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ur future nurse is using chapgpt to glide thru school u better take care of urself

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The road to hell and all that...

Fuck I hate our society sometimes

You know when people ask how did germans let Hitler get so much power ... this is how

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God I wish elections in the fucking US wouldn’t affect literally every other country in the world

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Fingal’s Cave in Scotland. Good example of how nature’s hexagonal bias can produce blocky shapes.

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I respect your defense of bisexual woman and all but I just don’t want to put my mouth somewhere I know a dick has been

Yall out here acting like these girls’ pussies be haunted by the ghosts of penises past, this ain’t a Dickmas Carol, be so fucking for real

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please note, i entered my playthrough of datv with nothing but good faith and have in fact been ignoring all hype about it, for good or ill, as best i could prior to its release. but tonight something hit me irrevocably about the writing that might've genuinely trashed it for me, so... well, those who are invested in maintaining optimism about it probably should not read further.

with that said...

unfortunately, like four hours in i developed a suspicion that the dialogue in this game was written either partly or largely with AI, and... fuck. i cannot make myself un-believe that now. the dialogue is so rote and so flat and so glutted with cliché and so devoid of linguistic and emotional nuance that it legitimately disturbs me. it's like i'm detecting some kind of literary uncanny valley.

i don't know. maybe i'm being deeply cynical. but bioware also let all their writers go and were utterly unconcerned about that fact, so against my will i am now envisioning a room full of shitbrained game execs thinking this would be a fine way to make sure the damn thing ships by halloween and i don't like how plausible it feels.

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Once again we have to do what Bioware doesn't do themselves

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Ok, as much as I have been hyping and playing 12 hours a day since it got out (still in Act 1 though, bc I'm a slowass player and completionist), I feel like I have to say something that is getting hard to ignore at this point... and I wanna preface this by saying that I am loving a lot of aspects of the game and I adore the writing when it comes to the companions, who I am obsessed with.

And maybe this will get better yet, as I generally heard the writing picks up once the story progresses beyond picking up all companions..

But I'm starting to get quite upset at the way the writing just does NOT care about the established lore and the politics of Thedas like at all, when to me - and many others - that richness, nuance and depth of the world is what makes the games so special.

(Spoilers below)

I looked past the way the elves in Arlathan just seemed to know that their gods are evil and Solas is "kind of a dick" but was right about that. When, you know, that made him basically the Satan of their pantheon up to now.. It was after all the tutorial stage of the game and I understand that you wanna ease newcomers into the lore. I could also handwave it in-universe with Morrigan being there - she could have filled the Veiljumpers in on the discoveries of the Inquisition or even what the Well told her.

It felt a bit weird that our contacts in every other faction just accepted this huge revelation without a blink, but again it was the early stages and I also get that having a discussion about it 6 times with different faction leaders would have been incredibly tedious. So I ignored that. And yeah, at least the First Warden found it hard to swallow.

The fact that they brushed aside the gods finding elven subjects - many of whom after all still worship them - with one sentence from Solas was disappointing though. Instead they chose to ally them with the Venatori and the Antaam who are the pure evil factions with no nuance or motive to side with them besides a comic book level of hunger for power. They didn't even throw in a sentence about the gods maybe speaking to the Venatori through the Archdemons to get them on their side or how it's very ironic that the Venatori, who want to make Tevinter great again, stoop to working with the pantheon of the people they oppress because they see them as lesser and other. No political exploration of the massive lore implications at all.

It really hit me when I picked up Davrin and he commented how Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain blighting the world would really endear us (elves) to the rest of Thedas - this was the first time anyone actually mentioned the political impact of the elven gods being real, freed, evil and blighted on modern day elves at all, when this should be HUGE. It should be ugly. It should be complex. It should be explored in as many examples as bloodmagic and the oppression of mages was in DA2. It should be a central point of Act 1. (This btw made me love Davrin so much in that moment because this was the first time in the game for me when I actually felt like talking to a Dragon Age elf and even just that one line felt like home.)

And now I just did Taash's first companion quest and it seems Qunari lore is also being ignored (except for the gender aspect of it, which I look forward to). Taash's mum was a scholar and had a baby and the only problem about that was that it could breathe fire and was special but otherwise all would have been dandy? Like she would have just been allowed to keep Taash long enough to find that out about her baby if she was living under the Qun? That directly contradicts everything we know about how the Qunari's culture around reproduction and childcare works.

Sorry to be negative and talking myself into a rage - I know it's not something people want to see rn. But like, I realise you have to brush over some lore intricacies for brevity and to make it digestible for new players. But this is a world initially inspired by Wheel of Time and ASOIAF, both of which are interesting because of the depth of ficitional cultures, lore and politics, and hence it's also what gives Dragon Age its appeal. And now they take us to the most politcally interesting areas on the world map and just get rid of all of political depth?

That's really disappointing. Imagine if Winds of Winter dropped all political themes just because there's several previous books and it's been some a lot of years.

Also, I managed to play DA2 before I ever played Origins and they could introduce me to a vast established background of lore just fine back then.

Sorry. Rant over. But I had to get that out of my system.

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Megan talking about the reaction to W.A.P in her documentary

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Always exercise your right to vote, ladies. It was something our grandmothers fought very hard for, so we must cherish it

National League of Women Voters hold up signs reading, 'VOTE' on September 17, 1924.

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I've said this before and I'll say it again: it's more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It's performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.

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gotta love the mics