I swear to god post the map with lots of diagonal arrows one more time

I don’t play TCGs much* but I’m fascinated by them and have friends who play, so I hear some of the big controversies.

In my view the Magic player base is looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. Power creep is real, but certainly not new. A median MtG card from 20 or 15 years ago will beat the shit out of the median card from 25 or 30 years ago**. Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?

Knowing the kind of shit that goes on in YGO, Magic’s trajectory seems downright conservative. Then again, a comment Iheard about that game recently that resonated with me was “the only thing more intricate than the OTK combos in this game is the fucking banlist”.

Again comparing MtG and YGO, at least I see a healthy ecosystem of alternate formats in Magic. For the latter, the serious contenders for actually played formats are “standard” and “standard but 20 years ago”. Maybe commander is the main way to play Magic nowadays, but at least it’s not just a choice between two games with the same mechanics (modulo a couple of extra deck summon types) but different banlists.

I might be an outsider, but I quite like the special format cards. The crossovers are mostly meh, but the Secret Lair series includes some really cool cards like these snow lands, the social media goblins, this magnificent goat, and my favourite MtG card art ever.

I don’t doubt that the game has enshittified, but for this one I might hazard a “it took you until now to realize”? At least usual competitive Magic isn’t an eternal format so power creep is not quite so guaranteed.

I don’t meant to defend WotC with any of this. Fuck them and their interpretation of the “open” game license they wrote, but seem to suddenly not like. Just to me it’s a bit funny how fans of the OG trading card game seem to be really late to noticing the problems inherent to the medium.

* I have played Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! casually, but mostly in the form of ancient video game adaptations. Also Pokémon TCG, but with a “one booster pack every two weeks” kind of kid’s allowance with no internet access in those days.

** Specifically median because of early broken ass bs like power nine

Wow, it took until 2024 but politics have finally arrived into software. Having politics is not at all in the spirit of the GPL. Not giving these people a privileged access to the codebase is discrimination obviously. What do you have against apolitical entities like Baikal Electronics?

As in a member of a race of edgelords allergic to sunlight? Very progressive of your mistress to let you post on the internet on your own. Is “Nock” the Undercommon word for mom’s basement?

And what does “just over the horizon” mean? According to Radio Yerevan, the horizon is an imaginary line that moves further as you approach it.

I was reminded of a particular anecdote I need to get out of my system.

There was a time on a particular fiction series’ fan forum’s IRC channel when I had to convince a very enthusiastic teenage fan that the instructions they found on 4chan to open a portal to a parallel world of that particular work of fantasy fiction was actually a method for synthesizing and inhaling poison gas.

The weird part was that they admitted they knew it was probably just a cruel prank, but were still willing to try just in case it was real. We had to actually find and link articles where the same reaction was exhibited as an actual documented suicide method, if an unreliable one at that, to convince them not to go for it.

By my estimate that person was about high school age, almost certainly over 13 and probably over 15. Mostly their behavior seemed normal for the age, certainly overenthusiastic about the fandom and with obvious signs of teenage ennui, but both of those are typical for someone in their mid-teens. It was just this strange incident of extreme gullibility and self-destructive devotion to a fandom that really stuck with me.

I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(

That’s kinda funny. If I’m ever in the market for a proprietary chromium-based web browser, they have my interest.

Fuck, I didn’t need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was “Bender” or “Wall-E” too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney’s trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?

Ok, what next?

Alright, since you’re asking nicely, I’ll give you a commentated play-by-play just this once. Apologies to @self for playing dad and to everyone else for the wall of text.

Consider the context for starters. V0ldek was talking about how shopping for sperm based on the donor’s level of education and occupation is weird and eugenicist and making a jab about how jobs are not genetic.

Your reply pointed out that education and job can be proxies for intellect, which some here might dispute, but which is probably not a foreign concept to anyone here. “[Some] people want clever children” is certainly true, but that doesn’t make it any less eugenicist.

It’s kind of weird anyway to have a child with someone random, isn’t it?

This is a question with many layers, and V0ldek picks at one of them. Having your child conceived using a stranger’s sperm does not constitute having a child with them, in a cultural sense. Consider a couple who commit to having a child together, opt for IVF (for any of many possible reasons), the mother carries the child to term, gives birth, and then the couple raise the child together. It’s pretty damn insensitive to say the mother has had a child with the anonymous donor (this also applies if the mother is single or the number of parents is otherwise not a clear two).

I would add that even if you mean “have a child with sb.” in a purely genetic sense and still think the gamete of “someone random” being used for insemination is weird, knowing that “someone random” has a fancy diploma and a highly sought job shouldn’t make it less weird.

I think for many women “being inseminated by” IS a big thing.

The awkward phrasing makes it sound like you’re talking about a breeding kink or something, which doesn’t really help.

It is strictly speaking true, that many women consider the identity of the sperm donor a big deal. That is why fertility clinics are screening for donors with high status and providing information on their education and career. The point is, if a woman is willing to have her child conceived using the sperm of an anonymous doctor or pilot, but not someone with unknown level of education or profession, that is eugenics. To deny or downplay that is either condoning eugenics or denying the woman’s agency as a moral actor.

Also it’s weird to single out women, because embryo recipient mothers are not the only people for whom, uh ‘“being inseminated by” is a big thing’. The partners of those women frequently also have eugenicist preferences about the children who may not be their genetic descendants, but will probably still be their children. The system is perpetuated by fertility clinic administrators and doctors of all genders, who practice eugenics either due to their own beliefs or to cater to their customers’ eugenic choices.

Charitably, you’re being Captain Obvious. “Some women want the ability to choose a champion athlete supermodel with a PhD for IVF sperm donor.” Yes, and we’re discussing that very thing and why it’s a problem.

Uncharitably you make it sound like all them women just be wanting to be impregnated by genius chads so shikataganai I guess.

I should get in the habit of Googling “how to renew expiring fed mitm certificate” every few weeks for the microscopic chance the joke might some day pay off big time.

Yea who would want to live in a dusty, arid, brown and yellow wasteland city like that? Certainly not the “Occupy Mars” guy.

The dark theme is nice, btw.

You’re just jealous of my sick microwave oven pendant

Lamarckian eugenics!

Note that I was specifically talking about branch names in Git, where it’s debatable if the default name “master” even originated from the master/slave nomenclature.

The problematic nature of the term is a lot more evident in other contexts where a counterpart of the “master” is in fact called a “slave”. Whether that’s reason enough to change the names in any particular instance is not something I’ll comment on.

I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?

Well, I guess that guy does.

ketamine of the masses / pulling this from my asses

I got nerd sniped into trying to resize felons_musk_and_maxwell.webp to the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the same magick invocation but I need to sleep so I’m giving up for now.