As "bullshit wokeist talking points" go, that's another one that gets right up my nose. Sure, Europeans were "colonialist" - as were every other group of people who expanded beyond the boundaries of their tribal lands, killed the people in the area they moved into, and took over the land. It's the way of every culture under the sun up to the point of modern society. Absolutely zero groups out there, upon migrating into other lands, took a look at the people that were already there and said "oh, no, this place already has another group living here, we must turn around and go back". Not unless they realized they were outnumbered, outgunned, or outmatched. The only difference between older cultures and expansion-era Europe is that the Europeans had already figured out how to wipe out the other bastard better, faster, and with more efficiency than any other group on the planet. It's not their fault that the other cultures were sitting around with their thumbs up their asses and hadn't progressed outside of a nomadic/subsistence lifestyle or developed beyond spear-chucking and obsidian knives.

The whole "erhmagerd cultural appropriation" attack point is really starting to wear thin with me. There's a huge difference between using a cultural style as a backdrop out of respect for it (Ghosts of Tsushima, for example), or just representing that culture by showing interest in its traditions and ceremonies, and having puppets dancing around as racial stereotypes. Kotaku seems to miss the forest for the trees, in that if a society were to be knocked back to proto-stone-age, there's a pretty damn good chance that humanity would revert back to a hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle, and there's a pretty damn good chance it'd resemble the tribal societies of pre-expansionism Europe/America.

As far as the Lost Ark thing goes, I can't say as I'm surprised that the devs bent the knee in the censorship they did to to the version that's available in the US, but what really makes me shake my head is the typical "it's never enough" reaction on the part of the wokies. I swear, they're not going to be happy until every female video game character every looks like a butch transwoman or is just covered head-to-toe in a burka.

I find it heavily ironic that these woketards are bitching about the white savior trope in a game they were previously fawning over due to the uggifying of Aloy, given that they, themselves, are usually a bunch of rainbow-haired white kids acting as the ones speaking up over the top of native populations, effectively saying "you're too dumb to know when you're being insulted" and for all intents and purposes playing the white savior.

General takes based on the blurb:

• Can't say as I'm surprised that the games journalism world is losing their shit over Sifu. Ghawd forbid that white people produce anything other than white video games, but then that'd be RAYCISS, too, due to lack of inclusivity. Guess if we're fucked either way then we'd just as well go ahead and do it and flip the bird at the wokescolds.

• Not sure what he's referring to re: PC Gamer. I've pretty much quit paying attention to anything they say, since the mid 2010s.

• Kotaku couldn't find their ass if they were using both hands and a map, and there was a string attached, so it doesn't shock me that they're clueless when it comes to an accidentally ironic take.

• Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck Sony. Their censorship of everything under the sun thanks to the freakshows on the west coast taking over the management has ultimately screwed their audience as a whole.

• Kotaku freaking out on Critical Role? Hell, it's fun to watch the woke eat their own, isn't it?

• Race-lifting hobbits, elves, and dwarfs to being pee-oh-cees is why you're hearing that whirring noise coming from the direction of JRRT's grave, as he's currently spinning in it so fast if we could hook up a generator to him we'd solve the energy crisis.

Black? I'd love to see her genealogy and family tree on that one. What is she - Quarter? Eighth? Sixteenth? Maybe thirty-second? She sure as heck wouldn't qualify as black via the old-school brown paper bag test.

"Due to donor feedback", my ass. They knew if their hypocritical asses shut down the funding, didn't return the funds, and gave them to other causes they were going to be open to a shitload of legal ramifications. This is just them covering their asses.

Why the hell people on the conservative side of the fence still use GoFundMe is beyond me. They've already proven themselves to be woke, leftist shills many times over. I would have been more surprised if they had actually let the funding campaign go through and paid out the money.

"Mega-Cope"? Hell, that's some of the best confession through projection I've seen in months.

Slander. Libel is when the allegations are in printed form, slander is verbal.

But yeah, comparing the shit that the USG has pulled to Alex's antics is a slap in the face of Alex.

On top of that, one can easily deduce that the Innkeeper is Kvothe, so in the grand scheme of things the tale in and of itself is either one of a flawed narrator, or completely irrelevant except for detailing Kvothe's power creep. There's no hard conflict in any of it, considering that he has to survive every speed bump in the past in order to be able to tell the story in the present. As a narrative device for a single book, it might work, but stretching it across a trilogy is an amateur move, at best, and a complete failure to understand the device, at worst.

In other news, sales of copper tubing, copper pots, aluminum pots, and propane burners are expected to skyrocket on Monday in Australia.

Honestly, with his general health and age, I'm fully expecting he's going to have a grabber before he gets to the point. We're more likely to have Brandon Sanderson finishing things up based on his notes.

Hambly put out the offer to have her on his show to debate/speak her piece. Supposedly she initially turned him down before saying she'd do it. The tweet where she agreed to it got memory-holed, but he's on record as stating it's supposed to go through.

"Cheesecake", in this sense, refers to clothing that is revealing or hints at nudity, but doesn't go so far as to reveal potential "naughty bits". Women's clothing that has peek-a-boo holes in their shirt that reveals cleavage, mesh sections that show areas where undergarments would potentially be visible but aren't, skirts that are slit high on the thigh so they show a lot of leg, and that sort of thing. Most of the female characters in the series have clothing like that.

Considering Rothfuss supposedly had the third book done well over a decade ago, before he got famous, he has no excuse other than "extensive rewrites because my style has changed", and even then that shouldn't take more than a couple years. No, that smug bastard apparently hasn't turned in a lick of production to his publisher since circa 2014, according to his agent. We're never going to see the end of the Kingkiller series, and I'm sorry I even started reading the damn thing at this point.

General thoughts:

• We all know "FrostKaren" has purged her Twitter history by this point, so it's pretty obvious she's trying to cover up something. Supposedly she's going to be on The Quartering's show, but even odds say she'll pull out of that one at the last minute.

• Tencent is actually for bigger boobs. What kind of clown world are we living in?

• D&D is a wokeness shit-pile at this point. Leave it, find an OSR-style rule set that works for you or dig back into old versions, and leave the new garbage behind.

• Genshin's outfits were always borderline cheesecake before, and I personally don't see anything wrong with the way they were before. I get it, you gotta bow to the CCP masters, but damn, they are just throwing it all out overseas.

• I'm not the biggest SoulsBorne fan, but I'm glad it's finally going to be dropping, if only so GRRM doesn't have yet another excuse to not finish his damn novels.

Shit like this makes me glad I made an account over there years ago. It may not be verified (because I'll be damned if they're getting my phone number for their database) but at least it works. Still as the saying goes, the more they tighten their grasp, the more users will slip through their fingers. They'll just migrate to Gab, et al, and carry on while Twatter turns into an even bigger echo chamber.

'It's definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,' she said

Sounds like someone is actually straight and just playing at being trans so he can beat the pants off the competition. Not to mention beat his own pants off when he gets home after watching the real women changing in the locker room.

Oh well, they brought it upon themselves. Sucks to be them.

This is the rant of a man who just doesn't get it from a business standpoint. They're not going to go out and make a live-action movie of Coal Black and the Seven Giant African Dudes. Disney is doing this shit so they can retain copyright over their version of the story for another hundred-plus years. On top of that, the whole thing about him ranting about dwarfs just further proves that he doesn't get it, as the dwarfs in the story were fantasy characters. They're stereotypes of the classic dwarf from fairy tales of old.

Dude needs to quit huffing his own farts and get over it.

Admittedly, this episode is probably not the best jumping-on point for new listeners. Usually his takes on the news of the week are a bit more punchy, and he does a bit more research on the topics, but he's also coming back from an extended holiday leave and him and his wife just having a kid, so things are a bit scattered. Not your bag? No problem, just chalk it up and move on.

My takes on the topics:

• They actually touch on this in the podcast, but the whole beef about scoring in Halo totally smacks of "participation ribbon" kids' sports. Renata wants to make Halo into something it objectively isn't.

• With regards to DBD's Cannibal, I just have to laugh about it, because it seems like the default stance for a hint of someone who is white putting on anything black over the face is to scream "RACISM". Nobody tell these people about white guys wearing black ski-masks in the middle of winter, eh?

• Regarding the Bloomberg article, it makes me feel like someone just discovered Sark's YouTube videos and is trying to apply that "logic" to the uggifying of vidyagaem women. It's the same old woke sexist song and dance, where any hot woman in a video game is there for the male gaze, any hot dude is there as a male power fantasy, and it's more woke to virtue it signal up by calling anyone who notices the now-ugly female protag in a sequel a sexist incel manbaby.

• Oppression gymnastics abound over the black female protag written by whypipo, and the whole thing boils down to "more black people in positions of power at gaming companies". Film at Eleven.

• I'm not going to bother commenting on the Indiana "Foreskin" Black debacle over at G4. We've beat that to death over here already.

• The resurgence of Frodo & Sam Are Gay is the same old shit where these people who do nothing but sit in front of their keyboards all day writing slashfic (the majority of whom are women) are warped in their perspective. They harp about toxic masculinity, but the instance two guys show a bit of deep friendship their default mindset is "Oh, they're gay and fucking". They don't get the concept of having a bro who is your ride-or-die and you would be there for them any time, any where, so they only view it through the lens of homosexuality. It's pretty sad, really.

Truth. Unless you're dealing with something with a super-thin needle, like an insulin syringe, it's going to be a huge pinch feeling and then the burn of the injection. The only way you're not feeling that is if you're already half in the bag, which we can surmise that most of these chicks already were.

I've switched over to looking at alternative OSR rules that aim to capture the feel of the old redbox or AD&D, in that respect. That and sailing the seas looking for PDFs of anything that's pre-3.0. It's also worth noting that you can find the entire run of Dungeon magazine uploaded to Archive.org, so one can easily find more adventures than you can shake a wand at.

Walled: The Emptying, otoh, can go get fucked.

Licensing. IDW forked over enough cash to get the ball rolling with the TF and G.I.Joe licenses after Devil's Due (one of Image's imprints) lost the license. When IDW first started publishing the books back in 05 and 08 they weren't nearly so woke and the story lines were actually good. They kept bringing in the money, so Hasbro kept renewing the license. The books went woke, they dropped readers, revenue dropped, and Hasbro opted to not renew the licensing.

Because the asshat regularly vanity-searches himself and when a ping turns up his brain-dead followers crawl out of the woodwork to brigade the post.

RIP to golden space uncle. I feel like they did him dirty in the quest line.

Jeebus. I'd heard she was a petty cunt, but that's taking it to the next level.

The other general fuckery I know of was their protection of the affiliate streamer known as "AGGP" (shortened version of his actual handle, but IYKYK) and his toxicity against the player base. His whole online personality is basically "fuck you, I'm gay", and if anyone dared to challenge him on anything, in-game or out, his first line of defense was to scream "HOMOPHOBIA" and be a dickbag to anyone and everyone who might call him out on it.

Everyone and their dog knew the dude's shtick and there had been actionable complaints against AGGP that DE did nothing about. Their entire revamping of the affiliate program was simply so they could get around the calls to shit-can him from the program, and bounce out the other content creators they wanted to get rid of but didn't have the grounds to do so, by denying them entry to the new program. They really are a bunch of insular, self-protecting wokies.