Good stuff. Important for people who want to play the game but don’t want to give money to Bethesda and, by extension, their genocide-complicit parent company, Microsoft.

FYI, it’s an acronym: TERF. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist

Personally, I disagree with Rowling’s views regarding trans women, but it’s unfair to condemn everyone involved with making the game for the IP’s creator’s backwards views, especially since she had no role in its development.

Dude, I’m a prog head, and I have to say you are so, so wrong. Some of the best prog rock has released in this millennium.

Look, dude, I don’t have the energy to teach you in addition to my own kid at home. Improve your reading comprehension, reread my last comment, and maybe we can have a reasonable discussion.

It’s as similar to racism as any prejudice is. It’s just a lazy term coined, I’d bet, for the sake of quick understanding within the context of its era, rather than for semantic accuracy.

I tried to find the correct word or phrase to use, and the consensus seems to be “cultural racism”, so I guess it’s technically a kind of racism, even though it doesn’t directly relate to race. “Culturism” would be a more accurate word, I think.

No, the only one approaching racism here is you, as you’re the only one equating culture to race. A black German is the same as a white German.

Oh no. I remember that video now. I didn’t need to remember that video. Why did I have to ask?!

I’ll probably regret asking, but I’m out of the loop and insatiably curious.

Brick in the window video?

The vaudevillian steampunk band Steam Powered Giraffe apparently had the same thought, and made a song about it.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2d4Rf57220M7TQ6JkZE0Bh

Look, I’m not really that invested in this, and yeah, the disclaimer idea was dumb. I just love Assassin’s Creed for many reasons, one of which is its historical accuracy. Sure, it’s no replacement for a real history lesson, but every game has been one of the most accurate portrayals of its respective slice of history in pop culture.

It’s about expectations. There are obvious embellishments in each game - Da Vinci’s inventions, the cyclops & minotaur, Norse gods, etc., and those are fine because they’re obvious fantasy in otherwise-mundane worlds. The only reason people care about the whole Yasuke thing (or the only reason they should care) is because his story is not obvious fantasy; those not versed in Japanese history would assume his story in the game to be mostly true to historical records, because it’s all mundane.

Take me with you.

Before I begin my retort, I feel I should preemptively defend myself against those who only assume the worst in others: The only dog I have in this fight is the dog of objectivity. Dogjectivity. Objectividog?

Anyway, comparing a real person to a fictional monster is missing the point. I love the game and I really like Yasuke’s part of the story, but it’s inconsistent with Ubisoft’s previous approach of keeping the events and characters as true to history as good gameplay would allow, while throwing in bits of embellishment here and there to keep things fun.

I honestly wouldn’t change anything about the game, but there should maybe be a disclaimer that Yasuke’s real role in history is not truly known, but they chose the most fun version of events, even if it’s likely untrue.

Interesting article. Disappointing to see that it’s likely Yasuke’s role in history was greatly embellished just to sell books to the Western world. And disappointing to see that Ubisoft didn’t do their due diligence in researching him.

That being said, the game is a blast to play. Historical inaccuracies aside, I’d say it’s the best entry in the Assassin’s Creed series since Black Flag, which was also fraught with historical inaccuracies.

It’s okay. I’ve never said “I love you” to your sister, either.

It’s saying that copyright law doesn’t apply to AI training, because none of the data is copied. It’s more akin to a person reading an impossible amount at an impossible speed, then using what they read as inspiration for their own writing. Sure, you could ask an LLM trained on, say, Edgar Allen Poe’s works to recite the entirety of The Raven, but it can only “recall” similarly to a human, and will have just as many mistakes (probably more, really) in its recitation as a human would.

Spoken like someone who either didn’t read the article or has a deep misunderstanding of what AI training is.

Any fan (or hater) of punk will tell you:

“Nice punk music” is an oxymoron.

I’m honestly a bit surprised ArenaNet hasn’t implemented any Steam Deck support. The game runs great on the Deck; all it needs is official controller support.

So much Elden Ring. I already Platinum’d it on PS5 at launch, but I recently saw that there’s a surprisingly big and active modding community for it, so I got it on Steam and installed the Elden Ring Reforged mod. It’s been long enough since I played and the mod changes enough that it feels like a new game. It’s incredible.