Show me on the doll where that comment said Larian is an indie developer. Saying that they lack corporate interference does not equal claiming that they’re an indie team.

There’s this neat thing between indie devs and AAA corporate studios called AA. Big enough to fund larger projects than indie devs while being small enough to usually still be private companies that aren’t beholden to investors and therefore can take larger risks than the AAA devs are allowed, letting them make the games that they would want to play. CD Projekt RED and FromSoft both fit into this category as well, though all 3 companies are getting big enough to potentially start being considered AAA studios.

Yeah, it was that cheap because I have health insurance, otherwise just the ambulance probably would’ve cost over $1,500, and I was perfectly fine by the time I reached the hospital. The ambulance ride and 3 hours at the hospital were mandatory to make sure I was actually okay, but I didn’t have any serious issue that needed medical intervention or anything. My point was that even without a serious illness, and even with health insurance, you can still be one trip to the hospital away from being bankrupted by medical debt.

They’re not doing it to be contrarian. They’re doing it because the Republican party has spent more time than they’ve been alive establishing themselves as the anti-establishment party as well as the victims, and the good ol’ fascist play of giving young men disillusioned with the bad things in their lives an easy target to blame rather than blaming the people who are actually at fault - the Republicans.

There are 40±year-olds who were surprised when Rage Against the Machine didn’t support Trump. What machine did they think they were raging against? The Democrats of course, well known for being the party of the establishment and the status quo. Not like those scrappy Republicans, looking out for the common man while the Dems look down from their big-city ivory towers with disdain.

Kids have little in the way of influence outside of their parents up until they’re in their teens, and they take stuff at face value without questioning it too much.

On the one hand, this is great because a kid can ask a question, get an honest answer, and accept it as fact. This is why every generation seems more socially progressive than the last. You tell a kid that men can love other men, women can love other women, and that sometimes people are born in the wrong body, and they go “Oh, okay. That makes sense.” And now that’s part of their understanding of how the world works.

On the other hand, if a kid is surrounded by their MAGA parents and their parents’ MAGA ride or die friends, they’ll grow up thinking that Trump is right and everybody else is bad. Conservative households especially foster a cult-like mentality it seems, where questioning the beliefs hoisted upon them by their parents is out of the question, and I feel that that has something to do with the conservative mentality. They always accuse progressives of brainwashing and indoctrinating the youth because that’s their relationship with their own kids. My dad grew up in a very conservative household and it wasn’t until he went to college and both got away from his parents as well as met people who grew up in different circumstances than he did that his beliefs completely 180’d.

There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.

In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.

Even with insurance. I had to take an ambulance ride once only to literally end up hanging out at the hospital with the nurses who put me on a saline drip and otherwise just chatted with me because it was a nice break, and the ambulance cost me $600 AFTER insurance.

The average American has less than $300 in their bank account.

Revelations 13: 16-17

And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.

Don’t forget the flipping tables, beating bankers and money-lenders, and saying that rich people don’t go to Heaven.

I live in a vacation town where fireworks are illegal and I can hear them basically every weekend from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Nationalism when taken to the extreme can be bad because it’s extreme, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with nationalism.

What you just described, this “mild nationalism?” There’s a word for that: patriotism. Nationalism is extreme patriotism.

Nationalism: an ideology that elevates one nation or nationality above all others and that places primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations, nationalities, or supranational groups

-Merriam-Webster Dictionary

And when nationalism becomes even more extreme, it becomes chauvinism or jingoism.

Chauvinism: undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged; excessive or blind patriotism; an attitude of superiority toward members of the opposite sex

Jingoism: extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy

When Hitler promised to build a wall around Germany to keep immigrants from diluting German culture during his campaign, that was nationalism. American isolationists were/are nationalists.

The Republican Party in the 90s and 2000s was a nationalist party bordering on chauvinism. The party of Trump is a jingoist party that hits every definition of chauvinism at the same time.

Both? Both. Massachusetts is right up there as well, and while Boston isn’t as large or dense as NYC, a full 50% of the workforce in Boston commutes every day using the T. That’s a huge portion of the people who go into and out of Boston daily from outside suburbs and towns who aren’t on the roads.

One of the big reasons for the stupid size of parking lots around stores has to do with zoning laws as well. I don’t remember the numbers and it’s gotta vary by district, but it’s tied to a certain percentage of the max occupancy of the building.

Because of the car-focused infrastructure that puts everything else last, we’ve created a self-defeating system that forces people to drive everywhere, thus justifying the massive parking lots that prevent people from using other modes of transport in the first place.

Yep, and I’d add family to the list. A lot of this stuff comes from how parents act around their friends as well, both in public and private.

It’s the original definition of memes: information passed on outside of genetics.

Call it what it is: nationalism. I’ve been weirded out by it since I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in elementary school.

Fun fact: the pledge was created as part of a campaign to sell more flags to schools.

While this is an old saying, misogyny and disrespect like this are learned behaviors, not naturally occurring.

This kid is, what, 12? And he’s publicly talking on social media about how he thinks he’s got the charm to get in his teacher’s pants. Call it what it is: this kid has been groomed by “influencers.”

This is what happens when you try to sanitize the internet for advertisers children.

Where have I heard this before?

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute for Sexual Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology, or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was the first sexology research center in the world.

The Institute was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who since 1897 had run the world’s first homosexual organization Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance at the start of the first homosexual movement that would flourish in interwar Weimar culture. The Committee published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Hirschfeld built a unique library at the institute on gender, same-sex love and eroticism.

The institute pioneered research and treatment for various matters regarding gender and sexuality, including gay, transgender, and intersex topics. In addition, it offered various other services to the general public: this included treatment for alcoholism, gynecological examinations, marital and sex counseling, treatment for venereal diseases, and access to contraceptive treatment. It offered education on many of these matters to both health professionals and laypersons.

After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.

One estimate says that between 12,000 to 20,000 books and journals, and even larger number of images and sex subjects, were destroyed. Another estimate says that about 25,000 books were destroyed.

This included artistic works, rare medical and anthropological documents, and charts concerning cases of intersexuality which were prepared for the International Medical Congress, among other things. A collection of works about sexuality, in any one place, similar to the one stored at the institute was not compiled until the founding of the Kinsey Institute in 1947.

They have to experience the horrors of it firsthand to hopefully get it through their thick skulls why it’s a bad thing

This is such a frustrating and consistent issue. Every time I hear a story about a conservative changing their opinion, it’s because the consequences of their actions affected them or someone related to them. They can’t simply imagine how the consequences will play out or be bothered to care when it hurts their neighbors.

And even then, there’s like a 50/50 chance that they’ll just blame the Democrats for it and vow to keep voting for Republicans.

Honestly could be a little of column A, a little of column B. Or even the lead, like you mentioned. Lead is one of the leading theories for why there were so many serial killers, but it’s also a theory on why the Baby Boomers are so much more conservative than the generations before and after them. Symptoms of long-term lead poisoning include things like heightened aggression, violent tendencies, and impaired cognitive abilities, and the theory also correlates the coincidence of serial killers largely disappearing in the time since lead was banned from gasoline, paint, pipes, etc. - but that also fits for the political stance of generations before and after the introduction and banning of leaded gasoline.

Obviously, there’s more to it, but I can’t say that I think banning the lead was a bad idea!

Studies have shown that conservatives have smaller areas of the brain related to a sense of empathy on average compared to others. It could be said that they are outright physically less capable of feeling empathy compared to the rest of the population.