I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I’m a dad to a FtM trans teenager and I was born in the early 80s. There’s a lot of “inertia” to the worldview presented as “normal” in education, media, and society at large just in my lifetime.

I think the first time I learned that homosexuality was a thing was from Ellen. I know now that everyone isn’t hetero but every relationship I saw around me, in books, in movies for my the most formative years of my life defined it as “normal” in my brain.

All I knew outside of “gender norms” was Bugs Bunny in drag, Bosom Buddies, Some Like it Hot, Rocky Horror. It was “not normal”, a joke.

I come from a liberal family with a liberal upbringing. I’ve considered myself an LGBT ally for a long time, but I still have a lot of implicit biases in my head.

When my child came out as trans, those implicit biases were the first things into my head. I love my son for who he is, want him to be happy, and fully support him. When he decided to dress fem for the first time after hatching my implicit biases were confused. But it doesn’t matter what those biases say because I consciously support what makes him happy.

My parents were born in the 50s. They are both unabashed feminists but they had another 30 years of that “inertia” to overcome when my son hatched. They still occasionally forget the right pronouns. His one remaining great grandmother has almost 20 years more inertia to overcome and still uses the wrong name occasionally.

I guess what I’m saying is that I agree with you to an extent. These things threaten their “inertia” and it’s hard to question yourself like that. It’s easier to dig your heels in and fight back.

Even if the game is a repack, you can add the installer EXE to Steam and it’ll run with Proton Experimental or GE, choose the install location, then add the resulting, unpacked EXE to Steam and it’ll run just fine.

Jon Stewart just discussed some of this on The Weekly Show podcast with Heather Cox Richardson as guest. Discussing whether the metrics that define economic success are outdated and also how poorly any of Biden’s “successes” were shared by his White House and the media. It was all framed much better than this article.

I’m playing the “demo” and just met an elf companion who said something like “whoopsie! My gods are real and they’re going to destroy the world! 🤷” And it just undercuts the whole story.

Marvelization is the perfect way to describe it. There are zero stakes.

Origins had humor and snark, but it was mostly used in service of the story and themes.

DAO sets the tone during the harrowing when one Grey Warden candidate dies drinking Darkspawn Blood, then Duncan straight murders the other candidate when he freaks out.

Veilguard just seems saccharine and safe.

A few years back, I handed out candy for friends while they took their kids around the neighborhood, and a group of kids jokingly asked for potatoes. I obliged and grabbed them each a potato from the pantry.

When my friends came back, the potato house was apparently the talk of the kids in the neighborhood.

Happened to me nearly 40 years ago on my baby teeth. My mother finally had enough and took me for a second opinion and the next dentist found no problems. It’s given me 40 years of dental anxiety so bad that I have to go to a specialist that deals with it. The only time I had to have work done there, they drugged me to the gills.

Oh shit, there’s a horse in the hospital!

Not sure I’d have bought it on launch day but definitely early as long as reviews were positive and it ran okay in Linux.

I kickstarted the first one, so I’ve got no problem waiting until it’s on GoG or at least Denuvo-less on Steam.

I’m not a fan of Gnome either but Pop was the most stable distro I found for an Nvidia card.

This Gnome extension let’s you move everything down to the bottom panel.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

I’ve had good luck using Pop!_OS to game on Nvidia systems. Can’t speak specifically for those two games, but several other games that gave me trouble on other distros worked smoothly on Pop.