Recognize what others do that you don’t do

Admit which things are bad or not, understand why they are bad or not, and chose to not do the things that are bad

See the distinction between others and you

If you do things and you learn that they are bad and hurt others, work on it to understand what’s going on and make a better decision, don’t feel insulted and get mad at people telling you that something you did is hurting others

Don’t take things personally as an attack on yourself, don’t bind your identity to a larger group

“Here’s your equipment” hands a pair of boots

The bike Amiibo unlocks color schemes for the bike, there’s a handful unlocked every 50km you ride (which seems to go pretty fast and I barely crossed the map once in one direction). So far I’ve only unlocked a classic Varia suit color scheme.

Looking at a list, they’re not terrible if you’re into that, but they’re a bit meh and I wouldn’t be too upset if I was locked out of it. The default skin looks great.

On cable TV / talk shows, that’s “the host and the sidekick.” Kimmel and Guillermo, Conan and Andy, some do that with the lead of the band (Colbert, Fallon, Meyers)…

Gotta make them edible enough first. Need some seasoning.

How about

Middleman anonimizer, pornhub sends the message to a middleman, the middleman puts its own token on the request, sends that to the gov, the gov responds yes/no to the middleman on the authenticity of the message, the middleman forwards the response to pornhub. The gov doesn’t see pornhub, pornhub only gets the yes/no response, the middleman only sees the message with no ID and the response as well as the site.

Requires a separate middleman maintained by who the fuck knows. Pornhub keeps your IP, the gov keeps your name, the middleman only knows the number of visitors on pornhub.

That’s right, when a foreign army invades your country, don’t escalate, just give them control of your government and your institutions.

The molehill is your focus on the word believe

The serious part is the US just waltzing into a foreign country planting signs and Mexico removing them

Not that many people have actually died in Gaza, as a percentage of the total population. For that to work as a means of genocide, the number of dead Gazans would be in the millions. It is not.

Uh? Wasn’t the population in all of Gaza about 2 millions? Estimates these last few months put the death toll at 700 000 AFAIK, what percentage would be mass genocide?

That’s not an a, that’s a schwa, the silent e.

I’m still sad they killed the 2008 Prince of Persia after the DLC, top of my list from them. (Lost Crown isn’t far)

Also TBF, Origins isn’t the best example to blame them for making a stale loop, since that’s precisely the game where they updated the AC formula to make it a lot more RPG.

But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.

Heavily historical setting fairly accurate about settings that a lot of people are interested about. Nothing easier. You can literally throw a dart at a map and a timeline and make something interesting with a shit story. People will buy a million of them, doesn’t matter if they’re all the same game. It’s a goddamn mystery that no one is doing anything like that with their own engine, absolute lack of imagination.

That country is providing them with air defense missiles, so… (yes, it’s a shit situation)

I think the writers pretty much admitted they had no plan for Trinity, seeing how their goal completely changed from immortality to apocalypse between Rise and Shadow. They were just the reason for Lara to track them across the world and stumble on ancient stuff.

I’m looking up the opening scene for Rise of the Tomb Raider and I can’t find the therapy session itself. Maybe it was only in the trailer and they cut it from the game, I remember people thought it was weird when they released that trailer because it was unexpected at the time that this was the direction they were taking? But the game does have you find tapes of Lara’s recorded sessions talking with the therapist, like how she’s having control issues and it turns out she has become a different person in a bad way.

The third game of the reboot trilogy starts with her tracking this evil organization that’s been screwing with her family, finding the item they’re trying to steal to trigger an appocalypse, stealing it first, and almost triggering that same apocalypse because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, thinking she’s doing good. Second game also started with her tracking the same organization to figure out what they’re doing, and from that, she stumbles into some archaeology. It’s a long character arc, she was looking for unrelated answers, but she learns that she can be good at figuring out ancient stuff, and she finds out the hard way that she can also fuck up badly when she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s supposed to end at the point where she’s mature enough to do better. We just see all the “fucking up” parts.

The second game of the reboot trilogy starts with Lara in therapy session about how she became a thrill addict from her survivor’s guilt from the first game and how she’s liking it.

That was very clearly on purpose, she starts panicking about the first guys she kills to survive (and there’s a very obvious rape vibe when she gets ganged up on), and near the end she’s screaming I’m gonna kill you all. That is the narrative arc. Welcome to trauma stories?

Have you not seen those movies that end up saying “if we kill the big bad, we’re no better than them” after mowing down countless faceless mobs

… To indiscriminately beat up anyone who’s not rich?

Git gud or leave but no complaining allowed okay bud. No, the difficulty being too high is not a different complaint, it’s exactly what we’re talking about. The AI, the room setups and somehow every bug being placed exactly where you’re jumping, the runbacks, getting killed in 3 hits half of the time even though you have 5 HP, getting juggled to death into a spike trap or lava as soon as the first hit despite requiring 3 hits to die despite having 5 HP, getting hit when you’re healing and losing all of it, every single stupidest bug requiring at least 2 or 3 hits to kill and somehow up to 6 or 8 for the bigger ones when they all dodge everything and you have garbage range, anything that flies especially, constant pixel perfect coordination in your jumps, the need to be alert 100% of the time between environment traps and enemies and always have the perfect speedrun strat, on top of the resource management, this is all one complaint. It’s artificially way too hard and there is zero learning curve and no way to tune it down, and it would be less of a problem if you didn’t lose all the resources you were collecting for an hour of doing that loop. Take off some of those or loosen some positioning and it’s already much less stressful - literally any one mod is a big help already (no 2HP damage, respawn near your coccoon…) It’s ruthless, it allows zero second of paying a little less attention, it’s on purpose, and it is not the player’s fault for not running back to a string station that is not marked anywhere. This is not a healthy game to play, and it shouldn’t be justified by saying it’s for players who want to get very good at every single screen of it and no one else.

You want to buy Shakra’s map? Too bad, that room is empty now for some reason, and you have no idea where to find the map now, you don’t know Shakra comes back to the shop area and can be called with that ring, and since you HAVE NO MAP you don’t even know where to go at all anyway. Benches and bellways, same, you CAN’T GO BACK or safely rest and create a checkpoint until you have the funds to even unlock them, at which point getting your beads stringed becomes useless because you just spent them. See that mask shard and/or the simple key and you think it’d be nice to buy in your first couple hours? Your fault for not wanting to keep going back and forth between the docks and the shop to make a string, on top of going back and forth to the farming room for an hour at 5 to 15 beads per run in lava for the Deep Docks, so that’s 500 rosaries gone the second time in a row some stupid bug won’t get out of the way but also reads your every input to dodge every single time you even look at them. And even the first time you die, if you had no bench close by and no map, good luck even getting your coccoon back. What I’ve learned is to completely ignore those big stashes and strings of free rosaries because it’s all bait that you’ll lose in a minute and then permanently the next minute (that Greymoor bird house trap and Moorwing are NOT in the refund window). And learning that didn’t make the experience any better. That’s the difficulty problem we’re talking about, these are not two separate things, it’s literally the whole game. On its own, dying repeatedly is not such a big deal if all you have to do is redo that one jump or even that one series of 15 perfect jumps (fucking Karnak), other Metroidvanias do that too and they’re not awful. It’s everything around it and the permanent pressure.

This game’s trap is that people who played the newer Metroid or Prince of Persia think dying repeatedly in a lengthy, very hard bounce-and-dash maze is not a huge deal breaker even if this one ramps it up to “every screen is a constant challenge”, but they don’t know they should also have played Dark Souls and some other roguelikes first.