not wrong! My understanding is no better than theirs, just different. This isn't hysterical. You gripe about perceived transgressions, but the reality of these differences is that just by telling people something seemingly innocuous you can be massively overstepping boundaries, if you've not previously communicated about what their expectations and wishes are. This is something I've struggled with for a while, because I had to learn and accept that it can actually be selfish to love so selflessly, because it can put a lot of unexpected pressure on another person to somehow respond to these feelings I have. Many different forms of it, but for me definitely it's more a matter of having several serious relationships at the same time rather than having no serious relationships and just sleeping around. Which is also fine. What you mean, a constellation of one primary partner and other casual relationships definitely also exists. One-hundred percent. No matter how frustrated you get out in the dating world, important to never get uppity at people for using whatever means available to minimize the avalanche of creeps.

Also another example for how the intent of something doesn't have to line up with the realities of something, especially if you practice the kind of deregulation GG is so fond of. So an unmoderated forum for political discussion can, in practice, hardly become anything other than a racist clubhouse, since it's always the grossest people who will fill the power vaccuum created by a lack of oversight. By, in essence, farting up a storm until everybody else leaves. Which is GG's vision for games as a whole too, I guess.

To be fair, very few items in the game are entirely detrimental. Plenty are mostly useless, like the many different flavors of speed, range and shot speed upgrades, or less than impressive familiars. Others raise one stat at the expense of another, but only a very small number of them have the potential to irredeemably mess up a run. Tiny Planet, definitely. Dead Cat, I guess, if you had a lot of health before picking it up and didn't realize it would knock you down to one. Soy Milk, Strange Attractor or Anti-Gravity maybe, but that's already more debatable. Would the opposite of that - for items to be entirely random and impossible to ever learn - be preferable to you though? That didn't happen automatically though, you did something to trigger the teleport. If it was Telepills, you had some bad luck. If it was an Emperor Card, well then you know what that does now. Either way it's something you could have activated after picking up those hearts. Manage the randomness, you know.

Gross as always of course, but it's not terribly surprising to see another history rewrite from GG, in which their opponents somehow turn out to be kids and not grown-ass game developers and critics. It is super weird to think about the process that goes into something like that though. I mean, look at the absurd platitudes they use to describe their champions opposite the weirdly specific insults. "Taught us to be creative" could be applied to any site on there really, but somehow it becomes about a lack of originality later on.

Well, it's not that I mind that stuff, more the disconnect of being so super full of yourself with nothing to show for it. A very teenage mentality I guess.

Technically I came here to get away from that, but taking another sideways glance at the Escapist forums after news of the layoffs there really left me itching to talk about what's up with that weird forum mentality. When I still hung out there, the common consensus was that it's the only place to have intelligent conversations about games. This was almost universally accepted and frequently added as a barb to discussion of any other website: "but of course they're not as good as this one." But what you found when actually looking at the board then, and what you'll find now, are multi-page debates about which direction to wipe with toilet paper or whether it's okay to pee in the shower. Here's a group that somehow has become absolutely convinced of their own immense intelligence that they forego any genuinely challenging material and skip straight to writing fan fiction about each other (No, seriously). And of course there's a Religion and Politics board infested with people who think their lack of empathy somehow led them to a higher, more pure form of reason. Man, what a silly thing to have ever been involved in.