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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Men need to find animal

    Women needed to make sure it was safe to eat

    Most food eaten wasn’t harvested from animals for most of human history in most cases. The obsession with hunting and meat consumption is a cultural one FROM CURRENT CULTURE (especially in the US where I live).

    There really is no good reason to enforce our current conceptions of gender, masculinity and feminity on wildly big swaths of human history. It is always a lie best case, worst case it plays into dangerous narratives about who “men” and “women” are “”“”“naturally”“”“” supposed to be.

    These kinds of reductive generalizations seem fun to make but they are hurtful, just plain wrong and honestly just kind of boring compared to the actual truth.





  • In terms of twin stick games, Voidigo is currently giving Enter The Gungeon a run for its money.

    https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

    i recommend this bundle, donut dodo, round guard, indie guards in that bundle,

    Also Hyperparasite in this one https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

    Spelunky 2

    Chronicon

    Caveblazers

    Heroes Of Hammerwatch

    Helldivers 1

    Barony

    Terraria (of course)

    Broforce

    Duck Game

    Don’t Starve Together

    Nuclear Throne (of course!!!)

    Streets Of Rogue!! (keep your eye out for Streets Of Rogue 2!!!)

    Wobbly Life

    PlateUp

    Glitchbusters

    Ember Knights

    Bones Cafe

    Shovel Knight

    Rainworld Downpour

    Petal Crash

    Definitely Sneaky But Not Sneaky

    Sigma Impact

    Cassette Beasts

    Spirits Abyss

    Cosmos Quickstop

    DIG

    Farm Together

    Death Road To Canada !!! <-----

    Knight Squad 2

    One Step From Eden

    Mutant Football League

    Rampage Knights

    Maniac (who cares it isn’t co-op it is hilarious as a pass and play)

    X Morph Defense

    Monaco

    Tricky Towers

    Himno the silent melody

    Dungeon Of The Endless

    Adventures Of Shuggy

    Renegade Ops

    Omega Strikers (online team based)

    Cryptark

    Ms Splosion Man

    Full Metal Furies

    Battleblock Theater

    Colt Canyon

    Cook Serve Delicious series



  • Thank you for the thoughtful response

    It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

    I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

    Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

    I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

    Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…



  • I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

    I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.






  • How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don’t ask the finer details of that) and then we just… got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.

    Nah actually a crazy guy named Zefram Cochrane creates the first warp drive on earth using an old ICBM as a platform to build his spaceship, he is basically just doing it as a crazy entrepreneur trying to make money. When he launches it to test it for the first time, the use of the warp drive alerts the Vulcans, who come and investigate. Generally, Vulcans did not have a policy of interfering with other planets that had not yet become spacefaring, but since Earth now had developed the warp drive the Vulcans established first contact and then helped usher Earth into a new space age. If it wasn’t for the Vulcans, it is likely that Zefram Cochrane would have still been moderately successful but it is unlikely that the Federation would have arose complete with massive starships.

    In the silly mirror universe where everyone is evil what happens is that instead of Zefram shaking hands with the Vulcans when they land and make first contact he and the other people in the camp shoot the Vulcans and steal their technology, eventually building an authoritarian galactic empire called the Terran Empire.

    An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.

    I don’t want scifi to only be about the mathematics of spheres though.

    It's all just spheres mannnnn

    I also don’t want my scifi to be just about Space Wizards (ughh Jedi and Sith are the most boring part of Star Wars by far), Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys… I want my scifi to be about people and the positive capacity of humanity. When we look to imagined futures they should remind us that we have the agency of choice to pick what the future is, and that is totally possible for us to pick kindness and empathy. That is why Star Trek is so much more interesting and compelling than 99% of scifi, because while sometimes it is grim it is always concerned with the choices we make and imagining a future where we make better choices. Outside of Star Trek, the feeling of scifi has overwhelming been dystopian futures and though there is good reason to imagine dystopian futures as cautionary tales, I think they are also a drug that when overdosed on makes us believe dystopian futures are inveitable.

    For example I wanted to love the scifi show Tales From The Loop, the appeal of Simon Stålenhag’s visions of alternate realities is undeniably captivating. However, all the characters seemed to act like complete sociopaths, the episode that did me in was where the two kids have their bodies swapped and kid who is switched into the body of the kid who has a much nicer life refuses to switch back. He goes on to just live that kids life presumably as an impostor… and I just… like I don’t even remotely believe 99.99% of humanity would make that choice (especially as a child who hasn’t even become comfortable in their own body yet). Some humans might, but that has far more to do with how abnormal those people are than it does to do with how technology might corrupt us with its power. Same thing with a lot of black mirror, it is this repeating vision of dystopian futures that just assumes that everybody will behave like sociopaths and it gets really tiring to me not the least because it fundamentally undermines the plausibility of the imagined future at a basic level. It subconsciously teaches us to deny the possibility of more positive futures since our imagination is a bayesian space defined and bounded by visions of the future provided to us by culture.


  • There are a myriad of reasons we are on the shitty timeline, but a non-insignificant one to me is how terrible classic sci-fi writers were at writing humans rather than planks with faces drawn on them that periodically state the author’s views on something. The focus of sci-fi on massive space operations and colonization of other planets from the beginning was warped by a dis-interest from sci-fi writers in the positive potentialities within the human psyche that are outside the grasp of cynical structures of power and control, the part of ourselves that just wants to tend a garden in their backyard and nothing more.

    I think this has lead to very hollow visions of the future that were well suited to becoming the basis for people like Elon Musk’s world view. Sci-fi looked to the stars and tried to see into the future while ignoring the one thing we can count on about the future, humans will still be humans.

    (I know this is a generalization and isn’t true as a rule)



  • Nebulous has a conquest mode that is in testing at the moment that sounds extremely promising. The base gameplay is so good the game doesn’t need much, just a bit of progression between battles and choices to make about who to fight next.

    Transcendence is a classic, the dev is still working on the game and the first early version came out in 1995 so rest assured if the game peaks your interest there is a lottttt to sink your teeth into there!



  • I don’t know how I came across Star Sector but games it reminds me of:

    • Mount and Blade obviously (the open world with roaming bands you encounter)

    • Transcendence is a game where you only play as a single ship but this is one of longest developed 2d top down ship games and it deserves mention.

    • Battlevoid Harbinger is much simpler but the game is well suited for mobile and the tactical battles are actually extremely interesting, there is a lot of thought to how you approach situations and which direction you choose to go through sectors.

    • Silent Sector, I haven’t played this one but it seems to be well reviewed. This is a game where you fly mostly one ship I think.

    • Subspace Continuum is a deep cut lol, old multiplayer 2d spaceship combat game with really realllllllly deep combat mechanics and a very high skill ceiling. You pilot a single ship. Mostly dead :(

    • Nebulous Fleet Command is a good pick if you want Star Sector but 3D. It actually controls fantastic on my steamdeck and I am reallly REALLY impressed by the UI, tutorials and general control scheme as this game is basically as in-depth with radar, targeting, guided missiles as you can get without going for a modern day military sim (like command modern operations or something).

    • Space Rangers HD: A War Apart looks bonkers, haven’t played it but it deserves a mention for just being so off the wall and obscure

    • (Microsoft) Allegiance is an old space combat game kind of like Empires Mod or Natural Selection 2 where one player per team is the commander who plays the game like an RTS and all the other teammates play the game like it is a spaceship combat game. It is 3D and multiplayer but I feel like there is some shared DNA here with picking the right fights so you can upgrade your fleet and then taking enemies more head on.

    • Armored Brigade is worth a mention, yes I know it is an entirely different genre of a Cold War gone hot realistic military game, but the top down visual style and the really interesting delayed orders system I think might be interesting to check out as a fan of tactical spacecombat games. The effective range of main battle tanks in this game alone is terrifying.

    • The Last Federation by the makers of AI War also deserves a mention here because I LOVE the clever twisting of game mechanics (these developers are great at that, see Tidalis lol) where you play a single spaceship amidst warring factions but that your goal is to UNIFY them. You are an extremely powerful alien from a dead race with a powerful ship and you want to stop the galaxy falling into war but you are only one ship and you have to think about the political/diplomatic implications of every move you make. It gives the game structure of star sector or mount and blade where you roam around fighting and negotiating with much bigger factions than yourself a broader shape and arc to the experience. Very cool game, I haven’t tried it yet either though.

    • Star Traders: Frontiers sigh imagine if it had combat like star sector??! Or imagine Star sector had its non-combat elements fleshed out this much?

    • Helium Rain looks very very interesting in the way it simulates economies and let’s you interact with an open world but it is 3D

    • Children Of A Dead Earth is probably the only actually realistic space combat game, I want to try it

    • x4 series or whatever seems like it has great options for building up companies with automated ships going everywhere never tried it though

    • 3030 Deathwar Redux is a great singleplayer 2d space game with a well done story and fantastic looking grim cyberpunk pixel art. I love the commitment to going with a point and click style art scheme for everything outside of the spaceship cockpit. This game nails the vibes and I think other game developers making space games should take another serious look at just how efficiently point and click games can convey the feeling of place with a single backdrop or two and some music (imagine if a space game like Star Traders: Frontiers had the art style of The Sea Will Claim Everything?? Ooooff that would be dope).

    • The Dominions and Conquest Of Elysium series, I know this is a different genre but there are a ton of shared mechanics and strategies here and I need to mention them in case a space strategy fan hasn’t stumbled onto them yet.

    • ΔV: Rings of Saturn rightfully takes a closer look at space mining as being something that is fun, exploding spacerocks with lasers shouldn’t be like a more boring version of a basic MMO quest right? It should be like playing a game of pool but you are ON the pool table and the pool balls can crush you (I suppose Hardspace: Shipbreaker deserves a similar nod for making us consider how foolishly we handwave away the fun of disposing of our unwanted starships by abstracting all the fun plasma-torch cutty bits into a single “sell” button) .

    sigh ok sorry one more deep cut and I will stop, I am just having too much fun going through the cobwebs of my brain lol

    • Approaching Infinity is a turn based roguelike game where you play a spaceship captain roaming the universe with very very simple graphics but the gameplay is absolutely superb and deep as hell. Yes, the graphics are awful hahaha but the abstracted tile based nature of the game means that complex systems can more easily be built and developers have more time to focus on balancing those mechanics so that a player always feels like they have interesting choices to make. A difference here though is that a big part of the game is exploring a wildly different planets with different hazards and resources, this game is kinda a bit like No Man’s Sky if it had completely opposite design goals.

  • This is actually something that is really important to do with your dog, especially if they are a young pup that is going to grow into a large, powerful dog.

    (This is obviously advice ONLY for a dog you trust or unlikely to be seriously hurt by)

    Lay down next to their food bowl while they eat, get your face near their food, pet them and make them feel rewarded for doing what they are doing as they are eating. Pick up some kibbles out of their dish with your hand (again, ONLY do this if you already trust your dog or feel safe doing this) and offer them to your dog to eat out of your hand as they are eating their meal. Don’t let your dog become territorial towards humans about eating their food, teach your dog that humans don’t steal their food, it makes your dog so much less dangerous around other people.

    Lol so yeah, I literally do that last panel with my dogs, but I do it so a human having a face near their food isn’t perceived to be a threatening thing to them, it’s just normal. I grew up with german shepherds and we trained them to be friendly family dogs, you can’t risk a kid running up behind your shepherd while it is eating, surprising them and then having their entire face bitten off. They need to be chill about humans being around their food or you are raising an animal that could seriously hurt somebody.