Where I live, two of the three trades you listed require completion of 4-year apprenticeships, including a minimum of 6 weeks of in-school technical training per year. It’s much cheaper to train as an apprentice than it is to pay other post-secondary tuitions, and you earn an income most of the time you’re an apprentice, but the reality is a lot more complicated.

And it’s also very easy to be employed in most trades and not make that much. It depends on which trade you’re in, how much punishment you can take, and whether you’re in a union job or not.

Can’t take credit for that one, but glad you enjoyed it!

Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s followup legislation in the works to limit disastrous climate events to a 4-day duration.

(This is still better than anything my country will do, of course.)

Well fuck this shit.

Like I want to see Air Canada renationalized, but not under any government that could get elected under FTPT, and sure as fuck not with facial recognition systems.

Not actually a stupid question at all!

We have shitty fake universal healthcare that most of us (myself included) do not fully understand because we are not actually taught how the system works. Currently reading The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto to try and better educate myself, but it’s fighting with my epub reader so nyehhhhh

Healthcare in Canada is about 70% public and 30% private, but your mileage will vary by province as healthcare is administered at the provincial level.

Some provinces require people to pay premiums.

As other posters have said, most GPs, specialists, and emergency medicine are covered (but not ambulance service, you get a bill for that later).

Without private insurance (which many employers offer if you work full-time hours), you have to pay for anything considered an elective procedure, dental care, and prescription drugs. Also stuff like physiotherapy, massage therapy, and optometry (or vision testing by an optometrist, at least).

If you spend some ridiculous portion of your income on prescription drugs you can get a shitty tax break, assuming you are able to tabulate everything for the CRA.

National pharma and dental care are “in the works”, but I think currently limited to seniors, people who have been approved for the Canadians with Disabilities tax credit (which excludes a large number of Canadians with Disabilities), and children? At this stage I’m pretty sure it’s still mostly hot air and either Bitcoin Milhouse will kill it as soon as he’s elected (likely), or the Liberals will weasel out of it (less likely, but only because they are almost definitely going to lose the election).

Have you played the game?

I haven’t.

Do you have to interact with that character? In all the BioWare games I have played, you don’t actually have to interact with any companions at all outside of critpath questlines. Even big blowup moments like the Miranda/Jack fight only trigger once you’ve completed both of their loyalty missions, and you have to choose to talk to them to unlock those in the first place.

And since I’m assuming you’re referring to the Qunari companion, and I’ve watched a couple of critiques of the scenes I believe you’re referencing - it’s not their sexuality that’s being discussed, it’s their gender.

I agree with you, slapping a veneer of diverse identity on a character post-facto is often just performative bullshit. At best it’s bad representation, at worst it’s cynical pinkwashing and pandering for profit.

But that’s not a distinction I have ever seen an “anti-woke gamer” railing against.

What I do see them railing against is any representation in games that does not pander to their own personal preferences.

Did you not encounter any of the backlash to Ellie’s sexuality? Honestly I think FNV only escapes a lot of that kind of vitriol because it was released pre-gg.

Shaun hits a lot of my major concerns in his new video.

Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.

I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.

And “woke DEI SJW snowflake game dev” is far from the only thing making games worse, it’s just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.

By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.

We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.

The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.

How do you differentiate between a character “written for the sake of checking a diversity box”, a poorly-written diverse character, and a “random fact of the world”? It’s a fictional world. Nothing is random. It’s all creative decisions made by a team of writers and producers.

I don’t think shoehorning in of diverse identities and character backgrounds is good representation or good art, and I completely agree with your point there.

But I don’t think that the people driving the current backlash bother to make those distinctions.

What I see is a lot of outrage being stoked by people using the (updated) language and tactics of gamergate, and I don’t think the result of that will be “better representation”.

I think the result will be devs being harrassed and pushed out of an already brutal industry.

Fuck yeah anomalocaris

I was just playing Powder a few weeks ago! My friend and I used to play on a work laptop during slow periods, and I got nostalgic for it.

Had some good fun with unidentified ring of polymorph, don’t remember that from 2010.

Worm 1 [Healthy] Age 2 quadrums (32000) of Russia Consuming nutrient paste

Worm 2 [Healthy] Age 1 (41700) of Russia Consuming nutrient paste

Only if you’re completely unwilling to unpack what things like “be a man” and “like a man” generally mean in the anglosphere, and how phrases like that have often been employed to reinforce the worst and most destructive aspects of masculinity.