English Esquie is one of the most delightful things I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. He’s voiced by the same person in both, but in French he just sounds French. In English he gets to have a French accent. Every character with a French accent is at odds with the main cast in a way that’s very flavorful. It just makes all the Frenchness really pop, like mixing sweet and salty.

Honestly, I think knowing might help get through chapter 1. You know something’s up almost immediately, but they drag the mystery out way too long for my patience, where I felt like I was being fucked around with and having my time wasted. I would have dropped it if not for my partner insisting I’d like it, and the rest of the story did end up being worth it.

I don’t mean to agree with that other person hating on kanji, but if they’re going to take on the task of making a new font they could potentially alter the writing system somewhat to simplify some things and/or extend versatility of some characters. A new evolution would be exciting.

鬱 has 29 strokes. People just write うつbecause they can understandably not be assed to write all that. So why not, if you have to go through the task of making an entire font, replace it with something people might actually write? You could come up with a new character in the tradition of hiragana’s origins, something uniquely Japanese.

I interpreted it as profit.

Not the person you asked, but I think it’s clickbait because it presents the word without context in such a way as to provoke an emotional response. It sounds like maybe he thinks he can make money off of child predators. The subheading “Who said CEOs don’t have a sense of humor?” also implies that he said it jokingly.

You can read the original interview here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-child-safety.html

I think “CEO of Roblox downplays problem of child predators on the platform” or “CEO of Roblox dodges questions of child safety” very accurately describe how the interview went and are not misleading. (The original headline is kid gloves bullshit, and I’m not happy about that either.)

e: Realized the Futurism article literally says “Baszucki didn’t downplay the issue of child exploitation as some might expect.” He did absolutely did at multiple points in the interview.

Full interview question and answer, just for fullness of context:

Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.

I dunno about every other country, but age of consent legally applies to US citizens while abroad. I’m sure it’s easier to get away with, but it doesn’t make one immune to the law.

Thanks, OP.

But why is the Steam Android client trying to download and install Steam on my phone?

A simple demonstration of this are the Yugioh and Digimon franchises which consistently appeal to a wide age range.

Yes, the one responding to a suggestion to pirate their games, which directly references piracy in the quote you pasted.

We’re taking about pirating the games, not buying them. Not buying them is still voting with your wallet.

If you really want to do something, and you’re watching everyone else enjoy it on social media, that takes willpower. You only have so much willpower, so why not use it on something that actually helps someone, like not eating meat or child shave chocolate or whatever?

Abstaining from entertainment to no actual end drains valuable mental energy that could be going into constructive solutions.

There are way, way too many people who have never heard of Nintendo’s problems and/or don’t care for it to make any difference. They’re culturally relevant, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.

Yeah, but that’s actual copyright infringement. I want more Palworlds and Cassette Beasts and Monster Sanctuaries, and I want them to be really blatant about things like summoning your monsters to ride them.

I think we should support game development designed around “infringing” on some of their bullshit patents. I love Pokemon and they’re doing fuck-all with the franchise, so I’d love to see more indie devs’ takes on the concept. Have you seen all the really cool “fakemon” that have existed for decades on Deviant Art?

Adding to what Kolanaki said, these kinds of abuses are unfortunately pretty commonly unreported in Japan because of social pressure against the victim.

In particular there’s a practice of mentally abusing workers until they resign to avoid firing them.

Sexism and homophobia are alive and well because they’re rooted in a culture of conformity to social norms which punishes those who stand out.

And I don’t mean to be xenophiobic about this; it’s just information I’ve gotten from LGBT manga authors and the news. I in no way think there’s anything inherently wrong with Japanese people or that their culture is without value. I don’t really trust any large corporations to begin with.

It’s been really nice to be able to type a plain question (in any language) into Google and receive a concise answer before scrolling down to confirm with more trustworthy sources. In particular it’s been very good for solving annoyances with UI options by directing me to exactly what I’m looking for. A traditional search will often conflate my search with synonyms (even when using quotations, which is some bullshit), and even ignore what language my search was in.

e: Also you should be careful when clicking on any links provided by an LLM because they can accidentally send you phishing links.

FF14 has some of the worst English writing I have ever had the displeasure of suffering through. I started and quit that game like four-six times over the years before finally forcing through to play with friends. I had to look up portions of the original Japanese and translate it myself to get any enjoyment out of the story. I’m not sure about some of the later expansions because it eventually got enjoyable enough that I stopped looking things up, but the latest expansion had me going to the Japanese again, and I cannot understand why they keep deviating from the script in ways that make it worse.

I also quit reading the Witcher series part-way through book four because I just can’t take David French’s writing. The fan translations are much better.

I can only think of one book which was originally in English and translated to Swedish that I found readable. Literally every originally-in-Swedish book I pick up is delightful. Are the people doing the translations just people who failed to write on their own or something?

That’s what I mean about the large sample size. It only takes the existence of a single asshole to ruin the experience for a target of harassment or casual phobic comment not even directed at them intentionally. Blizzard won’t ban these people, so they’re allowed to exist in the public chat channels, and they can say pretty much whatever the hell they want.

But what I mean is most people do not side with them. An asshole will drop a transphobic comment specifically because they know most people will take offense and argue with them. The general advice is to disable public communication and stick to organizing via guilds and Discord servers which are actually moderated. If the game were a democracy, those people would punished and/or removed.

Activities don’t need to be inherently sexist for the culture surrounding them to be. Consider the ways things like healthcare, cooking, and hunting have been gendered in different times and places.

Folks in MMOs tend to be more chill in my experience. In such a large sample of people you’re going to find a few dickbags who think they’re hilarious or the kind who will DM sexual harassment, but the majority of people just do not care and are happy to play the game. Toxicity tends to crop up around entitlement to loot and perceived performance rather than gender.

You want a handful of robotics nerds to overthrow capitalism for you?

It gets frustrating when the thing you don’t like is a very common feature though, and it’s valid to complain.

I really prefer dodging to parrying or blocking, so I don’t like it when a game is set up so that parrying is necessary or overly rewarded in a way that makes the fights much longer or more difficult if you choose to not play that way.

Playing a game like this involves a heavier server load compared to normal use, right? Would that incur a significant cost to said alternative? (I don’t actually know how the magic box works.)

Wait, wait, wait. Are you telling me Uno is literally just crazy eights, and that’s why I’ve never seen anyone play crazy eights after like 1993?

I think we’re taking about the same thing, actually. When the maps were small 2D areas that connected at set points, I was able to learn them well without any special effort. With experience one could bypass the paintball system by having learned a monster’s likely behaviors, which was extremely satisfying.

Now we have the auto-tracking features which render navigation mindless, along with maps existing in 3D and on much larger scales and interconnecting in more complex ways. When I’ve attempted to ignore the navigation system and do things manually I find it very difficult, which I have to assume is why they added the navigation in the first place.

My memory isn’t as clear as I’d like for this kind of discussion, but I remember something like a single button being both start climbing and also jump off the thing you’re climbing or something like that? And then if I wanted to jump off a cliff it was a different button from what I’d been lead to expect in other contexts? So I’d just constantly be accidentally using the wrong inputs because they were too context-reliant, and it made it extra difficult to navigate and gather. The controls used to be a lot simpler, and we didn’t have any of this hookshotting around with bugs or super dogs. Saying the controls used to be simpler and 100% meaning it is hilarious coming from someone who played on PSP. How did you make me prefer the claw, Capcom? Maybe I was just used to the old way and can’t adapt; I just remember things being more straight-forward in terms of actual gameplay.

I could also really do without action games bogging themselves down with lengthy dialogs and cutscenes. If I wanted to watch a movie or read a book or play an RPG I would just do those things. I don’t need an epic lore motivation for stabbing dinosaurs. This series barely had dialog when it started out, and the voice lines were delightfully world-buildy and flavorful by not being any real-world language. Less was more in terms of immersion.

I don’t really like the more recent entries in the series anyway, honestly. Like so many modern games, I feel like it’s become over-complicated with systems and cutscenes, and I miss when it was just you and a sharp object vs a dinosaur. If you want to check it out, get a PSP or emulator. I wish I could remember which specific titles to recommend.

e: Freedom Unite, I think.

I would love to learn why this isn’t completely stupid, if anyone has a way of explaining. We’d be down entire genres of games if developers didn’t copy each other’s homework.

Seems to be working just as well as regular voting.

I’ve never been interested in RDR2 because I’m not into the western aesthetic, but I am absolutely into the aesthetic of being a time traveler or alien or wizard using my powers to help farmers and explode bad guys in an otherwise western setting. If I had any money, I would pay someone to make this.