Hate Pistorius so much. I realize you don’t become Minister of “Defense” without being a warmonger, but his rhetoric is so much worse and openly lusting for war than his predecessors (and he’s a Social Democrat, of course). At this point he could start copying Nazi speeches verbatim and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
By the way, Politico was bought by the German publisher Axel Springer two years ago. They’re notorious for their right-wing tabloids and two of their core values are supporting Israel and supporting capitalism, so it’s no surprise, if unfortunate, that they’re also forcing Politico to take reactionary positions.
I’ve got a thing I need to do in a few hours and until then, I’m just sitting here vibrating with anxiety
Don’t worry, there’s nothing psionic about these mind flayers.
This is a really silly question, but does anyone know some good texts about chapters in academic/non-fiction writing? It’s just such a basic prerequisite that texts be organized into different sections and subsections that I don’t manage to have one clever thought about it. Why do we have chapters? What are subchapters even? Is there writing outside of chapters? I would really appreciate some answers!
I don’t think you’d gain much enjoyment of 3 by replaying the originals. The characters that come back are basically just for fanservice and the story kind of acknowledges the premise of the originals but conflicts heavily with Throne of Bhaal. Other than that, there’s just a few written jokes referencing various old characters. So if you want to play 3, just go for it.
I’m also saying Baldur’s Gate 3. The writing is juvenile, the combat is a slog, the characters are cliches, it retcons the story and characters of the game it’s supposed to be a sequel to, it has possibly a worse UI than the original Baldur’s Gate, and the famed reactivity and choice only works if you do things exactly how the developers intended you to do them. Oh, and the music is just forgettable.
Have you ever thought about how Jude, Yehuda and Judas are really all the same name, just written in different languages, and yet only one of these is completely proscribed in Christian culture? Seems really arbitrary to me.
epic strawman argument
I’d like to rant about LGBT erasure in academia for a bit. Specifically, historians become incredibly angry when you suggest that Ancient Romans who were assigned male, wore women’s clothing, castrated themselves and married men were trans. You’ll hear complaints about how it’s ahistorical to use a contemporary label for the past, but I never understood that kind of criticism. It’s not like being transgender is a random social identity or subculture without any deeper meaning; it refers, roughly speaking, to a certain combination of behaviors that transgress the bounds of gender assignment. So when I say that Elagabalus, for example, was probably a trans woman, I don’t mean that she consciously thought about herself in our contemporary terms, but that from what those admittedly questionable Roman historians write of her, she expressed a strong wish to be and be seen as a woman. I think it’s fair to use the term “trans” for that.
Personally, I blame both old-fashioned positivists and Foucault for these brainworms. I think they both agree that you must understand the past from within itself, and not by relating it to the present. For me, that’s so far away from my lived experience and from the way I approach texts that I just can’t fathom it.
There’s a turn-based mode that can be switched on at any moment. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but I found it more tolerable than that of BG3, not least because it has a fast-forward button for the enemies.
Exactly! I guess you can do an evil run in BG3 if you’re okay with losing parts of the game in return for some additional dialogue. The combat system of D&D 5e also doesn’t really entice me to try another playthrough as a warlock or something, especially as you can just respec everyone whenever, and let’s not even mention the romances. But the mythic paths in WotR really do make an impact on the game, especially mechanically, when it comes to your main character.
I have so many mean things to say about BG3, but instead I’ll be positive and say that in my opinion, Pathfinder: WotR combines all the best parts of the old Baldur’s Gate games (well-told, if a bit generic, story; fantastical setting that doesn’t go too far overboard; interesting and sympathetic companions) with a ruleset that offers many options for character building and highly adjustable difficulty settings. There’s a crusade minigame which is a real drag, but that’s the only real bad thing about the whole game. Also, the different paths – the big ones at least – make enough of a difference that there’s some replayability. It doesn’t reach the narrative heights of Torment or Mask of the Betrayer, but neither does BG3 (not even remotely).
The way I understood it, the admin of mastodon.lol got into a fight with trans users over whether discussion of the Harry Potter game falls under transphobia, he got some pushback, flew totally off the handle and decided to shut down everything. With thousands of users, heated discussions like that are basically inevitable and administrators have to be able to withstand that or they’ll flame out like mastodon.lol did.
Still in awe that abstract calls for death are the big red line that can never be crossed because it makes a space unsafe. Calling us fascists and Nazis? That’s just some healthy discussion. Doubting that people here are really trans? That’s a slap on the wrist. But hyperbolic vitriol against landlords or “people of NATO”? Oh buddy, now you’re going to get it.
There’s nothing fun about French gender. 
It was also a part of Austria until World War I. You can’t really write the history of smaller nations like this one without contextualizing them within their ruling empires, I think.
Throwing in the Sanskrit thing as a bone to Hindutva fascists, that’s just super
What a statement. Forget the Native American genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dozens of wars of aggression the world over, or, on an individual level, raping women and owning slaves (sometimes both at once): that’s nothing compared to riling up followers on social media.
Besides, these platitudes about how important stating the obvious truth is are the kind of propaganda any side can claim for themselves. Real lack of media analysis on display here.