And you probably see them almost every day!

Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs.

Wikipedia

Specifically, they are members of the Aves class, therefore also members of the Dinosauria clade.

The problem is that then you need the government’s permission to procreate. There’s always the valid concern that the government would prevent you from having children to remove some undesirable trait from the population and justify it as being a danger to a child. I know you described basic competency skills, but there would always exist a very credible threat of it being politicized.

In fact, this already happens for things like queer couples being rejected for adopting children or the Uyghur population being quietly genocided in China. And Eugenics was historically practiced such that criminals would be sterilized as part of their punishment.

It’s worth pointing out that governments already intervene with unqualified parents by removing the child from the household. Shifting the burden of proof from the government needing to show neglect to parents needing to prove themselves worthy is a dangerous amount of authority to cede to a centralized, corruptible power.

Also, it’s not clear how you handle unlicensed parents. People are going to have unsafe sex no matter how illegal you make it. Would you push for preemptively sterilizing everyone and trusting it can be reversed after a license is acquired? Forcing abortions? Confiscating the child after birth?

I haven’t played it and hate nearly everything I have seen about the age system, but they did make the map generation more varied in the latest patch. They’ve called the map inadequacies a priority to work on, so it will probably get better if you return to it down the line.

The UN hasn’t explicitly called it genocide, but if you assume China’s motivation is to reduce their population, it seems hard to argue its actions wouldn’t qualify. Widespread arbitrary imprisonment and certainly forced sterilization would meet at least condition 4 of their requirement. The Genocide Convention’s definition is below, emphasis mine:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

You could argue they don’t actually intend to reduce the Uyghur population, but it’s hard to accept that a surge in the Xinjiang region’s sterilization rate and the birth rate being cut in half over the course of three years are just anti-terrorism measures.

My friends and I really like Civ 5, but we didn’t get into 6 much and had some reservations about the changes in 7. I think we’ll get it at some point, but it will probably be during a sale after some more polish (and maybe some mods to adjust some of the controversial changes).

But I’ve had the itch from the hype and I’ve been wanting to try some other turn-based 4X games. Old World is 75% off on Steam at the moment so I pulled the trigger yesterday. I’ve seen gameplay but I’m eager to try it myself. The narrative choices seem like they add a lot of meaningful decision-making that I want to explore. I also played some Age of Wonders 4 and have enjoyed that too, but there’s a lot to learn with all the combat mechanics. It means there’s a lot of replayability though.

When you give blood, often the “wrong” answer will just have them ask a followup after you submit the questionnaire. Like there is one asking if you had recently visited any of a list of countries of concern. I selected that I had because of a trip to Mexico, but I was still able to give blood that day because when they later asked which region, the one I had visited was considered safe.

I expect if you had been bitten by a mosquito in a place where that isn’t a significant concern and developed no symptoms other than the itch, you would probably be approved to donate. Receiving plasma is less dangerous than receiving blood so I would be surprised if the safety evaluation is more strict.

When people criticise me or my actions, I have at least as much right to defend myself as you do to cast judgement and voice it in the first place. But the magnitude of the condemnation you expressed by your word choice is greatly at odds with what I have done.

I bought a game because I thought its value would be worth the price for me. Having used it, I’ve found my early assessment was right. You clearly have different expectations for a game to be worth buying, and my purchase makes it less likely that companies will have to cater to you in the future. I understand your frustration, but I have not wronged you or anyone else.

I bought it the night before it released so I could download it and have it ready to play. At that point, I had played hours of the betas, had seen interviews with the developers, and had read various reviews that were overall very favorable. And just from playing it one day I’m very happy with my purchase.

I understand people disagreeing with it being a worthwhile purchase but calling it “shameful”, “disgusting”, or “disturbing” is actually really disappointing for me to see. It’s just buying a video game when it releases. You can have a complaint about a product without being so judgemental about people who find it valuable enough to buy even with its faults. Let people enjoy things.

They did the same thing with MH World too, and that’s one of my favorite games of all time. Capcom shouldn’t charge for things like appearance changes, but even so, they create games with huge amounts of value for the price tag. And most of that came from years of free post release added content. A feature-complete game with cosmetic bonuses available as paid dlc is not a problem. Failing to achieve that would be the reason to be concerned over microtransactions. I understand why microtransactions are unpopular, but they can be done well and without them existing, many great games would either not exist or have to be much smaller.

Also, for this specifically, there is a nexus mod that lets you change your appearance for free. There will very likely be a similar workaround with the new game if you have the pc version.

During the betas at least, it was mentioned in at least one of the interview/preview videos that you could adjust your character whenever before release but after release it would cost money. Not sure how accessible the information was but it wasn’t a total secret.

Riot actually has short stories, comics, and a few books on the lore of the world. It doesn’t show up in the game beyond voice lines, but some of the broad strokes of the Arcane story had been all but confirmed for years. Legends of Runeterra is also a card game set in the same world that expanded on things by letting champions talk to more minor characters (other cards in that case). And they are working on an mmo that will probably dive into the lore much more.

Conjuration gave you access to a daedric bow with effectively unlimited daedric arrows whenever you wanted. Pretty significant when stealth archery is the natural meta in the game. Plus you can summon things to give you free damage and take aggro. That’s useful for any build.

Club Penguin Rewritten, Toontown Rewritten, and The Legend of Pirates Online (based on Pirates of the Caribbean Online) are resurrected fan-made versions of games shut down by Disney. The former was also shut down by Disney, but the others are still going. I think the difference is that the Club Penguin revival included ads while the other two were never monetized at all.

It seems like Overwatch news always gets very downvoted. Is it just because people dislike Blizzard’s mishandling of the game? That’s hardly reason to shoot the messenger for major updates. OP hasn’t endorsed anything, they just shared the news neutrally.

Chess is an old game, and stalemate wasn’t always considered a draw. At other times, creating a stalemate may have been considered a win or loss or partial win, or it may have been illegal altogether. But the modern draw makes sense if you keep in mind a few things. First, the victory condition is putting the opponent’s king in checkmate (or accepting their concession). Second, exposing your king to an attack during your move is not just a blunder, it is actually an illegal move, to the point that you can’t even do it as a pass through while castling. So stalemate is a unique outcome where neither player achieves their victory condition, yet the game cannot continue, since the player who must move next has no legal moves available.

In a practical sense, stalemate offers a means of giving a player in an inferior position a means of escaping a loss by punishing the dominant player for not being able to capitalize on their lead. It helps prevent someone from being able to brute force a win by making safe moves that do little to actually progress the game, like advancing all their pawns until the game is trivial. It’s much less interesting to have the end game strategy be more about not losing one’s lead rather than extending it.

So a win requires being more than slightly ahead of an opponent. It’s worth pointing out that most high level chess games end in a draw where neither player has a sufficient lead to force a checkmate. There are other rules in modern chess that also force a draw to make sure the game is more about getting a win than just avoiding a loss. Otherwise there would be plenty of ways someone could stall forever to try to get their opponent to concede, and that’s not very interesting.

Its hardware is yet to be announced, yet is somehow already obsolete.

The Bazaar is a similar game releasing soon. It’s still primarily focused on developing synergies between items in your build, but there’s more varied events between pvp fights and configuring your pack is simpler because it’s on a line rather than a grid, if that makes sense. It will be releasing as free to play probably in February or March.

Thank you for saying this. I’m a vegan and the only comment I’ve ever had removed on Lemmy is one pointing out that the official definition the vegan community uses is different than the one used by the historic coiners of the word, and by non-vegans, and probably by the majority of people that consider themselves vegan today.

For all the division the mod team creates with others on the platform, they make just as much within their own community. It’s hard enough to convince people to give veganism a chance when you don’t first have to distance yourself from those unwilling to engage with anyone below their moral high ground.

This doesn’t even need to be for a crime if you consider eminent domain. And all industries still face regulation in a capitalist nation like the US, meaning industry is only given as much leeway as the state allows.

Private “ownership” is an exaggeration for convenience; the office building you own may still be searched without permission or notice if you are suspected of a crime, it may be seized if you are late with paying taxes or simply do not maintain it, you may not own mineral rights or the right to restrict aviation above it, and you need the approval of the local government to make certain construction projects on it.

The definitions I hear for socialism could often apply to the US or any other capitalist nation.

You understand the person they were replying to used their own anecdotal observation to characterize liberals in general, right? They were providing counterexamples.