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LOL
Notice? I never heard of such idiocy before internet!

PS - And most of my good friends from childhood were males! As I was never much interested in "girl games/play time"...

I always figured guys did that sort of things to impress other guys, trying to prove who's the toughest etcetera.

I love it.  It's so ridiculous!

Thanks! Maybe I'll try doing more stuff in the future!

It grinds my gears when I have to endure "creative" DVD menus in order to watch a movie.
You'd think not making the default text white and the text on the option you've chosen highlighted in pale yellow would be an easy thing to do, but I've seen it in far too many menus, alongside nearly unreadable fonts and blaring music looping in an annoying 15 second loop repeating endlessly until you've found the right language option. And far too many DVD also have irritating animations swishing by whenever you pick an option.

I tried to animate a funny GIF some time ago, and I thought I could post it here:

I never liked self-service checkouts, I always end up paranoid that I'll forget to scan something and they'll think I'm trying to shoplift, plus I've always detested self-service as a concept, it's just a lazy way for the greedy cheapskates who run the place to cut corners while pretending to be more modern and effective.

Good work!

A game maker's best friend is rain

This is why Sweden has such a strong game industry.

It's lamentable that competitive trash talk in a competitive environment becomes harassment when someone of feminine sensibilities is thrown into the mix.

This is what I meant when I say I'm weary of complaints about pc culture. Most women can tell the difference between harassment and mere trash talk, and not all men feel comfortable hearing racist or homophobic slurs, and it's tiresome to see people dismissed as oversensitive when they have legitimate grievances. I know plenty of women who have not only faced severe harassment and bullying, but also stalking, rape threats and threats of severe violence, and many men who have faced homophobic insults and similar threats just for standing up to women or speaking up against racist comments. It might be easy for somebody who have never experienced any such threats to dismiss it as mere words, but people who are born as women, as LGBTQ or as an ethnic minority have been made to learn early on that they risk facing violence just for who they are, that others like them have become victims of horrible crimes for letting their guard down, and there is too often little in the way of telling if a bigoted joke is just going to stay a joke or if if the person behind it have something more sinister in mind. So while to some, it's just mean jokes, to others it's a stark reminder that there are people out there who sees them as less than human.

And if it's anything else that grinds my gears, it's that what used to be a fun thread about everyday annoyances has devolved into a sad discussion on "SJWs".

Cat or chicken?

It grinds my gears when people use the word SJW. People use it too much to dismiss others. I've heard people who certainty are NOT an SJW being called an SJW, just because they say things that other people disagree with. The world is starting to become overrun with SJWJWs who call everyone SJWs!
These are the same people who claim everything is becoming offensive, and I hate it when people are easily offended about other people apparently being easily offended! And Facebook is full of people who are trying to find every excuse to be offended about easily offended people!
What's worse, is that I've not seen a single person notice this meta trend!

I couldn't agree more! SJW is so broadly applied that it's practically a meaningless term.

There's too damn much pc now in the world and it makes me sick. We will have generations who will be afraid of everything. I read about a woman who wanted to ban that book/story...which one is it. The sleeping beauty? The one where she wakes up by a kiss from a prince. The woman thought that the message frpm that story is that it's ok to take advantage of passed out women...come on...really?!? I am so sick of that stuff. People who do bad stuff will do it no matter what book you ban.

Unless that woman is a high up political leader with a huge following, I don't see how she could possibly ban that book, and I don't think random opinions of a random person alone will never be a threat to free speech.

Many complain about too much political correctness, but the opposite is far worse, because when racist and sexist jokes are commonly accepted, racists and misogynists will feel that their views are justified and some of them will feel emboldened to act on their views. I have seen so many fandoms and communities that could have been great be ruined by bullying, girls being automatically harassed and threatened just because they are girls and anyone who isn't white gets barraged with racist slurs. This is one of the few communities I've found where I actually feel welcome enough to share my thoughts and my work without risking being bullied and harassed, and this is also why I am wary of comments complaining about pc culture going to far, because I have seen too many others use such words as an excuse for advocating threats and harassment directed towards queer people, women, people of color or anyone that is part of a minority.

I don't see how the twitter example has anything to do with political correctness, and extremely sensitive artists are by no means a new phenomenon. As long as there have been art, there have been artists interpreting everything that isn't immediate praise as bullying, and others, often with artistic aspirations themselves, jump on because it means no one can criticize what they like either. I think this is more about artists with inflated egos and fandoms rather than any form of pc-culture.

I think it's worth remembering that whenever you think that pc-culture is stupid, the opposing side will do something even stupider. For example, in Sweden there's a treat made of butter, cacao, sugar and oatmeal rolled into a ball that's nowadays called chocolate-ball, but in the 1950's they used to call it n-word ball. When this was changed for obvious reasons, lots of old people complained about the name change, but most people today do prefer the name that actually describe what the chocolate balls taste like and does't imply that the balls were created by castrating a black man.

Likewise, when several people wanted to expand the Swedish language by introducing a third, gender neutral pronoun, lots of people protested and put up tons of ridiculous straw-man arguments about "shall we be forced to burn all the old books with the old pronouns in them" and "kids won't be allowed to be girls and boys anymore", none of which ever happened when the third pronoun became popular. People in Sweden didn't stop using he or she as pronouns, most people simply discovered that having a gender-neutral pronoun is a good option to have for situations when you want to adress both men and women at the same time.

From what I've seen, Golliwog dolls do look like racist caricatures and blackface/minstrel type of designs that aren't acceptable today and I can clearly see why many people would find them offensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwog

While there are some pretty dumb arguments made around different words or images or cultural appropriation, insults like "SJW" and "snowflake" has also been used to dismiss real bullying and legitimate grievances.
To me, avoiding slurs never felt like a sacrifice, and requests asking for people to take others into consideration in any public space are there to make people feel safe and welcome.
Why would it be any worse than being asked to keep quiet in a library or leave leave a bus seat free for the elderly and disabled?

For honor is currently free on Uplay.

Heh, that's pretty accurate for video games. Did you want english corrections for the comic strip or shall I keep quiet?

English isn't my native tongue, did I make an error in the text?

I tried drawing a short comic, though I have to warn you that it contains some blood and bad language:

Spoiler

[close]

Nice, good work!

Great new work!

Anyone else spotting the Photoshop error?

Now, these are just my personal reasons and may not apply to others, but the two main reasons I don't participate in MAGS as much as I'd want to are:

1. Too often the topics feel a bit too specific, and if I manage to come up with something, it usually so late into the month that there's no time left to make anything resembling a worthwhile game. More broad and general topics that can be interpreted in different ways would make it easier to come up with a fun game concept.

2. The rule about not being allowed to use pre-existing graphical assets. For me, that's probably what takes me the longest to finish when I work on a game, and reusing GUI elements and inventory sprites of generic items would save me a lot of time. It also feels pretty limiting to not be able to re-use character sprites, since I have toyed with the idea of revisiting or expanding upon characters I made for previous MAGS entries, but I just don't have the energy to redo every single sprite for a character I've already worked on, not because I have any good ideas on how to improve the sprites, but just because of a rule in a competition.

I understand the reasoning behind this rule, but I don't think it's necessary. While it could give members who already made games and sprites an advantage over those who hasn't, there's always RON assets or they can ask other members for permission to use their sprites and backgrounds. Now, while there is a possibility that some might try to make entries made entirely out of re-used assets, I still think most will only use it for the things they don't have time to draw and animate before the deadline and still try to make as much original content as possible. The alternative doesn't necessarily mean that all contestants will make good original graphics, I've seen several entries where they ended up using ugly placeholders due to time constraints.

Great new work, the second track is just perfect for the game project I'm working on!