Glad to hear it!

Well yeah. The goal is to humanize the person they just killed, to make the players potentially regret their murderhobo ways for a brief moment. And one of the fastest ways to make a character (at least shallowly) altruistic is to have them pet the dog. Do something kind for something/someone innocent. It’s often used to show that an antagonist isn’t entirely evil, and is acting against the party due to a specific goal (rather than simply being evil for evil’s sake).

It’s the inverse of the “kick the dog” trope, where a character does something obviously evil for no narrative purpose other than proving that they are evil.

I’m a mod over at !outofcontextdnd@lemmy.world and would love to see some activity! I started it to keep track of some of my own group’s quotes, but the group has been on a two week break for the past four or five months now.

Yeah, 6” is basically a kitchen knife. I carry a fairly large pocket knife by most standards, (a Smith & Wesson Black Ops 3) but it’s only 3.25 inches long. That 6” blade (plus the hilt) isn’t something you’re going to be able to fit into your pocket, and I certainly wouldn’t consider carrying one around on a day-to-day basis. It’s fine as a novelty letter opener, but it should stay at your desk.

Just use a GPL license instead. It allows use with credit, but requires that usage also be released for free. Meaning that it can’t be used by corpos and their closed-source projects.

This is great. Hit the gym memberships next.

Yeah, the problem is that game publishers are trying to reach the broadest audience possible, which means niche games with unique features and gameplay are dying out. Why bother spending millions of dollars on developing a unique game which might not sell well, when you can churn out another open world lite-RPG with grassy stealth spots and counter/parry based combat which you know will sell well.

+1 for Anna’s Archive. It’s an amazing resource for students too, since they keep research papers and textbooks.

And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.

If you ever need to get research for free, you can usually email the researchers directly and they’ll be happy to share it for free; They hate the journals too, (because like I said earlier, they have to pay the journal thousands of dollars,) but feel obligated to use them to publish.

Even worse, that research and journal publishing was often funded by public funds and research grants. So the journal is paywalling research that taxpayers already paid for, and should be free to access.

Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.

You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.

Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.

It’s honestly giving big Starlight Brigade vibes.

That’s only for defederating. Blocking is local, and basically just hides the instance from your feed.

Higher than the blatant pedo instances? Those are too far down on the list, tbh.

Sort of. It does block the users, but only on your specific instance. If you’re interacting with a post on another instance and that instance is federated with them, you’ll still see them on that third instance.

Defederating basically takes the three instances from a closed triangle ◺ (where all users can see and post on all three instances) to an open triangle ∟ (where your instance and the defederated instance are blocked from each other, but the third instance can still see and interact with both.)

Did anybody say admins aren’t entitled to block stuff?

I mean, it’s a user complaining about defederation from known nazi instances. It gives off some big “free speech absolutist (as long as the free speech is hate speech)” vibes.

User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn’t want.

That system already exists. You can spin up your own instance in like 15 minutes, and have access to the entire unfiltered fediverse. But nobody wants to do that, because nobody actually wants to see the unfiltered fediverse. That shit is basically rawdogging the internet, because it’s full of extremists and pedophiles.

There is only one side who benefits from the “everything unfiltered by default, the user has to individually wade through mountains of slurs, hate, doxxing, and child porn to manually block all of them” option. And it isn’t the user. The only side that benefits is the side that now gets to peddle their BS to a wider audience.

If you genuinely want the fediverse to improve and grow, advocating for unfiltering isn’t the way. That shit will scare off any curious new users faster than any kind of reasonable filtering would. Imagine you make a new account, and your first interactions are blocking a thousand individual instances just so you don’t end up on a federal watch list.

The number of instances, not accounts. The instance is the entire server. All of Lemmy.world would be one instance.

Worth noting that there are lots of people who also run personal instances off of their home server. So like they may be the only user in that instance, or have a few friends who use it too. And they would also count as one instance on this chart.

Yeah, every now and then I hop over to an account on another instance, and immediately remember why I tend to hang out on .world…

.world isn’t perfect, but holy hell some of the other instances are just buried in tankie BS.

Yeah, there are more further down in the list too. I was honestly shocked to see how many blatant pedo instances there were.

Makes me wonder about all the times that instances like lemmy.world got brigaded by child porn posters. Was it people against the fediverse, or just shit leaking in from the blatant pedo instances?

Wow, there’s a lot more pedophilia stuff on there than I initially realized. Really blatant shit too? I’m surprised that’s even allowed without the feds cracking down on it immediately, because the whole point of ActuvityPub is that everything is open. So how the hell do the pedos manage to hide their tracks?

That literally already happened. It was like a year ago. It caused minimal damage, but it was clearly just meant to be a “boop. Look what we can do if we want to” message.

Worth noting that the “they thought they were Hamas” part is… Well… Not correct. WCK coordinated the shipment directly with the IDF. The IDF knew exactly where the trucks were, and what they were carrying. And then the IDF bombed them anyways, because they’re manufacturing a famine to further the genocide. And allowing food aid to enter would disrupt their planned famine.

Bombing the trucks was a message for any other groups that may have considered sending humanitarian aid: “Try to help Palestinians, and we’ll kill you. Even if we know who you are, and you clear it with us ahead of time. We’ll blame Hamas and get away with it, and your death will be meaningless.” And it worked… The truck bombings had a chilling effect on any future aid that was planned, because the IDF has shown that they can and will get away with it.