Yup. You can craft leaves that grant you bonuses once equipped. In a game about blowing leaves out of your screen. (One of the achievements even pokes fun at this contradiction.)

The game is weird, to say the least, but actually fun. It reminds me Anti-Idle, as there are multiple mechanics that are barely associated with each other, except on making some numbers go up; except that those mechanics revolve around leaves as a common theme.

Picture related:

My sides! Just now I’ve noticed it.

At least it’s more creative than mine - got a folder full of files that boil down to “unsaved document $number”, “drawing asfgsa.svg”, “screenshot $date.png”. Then ~once a month I review them to delete the unnecessary ones, and to rename+move the ones to store in the long run.

Proto-Indo-European had a similar-ish system, that was used far more extensively than in modern IE languages. What you see in German and English are leftovers of that system.

I’m a sucker for crafting and breeding systems that allow you to customise equipment and/or characters. But it’s really hard to find good implementations of the idea, most have some obvious flaw:

• Pokémon (breeding) - in early games RNG plays too much of a role, so it’s hard to get what you want. Late games don’t fix this, instead they allow you to skip the process altogether (see: hyper training).
• Niche - the breeding part of the game is actually really good, a shame that the rest of the game is a slop. For example gathering food gets a PITA once you got too many nichelings, and yet you want them to support your breeding pairs.
• RimWorld (Biotech; germline genes) - arbitrary restrictions that must be lifted through the usage of mods.
• RimWorld (crafting) - now we’re talking. If you pay close attention to which materials you’re using for which tasks, it pays off in the long run. There’s some luck involved, but you can get perfect (legendary) stuff fairly often if you know what you’re doing.
• Leaf Blower Revolution (leaf crafting) - the game encourages you to craft a lot of leaves and salvage most of them. That’s fine, it’s easy to get cheese anyway. The problem is the sheer amount of beer that you need to get the properties that you want in each leaf.
• Monster Breeder (old Flash game) - the game is a bugfest, and the lack of any sorting system makes you have a hard time even knowing which monster you should be breeding with which.
• Minecraft (tools and weapons) - vanilla has a really dumb system that doesn’t fit well in a game that encourages hoarding piles of materials into chests. The mod Tinkers’ Construct fixes this, and makes the system next to ideal.

Plus a lot more that I didn’t mention. Sorry for the wall of text.

Think for a moment in English.

• I sing /sɪŋ/
• I sang /sæŋ/
• I sung /sʌŋ/
• a song /sɒŋ/

Note what’s happening here: the basic meaning of the word is dictated by the consonants, that stay the same across multiple words. Then you change the vowel to convey further meaning: present vs. past vs. participle vs. noun.

In English this is a bit of an exception, but your typical Semitic language (as Arabic and Hebrew) does this all the time, typically following certain patterns. For example, extending OP’s example:

You do see some affixes here and there, like that -tu in katabtu. But the workhorse of the morphology are those vowel changes.

And since this system was already present in Proto-Semitic, you can even find cognates across Semitic words, and they’ll conjugate? decline? in similar-ish ways.

But what is effective?

The video that I’ve linked directly proposes, near the end:

1. if you can remove the bullshit, do it. (i.e. deplatform those muppets.)
2. address your audience, without referring to the bullshit; in this situation a detailed explanation sounds better, as it isn’t being contrasted with a sound bite.

I don’t think that it will cause a controversy; almost all Lemmy hates racists. And it’s fine as long as you’re 1) consistent with who you ban, and 2) transparent on why you do it.

And, like, there’s always that bitter taste in the mouth when you ban someone, but as you see the comm thriving it makes you think “I did the right thing”.

Most of the time it’s a bad idea to ban people based on behaviour outside your “turf”, but there are some exceptions - and this is clearly one of them, the mere presence of the user in your community is bound to make it less safe to the others.

The findings reinforce a few things that I’ve seen in this series of videos, about the Alt-Right Playbook; one of them is that engaging the perpetrator is mostly a waste of time.

Sounds like a cool premise for an educative game. I hope that it’s fun too, but usually you play this sort of game to learn, not to say “OMG I HAD A BLAST YESTERDAY PLAYING IT!”.

Yup, pretty much.

Both “to prescribe against [thing]” and “to proscribe [thing]” are functionally equivalent in this context, at least acc. to how I use both words:

• to prescribe - to lay down rules on what should be accepted / rejected.
• to proscribe - to forbid, to strongly recommend against something.

But I’d rather use the first one here due to the topic, prescriptivism.

The knee-jerk reaction is understandable, since most prescriptions are of the exclusionary type. And at the same time, since linguists say “we’re describing, not prescribing”, people create a false opposition between both things. And, well, if description is scientific and good the prescription ends as “unscientific and bad”, through that opposition.

Prescriptions and descriptions are not opposites. They’re orthogonal to each other:

• when you tell people how things are, you’re being descriptive;
• when you tell people how things should be, or what they should do, you’re being prescriptive.

And prescribing is not automatically wrong. For example if I were to tell someone “don’t call us Latin Americans «spic niggers», it’s offensive”, I am prescribing against the usage of the expression “spic nigger”; it is prescriptivism. Just like when someone proposes inclusive language.

What is wrong is that sort of poorly grounded prescription that usually boils down to “don’t you dare to use language in a different way than I do, or that people did in the past”. It’s as much of a prescription as the above, but instead of including people it’s excluding them.

Tagging @bgainor@thelemmy.club, as this addresses some things that they said.

I think that the text has some merit, but it misses the full picture, and the conclusion is crap.

Sure, what matters is what you say, on a discursive level; not the specific words that you use to say it. And meaning is not hard-coded into the words, it depends on a thousand things, it changes over time, yadda yadda.

So far, so good. However meaning doesn’t depend on “intent”, as the intent only exists inside the head of the speaker; meaning is socially negotiated between the speaker and hearers. And some words become associated with prejudice in a way that, even if the speaker tries to cancel it out, they still sound “unfortunate”.

I also think that the author is building a big strawman on what “politically correct language” is supposed to be. It is not just about the individual words.

As I mentioned in another thread, I don’t think that he’ll be able to attract chip makers to USA. Instead I think that he’ll kick every industry relying on those chips out of USA.

It seems that your idea is fairly solid already on what to do, then. That’s great!

So, you want to give your userbase creative freedom, without allowing it to attack itself or marginalised groups. Is this right? Here’s what I’d suggest:

Rule: fanfics featuring prejudice must not show it in a positive light.

This rule alone would shoo 90% of the potential bigots, who’d likely cry about “muh freeze peaches”, but still allow people to have bigotry in their fanfics.

Rule: fanfic discussion must be kept on-topic.

If there’s something that bigots love to do, it’s to pick on some loose end of a discussion, then pull and pull it until the discussion gravitates around their pet issue; this rule would make short work of this tactic. It’s also useful to improve general quality of the discussions.

[If allow RP at all] Rule: Roleplay is only allowed in a specific subforum / community.

Some people actually like to RP their OCs; to each their own, I guess? Either way, if you let people RP all over the instance/forum/site some might use it to say “ackshyually I was RPing” to attack other members.

Don’t feel afraid to change the rules as you go. You’ll get a thousand problems that nobody could predict, it’s fine to address them. As long as you do it transparently, it’s fine.

A few additional points:

Keep a close watch on users who gravitate around certain specific topics. Most of them should be OK, but some might be looking for trouble. Look specially for signs of sealioning.

Recruit mods with good reading comprehension and who are OK reading huge walls of text. You’ll need it for subtleties like distinguishing “the MC is racist and this is shown as a character flaw” versus “the MC is racist because the user is self-inserting”.

Social media is full of a certain type of user full of “good intentions”, who points fingers at other users based on weak reasons (such as poor reading, assumptions, etc.); for example, if you say “Hitler was shit but this has nothing to do with him eating bread!”, they’ll pick on that “but” and claim that you’re a Nazi. Well, I call those “witch hunters”. Don’t let witch hunters in your community - they make people feel insecure to approach certain topics, and they indirectly help the ones whom they allegedly fight against.

I also feel like your idea leans more towards an old style forum than a Lemmy instance. So perhaps NodeBB is a better choice in your case.

If I’m reading it right, I also disagree with it, on a practical level; it’s like herding cats and not enough. I also think that an instance for women is the way to go, at least at the start.

However, to be fair with drag those actions aren’t mutually exclusive, and even if only a few admin teams keep a closer watch on sexism, it’s already improving the situation.

I understood “the admins” as “a meaningfully large amount of the admin teams of the Fediverse”. Collective action.