Bay 12 Games Forum

... though, mind you, having parts of your game that are effectively outreach to folks not quite so enamored to that part of RL design, or ones that are but occasionally want a romp more than a fight, is... fine. Good, even, a fair bit of why ToME has been as popular as it has been, or what makes starward rogue as oddly accessible as it manages to be despite integrating both bullet hell and roguelike design. Neither of them really block off content (SR to a small extent), but they change how critters work as things ramp up. SR probably does it more elegantly (rather than really upping enemy power directly, per se, it changes behavior and bullet patterns), but its format arguably allows for that a lot more easily than stuff more inclined in the direction of your standard turn-based RL stuff.

Just don't make folks have to play through the easier stuff to get to the other ones and you're good*. So long as it's not mandatory having the option there degrades nothing (save available coding time, anyway, heh).

Still, I'd definitely say that if it's possible, having harder difficulties make enemies behave differently rather than have it lock content off would be great. It usually sucks pretty hard for folks that either don't won't or can't manage harder stuff but still enjoy exploration and whatnot to have stuff stuck behind a difficulty spike wall.

*Which is probably one point where T4 screws up a bit, but it's silly easy to unlock stuff with that via text editor so it's not that big of a deal.

Pretty sure it's an actual war crime. Not all of 'em's as visceral as some of the more obvious stuff. Term tends to be used to talk about things like mass murder of civilians or particularly heinous methods of killing and all that, but it's broader from a practical angle.

That feeling when less than a day is all it takes for someone to set a dog's leash training back at least four or five days. Thing was getting better, trying to pull itself away from the holder less, starting to figure out keeping pace a bit, picking up on minor verbal and physical/gesture cues, all the various rot that starts coming in as they get used to the desired behavior patterns. And now it's pretty much all gone, because someone else apparently doesn't give a single shit about having a dog that's not going to get itself killed.

Hell, I can't even really blame them, cause they're old, the animal was sprung on us without warning, and the ruddy thing's approaching about as poor a match for old people as possible,* but good gods I had forgotten how rapidly and obviously someone breaking consistency during the initial learning period fucks said period up, particularly when the animal itself is not in terribly good shape and seems to have a previous history of unaddressed bad behavior.

*Unfixed male, almost utterly untrained (the closest it comes is a shoddy job of house breaking and that's it.), high strung/fairly energetic breed that gives every indication of coming from a pretty bad environment, itself dumped on us with zero previous exposure, the list just goes on. This is something that should be in the house of someone learning how to handle rescue dogs or some shit, not two geriatrics and someone in as poor a situation health wise as me. No one here has the energy or consistency needed for this thing.

... for what it's worth, there's probably somewhere nearby you can get a CRT for very cheap, possibly even free. They're certainly not nearly as nice, and a complete bastard weight wise, comparatively, but pretty sure most computers are still compatible with them and they do work, if you need something to tide you over until better financial times. I spent probably... six to twelve-ish months with a CRT monitor plugged into a dead screen laptop a few years back. It was a thing.

I may have misinterpreted Silverthrone, but I believe with that metaphor he was referring to the serious issues (not least of which is a huge spike in sexual assaults and rapes) in Sweden caused by immigrants and refugees.

Nah, pretty sure it was just somewhat hyperbolic reference to all the sex related shit in trump's history. Having a sex offender's record doesn't necessarily involve actual conviction. E: Or not. Eh.

Though speech wise... good gods. Actually skimmed over/read one or two of the recent speeches. Tighter grip nothing, the man's incoherent better than half the time at this point. Paragraphs worth of verbal diarrhea that are as nonsensical as they are empty of anything but the most shallow of platitudes. Guy either needs to hire better speech writers or just hire them at all.

But it's that attitude. Any problem that specifically seems to affect men: "haven't we already done enough". Well clearly not, if one group is disproportionately suffering some outcome.

Except it's not even remotely "haven't we already done enough". People, especially those left-inclined ones you seem to be railing about, have been pushing for better mental health resources for basically forever, usually as part of a general campaign to improve health care on the whole. That includes suicide prevention and what's related to it both for men who are more likely to succeed if they try and less likely to try, and women who are less likely to succeed but more likely to try.

If you're trying to say that men need more efforts directed to them to reduce success rates, despite the fact that the actual problems causing the attempts (i.e. what mental health can help with, what political efforts can realistically address, and so on) is less prevalent with them, well, guess what? Firearm control is part of the general platforms the folks you're yelling at tend to lean towards. So is support for increased funding for mental health care. So is support for men to actually fucking use the resources we have available. So is cultural attempts to drag men towards social practices that help mitigate the issue (such as talking to people about their problems, acknowledging emotions, and all that rot). And on, and on, and on.

Also being in a public news journal means close to jack all when it comes to psych research, particularly when it's a subject where specific attention outside of what we already have isn't really needed. You don't need explanatory research, we already have the goddamn explanation. Of course public awareness is going to be low, it is for suicide in general. And so on. There's not some kind of damn mystery going on here.

Also that first one is the one you already linked to. And I already addressed. The statistic is sensational bullshit, we know exactly what's causing boys and young men to take their lives -- same as everyone else, with the addition of a handful of cultural issues (we're aware and working on it!) -- and little effort is made to understand the trend because it takes basically no effort to understand it. And hey, the second one repeats the same goddamn statistic. How someone spends twenty years on suicide research and fucks that up I have no idea. Hopefully it was just the PhD not paying attention.

All that said, there actually is a handful of suicide prevention programs in the US directed specifically towards majority male demographics. It's just mostly focused on veterans and military (and even that has been about seven different kinds of fight and continues to be complete friggin' misery to keep going and getting better) because the conservative side of our culture is fucked up (when it comes to psych issues in particular) and has been fighting tooth and nail to do everything they can to make health care -- particularly mental health care -- worse and the cultural issues leading to higher rates of success that much stronger. You can expect that to get worse still over the next few years

Seriously though, do you really not realize you're yelling at just about the only people in this country trying to address the problem you're going off about? Or that fixing the general problem will largely address the specific one? That the culture problems are in fact ones that are trying to be softened? All that mess? To a massive extent there's not specific measures needed or existent because every freaking thing that could be done on that front is already being done, either as part of the general efforts against suicide or from efforts related to other cultural issues.

its because its not a real religion but folk tradition that's been forcibly centralized.

... doesn't that describe most religions in human history? Shanghaied folk tradition is, well. Tradition. For religions, heh.