And not a single black person in any of them.

There were no sex cards, but if memory serves you could “romance” Jaheira (while effectively standing on the still warm corpse of her husband), Aerie (I remember that being kind of fucked but it has been 20 years), Viconia, and one of the boring dudes.

The “romances” weren’t particularly well written but… they honestly aren’t much better these days. We mostly just, as a culture, have moved on from needing everything to be a storybook romance and understanding that sometimes you just need a bang. Which makes “romance” in games a hell of a lot easier.

But also, since BG2 (well, NWN), Bioware have basically made their entire thing “romance options” and so forth. Similar to how Obsidian and Owlcat decided the real culture war was Turn Based versus Real Time With Pause. And Larian realized that we could do all the environmental nonsense that was originally only an option for tabletop games with GMs who didn’t know why you were asking when it last rained.

Meh.

We’ve known elon was a shitbird for years. The case where he accused a straight up hero British Diver of being a pedophile for rescuing 12 children without using a musk branded product was 2018. And the sex pest shit has been pretty consistent since. And I will always argue that tesla emphasizing battery size so much actively hurt EV adoption throughout the country (you don’t need a giant battery. You just need to realize that you were going to stop for lunch at some point anyway).

But also? The people buying teslas, generally, weren’t people living paycheck to paycheck. They were status symbols for tech workers an so forth. Their asses can do a trade in or, at the absolute least, put on a bumper sticker to say they hate him too.

So no. I am not going to lose any sleep over people needing to make insurance claims because they drive around in a car that is branded around a nazi who is destroying the fucking country and destabilizing the world.

None of what you listed is “new”. Also, Morrowind wasn’t actually “strange” in the slightest. Plenty of fantasy RPGs had elements of sci-fi and weird bug shit (see: Wizardry and even Might and Magic) and the “you can screw up the main quest” was similarly common at the time. Planescape I’ll give you.

Which is also true here. BG3 is not “strange”, It is literally the third Baldurs Gate game and continues most of the same themes and concepts. Yeah, it is a whole lot more gay but even that is not out of the ordinary for CRPGs at this point and had been pushed by companies like Larian, Obsidian, and Owlcat. Hell, the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages deserve a LOT of props for how horny and gay they were and normalizing the idea of picking the right dialogue options for a sexy card cutscene (also see CD Projekt Red).

And KCD2 is one of the most bog standard power fantasy games out there.

Like most articles of this variety, this is just a fancy way of saying “people should make good games”

And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.

In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.

And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.

For a lot of these mega corporations an indefinite boycott is just not viable for the vast majority of people.

But a one week boycott? THAT is reasonable. People in small towns can put off their deliveries for a few days. I know a few twitch streamers who are willing to take the week off or only stream to Youtube because it is a chunk of their revenue but not their livelihoods. And so forth.

And a small number of dedicated indefinite losses are a lot less impactful than a large number of temporary ones.

He doesn’t have to do shit to justify anything. He hasn’t thus far.

All he has to do is say “I declare an insurrection” and the democrats will hem and haw while the republicans move in lock step. And the military will support him, just like they did last time.

Oh, wait, that pisses people off. Let me try again

The military will wait for orders from the POTUS to figure out what to do about the POTUS. SUPPORT THE TROOPS MOTHER FUCKERS!!!

This is gonna suck but fuckin’ A canada. Have the spine we don’t.

To my knowledge, Sanderson has not spoken out against Kindle*. His kickstarter was mostly to advertise Dragonsteel which is likely going to become his own publishing house at some point.

And while… fuck amazon, Kindle is a ridiculously author friendly platform to publish on and is the only reason we have so many amazing self published authors these days. And while KU is not great per book, it is an excellent way to get people interested in an author and buy their latest books. I strongly encourage actually reading what authors say instead of what users and armchair financial analysts do.

*: I would be incredibly shocked if he did. I think he is definitely becoming more “woke” than “mormon” these days based off his writing and character details but he is still very much a business person

I strongly encourage POLITELY reaching out to your favorite authors on social media to talk to them about this.

One of my favorite guilty pleasure reads is very open that this is why his ebooks are only on kindle. But he is also looking into alternatives (especially since he is now big enough to have at least a small publisher) because the readers he is trying to help with KU are the ones asking him to get away from it.

Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.