Given the nature of the mod, like the fact that it provided like 4 dozen varients of every character to select from, I’m guessing it was taken from another source. That said, it was likely also tweaked to work in the Source Engine, and to be closer to vanilla Alyx. Its unlikely he would have downloaded an apparently tame model, possibly modified it, and imported it without noticing it was a model intended for porn.

Purpose: Determine if you are able to harm teammates, or they are able to harm you in Counter Strike 2.

Hypothesis: Teammates are able to harm one another, although damage is decreased relative to damage against enemies.

Materials:

• 2 copies of the game Counter Strike 2
• an in-game AWP rifle

Procedure Aim at teammate’s head and click mouse.

Observations Teammate is dead.

Conclusions Friendly fire is enabled in Counter Strike 2. Further testing is required to determine if damage is decreased relative to damage against enemies.

Sometimes all thats relevant is the link, or the commentary would be more appropriate as a comment. For example, posting a news article to a news community or a set of patchnotes to a game’s community. At least personally, thats the majority of what I want to see: a post with a bunch of fairly direct information, and discussion of its implications in the comments.

An upvote should be for quality content/discussion. This might be a well researched comment, a good joke, or just something that leads the discussion in a meaningful or interesting way. Generally, things I think should be valued or shared. There will obviously be bias, but my opinion isn’t the basis of my decision. I try to upvote good-faith or thorough arguments I disagree with.

Downvotes are for low-quality and unhelpful content that I think shouldn’t be spread. This doesn’t have to be irrelevant or against the community rules, but often is. Things I might downvote include overused reposts, unnecessarily rude or insulting comments, low quality comments (IE someone trying to argue a well cited comment with an anecdote and nothing else), or spam.

Ill double check the available documents, and edit this comment, but at least when I last checked like six months ago, they only had one example, and it was Steam warning a developer for giving away free copies (if I remember right, Steam keys) on their Discord. I never saw any other solid evidence.

EGS doesn’t sell Steam keys but games still can’t be listed for cheaper on EGS than Steam without violating Steam’s terms, for example.

But are devs allowed to sell for cheaper on Epic? I haven’t see any evidence that they aren’t. On the othet hand, I can point to multiple examples where games are cheaper, on other services like the examples I gave, which seems to disprove this.

Thats why I was asking for evidence. Because so far, there is quite a bit of evidence that devs are allowed to chose their prices on other distribution channels, and to my knowledge, no real evidence made available that it is written in contract otherwise.

Personally, the only games I’ve found that Im esspecially comfortable to “lock-in” are:

Factorio for Labour of Love, as its an absolute gem of a game that has continued to receive significant improvements even after launch and not even all bundled in to the (itself amazing) expansion. I also considered Stardew Valley or Dota, both of which are great for this, but Factorio really deserves it for Space Age and the updates that have come with it.

Balatro for Best Game on Steam Deck, for its addicting, fun gameplay, good for longer sessions or pick-up and put-down play.

Tactical Breach Wizards for Outstanding Visual Style. There are other games that might have pulled off their themes better, but the mix of military and magical is so cool and charming and unique, that its my absolute favorite right now.

And Balatro again for Sit Back and Relax, for the same reasons I gave for Steam Deck, and just how chill it can be once you’ve learned the basics.

Gorilla Tag is too old to qualify. Honestly, I have no idea what will be chosen. It feels like most new VR content now is just mods.

Has there been any evidence provided yet that they have a most favoured nation clause for anything but Steam Keys yet? Last I tried to look into it, they had evidence (or claimed there was?) of a most favoured nation clause for Steam Keys, and an individual instance of a dev being asked to not give their game away for free but nothing for non-Steam keys. I know for the longest time, the common knowledge was that Steam allowed it for anything but Steam keys (IE dwarf fortress being free off Steam or GOG offering better deals for their own games). That said, its been a little while, so I don’t remeber details of the case.

Personally, the only games I’ve found that Im esspecially comfortable to “lock-in” are:

Factorio for Labour of Love, as its an absolute gem of a game that has continued to receive significant improvements even after launch and not even all bundled in to the (itself amazing) expansion. I also considered Stardew Valley or Dota, both of which are great for this, but Factorio really deserves it for Space Age and the updates that have come with it.

Balatro for Best Game on Steam Deck, for its addicting, fun gameplay, good for longer sessions or pick-up and put-down play.

Tactical Breach Wizards for Outstanding Visual Style. There are other games that might have pulled off their themes better, but the mix of military and magical is so cool and charming and unique, that its my absolute favorite right now.

And Balatro again for Sit Back and Relax, for the same reasons I gave for Steam Deck, and just how chill it can be once you’ve learned the basics.

I’m in Canada rather than the US, but I personally see it very little of it, except for those who are on the tail end of GenZ. In my experience, most of GenZ (with the possible exception of those still in high-school or early post-secondary) are primarily disgusted by the sort of opulent displays of weath common in influencer culture. If anything, I could see the ridiculously high numbers reflecting a distrust in the economy after living through multiple large financial crisis, and even-increasing costs of living moreso than a direct worship of weath. For example, if they assume a 5% annual increase in cost-of-living over the next 20 years, and want to be making the current equivalent of an 100k salary, they’ll expect to need to make about 265k. If they worry that the economy could crash at any point, it wouldn’t be weird for them to feel the need to aquire more weath faster to prepare. Thats not to say there is no worship of weath and fame, but thats also not new. Before the internet, it was reality tv, and before that, magazine and newspapers. I mean, look at Donald Trump even - he got where he is not because of an education or anything but because he used his existing fame to springboard him into power. Even before that, think of the worship of the British monarchy and the facination people have with their drama. The only new part is the algorithms, but their widespread use and monitization only really caught the tail-end of GenZ when they were young and its mostly Gen Alpha growing up knowing nothing else.

A thought I had was, that this might be a paid online poll. The answers might reflect the true feelings of the demographic that makes it a hustle to respond to those.

Its probably something like this, but theres a lot of more significant potential pitfalls with an online poll. For example, at least in my circles, is basically common knowledge that its a good idea to take these polls whenever you get the chance, but answer what they want to hear so you don’t get screened out. Similarly, theres lying about age. Even just how the question was asked could have a huge impact; “How much will you have to earn to be financially successful?” is a different question to “how much do you have to earn to be financially successful?” given that one implies future or continued wealth while the other implies current costs. But again, none of this was specified, so we’re making assumptions - instead we should take only the information that was provided. So little is given, it could have been run by, for example, emailing their mailing list subscriber with the poll and offering a raffle entry for each submission, or hell, even something like a Twitter poll. That would still match their given methodology.

Anyway, from my personal experience, the results are not obviously wrong. I matured before influencer culture became big. To me, it was always people playing pretend; a form of online role-playing; another thing I never got into. I feel that those a bit younger, who grew up with influencer culture, simply did not develop a world model where that distinction exists. Of course, these topics don’t come up in casual conversation, and on the internet you never really know someone’s age.

For claification, I’m Canadian, not American, so my experiences will be a bit different. That said, I’ve experienced this some with Gen Alpha, but not really GenZ. Keep in mind, GenZ is at least age 15, and averaging around 23: still young, but already starting to come to terms with income and costs of living. Most people this age are from before the current influencer economy, and even then, they are going out into the world now and usually learning the value of money quickly. If anything, I think the ridiculously high number given in the poll (if taken seriously) is just as much or more an indication of the expectations for rising costs of living, instability, and inflation. GenZ is old enough to understand these concepts and have seen how they affected the world, likely in 2008, and definately during covid. Its not like this sort of toxic worship of money is anything new or unique either - think of the reality shows that were popular before they moved to the internet, for example, and all the tabloids and drama that teens and young adults followed even before that.

It looks like with some of their other stuff, they do provide more methodology, but given that the only methodology provided here is the fact that it was an online survey, and the sample size was 2203 (of very roughly 300,000,000) it doesn’t give us much meaninful to go off of. Notably, they also exclude anyone under 18 in the polls (or attempt to, given that this is online with no indication of how their sample was selected) which is a significant portion of those the sample is meant to represent. Given that thats all we really know, we can’t really get a meaninful idea of what the original data was, or how accurate the drawn conclusions are.

From what I could track down, here is all the available data on the polling methodology:

The Empower “Secret to Success” study is based on online survey responses from 2,203 Americans ages 18+ fielded by Morning Consult from September 13-14, 2024. The survey is weighted to be nationally representative of U.S. adults (aged 18+).

It also comes not from a polling company, but from a company that provides financial news, and financial services. No potential conflict of interest there…

Basically, the data is near-worthless.

I’ve only dabbled in Plex, but Im kinda confused about the hate for this. Isn’t the whole point to be able to more easily browse and use a large media library (esspecially for something like a shared library)? This seems like its useful to that purpose.

There has been some debate over the response to tactical Nuclear weapons - notably NATO threatened a conventional response to the use of nukes (likely meant to be read as, “We will end this war, no nukes needed.”) but it would depend massively on their usage.

Its unfortunately a pretty common thing, especially for gatcha games. Look at the whole Limbus Company debacle from a few years back, for example, where people protested outside the studio because the summer skins weren’t sexy enough (for a game that hadn’t previously sexualized characters heavily) and got an unrelated artist fired because she was a feminist and thus was surely the one who made the decision.

With gatcha games, its a bit of a perfect storm with the extreme investment expected in these games, the monetization of characters, an industry that leans into this, and the fact that these games tend to be made in and marketed towards east-Asian regions where generally, sexuality is more accepted but sexism also more common and played largely by young, immature men.

Edit: Notably also, a lot of the men getting super invested in games like this are also vulnerable, which means a lot are likely to also end up in groups like the incel “movement” as well as being more likely to be swept up in any existing toxic culture around the games themselves.

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They provide a bunch of other services tied in, like the reviews, Workshop, and most infamous, guides and forums. While the reviews and Workshop tend to not be too bad (although still often not great) the forums and guides tend to be completely unmoderated and as a result, devolve into spam and extremism.

As everyone has clearly stated, you need to watch out for your personal health and safety (mental and physical).

That said, I just want to highlight the fact that you probably shouldn’t broadcast your feelings on it too bluntly (even if you are in the right) and should consider if a more middle-ground approach would be better for you compared to making a large announcement and cutting people off. To be clear, this should be primally about you and your well-being, though.

In particular, as other have stated, if you’re cutting them off anyway, its probably worth considering just ghosting them. That way you can avoid fights and drama, as well as likely having less records of you being trans if you’re worried about that.

If you still care about your family a lot, as it sounds like you do, it may also be worth considering trying to work out a plan for low-contact rather than completely cutting them off. For example, if you communicate mostly through social media, you might disconnect or switch to alts they don’t know. If its primarily through sms but not phone, prehaps block or hide their sms messages but allow them to call you. Maybe you just need to stop visiting them or allowing visits. Your family doesn’t need to know this plan or the reason for it, and probably shouldn’t. For example, you could just brush it off as wanting to disconnect from social media/technology or being busy. If you want to go this route, figure you what works for you - don’t do it out of obligation, but because you genuinely want to keep the connection and are confident you can do so with without putting yourself in danger. Also, be willing to re-evaluate this later, if your relationship or need change.

In the same vein, you can also start looking at moving to safer regions. I understand this is a big commitment, so I don’t expect it to be a reasonable answer, esspecially in the short term, but if may be worth starting to look at whats involved. It might be complete overkill (I pray to God it is) but if you don’t have significant roots, moving further away may help distance yourself from them, while also providing more security.

Ultimately, I don’t think you’re in the wrong, if you feel the need to resort to anything more extreme for your own well-being, don’t hesitate. At the same time, it can be hard on you to lose family, reguardless of how terrible, abusive, or stupid they may be, which is why I’m bringing up some more middle-ground options. Consider your needs, and decide what the best way to achive that is - you don’t need to consider their reaction or feeling when trying to figure out how to keep yourself safe and healthy.