Very much this. A great many of us in our early 40s had access to pornography from BBSes or early internet and it didn’t seem to fuck us up. Why are we trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist?
Legal sexual gratification between two consenting adults (even if some may find the way they achieve gratification taboo), so long as it’s not illegal, should not be shamed or denied.
Not only that, but their PR person gaslighting people with the article claiming that the game wasn’t bad, it was just “cool to hate” has left a really bad taste in my mouth. The game could be absolutely amazing now and the expansion pack could be the game that we were always promised, but the experience and the follow-up has been so bad that I’m similarly waiting until post launch (heck, perhaps even until GOTY with included DLC) for any future CDPR games.
I’ve been playing GW2 since beta – heck, I’ve been playing Guild Wars since the original game’s beta, I am a sucker for a good MMO that isn’t pay-per-month. I still remember the end of the original Guild Wars beta when meteors started falling down killing everyone in Ascalon. My wife isn’t quite as interested in MMO-esque experiences, she more likes the couch co-op style (we played D3 until Paragon 950+ on PS4 Pro and play D4 on PS5), so I haven’t been able to get her playing it yet – but I’ll keep trying!
Same experience here – I started a seasonal character and gave up at level 12 because while the malignant hearts were a neat concept, everything else was ridiculously trite and stupid.
D4 is an exercise in how a lot of effort and a lot of thought can go into something and result in a game that’s inferior in the important ways (is the game actually fun to play, is progression fun and rewarding) while also being technically superior to its predecessors – the game looks amazing, the engine is fantastic.
I’m playing it with my wife and it’s just not very fun yet. It reminds me of grinding levels in classic WoW, but without the benefit of getting new skills and feeling more powerful with the levels. I’m hoping that after some patches, seasons, and expansion packs that it gets to be a little more fun, but right now they’ve made leveling so slow and so inconsequential that the game is just a repetitive slog. You’re not getting any new skills past level 50 but it takes absolutely eons longer to go from level 50 to 100 than it did to go from 1-50, all areas in the entire game except for nightmare dungeons are level scaled so you aren’t actually getting any more powerful with each level, you’re just watching numbers go up while killing exactly the same things in exactly the same way you have been for the last 50 levels.
Appreciably, Diablo 3 was kind of crap at launch as well and it wasn’t until they removed the RMAH, added a new class, added adventure mode and bounties, and added a lot of seasonal content that it fleshed out to being as fun as it is now. I’m hopeful that D4 eventually gets there but man it’s just not the fun I was hoping for presently.
I gave them a crap review in the Android app store because of it – I have absolutely no need for my lights to be able to be controlled over the internet outside of my house, and I don’t want the feature nor do I want my hue bulbs connected via any stupid cloud link so they COULD be managed over the internet outside of my house. Their response was “as we add new features, so too do we add new security features to protect the platform and that justifies us requiring you to have a login and make your devices controllable via the cloud”. Uh huh.
I’ve set the Android app to never automatically update in the future and I’m really hopeful that I can avoid this garbage requirement by doing so, but I’m sure they’ve thought of it and I’m going to end up having to move to 3rd party apps to control them eventually.
Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I’ve just given up – everything says it should work and I’ve tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex’s ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!
Worse is a subjective term. Alcohol causes more deaths per year (140,000+) than all other drug overdose deaths combined (~103,000). Alcohol also has significant long term health impact for even light users. I think what’s truly the worst is how normalized alcohol use and abuse is in American society.