I don’t think it’s prudish to focus on cool before sexy as the default, especially in games where you’re creating an avatar of yourself vs playing a pre-defined character. Maybe I’m out of touch but I don’t make characters I’m attracted to, I make characters to represent myself. I want to see me looking cool, not me with my cheeks spread.

FFXIV’s high-end content is, without a single question, something that you’ll want a regular group for. I basically quit because I couldn’t convince my friends to keep playing. Partyfinder isn’t usually toxic, but it’s always draining because high end content doesn’t really let you “carry” somebody and if a single person leaves then you’ll most likely be starting fresh with another person who has never done the encounter before.

I think it’s a frame of mind. Generally, people are not trained to view media as art, nor to interact with art in any meaningful sense. If you see a video game and subconsciously think “this exists solely for my gratification” then yeah, you’re not gonna be thinking about it much.

This is one guy, one single guy, has made a statement as powerful as a protest of thousands. You can say it’s suicide, but not that it’s meaningless. You can say martyrdom is not something to aspire to, but cannot say that it did not take an incredibly rare level of devotion towards a cause that is just. Writing him off as out of his mind is an insult to his determination. I don’t think self-immolating is the most productive thing he could have done, but at the end of the day, if it was, I know I wouldn’t have the guts to follow through on it.

If there’s arguments that solar is better, sure, I’m sympathetic to those. I can understand if nuclear technology is not safe enough yet for widespread use. I think that arguments about nuclear being inherently unsafe are not convincing, though. As long as each reactor is safer than the last, we can minimize that inherent unsafeness. To take an example from programming: the only bug-free program you’ll ever write is a hello world program. Introducing complexity naturally increases the amount of unaccounted for states. Cutting-edge medical technology is invariably going to have an astronomical amount of unaccounted for states and the bugs that come with them. That doesn’t mean computing has nothing to offer medicine, only that its use must be weighed against alternatives. Fusion might be less inherently unsafe but AFAIK it’s not on the table right now, and we need energy today. China’s investing in nuclear technology, but it hasn’t been neglecting wind and solar, either. Putting feelers around each solution just seems like the no-brainer thing to do.