Bison expert Rafal Kowalczyk spotted the cow this week on the outskirts of Poland’s Bialowieza Forest. Rafal Kowalczyk/AP
Excerpt:
The Bialowieza Forest, which spans 350,000 acres between Poland and Belarus, is home to a vulnerable population of about 600 bison. But this winter, the forest also became home to a reddish brown cow who decided to escape domestic life for some time in the wild. Poland’s TVN24 news portal reports an ornithologist first spotted her in November, wandering the outskirts of the forest with a herd of about 50 bison.
This week, Rafal Kowalczyk, a bison expert and director of the Mammal Research Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, spotted the cow again. He told TVN24 that she appears healthy. She is a Limousin cow, which means she has thick fur, and eastern Poland has had a relatively mild winter. He also says the bison herd she is traveling with appears to be doing a good job of finding nutrient-rich food like corn.
“This isn’t the first time in this region that a cow has escaped, but it’s the first time that a cow has joined a herd of bison,” Kowalczyk told TVN24. “With the bison, it’s safe from wolves. If it was on its own, it would likely fall victim to wolves.”
a jewish kid was murdered by a nazi last week in california and almost none of the articles about it are mentioning that he was jewish or that his murderer was a nazi
he was taken into the woods by someone he thought was a friend and killed. hits pretty close to home bc multiple relatives of mine, including my great-great-grandfather, were taken into the woods by their own neighbors and killed during the holocaust
So apparently in Skyrim, if you just eat all your stolen items in between the “wait I know you” and actually getting arrested, the guard will just… walk away???
I LEGITIMATELY DOWNLOADED AND INSTALLED SKYRIM JUST TO TEST THIS.
I COULDNT STOP LAUGHING AFTERWARDS.
You do know you can just… keep walking, right? Also why are you only stealing food items???
1) it’s not about the fact that you can keep walking
2) it’s not about playing properly only stealing food
It’s about CAN YOU, if your only stolen items are food, eat them all and get out of being arrested. The answer is yes.
If you’re trying to make this into some sort of logic or reason thing you are not playing Skyrim correctly my dude.
It’s about the mental image of a guard starting to apprehend you, watching you devour three cheese wheels in like half a second (presumably looking him dead in the eyes as you do), and deciding that he is not getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit.
The thing that gets me about most arguments against accessibility features in video games is that they’re not just grossly ableist, they’re also hypocritical as hell. Video games have always had accessibility features: we just documented them poorly and called them “cheat codes”. Indeed, having a robust library of difficulty-modifying cheats was considered a mark in a game’s favour! The only difference is that a cheat code is theoretically a secret, which allows it to be framed as elite knowledge, even though it’s functionally identical to having an “infinite lives” switch on the options screen.
Here’s a thesis for you: the Konami Code was the first well-publicised accessibility feature.
being bad at video games is a disability now?
I’m going to assume you’re not being disingenuous here and take this as a serious question. In brief, very few people are generically “bad at video games”; in most cases, difficulty engaging with interactive media stems from one or more of a wide range of physiological conditions, including:
visual deficit (including colourbindness; colourblind individuals often have difficulty identifying threats in action games because they don’t stand out from the background for them)
repetitive strain injury in the hands, wrists or forearms (common for anyone who performs manual labour for a living)
arthritis and other degenerative joint conditions (both those due to age and those comorbid with many autoimmune disorders)
dyslexia (a common symptom of even mild dyslexia is the inadvertent mirroring of sensory-motor responses under pressure, e.g., moving your hand left when you meant to move it right – which is a big problem for action games!)
sensory processing disorders (delayed reaction to visual stimulus is a common symptom)
spatial processing disorders (see above)
chronic pain
propensity for motion sickness
This is, of course, only a partial list. Many of these issues are individually rare, but taken together, we’re looking a huge chunk of the population – up to 40%, by some estimates – who have at least one condition that would impact their ability to play the shooters and action-platformers that are held up as the gold standard for hardcore gaming.
hot tip: if your disability makes you bad at a thing, maybe either put in the extra effort to get good at it or just don’t do it instead of demanding people make the thing easier?????
Here’s the a better question: why is it an issue for you? Accessibility features in video games are entirely transparent to those who choose not to use them. Your experience of play isn’t affected by their existence in any way whatsoever unless you deliberately turn them on. Complaining about the mere existence of such features is like claiming that your viewing experience of a movie is being ruined by the fact that the disc has a subtitle feature on it, even though you haven’t actually turned subtitles on.
(And no, don’t try to frame this as video game developers somehow being victimised by unreasonable demands. The vast majority of developers are more than happy to include accessibility features in their games – and quite sensibly, because, you know, they’re businesspeople, and they want to sell things to as wide an audience as possible. The popular backlash against accessibility features is entirely on the player side.)
honestly, yeah you have a point there, i will concede that. the only problem i have with them is if you still get the achievements and shit with all the disability accomodations on, like with that game Celeste that you were talking about earlier, which is basically tantamount to buying one of those hastily-assembled dodgy steam games that exist solely to give whoever buys them a million steam achievements the moment you boot them up. Like, play your own game however you want, but don’t claim you performing a feat in a significantly easier version of the game is worth the same achievement as performing said feat in the standard game.
Well, if we’re going to frame it as a question of fairness, we’ve got to ask: fair in what sense, and to whom? Let’s flip it around: is it fair for you to receive exactly the same credit for performing a particular in-game feat as a disabled player, though they faced greater obstacles in practice than you did? Should we demand that players who’ve lucked out in the genetic lottery and enjoy above-average coordination and reaction times be obliged play with special handicaps in order to keep things fair for the rest of us? Whose level of ability are we judging fairness against?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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