I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.

I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.

Y axis: Empoisoned or Swumble’s Big Jumble X axis: Menus or Parkour

I think we are moving past the outdated genre system and finally finding a way to classify games properly

I haven’t either, and here we both are commenting on it. That’s what I mean.

I found this post browsing All. I have had significant superhero fatigue right after infinity war part 2, after a whole decade of mild disbelief at how huge these once-niche characters have become.

This headline definitely grabbed my attention, and as you said, the fact that they’re spoiling that he’s going to play Doom is why I checked this thread.

revealing them both

Even mentioning them as separate things wouldn’t have made me look. Their marketing machine is definitely working overtime to get the attention of people burned out on superhero movies.

Culture and identity and language and all that is a continuum in the Arab world as it is anywhere else. There are people who would claim that our native language where I’m from shouldn’t be considered “Arabic” but that’s a whole can of worms.

I am not a linguist, just a layperson.

I don’t like dividing us into little categories in most contexts because that’s often used in the context of saying “look we’re much better than <other group>” but very broadly four cultural spheres is correct:

• Levant has stronger Syriac and Turkish influence (which also applies to modern Turkish). Unfortunately that’s used sometimes as evidence that we a different (that’s not bad necessarily) or inherently better (this one is bad) people than the peoples to our south. Lebanon particularly also has a strong reliance on French and to a lesser extent English loanwords. Stereotypically seen as a bit gentle (when being generous) or effeminate (when making fun of it) as far as the spectrum of the language goes.

• The Gulf is where a lot of modern Arab stereotypes come from. It’s more heterogeneous than most people give it credit for but there’s obviously a distinct culture after crossing into the desert. The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon. Some surprising English loanwords scattered throughout. More aggressive in tone on average.

• Egypt is kind of it’s own thing and it’s simultaneously a cultural juggernaut, especially in the past century when it was exporting a ton of music and movies and literature (we were doing that too to a lesser extent). Egypt has a massive population, most of which is very densely concentrated, and a huge media machine. I feel like Egyptian is the most widely understood dialect because all Arabs are exposed to it. Libya is grouped with Egypt sometimes and sometimes it’s not, depending on what you’re comparing.

• West of Libya is basically alien to me. There’s been more culture coming from there that we are exposed to now, especially music in the past decade. We all like seeing Morocco and Algeria pull off upsets at the World Cup but we see them as kind of their own bubble all the way over there. Their dialects are difficult for us to grasp and even the vocabulary they use is very different. Personally, I’ve defaulted to French or English with the few Moroccans I’ve met while abroad. Yay colonialism. Although we do bond over comparing language differences (“You say what for pants? That’s funny.” Etc )

• Then there’s Standard Arabic (we call it Fus7a), which nobody speaks natively but we all learn in school. Most books and articles are written in Modern Standard Arabic. Divided opinion among the more nationalistic types on whether or not it’s important or should be taught. It’s the formalized form of the language and while I’m terrible at writing or speaking it, I do find it useful when I need to fall back to a word I can’t think of. I think of it as a kind of linguistic gear change. You can also drop the odd unexpected MSA word or form here and there to catch people off guard and punctuate your speech but maybe that’s just me.

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems