I’ve only dabbled in Plex, but Im kinda confused about the hate for this. Isn’t the whole point to be able to more easily browse and use a large media library (esspecially for something like a shared library)? This seems like its useful to that purpose.

There has been some debate over the response to tactical Nuclear weapons - notably NATO threatened a conventional response to the use of nukes (likely meant to be read as, “We will end this war, no nukes needed.”) but it would depend massively on their usage.

Its unfortunately a pretty common thing, especially for gatcha games. Look at the whole Limbus Company debacle from a few years back, for example, where people protested outside the studio because the summer skins weren’t sexy enough (for a game that hadn’t previously sexualized characters heavily) and got an unrelated artist fired because she was a feminist and thus was surely the one who made the decision.

With gatcha games, its a bit of a perfect storm with the extreme investment expected in these games, the monetization of characters, an industry that leans into this, and the fact that these games tend to be made in and marketed towards east-Asian regions where generally, sexuality is more accepted but sexism also more common and played largely by young, immature men.

Edit: Notably also, a lot of the men getting super invested in games like this are also vulnerable, which means a lot are likely to also end up in groups like the incel “movement” as well as being more likely to be swept up in any existing toxic culture around the games themselves.

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They provide a bunch of other services tied in, like the reviews, Workshop, and most infamous, guides and forums. While the reviews and Workshop tend to not be too bad (although still often not great) the forums and guides tend to be completely unmoderated and as a result, devolve into spam and extremism.

As everyone has clearly stated, you need to watch out for your personal health and safety (mental and physical).

That said, I just want to highlight the fact that you probably shouldn’t broadcast your feelings on it too bluntly (even if you are in the right) and should consider if a more middle-ground approach would be better for you compared to making a large announcement and cutting people off. To be clear, this should be primally about you and your well-being, though.

In particular, as other have stated, if you’re cutting them off anyway, its probably worth considering just ghosting them. That way you can avoid fights and drama, as well as likely having less records of you being trans if you’re worried about that.

If you still care about your family a lot, as it sounds like you do, it may also be worth considering trying to work out a plan for low-contact rather than completely cutting them off. For example, if you communicate mostly through social media, you might disconnect or switch to alts they don’t know. If its primarily through sms but not phone, prehaps block or hide their sms messages but allow them to call you. Maybe you just need to stop visiting them or allowing visits. Your family doesn’t need to know this plan or the reason for it, and probably shouldn’t. For example, you could just brush it off as wanting to disconnect from social media/technology or being busy. If you want to go this route, figure you what works for you - don’t do it out of obligation, but because you genuinely want to keep the connection and are confident you can do so with without putting yourself in danger. Also, be willing to re-evaluate this later, if your relationship or need change.

In the same vein, you can also start looking at moving to safer regions. I understand this is a big commitment, so I don’t expect it to be a reasonable answer, esspecially in the short term, but if may be worth starting to look at whats involved. It might be complete overkill (I pray to God it is) but if you don’t have significant roots, moving further away may help distance yourself from them, while also providing more security.

Ultimately, I don’t think you’re in the wrong, if you feel the need to resort to anything more extreme for your own well-being, don’t hesitate. At the same time, it can be hard on you to lose family, reguardless of how terrible, abusive, or stupid they may be, which is why I’m bringing up some more middle-ground options. Consider your needs, and decide what the best way to achive that is - you don’t need to consider their reaction or feeling when trying to figure out how to keep yourself safe and healthy.

Its possible I’ve just been lucky enough to avoid that part of the playerbase. Then again, my perception my also be skewed from spending so much time in Dead By Daylight, War Thunder, Minecraft and Counter Strike. At least in Dota, it takes some effort to kill more than a couple teammates.

Honestly, by online gaming standards, I’ve found Dota pretty tame. Prehaps its just because I stick to more casual modes and have a high behaviour score, but I rarely see much more than a “GGEZ” at the end of a game, or players tipping mistakes. I think its been at least a month since the last time I saw someone hack, intentionally teamkill, or throw. Obviously, its still a competitve online game (toxicity isn’t rare), but the only other online game I can think of where I experienced less toxicity was Deep Rock Galactic.

It could be done, but it could even more easily be done to just say Ukrane is part of NATO, and NATO will intervene if necessary to prevent further territory loss. The result would be the same. Putin doesn’t care about the theatrics. He just wants the Ukrainian identity destroyed and the land to be considered Russian. It doesn’t matter to him how NATO is involved beyond how much of a threat they are.

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Episodes 1 and 2 are now also bundled in.

Well, they implemented some graphical improvements and options, as well as workshop mod support so now would be a good time for a replay.

Technically, it can and has been done already. The problem is that AI is very bad at creating new ideas and even worse at understanding what it has created (as is required for plots or jokes). As a result, any writting created with heavy AI influence tends to sound like a child’s stream of thought with an adult’s vocabulary, and any jokes rely purely on randomness or on repeating an existing well-known joke. Similarly with art and animation, because the AI doesn’t understand what it is creating, it struggles to keep animation of elements consistant and often can’t figure out how elements should be included in the scene. Voices are probably the strongest part, but even then, it can be buggy and won’t change correctly to match the context of what is being said.

None of this is to say AI is useless. Its very good at creating a “good enough” quick-fix, or to be used to fill unimportant or trivial work. If used to help clean up scripts or fill in backgrounds, it can speed up the process greatly at minimal cost. It’s a tool to be used by someone who knows the field, not to replace them.

Who even thinks this is a big deal? This screams boomers being upset about violent video games all over again.

While its not a big deal, at least for Gmod specifically, they really could use some further moderation. I’ve seen some pretty reprehensible stuff there. The most recent example that comes to mind is “Burning Ukrainian Soldiers” on the front page (complete with combat footage to compare against and racist description of Ukranians), but that sort of thing is not rare at all.

WE’RE RICH!

In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.

That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.

A couple of major factors:

Users who expect low prices - This partly because of the history of mobile games being smaller and/or ad-funded but also because the vast majority of people playing games on their phone are looking for a low barrier to entry, time waster, not specifically a game.

Lack of regulation or enforcement - other gambling heavy fields tend to be at least somewhat regulated, but mobile games are very light on regulation, and even lighter on enforcement. This allows them to falsely advertise their games and how they function (both in terms of misleading ads, and lying about chance based events and purchases in-game).

Monopolistic middlemen - On other platforms, theres more direct competition (IE, Sony and Microsoft’s generally more direct competition) or companies that prioritize long-term growth and stability (IE Steam or Itch.io). Apple and Google, on the other hand, largely compete on brand perception and hardware specs. These means that their app stores, where they make most of their money, have zero competitors. Seeing as they have no reason to make the stores better, they can instead promote whatever makes them the most money; that being exactly these manipulate, sketchy, virtual slot machines.

I think it is technically possible - with the Valve Index you can read the camera input like a webcam, and I’m sure theres some way to do it with the Quests (although probably not easily). That said, as others have noted, between the bulkyness of the headset, the lower quality of the cameras, the risk of losing tracking, and the natural shakyness of people’s heads, it likely wouldn’t be an improvement. Try watching VR footage from someone who doesn’t stream/video it regularly and you can get an idea of how hard the footage can be to follow, even before the lower camera quality.

It would be anywhere between 2 and 5.

Either physical or digital. And I have access to a PC (with a bunch of emulators) or mobile phones.