Spyke

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Why would she tweet that?! We're so effed...

In the last couple weeks, I've noticed a sudden and dramatic shift in tone with how Biden is talked about on Lemmy as well as other corners of the internet I lurk on(e.g. this comment section). Before, it seemed like the general opinion was "he's nowhere close to my 1st choice, but the alternative is Trump." And now I feel like people are a lot quicker to jump to his defense and treat him like one of the better presidents of our lifetime.

I'm gonna admit that I'm a lot less up to date and informed about politics than I should be, but where did this recent pivot on Biden come from?

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I absolutely love this idea

I do this too. Instead of minis, I tape a drawing onto a Starburst and whoever kills the monster gets to eat the Starburst. I'm gonna have to get something like a donut for the boss fight at the end of the adventure I'm running rn.

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Rule

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That greentext has singlehandedly stopped me from fully hating AI, it still makes me crack a smile to this day.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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I disagree. I'm not much of a Fallout fan, but I picked up New Vegas for the first time because of the show, installed the Viva New Vegas mods mentioned in another comment, and this game absolutely fucking rules.

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good

I am nonbinary, I haven't played a Dragon Age game before Veilguard, I haven't yet gotten to this one scene that's apparently damned the entire franchise, nor have I even met Taash(?) yet. Here's my off the cuff rambling thoughts:

I've just now watched the scene devoid of context, and if that's where the misgendering conversation started and stopped, I think everyone is wildly overreacting. The first minute is fine, a weird older lady apologizes for screwing up in her own way, I've had people react in much stranger ways than that, and in it's own way "Whoops I fucked up, lemme do some push ups to show I feel bad" is kinda sweet. I'll concede that the explanation after was heavy handed, but you could definitely include the gist of it somewhere else easily. "Don't be weird, just say sorry and move on" is the correct advice to give to someone who doesn't know how to interact with trans people but wants to be supportive. If that last minute of the conversation happened somewhere else in the game, it'd have been fine.

The game overall has been mediocre so far, a solid 6 out of 10, nothing to write home about, but certainly not deserving of the flak it's been getting. This is one of the first games I've played where I feel like I'm represented, I think it might be the first major game where you can make a custom character who's explicitly transgender, and that counts for something in my book.

From where I'm standing, it really feels like a lot of the outrage DA:V is drawing comes from some discomfort(conscious or no) with having the queer experience very out in the open for everyone to see, which is what I would expect from a series that (as far as I can tell) has always had tons of explicitly queer characters. I'm sure that's not universally the case, but I simply don't buy this narrative of "I'm fine with trans people, but the way it's written is so clunky." because I've had almost the polar opposite experience. I can think of few other games that talk about transness in the way that actual trans people talk about it.

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Duolingo sees 216% spike in US users learning Chinese amid TikTok ban and move to RedNote

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It depends on the language tbh. Several languages on duolingo are decent ways to dip your toes in the water for language learning, I've heard good things about the Spanish, German, and Mandarin courses. But it's really dependent on the language, I tried Duolingo's Irish course and it was so bad that I'm still trying to unlearn a good amount of misinformation, really soured language learning for me even though I eventually got a good course elsewhere.