69%~ of Bulgarians disagree with gay marriage. Only 17%~ think gay marriage should be allowed in Europe in general.
In 2024 they passed your typical "gay propaganda" bill meaning that issues related to or affecting gay people cannot be discussed, even sexual health etc.
As a gay dude who never got being gay mentioned, or requisite sexual health advice when I was in school (in NZ) and took several hard years of not understanding what was wrong when I was trying to force myself to be hetero:
I don't think they deserve this. They don't deserve the financial boons and convenience of the Euro area. But then others will disagree of course; we're tribal - the gays are my tribe and might not be yours, but the difference between you and me I suppose is that I'd complain if they were known to have laws or persecute any particular group, not just my own tribes.
I totally agree with you, but is not just the progressive views on gay marriage on the EU that are at risk, is any progressive thinking. There's a wave of right wing backward thinking around the EU, and we keep adding more countries like Hungary.
Just like Trump's tariff bs, I'm starting to think that for Putin's M.O. that we should be fighting fire with fire.
Why not send a couple ships to drag anchors across Russia's cables? "Oh we are but innocent fishermen" is still valid going the other way.
Then when Russia inevitably seizes and imprisons the crew, the international community can do the same for every Russian controlled ship with the bare minimum of suspicion.
Would be a pretty sucky mission though, so many risks of capture. But the Russian government does it because they don't care about their people and also the rest of the world is too toothless to do anything about it (until this occurrence at least, go Finland - but then they know Russia's tactics very well).
Russia has been doing a "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" to the world for too long, abusing the "nice" way we desperately try to see things, pretending even when it's obvious. Like they'll do something egregious and then when the West calls them out, suddenly their political mouthpieces are all "we can't believe that the West is making this shocking and provocative accusation which is of course completely false, EU are bullies!" and then the world responds by taking a step back, pretty much every single time.
Oh, not at all. I don't have the balls or the skills for that.
Though perhaps we could test some autonomous trawling vessels, you know, big tech company stuff. But as we know, software can sometimes be difficult and have...bugs... ;3
He who fights monsters should take care not to become one in the process.
That you guys had presidents that didn’t fall into this trap is the reason you and I are ariund today.
William Inboden, The Peacemaker:
> In America’s last fight against totalitarianism, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In the context of total war, against implacable dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender made strategic sense. Such a demand did not fit the Cold War. Much as Reagan looked to Roosevelt and World War II as a model for how the free world should confront dictatorships in thrall to evil ideologies, in the case of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, calling for “unconditional surrender” from Moscow would have been delusional and foolhardy—especially since Reagan remained desperate to prevent the Cold War from turning hot and ending in nuclear apocalypse.
Because we reach a certain point where it's possible and reasonable to do so.
The ultimate goal of humanity should be UBI and all humans living a content, peaceful life in which they can pursue the things that interest them.
But because of evolutionary behaviours that result in things like capitalism, we'll never reach that goal. I'll say it now: humans are currently biologically incapable of sustaining a true utopia.
Second this one. I've recommended it before and I'll recommend it again. Read it as a kid and had to grab a physical copy as I couldn't find digital. Well worth the read.
Flipper zero being banned is silly, I suppose you could maybe annoy people by controlling some lights with it perhaps, turn a projector on or off.
I guess all the clickb8 tiktok bs which casts the flipper as some sort of super hacking device worked. I've even had people tell me it can hack contactless bank cards ahahaha.
Settlements in FO4 were a letdown, the gameplay loop is so pointless. It's the same as your buildings being attacked in Valheim and Grounded.
Occasional attacks, but no real frequency or point to it - because they don't want to annoy players with it. At least in grounded it's based on how much you've attacked a type of insect in some regards.
I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before.
But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.
I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so can the npcs.
Would be cool to come back to a village, and now the leader has changed because the previous one insulted someone at the tavern, who killed the leader in a fit of rage. The village then chose a replacement leader, the assailant was publicly executed for their crimes. But the villagers decided this was too brutal a punishment so they removed the leader, who resisted but got driven out of town. The ousted leader wants control of the village back so they've been planning to enter with a crew of mercenaries.
When you get to the village you get given a quest to go take care of the problem, based on the hearsay. Hell, when you get to whatever hideout they're holed up in maybe the npc has even decided to just give up and move somewhere else.
So many opportunities for awesome narratives. I've done experiments with this stuff in text, but not in engine with an actual game.
Oh I totally agree. More so I think the ability for AI to generate any kind of game you wish is in the not so distant future.
Dwarf Fortress has some wonderful world events and npc choice trees. For example in my biggest fortress, Ragnar was bored. Ragnar got really bored. Ragnar stared at a rock for almost 3 months game time. Then Ragnar got inspired so he ran over to the bowyer workstation, fetched a few gems and wood from the nearby piles, and started crafting a masterpiece crossbow. 6 months later, this thing comes out decked in jewels and gems, it’s got a +++ rating on the end. It’s wonderful. Then Ragnar loads a bolt. Pulls the trigger.
Won't spoil it for you but we did have a great discussion from that around how emergent gameplay can be amazing, but player agency means that you'd still need the "hand of God" to be involved in fixing things and making adjustments so that major plot points and still enabled and the player doesn't kill the entire world (unless that's the point of the game I suppose).
> But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.
The problem is most deployments will likely be sloppy shovelware and every now and then we’ll get half decent games with it, maybe a great one every few years. Just like how we see now with garbage unedited LLM outputs flooding the internet and dominating searches as “articles” or “blogs.” It is just far too easy flood us with trash while any decent work gets buried in it and can’t be found.
Oh for sure, but remember when Steam opened the green light thing more and a flood of absolute trash started pouring in...I feel like there'll always be shovelware, poor implementations and scams regardless of AI or any other technology. Seems it's just something that comes along with human nature, inside and outside of games.
Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.
Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".
Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.
Yes I agree that the patent system now exists for parasite businessmen and finance people rather than inventors.
But on a more positive note I loved SoM so much, played it on release - the nemesis system, movement and general open worldness of it was all so satisfying. I never got to the sequel but I'll have to check it out.
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."
I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
I agree with that, although a giant amount of support and attention is one way, the sexes are going through different stuff into terms of the meta-problem of "how our problems are viewed".
She died by assisted suicide, for private reasons. No need to exaggerate to make a point. There’s Twitter if you want to engage in that type of culture war.
It means that if you zoom out, things look more similar. Similar patterns, similar problems and solutions, but different components.
All the various shades of red are all red. All news is engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all different, and yet still the same.
I didn’t ask for an interpretation of the post, I asked for other times where anyone would use “same” and “different” interchangeably as words (in a sentence, presumably)
It kind of seems like the sentence I quoted was gibberish that’s short enough to seem vaguely profound. Unless somebody could give other examples of when those words are interchangeable (then obviously dogs is eggs), but as it stands it’s a duck pregnancy is optional type situation
You may be the victim right now, and I may be the perpetrator, but over time you'll sometimes be the perpetrator (what, do you think you're perfect?) and I'll sometimes be the victim (you don't think I suffer?), and over time it all averages out.
But just because you're the victim this time, you're getting all the sympathy. Is that fair?
> They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better.
How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...
No, because artificial intelligence is not yet ready to govern us.
Then when it is smart/flawless enough it will take many decades for humans to accept this.
Just like pretty much any change it gets shot down/backlash for a certain amount of time before it becomes commonplace. This is the human way, and exactly why we probably need machine governance in the future.
You think humans are good at doing the best thing for everyone? Humans are the species who walked away from rescuing people from the concentration camps, people who were imprisoned and mass murdered for who they are (many different groups including Jewish people).
After all that horror and mistreatment, the lessons learned? Nothing. Still went on to attack, kill and imprison gay men like myself. Even after bearing witness to some of the worst horrors that tribalism can cause.
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills."
In 2024 they passed your typical "gay propaganda" bill meaning that issues related to or affecting gay people cannot be discussed, even sexual health etc.
As a gay dude who never got being gay mentioned, or requisite sexual health advice when I was in school (in NZ) and took several hard years of not understanding what was wrong when I was trying to force myself to be hetero:
I don't think they deserve this. They don't deserve the financial boons and convenience of the Euro area. But then others will disagree of course; we're tribal - the gays are my tribe and might not be yours, but the difference between you and me I suppose is that I'd complain if they were known to have laws or persecute any particular group, not just my own tribes.
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