I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.

But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”

I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.

I figure I’d post a follow up after having the game for a couple of weeks:

I still stand by all the criticisms I made. (Poor early-game experience; lots of UI oddities and annoyances; weaker world-building and thematic buildup compared to DD1.)

However, I will say that the strategy and tactics side of the game do improve after unlocking a bunch of stuff. When first playing the game, there often weren’t any good responses to many challenges - so it was basically down to luck. But after unlocking stuff the balance is a lot better. I reckon the game would have a better early experience is more items were unlocked from the start. Unlocking stuff does give a nice sense of progress - but the player needs to have meaningful viable options to actually play.

So anyway, I do think the core gameplay is pretty good, and has quite a bit of variety in viable tactical styles - once you have the stuff unlocked to actually make it work! I think its kind of a shame that the game wasn’t polished a bit more before launching. Fixing the UI issues wouldn’t be a huge amount of work. And some early-game tweaks could improve that first-time experience quite a bit. … The thematic stuff might be unfixable though, because the nature of how the zones work. (Having randomised zones with bosses and such means that it can’t really give a sense that you’re gradually going deeper into the darkness).

Well, if they are the same game then it would be reasonable to expect that this “new expansion for Diablo 2” actually works with Diablo 2. But it doesn’t. It only works with “Diablo 2: Resurrected”, which is sold separately. People who own Diablo 2 cannot play this new expansion pack without buying another game.

That ladybird gender thing is such a load of crap. I find it hard to even believe that people are genuinely passionate about it. Every time ladybird is mentioned, someone brings up the ‘extreme views’ based on this. But it is the biggest load of nothing you are ever likely to see.

For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s what happened:

• The build documentation for this unreleased pre-beta software used the pronoun ‘he’.
• Someone suggested that they change it to be more inclusive.
• The author didn’t think it was important enough to change, so left it.
• More requests and pressure came to change the pronoun.
• The pronoun was then changed, and the author apologised.

To me, that’s a minor error of judgement, with no lasting harm caused to anyone at all. But yet somehow this is constantly used as a reason to avoid ladybird.

How can I take this seriously? Is this some kind of organised anti-competition propaganda campaign? We’re talking about a free and open source project of a highly technical nature, and somehow people are upset that the word ‘he’ existed temporarily in a work-in-progress document with a target audience of essentially zero people. The people making this project are not political leaders or public figures with media training. They are focused on the technical side of things. Yeah, the pronoun was a mistake, but it pretty much the smallest mistake you could possibly make in this context. It not like they are donating to right-wing orgs, or publicly denouncing anyone, or promoting hate. I see far worse than what they did on a daily basis from all sorts of people - including right here in lemmy. And in terms of ladybird, I have not heard of any kind of misstep ever since this instant - which was a very long time ago now. It is honestly bizarre that people have clung onto this incident. I’m honestly not sure I believe that the backlash is entirely organic. It’s just too disproportionate.

[edit] Let me just follow this by saying that I do think there are other good reasons to be upset with this same ladybird dev. I just don’t think the ‘he’ in the docs thing is anything at all.