While I still maintain my stance that anyone who votes 3rd party in a FPTP election is a moron, this does seem unfair.

The challenge was brought by Republicans, but it’s a challenge based on Libertarian Party rules of how they choose who to nominate. The only people who should have standing are Libertarian Party members.

If they had put in their nomination forms late or made some other error with the process of doing the nomination, then it would be fair for Republicans or Democrats or independent voters to challenge to get them removed. But an internal matter that the article says was completely uncontroversial internally should not be brought by outsiders.

Mastodon link?

edit: and/or link to Lemmy discussion?

I’m confused, why do you think “stop providing aid to assist in genocide” is the take of a tanky?

Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.

Honestly I didn’t even read the article. Shared it purely based on the headline.

You say “handful”, but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone’s favourite game…

…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone’s favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it’s gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.

See this, this I get. This is an actual reasonable problem. And we could be talking about it wrt Retold, since Freyr is a day one DLC.

Personally I’m not too concerned with it because even if you ignore Freyr, the cost of Premium is $25 AUD more than standard, and it includes two future DLCs (which they’ve already said will be $15 USD, probably $20 AUD each). So Premium is worth getting just for the two future pantheons. And since Premium includes Freyr in addition to the future pantheons, it ends up not looking like an added cost in the way it would otherwise.

But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that there’s actual playable content not included for free that’s available day one. And it would leave me very angry if the prices had ended up such that the best deal for everything except the day-one DLC actually cost less than the best deal for everything including Freyr. But all this discussion about cosmetics. Not even interesting cosmetics like unit skins, but something that’s basically just profile pictures. Is annoyingly distracting from that conversation.

You buy it for the expansions. The Chinese, one more as-yet-unannounced pantheon, and Freyr. The other stuff you get with Premium is basically irrelevant.

I’d much rather have a conversation about the day-one DLC of Freyr, and the fact that they’re charging for the future Chinese pantheon despite Chinese being available in 2014 Extended Edition and no previous Age of Empires Definitive Edition removing a civ that was previously available (indeed, aoe2 and aoe3’s DEs both added new civs in addition to all the existing ones). Granted, there are extenuating circumstances there, in that the EE Chinese DLC was so terrible it basically killed the game and they’ve promised the upcoming expansion to Retold will be “all new Chinese”. But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

This discussion about what is basically profile pictures is some irrelevant bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit about it, and I find the rhetoric from people claiming they do care (especially that one person claiming that this is a reason they’ll avoid Retold entirely because it’s “an advertisement, not a game”) extremely unconvincing. It’s eye-rollingly stupid to care about this when there are real things to get upset about both with this game and in the wider gaming industry.

where I’m actually playing a game and not an advertisement

That’s more than a little bit hyperbolic.

Mercifully, the base game’s faring far better.

On Steam it is. Though ironically, given the source of this article, PC Gamer has not given it such a stellar review. While heaps of other review sites are giving it 90/100 and its Metacritic score is 84, PC Gamer gives it just 75, which in the inflated world of online game reviews is basically a failing grade, and is a significant outlier compared to overall review sites and fan reception.

I’ve seen others allege that it’s part of a general trend at PC Gamer having a grudge against remasters and not scoring them entirely on their merits.

I’ll repeat my comment from !aom@lemm.ee:

Gonna be honest, I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I do agree that it’s kinda shitty to charge $6 ($8 here in Aus) for something that was basically the thing people already had in the original game.

On the one hand, the description of it as “22-year-old JPEGs” is wrong. They’re at the very least upscaled, but certainly in some form higher quality than the originals. There’s also the fact that they’re completely optional and unnecessary. They provide nothing but cosmetics, and not even cosmetics that you see in important places like character models. I also think it was primarily intended as a small added bonus for people with the Premium Edition, and to me the Premium Edition is a no-brainer for reasons completely unrelated to this. It costs like $20 extra, and includes the first two upcoming expansions free, each at $15 (or similar maths to that), as well as the Freyr god pack (like $10?). It’s able to be bought stand-alone, but I don’t think that’s really what’s intended.

Still, yeah I really think trying to upsell with this pack is kinda penny pinching in a way I wish they wouldn’t do things.

This reminds me of moon landing deniers. Like, y’all don’t think that America’s greatest enemy of the time, the Soviet Union, with all of their resources, wouldn’t have been denying the US’s claim to having landed on the moon if there were any credible evidence that it hadn’t actually happened?

She’s not out there stabbing babies

Rowling is using her considerable clout to drum up hatred of trans people. She might not be wielding the bat, but she helps embolden those who do. It’s essentially stochastic terrorism. To my knowledge, Card has not gone nearly as far off the deep end in this respect.

in JK’s mind she is defending women from men

You could have made this claim once, and it been believable.

Had Rowling made even one…just one comment about the literal child rapist (whose victim was a 12-year-old girl) that competed at this Olympics…you might have been able to keep believing this.

But her absolute silence about an issue where an actual girl was traumatised by the actions of an actual man, and insistence on going to war against a woman who she’s pretending is a man instead, completely removes any semblance of doubt there. Her goal is to delegitimise trans women. That’s not just an instrumental goal, it is the terminal goal: the cruelty is the entire point.

I know you’re being flippant and it definitely is a real issue, but my first reaction was the same. I’ve played plenty of games with some sexual content in them, but never one with sexual violence other than implied, and usually even the consensual scenes were fade to black, or close to fading to black. I was a little surprised to hear that this is going on.

Aoe2 is a modern game. And it’s the only modern game. Everything else is a distraction.

Look, I’m a Greens voter here in Australia. But the fact of the matter is that in America, supporting the Green Party is helping Trump, whether you intend that or not.

It’s not quite accurate to say that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump, but mathematically it might as well be the same as not voting at all. And thus encouraging people not to vote is equivalent to encouraging voter suppression—not necessarily from an ethical standpoint, but from the perspective of the end result it creates. Your intent doesn’t really matter.

First Past the Post is a fundamentally undemocratic system, and improving it in literally any way you can should be the number one top priority for any American who cares about democracy. But until that change is effected, anyone with half a brain has to vote for a major party. And that means if you have both half a brain and an ounce of morals, you vote Democrat.

While I can see that any vote for Stein is a vote for Trump

It’s not quite true. More accurate is that a vote for a third party is the same as not voting at all.

Tell me, when was the last time you went to a concert?

Because you should know, it’s very common for someone to talk a little before the concert or before the piece about the piece itself, what inspired it, how it fits into the programme, etc.

That’s what he did here. He explained what inspired the writing of this piece. No different to a conductor explaining that Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony was dedicated to the city of Leningrad, which at the time it was premiered was being besieged by the Nazis. Or explaining how his 9th Symphony was a deliberate mockery of earlier composers’ grand 9th symphonies, as a way to subvert expectations placed on him by Stalin’s regime. Or how Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony was written at first in honour of Napoleon, and then later changed to “celebrate the memory of a great man” after Napoleon went against Beethoven’s republican idealism and crowned himself emperor.

Music has always been political, and in modern times no concert is complete without at least some discussion about the context in which the piece was written. That should be as true for a piece written to commemorate victims of a modern-day war as it is for mid-20th century or early 19th century pieces.

ESO is pretty similar in that regard

Isn’t ESO a classy system? I’ve not played the game since shortly after its release…probably put more time in during the betas than I did in the official game. But from my memory, I think that they talked about the idea that any class could be specced into any role, and that at least early on people were saying that they hadn’t done a great job of that, but that the best class for a role wasn’t intuitive. But still, definitely not classless.