I didn’t expect to like Balatro as much as I did. I’m a big fan of deck builders but the poker theme was not super compelling to me. But wow, I’ve had a blast with it. Just boils down to a really good set of mechanics and some ridiculous fun builds. I don’t think it will hold my attention as long as like Slay the Spire or Monster Train but it was well worth the price.

Thanks for confirming this, all the rage around this game is exhausting. I loved the first game, would probably place it in my top ten of all time. I have no complaints about omg actually having to traverse the world. It’s the way the game is designed to play. If there are paid workarounds to play it a different way it doesn’t affect me or anybody else who loves this kind of game.

I’ll most likely end up picking it up and I’m glad it runs well. The reception has been wild to me. I loved all the jankiness of dragon’s dogma but I feel like a lot of people are buying this sequel and not knowing what to expect

The original dragons dogma had poor quality of life features and its arguably a large part of the appeal. No fast travel, no multiple saves. If you didn’t like your little ai character you had to advance pretty far to change it (and the same with fast travel, it sort of existed and was a surprisingly cool unique system but you had to get through a lot of the game for it). I’d compare it in a lot of ways to the first dark souls as far as not following gaming industry trends.

I was hoping dragons dogma 2 was more of the same honestly, I don’t think I care if travel stones can be purchased or whatever. Is it a bad game for those that liked the first one?

Didn’t he kill an employee with a box cutter? lol

I’d still rather hang with him than JP, you’re right on that.

Not to mention meds to suppress expression of autism traits and behavioral therapies like ABA that make daily existence a constant effort. But hey, they make it less awkward for allistic people to share spaces with autistic people. Or god forbid, have them accept that some folks have different ways of engaging with the world.

Thanks for letting me know. I’m glad that sex workers are never exploited to produce porn.

Sure, and “impossible” meat wouldn’t have existed if people weren’t already eating actual meat. But it’s a better alternative. Porn is not going anywhere. If generative AI means less real people get exploited that’s a win in my book.

If you don’t think anything unethical happens in the production of porn I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s getting better but exploitation, sex trafficking, revenge porn, etc. have been a thing since pornography was invented.

AI porn at least does not necessarily need to consider consent. Plenty of AI porn involves animated figures or photorealistic humans that don’t represent any identifiable person.

The only hang up I have is producing images of actual people without their consent, and I don’t think it’s a new problem as photoshop has existed for a while.

They’re probably losing money now and just trying to build a user base as a first-mover. They accept donations and subscriptions with fairly minor benefits, but I imagine hosting and serving sizable AI models is not cheap.

They’ll probably have to transition to paid access at some point, but I don’t see it as particularly unethical as they have bills to pay and do attempt to moderate content on the site.

I tend to agree generating adult content of real people is unethical, but probably less so than how a lot of real porn is made. I don’t think there should be open avenues for sharing that kind of stuff online, and their rules should be better enforced.