I believe sometimes it’s done because there’s a lot to read and it might be (considered) too hard to read in real time. Which I understand, but it also annoys me too. It’s not what they said, and sometimes the way someone phrases something is important even if they don’t cut out important information, it can hint at their character or their emotion.

An interesting example I saw was in Archer. During an agitated rant, Archer finally interjects demanding someone answer the phone. The next shot is a plain still shot of the telephone, which the captions helpfully emphasise [PHONE NOT RINGING]; a recurring joke is Archer’s constant ear-ringing due to careless gun use.

Having seen other, more careless translations, I can easily see jokes (or in other contexts, important clues) like this being missed and it made me think about how film techniques can imply audio silently. If there’s a plain shot of a phone, a hearing impaired person might reasonably assume it’s a visual implication that the phone is ringing.

One trend which annoys me is having meaningful non-English simply listed as ‘[speaking language]’

Even worse is when, despite being another language, a common word (whether homophonic or loan words) would by understood regardless, just isn’t present in the captions.

Do you think things will get better?

Yes.

A lot of the problems we face are systematic, to do with how our society is organised rather than any human limit. They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries. The reason they’re aren’t solved isn’t because we can’t, but because the few most powerful people are powerful because of this rigged system, and have a self-interest in keeping it that way by any means necessary.

History has shown us clearly that even kings, dictators and other broken systems can be overthrown AND stopped from coming back, provided the people doing it are politically educated and organized. That’s the key. If we just get angry without a plan, we will end up like the pitiful Jan 6 riot. But if we educate ourselves with lessons from history and work to create a mass movement, we can finally move forward beyond this frightening present situation.

That’s a great point. While not the same, I think this relates to the bullshit assymetry principle (aka. Brandolini’s law), where as a result of the time it takes to respond to basic repetitive questions, especially those which are pretty easy to search around for existing answers, then entire communities can get tired of tolerating them. In some cases people just become rude and dismissive and in other cases staff actually just ban the person asking the question, which is already the case in some Lemmy instances.

One potential way around it I’ve seen is having a decent FAQ available and well-known within the community, so one literally just reply with little more than a link to a page with the answer already written. In fact, one site used to (not anymore) have a culture where people would just attach a whole book as a PDF and simply reply ‘read this’, maybe listing a chapter if you’re lucky, which isn’t very tactful but it’s pretty funny and still provides a low-effort, high-detail answer (albeit maybe too high-detail for the kind of person who asks such a common question to reddit instead of trying to find the answer themselves).

If we consider that phenomenon you described to be a problem, the solution is being able to make it extremely quick and easy to give a canned response and politely tell them to RTFM.

Apparently it was popular in US prisons until it was banned.

Because of the colonization and mining? Didn’t bother me, similarly I don’t like most armies but I can still find a military FPS fun to play.

Seconding, Mindustry is much more visually pleasing to me than Factorio. From the screenshots I’m looking at, Factorio’s graphics just don’t have consistent composition, so elements in the same image look out of place. Shadows aren’t even going in the same direction or logical lengths, and only sometimes they’re pure black giving weirdly high contrast in certain objects and not others. Many environments are various shades of puke colors. The perspective looks weird to me, as if we could turn the map 90 degrees and then all the buildings would look like the leaning tower of Piza.

I would compare and contrast between the original Fallout, perhaps, or as Captain Aggravated here else said, “Factorio does look like Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit.”.

Now, whether these are problems or style is a matter of opinion, and furthermore whether it should have an appealing style (as Cpt. Agg also said, pollution is a theme in the game) but some of those points are objectively straying from conventionally appealing elements.

I wouldn’t call the game ‘extremely high difficulty’, it even has some easier levels early on (at least when I played it a couple of years ago). I’m not a regular tower-defense or sim game player and I was able to complete Serpulo. It can be a challenging puzzle at times, but it’s not a game I’d feel a need to warn people about difficulty-wise.

Disclaimer: this game may be addictive for some individuals.

Seconding (although I have a tendency to marathon the campaign of any game I think is excellent). No need for predatory tricks like loots, this is just a damn fun game.

It’s very weird for a FOSS enthusiast not to advertise one of the best open-source games of all time so here I am trying to make it spoken about again.

IIRC I found it in a ‘top 100 FOSS games’ list because it was one of the first which wasn’t an open-sourced cloning of an existing game. No disrespect for clones and adaptations at all, but it’s extra special to see original softwares so good that even people who don’t care about FOSSness would use them.