The original Fable did clichés well, though. Like the player is descended from the old royal line of Albion, but it’s so buried in vague hints that you need to read a bunch of lore to find out. It never matters to the story or gameplay until 3, it’s just a cool background fact.
Looking it up, while the high-end gift fruits are insanely expensive (hundreds of dollars), regular fruit seems to be widely available and costs the equivalent of a dollar or two. So it’s more expensive than in Western countries, but not exorbitantly so. They also tend to be unnaturally unblemished even on the low end.
I wonder how much produce gets thrown away due to a single bruise or spot. I’m hoping it gets turned into drinks or purée for desserts or something instead.
Where Winds Meet is a Chinese free-to-play RPG that was briefly popular earlier this year. The devs actually considered it a selling point that NPCs and sidequests were entirely LLM-driven. Look up a video if you want to see some of the most awkward and cringe-inducing dialog this side of Soulstorm.
This seems weird to me. Isn’t Japanese culture obsessed with aesthetics? Like when you buy fast food there it actually looks neat and clean like in advertisements, and you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries but they’ll be the brightest, most flawless specimens you’ll see in your lifetime. Even cheap throwaway meals are packaged like a professional food stylist went over them.
That focus on perfection seems incongruent with the slop machine that churns out soulless, derivative, and often obviously flawed ‘art’.
There was a brief but glorious period after Trump lost reelection at the end of his first term where all the social media sites finally started cracking down on the entire alt-right. Automated misinformation detectors went up, agitators and openly racist accounts (including Trump) were banned, and things almost started to look like they might get better for once.
The moment Trump started polling well in the last election, they reversed course real quick. All those programs were shut down and the worst people in the world got their accounts unbanned just in time for the 2024 election.