The Steam version is really quite approachable (by Dwarf Fortress standards) and the wiki has a very thorough and easy to follow guide for new players. And the slightly less fancy version is free on their website. So if you’ve got any interest, I’d always recommend starting up a fortress and playing around until you feel like you could join in!

Fuck, that’s a hard choice. I’m either sitting with moth gang or spider gang, but the bees are a great choice too.

I’d love to try again! I remember on the first run I missed one of the posts when it was my turn and played through a year someone else had already done, which was very embarrassing. Hopefully better organization can help prevent dumbasses like me from making such mistakes!

I’ll take the 26th if @gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net doesn’t end up wanting it. Otherwise I can do the week after.

Also I can be the farmer. I’m a big mushroom head

I think the human body is the way it is for a reason. It’s good at a lot of different tasks, so if you want to make a robot that can be used for a lot of different tasks (especially in a world where a lot of shit is designed around the human body) an anthropomorphic robot seems like a good idea. Like sure, a billion different hyper-specialized robot designs would be better, but are they enough better to justify the extra design time over just using the human shape we already know works?

Hey! Stop right there!

lmao no

Guess we’re woke and gay in Hyrule and Black Mesa

I mean kinda, yeah. Alyx is a POC woman who holds her own in Half-Life, Zelda is one of the three most powerful people in the setting and there’s no shortage of other powerful women around, including an entire species of dark-skinned warrior women.

(Not that the Gerudo are an especially good/sensitive portrayal of POC but even ignorant racism is woke to chuds these days, you have to be a full on nazi to satisfy them now)

nobody is going to make all that only to have a vanishing percent of players see it through

Not nobody. Fallout: New Vegas has all kinds of tiny details that most players will never see, and that’s a whole ass open world game made in less than 2 years. It’s entirely doable, either with insane crunch like game dev studios usually do, or by taking some extra time.

There’s no need to sling accusations at me just because I’m criticizing something you feel protective of.

Wtf are you even talking about? I’m accusing you of being intentionally obtuse because I had to ask you three times to define a term. I don’t feel “protective” of the fucking multi-billion dollar corporation. I’m trying to have a simple discussion and you’re constantly being hostile and unresponsive.

Why do you still refuse to define rent? How can you justify calling the conversation “frustrating” when you’re the one being intentionally obtuse?

Which is terse, wildly hyperbolic (even if we assume I’m seriously wrong, it does not follow that more than one of those things is misunderstood), and asserting that I don’t know what fucking rent is, among other things.

Terse sure, but I don’t see hyperbole in it and at the very least I do not think that we have the same understanding of what rent is. That’s why I essentially asked you to define it, and you didn’t. You just reasserted that charging a fee for a service counts as rent. Is the guy who fixes the broken window extracting rent from the landlord who called him?

My understanding of the word rent is that it is a fee charged by a private property owner for the use of that private property. Developers aren’t renting use of the private property that is Steam, they are making use of a wide variety of services, such as file hosting and payment processing and advertising.

Additionally, modern landlords frequently do engage in some amount of labor,

Yes of course some of them do, that’s not really relevant. There’s nothing stopping a landlord from doing the labor of a manager or a construction worker or a landscaper. Notice none of those things are called “landlording.” They’re not paid because they do landscaping, they’re paid because they’re the landlord. They’re paid for owning the property, not for what (if any) labor they do. That’s why it’s bad.

If all landlords on Earth were compensated for what labor they do and otherwise weren’t paid, being a landlord wouldn’t be bad. And they also wouldn’t be landlords. They would be called landscapers and construction workers and managers and so on.

In many feudal societies, “landlord” was a somewhat different title that referred to people who owned land and allowed peasants to work on it in exchange for some amount of the harvest, which was rent. Free peasants, i.e. people who weren’t serfs, etc., could theoretically try to find some other way of getting food, including sometimes also owning tiny plots themselves or going to some other landlord, but ultimately their best option was often submitting to terrible exploitation by a landlord because that was their least bad choice.

You once again compare Steam requesting a fee in exchange for the labor their workers do with landlords requesting a fee for nothing.

Fundamentally, a huge amount of what most devs are paying their cut for is the mere privilege of being on a platform with such a huge userbase, meaning it usually is their best option to make money if they don’t already have a name for themselves (and sometimes even then). The amount they pay is undoubtedly tied to this fact, and that is rent extraction.

That is marketing. Nobody who uses Steam is incapable of downloading a game that isn’t on Steam. The reason having your game on Steam is so valuable is because Steam will advertise the game for you in exchange for that cut of sales.

Have I given you enough material for you to now deign to enlighten me on the voluntary nature of the free market under this merit monopoly?

Why are you being such an asshole? I do not want to have a conversation with someone who is behaving like this.

I mean I feel like it would be better for you to explain how it is similar to rent extraction.

Landlords are people who had nothing to do with the construction of the home and are providing no service. They don’t deserve to be paid because they aren’t doing anything. And you can’t just decide not to pay them and go somewhere else, because you have to live in a house.

None of this is remotely similar to Steam in any way. You don’t have to put your game on Steam if you don’t want to pay them, and if you do put your game on Steam and pay them it’s because you want the service they are providing. Everything that is bad about a landlord is something that doesn’t apply here.

There’s a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam.

Yeah as the other user said, this isn’t true.

building an alternative means dealing with breaking into what is effectively a monopoly, and you can see how successful that’s been for Origin/Epic/whatever

Yeah it’s not successful for Origin or Epic because their idea of breaking a monopoly is to strongarm their own pseudo-monopoly by bringing Console Wars to the PC, which is one of the dumbest ideas possible. If Origin or Epic ever made their service good instead of just walling off exclusive games and forcing users to use their obviously terrible software (a move which creates the most negative possible feelings toward your company) they would be a lot more successful.

Okay, if that’s true then just don’t put the game on steam and don’t pay a 30% cut. Hell, put the game on steam and then also sell it for less money on your own website to try to funnel sales there. There’s literally nothing stopping any of that.

Devs use Steam because it kicks ass and it’s well worth the cut.

rent-extracting bullshit

This feels like a severe misunderstanding of what rent is, why it’s bad, and what Steam is.

It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.

Actually it only takes one person to trigger that message. It was a dedicated button on your profile and was used exclusively as an anonymous way to tell you that you should kill yourself.

Which makes me wonder if a single one passes the Bechdel Test…

The answer is yes.

Almost all of them as far as I’m aware. Definitely all the ones I’m particularly familiar with (7, 10, 13, 14)