Yes. From the article:

Ethiopia: […] It is one of the few African countries that enacted its own anti-gay laws – most others inherited those laws from Britain.

Love it. It’s almost like an unaired episode of the original show.

Yeah, that is - unfortunately - how it usually goes. The average game developer stays in the gaming industry for ~7 years and then gives up and does something else entirely.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

“My child…”

AI execs: Our AIs are going to be so powerful. More powerful than anything. Soon they could be able to destroy humanity!

Governments: Well, then we better regulate that shit and make sure that doesn’t happen…

AI execs: Nooooo! We did not mean it that way!

There is a legitimate reason why we may see “something” in the future.

Ubisoft accepted subsidies from the French government for the production of BGE2, which puts BGE2 in a similar place like “Skull and Bones”: “Skull and Bones” was partially financed by subsidies from the Singaporean government. So BGE2 is trapped in the same weird limbo “Skull and Bones” was trapped in for years. Ubisoft has to figure out whether they actually want to finish the game or write a big, fat check to the French government.

We all know how that turned out for “Skull and Bones”, so I am not going to get my hopes up.

Your quote reminds me of one of the biggest misconceptions about Judith Butler’s work who wrote so much about gender…

People constantly misquote them and say that Butler wrote that “gender is a performance” and assume that Butler meant that gender is fake.

What Butler Butler actually wrote is that “gender is performative”, ie. it involves a performance that communicates our gender identity to others without the performance being the end-all-be-all of gender.

The “”“alpha male’s”“” masculinity is so fragile, they threw a conniption when seeing a picture of a fit woman.

No, you see it’s not like education makes you see past your own prejudices and that makes you more liberal. If you are liberal you get awarded an education by the shadowy cabal that controls the education system with DEI measures! This guy only wants a tRuE mERiToCrACy where disenfranchised, downtrodden bigots get a chance to attend university where they are taught about the superiority of their white Aryan race.

/s if it isn’t apparent.

Without doubt, it will. Though the GD party is not keen on joining the EU anymore anyway and favor Russia. Laws like this will make it easy for the GD to blame the EU when the EU makes the inevitable decision to suspend Georgia’s admission process.

Visual agnosia?

Technically this year, but already after the last elections in 2020, there were credible allegations of election fraud in favor of the ruling GD party which resulted in massive protests. Since then GD has only tightened its hold of the country’s institutions and has suppressed civil society. You can see why the upcoming elections aren’t looking promising…

So much this.

It is the very definition of being cis to not understand wanting to be a different gender than the one being assigned at birth. People who are uncomfortable with their assigned gender are not cis.

But many need a while to realize that other people do not feel the way they do.

WillStealYourUsername has already given a very good overview, to add to that…

It is a highly individual process and while many trans people share certain experiences, no two trans people will have exactly the same kind of journey.

While the public perception of trans people is very much focused on the rather rare cases of young children who will insist on being trans from an early age on. While these cases definitely exist, far more trans people are going through a gradual process of realization. There may be a final “egg crack” (the moment of final realization), but it is usually preceded by a slow process of smaller realizations and it is nowhere near a linear process…

As WillStealYourUsername describes so well, in hindsight all the signs and individual quirks make sense, but most people have to attain a certain level of self-acceptance before being able to recognize the various symptoms for what they are.

In my personal case, it was an intense jealousy of fem people that would never go away and culminated in a moment where I had an emotional meltdown over a fictional character who transitioned from male to female in their storyline. That’s when I finally realized that I could do the same thing if I got my shit together and accepted being trans.

Yeah, I was pretty much convinced of the same thing while still in school: How could my class mates not want to change their gender? It’s the most amazing thing in the world to do! Who would say no to that?

A little long maybe, I assume it won’t be long until it’s just “likensub”.

I would prefer to burn Meta/Facebook to the ground too, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t point out Zuckerberg & Co.'s obvious sexism and racism.