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And to prove feminists aren't all fun-hating killjoys, I want to share a sample of a great parody comic highlighting some of the absurd stereotypes mentioned here:

I would absolutely love to get you in the same room as my sister. She'd probably turn your entire worldview upside down.
For instance, look up Lady Death comics. That's what my sister likes.
And trust me, she does not give a crap about what any man thinks. She likes what she likes, because she likes them.

Well, it'd be interesting to hear her point of view, but I will say that it's not exactly news to me that there are women who like divisive comics and similar media too,
and while I think Lady Death has a silly costume, I don't find some women liking her that strange compared to much other stuff actively marketed towards women.

Feel free to ask her to join the forum if you think she'd be interested.

"oh sure it's awful, but it's only those kind of guys who do it and I'm obviously and visibly not that kind of guy", well I'd hate to break it to you, but people like to defend themselves.
If someone called you one of those straw-man argument man-hating feminists, you would probably be quick to point out that those types of people are awful, but you're not one of those types of people.
Don't paint everyone with the same brush, and don't complain when someone tells you not to.
That being said, I am a little bit sexist and a little bit racist (I'm probably even a little bit homophobic). It's ingrained into me through cultural osmosis. You probably are too.  The question is, are you more than me?
At least I'm willing to question that what I believe might be wrong. You on the other hand, based on what I've read on this thread, seem quite adamant that nothing you believe in is wrong.
You need to question yourself more, re-evaluate your beliefs, and most importantly, stop going to articles written by people who think the same way as you. Diversify and question things more!
That's why I love talk to you. You're my way of doing exactly that.

I wasn't trying to call you out personally, and I'm sorry if it came across that way, but I really wanted to comment on a pattern I've seen for quite a while now.
Of course people don't want to see themselves as the baddie, but I do think there's a difference between saying "I try my best not to do this" and saying "only this group of other people do this".
I'm sorry if my first comment failed to clarify this.

And I do question myself and my beliefs, nearly every day, whether I'm not polite enough, whether I'm too harsh, whether I'm writing too much for people to read or not enough to explain my position.
I want to make clear that I do not think that the vast majority of guys in this forum is deliberately or intentionally sexist (in fact, this is one of the nicest corners of the Internet I've been to), but
many do or say things that are unintentionally sexist, and I've been trying to point some of this out as politely as I can, but it's hard when all of this has been stereotyped from the get-go as some
oversensitive and irrational prudery since the time of the suffragettes.

Anyway, I will say that I greatly appreciate your commenting on this, and being willing to have a good-faith debate on this. 

Also, of course they were all laughing at the same sexist and homophobic jokes, it's called reading the room. Trust me, you don't want to be the one guy to point out that this joke (or comment) is sexist, homophobic, or racist, in the middle of a friendly conversation. You aren't going to change them, you're just going to piss them off, and probably even make them worse (I'm not kidding, it's a psychological effect that happens).
I mean sure, if it goes too far, step in, but otherwise keep your mouth shut. 
You don't stop that stuff by highlighting it every chance you get.

I don't want to replicate any of the jokes I've heard there, but I will say that those jokes at the place I mentioned were really, really bad.
And I didn't say anything at the time, because they were a big group of burly men laughing at those jokes, but that just meant I and any other women or closeted gay men had to suffer in silence.

It's basically a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, because I fully understand your point, it's so easy to just
make them angry and write you off as a stuck-up prude, and frame their "jokes" as some cool rebellion against pc culture,
but at the same time, if you don't tell them off, they'll take silence as approval and keep dehumanizing women and minorities,
and it's been proven time and time again that accepting such humour also makes people more willing to write off more serious hate crimes
and harassment as not a big deal, and vulnerable people get harassed into leaving places where it's allowed.

Like that place I used to work? I left it, in large part because I couldn't stand the people there anymore, and the few who seemed otherwise decent never spoke up against the a******s.

The expression on the doll to the right that I saw in a bargain bin some time ago unnerved me.

Don't you mean the one of the left? Or both?
The one on the right looks stoned, the one on the left looks like it's about to murder me.

You're right, I made a typo! 

I've had an idea for some time now, though it's mostly about a bit of a pit stop rather than a full journey, would it still fall under the theme?

A pretty apt summary of our times.

The expression on the doll to the right that I saw in a bargain bin some time ago unnerved me.

Hello! I am Nacho Ayala, a Spanish guy that has been around since 1979... I was here a looooong time ago, attended some Mittens, made some unforgettable friends, made no games... I have been the sprite artist of "Fountain of Youth" for almost 15 years... But now I am back to fly solo, with some mistakes learned, re encounter some old friends and make new ones. Hello to all!

Hello to you! 

I've always liked the art of Caspar David Friedrich, famous for many paintings of dusk and dawn:

Cool story!

And, if this was a mainstream social media platform I would now brace myself for the usual hate of "Don't feed wild animals you IDIOT!" and "Do you think animals are just there for your enjoyment, tourist???" kind of responses but this is AGS so I'm suuuure I'm safe from that here....

That's idiotic, as long as you're not feeding them anything dangerous I don't see what's the problem.

Those birds are clearly in need of tuning. Sounds like a children's musical toy running out of battery.

Exactly! My thought was a stage microphone being tampered with.

For me, simply changing the angle on the keyboard with how it lays on my desk has made a big difference to my wrists.

I just found a video of Australian magpies singing, and they sound completely alien:

Pretty cool:

I recognize the other meme characters, but who's the guy to the left?

Yeah, a bit. Looks as the "facehugger" of the Alien's movies.

_

Now that you say it, they do have that Giger quality to them. To me, it's even more creepy because I mostly see them swimming with their feet underwater, so you only see glimpses of what's underneath at a time.

[deliberatel]

I just thought it could be good to have a thread to share stuff that has no right or reason to creep you out, but do anyway.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about things from horror media, dangerous predators, or things that are deliberately trying to be scary or humans are instinctively scared of for a good reason,
but perfectly harmless things that were either meant to be fun and friendly, or just naturally existed that way, but somehow looks cursed while doing so. 

Something I've always been weirded out by is the feet of coots, they just don't look right to me, they look like absurdly long claws with some leftover skin scraps haphazardly attached to them;

Anyone else find this creepy-looking?

Speaking of cursed things...

I see a guy whose goal in life is to make children cry.

If so, one can do worse 
But yes, I would probably be terrified if I saw him when I was a kid.
More so if he was walking backwards.

I wasn't scared of the eye tatoo guy until you put that image into my head! 

Completely random, but I think that formally this game passes Bechdel  test in the very first minute, because there are two women talking about their life situation during introduction:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=45593.0

Yeah, the game title is... lol. I think it's a dark comedy, but I never played it through. It was a part of a Bake Sale (or similar event), and it is not in AGS database sadly, and I dont know where exactly to get it now :/.

Also, "The Cat Lady".
But then again, it's kind of a random way to test games too, more suitable for statistics rather than anything imo.

Yeah, the Bechdel test isn't a test on how feminist a story is or how good role models the characters are (also, where I'm from at least, "whore" is considered a severe slur, so well, not the greatest title...),
the original point was to showcase how few movies never featured women talking to one another, usually because the writer didn't care to write women as anything other than a love interest fawning over a guy,
but to prove how insufficient the Bechdel test is on its own, plenty of modern filmmakers "solved" it by just having to women have a quick 1 minute chat about something, then go right back to being stereotypical love interests.

I think the Bechdel test is simply garnering so much attention because it's easier to add a short snippet of dialogue to a story than stepping up and working hard to write a cast with truly nuanced and interesting female characters
and actually give them important roles to play rather than making them a gender-swapped equivalent to Boba Fett.

["no monster club"]

I think this paragraph should be required reading for every man trying to write a female love interest, this sentence in particular;

Having read that paragraph, all I can say is that no guy wants a girl like that. Except those jocks who you always see playing the bully in 80s movies. 

You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.

With a quote like that, I thought it was going to be about anime girls (I've heard similar things being said in lots of reviews for bad anime). Instead it's about "Cool Girls". 
Which are obviously girls that only exist in the mind of a teenage frat boy. You know, the kind of guy everybody (and I do mean everybody) hates. 

Oh, if only...
But for every awful jock, there are just as many guys who think they are so much better than those jocks, yet still think they deserve a girlfriend who will bend over backward to curl for them anyway, and the quote I cited mentions several other types too;
It may be a slightly different version â€" maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics.

It's not about one kind of guy, because awful and entitled guys can come from any background or have any interests, but looking back at this debate, and many similar debates I've seen, lots of men will have the gut reaction to blame
another group of guys they aren't part of, similar to how some people will claim that the only racists are stereotypical hilbillies. I'm not in the habit of plugging podcasts, but I think a prime example of this is in this episode from the loremen podcast, wherein 1800s London, a number of women on the streets were non-fatally stabbed by a man who'd run away afterward, nicknamed "the London monster" by the public. And during these events a group of guys, disappointed that this had made London women more nervous in public and making it harder for the guys to flirt with them, decided that the obvious solution was to form the "no monster club", and basically, the logic was that if any man belonged to the No Monster Club, he wasn't the London monster, and therefore, said man would automatically be a good and decent man women should trust. And the only thing needed to enter the No Monster Club was simply to say you were part of it (totally not open for abuse  ).

This is a very extreme example, but I think this really showcases how it feels to a lot of women when a lot of guys will be so quick to say "oh sure it's awful, but it's only those kind of guys who do it and I'm obviously and visibly not that kind of guy".
I once had the misfortune to work in a place where there were a diverse set of men working, Swedes and immigrants from various nations, guys of all ages and with varied interests and levels of education, and they were all laughing along at the same sexist and homophobic jokes. There is no "magic bullet" that will make you immune to being a jerk, all you can do is just to keep being on your best behavior and be ready to call others out on it if you want to avoid being one.

Sorry if I'm going off on a tangent here, but this is something I've been thinking of for a while and think more people ought to consider.

As for The inner world and Guard Duty, I only saw the screenshots and thought they looked nice but never got around to playing the games because there have been so many other games I'd rather play, but this sounds disappointing yet not surprising

As for the Inner World, it really is a pity. Despite the sexism the game is rather charming, but that alone stopped me from even trying out the second part. Here's a bad review that illustrates the portrayal of women in the game:

Spoiler

"However, I cannot overcome the subconscious issues with this game: [spoilery]
- The main character Robert falls in love with the first woman he ever sees, of course, right at first sight.

- The main character Robert comments on a picture of the barmaid when she was young with: "What time does to women". The old barmaid has sagging breasts (there is no comment about the old men). Hello misogyny...

- The only time, two female characters (love interest Laura and toad) are on the screen at the same time, a "catfight" is created. Of course, two female characters cannot interact without hating each other [sarcasm].

- Only flirting with the toad leads to success, there is no other way. The flirting intensifies the catfight between Laura and toad because the toad "steals" the main character from Laura. What the ♥♥♥♥.

- The main character Robert does not manage one physical task. Self-talk of Robert: "Laura (Love interest) will laugh at me because I ask her for help". Laura then actually says: "Sure, we just don't talk about it". The toad then says "Well, I like it when men show weakness". Which does this say of the image of men in this universe?

- When the father of the Laura (love interest) is rescued and sees his daughter Laura with the main character Robert, the father becomes directly defensive and hostile: he has "always been afraid" that his daughter will meet a boy. Even though there isn't any declaration of love from Laura (Love interst) to the main character Robert so far. Robert could also be a stalker, but the father of course only recognizes one possible lover.

- In a flashback: an applicant only talks to king, even though the queen is sitting right next to the king. The queen only talks in private to the king. Which power does the queen have?

- In general, positions of power are only occupied by men. Main character, the villain, guards, king, mechanics, scientists, wind monks, black market sellers are all men. Women appear only as love interest, barmaid (also love interest), mother, wife (queen) or "nasty b**ch" (toad). All female characters are equipped with so-called feminising gender signifiers (lipstick, eyelashes). Otherwise, they have no other personality markers in their appearance, no characterising thing. Just lipstick and lashed. Wow.

- When Laura (Love interest) is petrified, main character Robert kisses her (no consent whatsoever). After she is saved, she first thanks Robert for the rescue, apologizes for always "teasing" him because she really likes him (That's not how this works what the ♥♥♥♥). She kisses him. Then finally she slaps him in the face "and that was for the kiss earlier, you didn't think I'd notice". Main char Robert lies on the floor, looks very happy and says "it was absolutely worth it". Yikes."

[close]

Wow, most of it just sounds like your bad garden variety of bad sitcom stereotypes paired with bad romantic comedy stereotypes, but the fourth and the last points on the list really jumped out at me with how crude they were in their sexism.

I guess this is what happens when you don't have any women test-read your script before releasing it.
I think this paragraph should be required reading for every man trying to write a female love interest, this sentence in particular;

You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.

Well spoken!
I think everyone ought to see this discussion video on Red Dawn, and the fact that entertainment will reflect the creator's politics, but at 9:15 in the video, the narrator also
discusses how fiction isn't real, and exactly because it isn't real, but a creation of the author, we ought to look critically on why they are telling a story in this way.

As for The inner world and Guard Duty, I only saw the screenshots and thought they looked nice but never got around to playing the games because there have been so many other games I'd rather play, but this sounds disappointing yet not surprising,
and it's better still than the atrocious open-world game trope where you have a mission set in a brothel and are encouraged to ogle (or sometimes even buy) the women there, or the countless games where the only female character is kidnapped/killed
for the male hero to avenge her, and I doubt this would be such prevalent tropes if it weren't for the fact that so many sexist men still see women as objects, in many cases you could literally replace the girl with a fancy sports car or other valuable possession
and nothing would change in the story, just look at how in the first John Wick movie, instead of the baddies killing his girlfriend, they kill his beagle, but otherwise the story basically plays out exactly as a ton of other stories of a man avenging his dead girlfriend.

I suppose I could link to the Sexy lamp test.