There’s no “precedent” needed, Russia and Ukraine are simply choosing not to do certain things to avoid widening the war in the ways you mention, because they don’t think that would be to their advantage. The precedent is there already, it’s not like either country is looking at Iran and going “oh wow, I didn’t know that was an option!”
My wife really disliked masculinization of the main character in the new She-Ra. The original was maybe her favorite cartoon as a kid, and what appealed was that She-Ra was a pretty, presenting-very-feminine princess who was also strong and kicked ass. She took the new representation (however it was intended, which, I think it's a safe bet it wasn't intended this way) as saying "being a strong woman means being more masculine and isn't compatible with the traditionally-feminine", which was very much not anything she was interested in.
In that specific case I think it was a result of the whole show bending almost every gender-presentation toward something less binary, on purpose, but the general tendency to make a woman character stronger simply by increasing her masculine presentation is pretty common and isn't well received by a lot of folks.
That part, and the player-death sequences(!), plus some other cutscene stuff, really weirded me out. It all read to me as way more sexualized (in a specific, fetishy sort of way) than anything in the old Tomb Raider games. Hated that aspect of it so much that I almost didn't even look at the sequels.
But I'm a dude, I dunno if it read that way to women who played it.
I touched on it in my way-too-long post elsewhere on here, but I think this is exactly it: there's a (fuzzy at some boundary, sure, but useful) distinction to be drawn on something like where the game happens. Does "the game" (the software) supply most or all of "the game"? Or is "the game" (the software) a toy in service of a game that the player brings and gives shape?
Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).
We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)
I'm struggling to think of a medium other than video games that isn't dominated by women.
... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?
Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?
Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.
> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.
(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)
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BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...
...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.
Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.
Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.
... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).
But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".
[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.
> In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.
Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.
The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.
If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.
Can confirm, the "stuff" costs basically nothing in the scheme of things and nearly all of it can be had used. A bunch of it's also not really all that necessary. Clothes and toys can all be had for very little, without even that much time investment, folks are drowning in this stuff and lots of it just gets thrown away.
The real money goes to:
1) Healthcare (in the US).
2) Childcare or foregone wages.
3) School/housing location (same thing; either tuition, or spending 20+% more for the same amount & quality of house in a nicer school district [and the ongoing cost of servicing the extra mortgage on that]; you can skip this, but if you can at all afford it, you'll not feel like it's optional)
4) Space. Larger housing and larger cars. You can skip this kind of (larger car is less-optional if you have more than three kids) but at significant cost to QOL.
I've observed that a whole lot of people absolutely do not keep putting kids in car seats once they're about the height & weight of a petite adult (us included).
So the guidelines say one thing, but I'd be surprised if a majority of parents are still putting their kids in them even by age 10, let alone 12.
Two keys rather than one, but makes up for it by not being way off in some oddball part of the keyboard. You can one-hand it pretty easily, since there's an "option" right next to the arrow keys.
As a stolid classic-era Thinkpad user I don't have a dog in this fight, but it seems to me that the strain of having to hold down another key as I scroll rapidly would get tiring rather quickly. Perhaps if there was a Cmd lock it would be fine.
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