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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I appreciate the question, and like many Jews I love questions like this. It is never hateful to be curious.

    Like many/most identities, being Jewish doesn’t mean just one thing to everyone. First and foremost, Judaism is a religion that is passed down through the matriarchal side of the family. So if your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. You’re Jewish particularly to other Jews in this instance, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself Jewish.

    Judaism is not a race, full stop. Just like Christianity is not a race. There are white Jews, black Jews, Latino Jews, South Asian Jews, East Asian Jews etc. There aren’t a lot of us as a whole, but we do exist in most racial groups. But Judaism is often correctly linked to ethnicity, which is a set of shared traditions, culture, language, and norms.

    There is a huuuuge range of ‘orthodoxy’ under the umbrella of Judaism. Different ‘sects’ holds fundamentally similar values (for example: you won’t find very many anti-abortion Jews), but people inside these different groups will observe their traditions at differently levels/extremes or not at all. Most Jews in America don’t keep Kosher, for example, but most Orthodox Jews do.

    Judaism also has a rich tradition of questioning everything (which is why we usually love these kinds of questions). It is not considered heresy to question beliefs or authority, in fact it’s usually encouraged. You’ll find many Jews who openly identify as atheists, and yet most still fully consider themselves to be Jewish. This usually doesn’t bother anyone, Rabbis included. Atheists even hold a place of honor in some Jewish communities, because atheists get their morality from their own values or other people, not from a fear of god or some external force. This is part of why it is pretty common to find Jews (observant or not) who consider themselves atheist.

    All of that is to say you don’t necessarily need to believe in god to be considered Jewish.






  • I’ve been needing a new big game to sink my teeth into, but I haven’t played any of the other Dragon Age games. I watched the glowing euro gamer review for Veilguard and it looks amazing to me (the slightly stylized look doesn’t bother me at all). Do you think I’ll enjoy it without much context? I don’t usually buy full-priced, but I make the occasional exception for games I know I’ll play for a while…Baldurs Gate, for example.



  • This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

    I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.


  • This kind of direct home visit has been happening for years in Muslim regions of China, for different reasons. At least these pregnancy visits (ugh feels gross to even talk about) don’t involve home stays, but any time the state shows up at your door to surveil your family, your human rights have been violated. It’s incredibly invasive and dystopian.

    “Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

    In early 2018, Xinjiang authorities extended this “home stay” program. Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.

    Source


  • I loved this game! I got like 6 solid months of fun out of it. It took a really long time for the card combat loop to get old for me. I had never played an x-com style game before this (though I loved their meta callouts to x-com), so the mechanics were brand new to me, but it all just made intuitive sense. The card design and animations are top notch, and some of the fights can be super-challenging, but there’s always a way, and there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finally finishing a fight after 5 different tries.

    Agree on the story and voice acting, it’s all excellent. There are a couple very recognizable voices in there too.

    Edit: Magik, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel are pretty much an unstoppable combo…



  • Bingo. I spent a few hours playing some zombie killer game/demo with the HTC Vive back in like 2017, and while it was actually a lot of fun, it was super disorienting and I definitely knocked some stuff off my shelves by trying to stand in the middle of the room by myself. Someone also walked in without me hearing, and they got a hearty elbow to the face when I swung around to shoot a zombie behind me.

    And ugh the sweat is real. After a few minutes the headset fogged up and started slipping off my face, and since that particular headset had porous foam all over it, the sweat soaked in and became gross immediately. That was the last time I used VR.



  • Your anger is entirely justified, and I share it. This whole licensing issue is a massive problem and shows how little publishers care about their customers. That said, this has always been the case, they’ve just covered their legal bases by updating their TOS.

    But to answer your question, there’s no reason to keep using steam, other than it’s one of the easiest ways to legally game. It’s totally your preference if you want to keep supporting their business. There are lots of ways to illegally game, or pay way more for some DRM-free games that you can actually own, but then you’ll be extremely limited in your selection. I’ve invested so much time and money in my steam library, that I’m basically locked in (they count on this, of course). Sure I own a bunch of games on GOG, but they represent a tiny fraction of my overall library.

    This is a totally unsatisfying answer, but your only actual recourse, if you want to keep using steam, is to reach out to them and express your displeasure at their updated TOS and its implications. But it’s an industry-wide problem, so I think we’re out of luck until Congress gets involved and changes how digital ownership works.