anna

Is the game different on Switch 2 or is it the exact same game? I’ve been holding off on getting it for the original Switch because I wasn’t sure if I was going to miss out on better performance, customisation options, online features or whatnot.

I got three too!

catfishing.net

#685 - 3/10

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To be fair, there’s the Red Sea on the other side, that connects a lot of the oil-producing countries to the sea too.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz

Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.

There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It’s also closer to Israel, and it’s partly under Iran’s control too.

And there’s too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.

I loathe JKR as much as anyone else, but I do wonder why the whole “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” thing seems to end exactly at Harry Potter and nowhere else.

No trans person I know who goes nuclear about everything related to consuming or discussion Harry Potter has any issues with the endless promotion of ‘approved’ products and companies that are often even an integral part of online ‘trans culture’, like…

• Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook/YouTube et cetera (pro-queerphobia, pro-fascist corporations actively funding and supporting alt-right movements across the world and helping alt-right actors make databases of queer people)
• Discord (surveillance company working with ICE, handing over trans folks’ personal information to the cops, the age verification scandal et cetera)
• Minecraft (created by alt-right figurehead Notch, owned and operated by notoriously evil company Microsoft)
• World of Warcraft (Blizzard, notoriously anti-union, pro-sexual harassment corporation)
• … and so on.

Of course not all of these are directly equivalent to JKR and HP in terms of tangible impact on trans people specifically, but the scale is definitely off. Why do folks cut off friends for discussing Harry Potter fanfiction but not for ordering a skirt on Amazon or encouraging vulnerable trans folks to hand their data to Discord?

The older I get, the more it seems like a teenage in-group out-group peer pressure thing than a real world view. Hating on Harry Potter signals you’re a good person, and that gives one a feeling of belonging in the community and having an identity that stands for something. It’s more of a rebellion thing than anything. At the same time, being a ‘Discord trans girl’ has an ‘uwu cute’ aesthetic and therefore must be good and desirable, no matter the implications.

It’s a vibes-based world view.

Of course JKR is evil and I want her prosecuted for what she’s been doing to hurt us. I just think shaming random people for enjoying Harry Potter is ineffectual and hypocritical when practically nothing else is so heavily policed; and while ‘mainstream trans culture’ online promotes and supports so many other evil companies and their products.

Hmm. How would I check that? Did my instance defederate?

Edit: Apparently we’re federated. Still can’t see any recent posts, though.

Is that one still active? The most recent posts I can see are two months old.

Welcome back, 2007, close enough!

Reminds me of trying to place fences in Planet Coaster.

I totally want to get it now.

I wonder if there’s horse oil for snakes.

My father is declining, my father’s declining, my fathers are declining, my fathers’ declining.

Aye, 'tis my father’s declension.

Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.

I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can’t believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.

I would also want to add that many of these terms are regional and subculture-specific.

In the specific part of Germany I grew up in, a ‘joint’ was any smokable rolled cigarette-like object with cannabis in it. Nobody used any more specific words like ‘blunt’.

Then talking to people one town over, they looked at you as if you were from the moon if you called anything a ‘joint’ that didn’t have tobacco in it. To them, a ‘joint’ was exclusively a mix of cannabis and tobacco, and a ‘blunt’ was cannabis-only.

Then there’s people who add weed to pre-bought cigarettes, people who insist on using leaves, filters and no filters, tobacco or no tobacco, and so on. Most of these terms are really regional.

I came here to suggest Urbek City Builder too. It could be right up their alley.

I’ve seen so many mixed opinions about this game and I can’t figure out how many of these opinions are relevant to my playstyle and tastes in these games.

Where does Bus Bound fall on the various scales of vehicle simulators? Is it a complete accurate-to-the-last-decal vehicle simulation that in order to enjoy, you basically need a bus licence and a lifelong obsession with bus manufacturers? Is it a casual bus driving game like what Euro Truck Simulator 2 is for lorries? Does it have a management aspect, and if so, how deep does it go? Is it particularly moddable? Is it made for wheel-and-pedal players?

I think the game with the highest playtime for me is Final Fantasy XIV with around 1,2k hours. That’s only Steam though, I’m sure Minecraft is way, way higher than that.

You know, growing up I always thought it was super odd for the ‘gamer guys’ I knew to talk about gaming as a hobby that boys and men are into by default and girls, and especially women, just wouldn’t understand.

They mentioned or assumed it so casually in all kinds of contexts, as if it was just a fact about the world everyone knew or agreed upon.

Meanwhile, most of my girl (and later, women) friends played games. And not just the type of games the guys would look down upon, like mobile games, but established major gaming franchises like Final Fantasy, SimCity or Legend of Zelda. They wrote fan-fiction about Sephiroth, they snuck their little DS lite under the school desk to finish a section of Majora’s Mask, or they spent weeks at a time meticulously crafting a storyboard in Sims 2. I never understood why the cultural image of gaming at the same time only included guys and maaybe one pick-me-esque ‘gamer girl’, when most girls and women around me actually were super into some games.

I eventually realised that these ‘gamer guys’ just never interacted with the girls I knew. Their entire world view came from the internet, from movies and other cultural sources. That was an eye-opener.

It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into ‘casual’ genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as ‘real gamers’. It’s really just misogyny.

I understand where this is coming from, I think. Both are distinctly different and bittersweet in their own way.

I just don’t think having experienced unrequited love from both sides fully encompasses knowing the full spectrum of love.

I have had about ten relationships in my life, and every single one of them was different in a meaningful way. Every person in your life is a wholly unique experience, whether it’s unrequited love, a short-lived relationship or a deep friendship. I am an amalgamation of everyone I’ve ever known and loved, and I appreciate that this is what life gives me.