Short answer: If they don’t know anything else about you except you’re “Christian”, they don’t know if you’re like a left-wing unitarian or a horrible “conversion therapy, make being trans a felony” evangelical. The former is pretty safe, but if you’re the latter hanging out with you could be dangerous.

Longer thoughts: Many christians are not good about queer topics. This can include “we should torture them” (“conversion therapy”), laws that make life harder for them (eg: banning marriage), and lower grade unpleasantness like “i’ll pray so you don’t go to hell”.

Many christians also don’t really do much to stop their peers. It’s not really your responsibility to fight everyone on every topic, but if you keep going to a church that wants to oppress queer people, you’re supporting something that’s hostile. I don’t care how nice their pastor is or how much fun the choir group is, if the church wants to rip apart my friend’s families and you support that, we can’t be friends. Find another church.

Lastly, and this is more general and less about queer folks, most christians are not very good at it. The bible has lots of stuff about love your neighbor (and your neighbor includes your out-group) and not fixating on material wealth, but I see a lot of so-called christians doing squat for the homeless and vulnerable, voting for cruelty, and sitting around in their nice house with their big screen tv. (All that prosperity gospel, “sin all you want and be forgiven” stuff seems like nonsense.

Violence is not inherently bad. The badness depends on the context. So “doesn’t that make them more-violent??” appeal is technically true, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

“Cutting someone open and taking out an organ” is pretty fucked up, unless it’s in a hospital and they’re removing an appendix so the patient doesn’t die.

Punching someone in the face is usually bad, but if that person is planning to go on and do mass murder, it’s still in the black.

How do you tell they’re a nazi? Well, sometimes they tell you. Sometimes they wear a clothes that signal it.

Sometimes people act like “if you can’t write an algorithm to perfectly decide how to behave in all cases you’re wrong” and that’s just not how human behavior and decision making has ever been. People make judgement calls with incomplete information all the time, and that’s okay.

The whole “most startups lose a lot of money and fail, but some will be wildly successful” model is kind of rotten. Especially when the "wild success " often means breaking laws or becoming consumer hostile.

It’s like some eternal September shit. Of course a private for profit entity like discord is going to eventually turn to shit*. It’s like the scorpion and the frog fable**. People should know that. But there are just so many people who this is their first time ever encountering these ideas.

And some people just don’t care about things. I had that galaxy brain realization a couple months ago. Imagine if everyone cared just a little more. So many problems would just go away.

*Valve arguably being an exception so far, but that could change on a whim

** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

You have to remember a lot of people are colossally stupid, but still are in positions to make decisions.

Windows sure is bad, though I haven’t seen an actual blue-screen in years. That’s some foul luck.

Oh yeah I got a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard for it, worked fine. One or two crashes, but mostly just fine.

Pray to Saint Luigi for guidance.

I believe this article misses the real reasons: labor isn’t paid enough.

Capital makes record profits but that isn’t being shared with the people who do the work.

Stop going to nazi bars.

I saw “No Men” play a tiny show and it’s still one of my favorites. They put on a great show and also they were super friendly with everyone in the crowd. I saw them another time after at a bigger venue and they even remembered me and my friend.

How I feel about mana depends largely on how quickly it regenerates. It can be just a reskin of spells-per-day or spells-per-encounter, or it could be something more interesting.

DA:O had unlimited mana potions, which meant essentially you spend a small amount of time to refresh mid fight. Not very deep tactically, but more or less fine.

I don’t think resource management is really a thing most people actually enjoy. Most people don’t like timed missions, so you probably don’t want to use that to prevent people from resting a lot. You don’t want to soft-lock players by letting them blow their resources too soon, so they can’t win the fight but don’t have a way to restore. The dark souls style “you reset at the checkpoint but so do the monsters. Keep trying until you get it right” works for me, but a lot of people hate that.

There are so many ways you could do magic, and it’s a bummer that vancian magic takes up so much space.

DND just isn’t as good and universal as people think it is, but it’s hugely influential anyway.

Side note: DND is balanced around like 6 “medium” encounters per day. You’re supposed to slowly trickle down your resources. Turns out most groups do one encounter per day on average, and then the system doesn’t work very well at all. There’s lot of patches (eg: gritty realism) but the problem remains people don’t seem to want to do that kind of cadence.

I meant how in poe1 and 2 might (the stat) is 3% more damage per point, so it’s hard to feel the difference between might 10 and might 15. Does +15% of 10 damage make a meaningful difference? It’s probably the same as +12%, right, or is there decimal damage too? I guess when multiplied by power levels it’s a bigger deal, but that’s kind of opaque.

Also “like proficiency bonuses on crack” is deeply funny to me as someone who played DND 3e. Base attack bonus every level, skill ranks up every level, oh so many memories and not all of them good.

I really liked poe2 and would play a third one.

I really liked that they made powers per-encounter instead of per-rest. Per-rest really doesn’t work well despite DND trying really hard. It especially doesn’t work well without a human steering to prevent things like “you killed everyone in the castle, now go rest for 8 hours before opening the final door to the boss”. Or you can programmatically enforce that, but players don’t like that. Mostly because it sucks to do like an hour of stuff and realize you’re too low on resources to win, and have to reload.

I’d probably prefer the stats to be coarser or more meaningful. It’s hard to get a feel for “3% more damage”. Especially when the base damage is like 5-15.

Remember when all those internet duds were mad that Dragon Age 2 was “sHoVinG tHe gAy aGeNdA dOwN oUr tHroAts!!!” because the NPCs would romance the PC regardless of gender? And they absolutely lost their shit that Anders might express interest and, if you’re not interested, you’d have to politely turn him down once?

Those are the worst sort of people and I frankly wish them ill.

I dunno. problems, mysteries, and war aren’t usually portrayed realistically in video games, either.

I think that you can just give them gifts until they’re horny for you is like the quintessential example of poorly done video game romance.

Half-assed sex scenes (no pun intended) are probably worse than ones that are well done.

I still think a lot about one of the beats in a DA:I romance. But like… all the ones from DA:O were kind of bad. But also the one I played in DA:V was so PG-13 and sterile it wasn’t any fun at all.

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.