And not a single black person in any of them.

There were no sex cards, but if memory serves you could “romance” Jaheira (while effectively standing on the still warm corpse of her husband), Aerie (I remember that being kind of fucked but it has been 20 years), Viconia, and one of the boring dudes.

The “romances” weren’t particularly well written but… they honestly aren’t much better these days. We mostly just, as a culture, have moved on from needing everything to be a storybook romance and understanding that sometimes you just need a bang. Which makes “romance” in games a hell of a lot easier.

But also, since BG2 (well, NWN), Bioware have basically made their entire thing “romance options” and so forth. Similar to how Obsidian and Owlcat decided the real culture war was Turn Based versus Real Time With Pause. And Larian realized that we could do all the environmental nonsense that was originally only an option for tabletop games with GMs who didn’t know why you were asking when it last rained.

None of what you listed is “new”. Also, Morrowind wasn’t actually “strange” in the slightest. Plenty of fantasy RPGs had elements of sci-fi and weird bug shit (see: Wizardry and even Might and Magic) and the “you can screw up the main quest” was similarly common at the time. Planescape I’ll give you.

Which is also true here. BG3 is not “strange”, It is literally the third Baldurs Gate game and continues most of the same themes and concepts. Yeah, it is a whole lot more gay but even that is not out of the ordinary for CRPGs at this point and had been pushed by companies like Larian, Obsidian, and Owlcat. Hell, the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages deserve a LOT of props for how horny and gay they were and normalizing the idea of picking the right dialogue options for a sexy card cutscene (also see CD Projekt Red).

And KCD2 is one of the most bog standard power fantasy games out there.

Like most articles of this variety, this is just a fancy way of saying “people should make good games”

Now with manufactured products, the customer may have local options that are now cheaper than an import+tariffs (but still more expensive than they were paying previously), which means the foreign manufacturer has to invest in a local facility or loose customers. The customer may just be stuck with it though.

And, as trump (and apparently you) don’t realize: it takes a lot of time to stand up manufacturing infrastructure. And that inherently depends on tariff’d raw materials and machines.

In a world where “nations” are towns on either side of the river? Tariffs “make sense”. You are growing your own corn so you want to actively discourage anyone from buying corn from across the river. That said, it also forces everyone to grow corn and rice and tomatoes and peppers. Rather than specializing to lower the cost for everyone.

In a modern post industrial global economy? Everyone is already specialized to hell and back. And many resources only exist in other countries to begin with. So while selective tariffs CAN lead to long term change, they inherently cause short to medium term hardship. Which is why the focus is more on tax incentives to build out that infrastructure.

Canada needs to use tariffs for three reasons.

First? Because trump is a fucking moron and this is the only language he understands.

Second? Because the US economy is so heavily dependent on exports and the only way to make us feel this is to shut down the import side in Canada. But this will cause great hardship for Canadians.

Third? To do the borderline medieval task of forcing industries to find new sources. Except they won’t be building up internal infrastructure. They will be importing from China and Europe.

But tariffs themselves? They inherently harm the nation imposing them more than anyone else in this global economy.

My worry is that there really is no way down for Canada. Nobody can trust any guarantee from trump so there is no difference between “tariffs until we have guarantees” and “tariffs until the next time you fuck around”. Because, as trump is incapable of learning, tariffs hurt the populace of the country imposing them more than anyone else.

That said: We (the US) desparately need hardship to force people to stop “being apolitical” or “ignoring the news for my mental health” and to get in the fucking streets. So…

…

The point of LMGTFY is to obnoxiously remind someone that they are on an internet box and can easily find things themselves. The animation is actively meant to shame people into understanding just how much of their time and everyone else’s they waste when they ask for a link to something trivial.

Also, again: The video is embedded in the article this thread is about.

Look, I get it: The pleasure box in our hands is fun and The Algorithm tells us everything we might ever need. But you REALLY should learn basic internet literacy if you want to function in this post-truth world.

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=trudeau+march+4+2025+speech

Or just click the article this topic is for which has an embed?

I mean, it is also designed to collapse the US economy too.

But yeah. Trudeau’s speech is 100% essential listening. It is so rare that a politician just tells it like it is and he completely did.