SatanicNotMessianic

They weren’t countries. They became countries when the colonizers (and I’m using that term as accurately as possible) lumped together into managed regions and then told them they were countries with their own governments and flags. It was all “We’re going to conquer these people and these people and these people, then put Governor Fitzroy, nephew to the Prince, in charge of all of it with a big army to back him up.” Then they wrote laws and made flags and all the happy crappy stuff they do. Then they lost WWII (because pretty much everyone except for the US lost WWII), and said “you’re on your own.”

They turned former colonies into artificial countries with governments that all but guaranteed factionalism.

There was always war, and there always will be war. But the specific type of war we’re seeing in former colonies is because of the post-colonial situation.

Also that whole India/Pakistan thing. And I seem to remember some stuff happening in Africa.

This has literally been decided by democracies around the world, including most of those who rank higher on the freedom scale than the United States. This is a question we will continue to refine, but it’s dishonest as well as disingenuous to play “who watches the watchmen” with this one.

This picture makes me feel like there should be an art project to photoshop Matt Gaetz’s forehead onto everyone.

This house is fractally horrible. Every single picture (is that all red one a murder room, btw?) is horrible, and every level of zoom makes it worse.

I can’t think of any use for this house other than renting it out to people making those “Ghost Hunter TV show about to get cancelled but then they find a real haunted house and they all die” kinds of movies.

That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.

That’s a great description! Thanks!

This is the first one that’s made me want to check out the game. I actually weirdly enjoyed the randomly generated dungeons that were basically all the same, probably because I had never played such a completely open world game before. At least some of it had to be the novelty compared to games like Ultima or the D&D games out at the time.

I’ve always played a lot of the RP part in my head - like in Morrowind I’d usually play as an escaped Argonian slave who became a thief-assassin after winning his freedom with a hatred for the Dunmer.

I’d this one is leaning back in that direction, I’ll check it out sooner rather than later.

That got me thinking. The universal hand sign for “call me” or “I’ll call you” is to stick out your thumb and pinkie and hold your hand to your face like you’re talking on the phone. It just doesn’t work the same if you hold your hand flat like it’s a smartphone.

That’s fair. I’ve been initially disappointed on a lot of their games due to the slide from doing basically anything in Daggerfall (but you might get stuck in a wall if you turn a corner too close) to Skyrim’s as-linear-as-open-world-gets approach. And I had about 4-5 false starts in FO4 despite playing all the other releases to the ending. Maybe it’s something that will click.

I do have to say that I am finding the Deck implementation of Cyberpunk unplayable without an external monitor and keyboard, so that sets an additional bar.

I’ve played TES games since Daggerfall came out. That was my first giant open world game, and despite all of the horrible game breaking bugs I played it so much I risked my college degree.

Based on all of the descriptions and the fact that I’m right now only playing games that run well on the steam deck, I’m skipping this one for now. I couldn’t imagine the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing and replaying TES and Fallout games. But every release gets more dumbed down, it seems.

Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring. I’m still totally overplaying BG3, I love playing Stray, and Depth is great when I have limited time or attention. If everyone was raving about it, I might check it out, but as it is, I can wait.

Hell, it has to be a steadily increasing number of people who don’t know what the phone icon is supposed to represent.

I think the idea of being envious of religious people is grounded in two fundamental errors. First, it is attributing a level of solace to religiosity that is rarely, if ever, achieved in practice. Yes, you can find religious people who are content, but the same applies to Zen monks who have no god but do have a grounding in a framework that explains the world and their role in it. As the Buddhists point out (if we can take that path), discontent and suffering comes from wanting the world to be different than it is. Whether one subscribes to a Buddhist philosophy or thinks everything is in God’s hands and is therefore all for the best, the key is accepting what happens. Or in the Taoist saying “Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” My point here is that it’s absolutely not religion that’s responsible for that, but rather a philosophical point of view that can also be arrived at via non-theistic justifications. I’d argue it’s even easier without the god part, since you don’t have to rectify with the problem of evil. If an all-powerful and loving god gave your newborn child a fatal disease, that’s a lot to have to figure out. That’s where you get all of those ridiculous, stomach-turning platitudes. If your child developed cancer because biology is kind of stupid (and I’m saying that as a biologist), it is still a cause of sadness and mourning, but there’s no causal party involved.

The second part is that whether you’re reading the lives of the saints, talking to friends, or pouring over the latest Pew survey on religion and life satisfaction, you’re looking at self-reports.

Do a thought experiment. Pick a cult-like religion. It could be Mormonism, adventism, Scientology, or something more like a David Koresh or desert dwelling new age thing. Imagine running through questions about satisfaction and happiness with those members, given they know you’re interviewing them on the basis of the religion they hold and (essentially) whether they’re good people because it’s working for them. Or talk to former members of those cults about how they acted versus how they really felt and what that realization was like.

At the end of the day, we as atheists have fewer reasons for existential dread because once you progress past the theology of a twelve year old, there’s far more problems introduced than answered by religions, and a large percentage of those problems come from the mythological component of their philosophies. I don’t go around trying to pick arguments or disabuse people, and I very, very much get Marx’s point, but I think he under-theorized the social and psychological dimensions and that he could be over-generous.