bigstuffedcat

the continuously transgendering hy libre!

@bigstuffedcat

  • she/her, they/them, sie/sie/ir, ask

dyke, poetess, games writer, &cet.

wow! this lesbian can pierce space and time!

log inask
if you can see this,
you have permission to message me on discord
bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat
MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE
MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

this is a purely personal pet peeve but indie games where the central-mechanic is based around dice that refer to a single die as "a dice" - this behaviour is like, singlehandedly enough to repel me from a demo I would otherwise be interested in. Like I understand most people don't have editors these days from the number of VNs I've played where people talk about being "unphased" but if your whole game is about the mechanic... please. please. A die! singular die! Pick up the die. Drop the die. I am begging you

bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat

i've edited rules before where they used "die" as the plural and "dice" as the singular and the linguistic descriptivism left my body in the form of steam out my ears

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

Suudsu13
@Suudsu13

It doesn’t just do it, it does it intentionally and maliciously. I remember one piece of dialogue where it very purposely passed up a “die” pun and it made me want to scream.

login to reply
antumbral
@antumbral

sometimes you can just tell that someone doesn't care about the same things you do.

like (random example) how wattpad has a bunch of genres in its genre selector and gay/lesbian got clustered together into 'LGBTQ+' to make room for 'werewolf'

login to reply
ireneista
@ireneista

yeah we're with you on that (unless it's clearly deliberate to get on our nerves)

like it's... while we wouldn't want to actually jump to conclusions, our first thought would definitely be that the game isn't made by people familiar with tabletop gaming, which is a bad thing when trying to imitate it

login to reply
kodicraft
@kodicraft

I don't think I've ever seen a video game which centralizes around literal dice rolling and tries to imitate tabletop gaming, usually it's just a cute abstraction for input randomness in a video game

login to reply
modulusshift
@modulusshift

I was like 13 when I learned that there was a singular for dice. I still don't think I've ever used it. Dice is simply noncount to me. So I do consider "a dice" ungrammatical, either I'd use it grammatically plural even when referring to one object, or I'd specify a "d6" or something.

login to reply
modulusshift
@modulusshift

Wait wait wait "the die has been cast"... is that a pun!?! I'd only ever read it as "the metal mold has been set" not as "a d6 has been thrown" lmao

Edit: okay, the Latin is clear, this was always about rolling a d6. That kind of metal working is centuries younger than the phrase. Fascinating.

login to reply
AtomicTangerine
@AtomicTangerine

As far as I'm aware, the use of the singular dice is widely accepted/used in the English language and is attested to sources almost as old as the use of the plural dice itself. Which is to say, "throw a dice" is perfectly grammatical. The die v. dice distinction is comparable to the poisonous v. venomous distinction, those two have always been synonymous in casual contexts.

login to reply
jcolag
@jcolag

I once worked on code that I probably shouldn't talk about too much, but does "important things." In putting shapes on a map, it dutifully gets the vertices, then iterates, and for each vertice...

Oh, well that doesn't raise any red flags.

login to reply
Pinned Tags