Should’ve gone for the thermite, then at least we could call him a “hot” boomer.

I would disagree with this sentiment on a basic game design level. I don’t know about the Zelda games, I didn’t care enough about BotW to play more than a few hours, but designing a large map that incorporates multiple biomes in a believable way is much more difficult than creating a bunch of smaller levels that don’t have to have any relation to each other in the slightest. You can get away with a lot more in terms of map geometry and set pieces when you load into each level individually.

This is obviously different when you’re talking about Bethesda-style load into every building style environments vs Elden Ring “You see that castle in the distance? You’ll be going in there eventually” design, but the fact that Bethesda makes their interiors separate from the rest of the world is how they cheap out on their games. It’s less hardware intensive and you can cheat a lot more in your design. And on a gameplay level that goes for Ubisoft-style collectathon map objects (and Zelda shrines in this case), but that’s not unique to open-world games - it’s a lazy cop-out that game devs have used forever to pad out their games. Collecting all the secret skulls in Halo is the same thing, but because it’s implemented well and doesn’t drag on forever with no reward like most open-world collectibles, it feels totally different.

Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn’t being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.

Personal responsibility only gets you so far when the big money actively fights against it. I think the answer lies in both holding companies like Google to higher standards as well as improving access to the knowledge we need to navigate what the world has become. It doesn’t help anybody when the FBI has recommended people use an ad blocker for over a decade but nobody has ever heard them say it.

I think this law requires you to upload a photo of your ID and says that it’s the website’s fault if underage people use it and they face a hefty fine. It’s a lot more than the standard “click to pinky promise that you’re definitely 18” because PornHub already has that.

Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

But no war like the culture war, I guess.

I mean, I’d personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it’s supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I’m talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.

I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.

From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.

I experienced this recently with a coworker who talked himself in circles about how he cared about facts and logic and agreed with both parties on different issues. But…he spat out Republican grifter speech over and over (basic biology!) and talked about how he watched these “debate me” idiots online who showed how Democrats “barely ever back up their arguments with logic” while the Republicans apparently do (you probably know the ones, they’re famous grifters but I don’t remember their names), as if these guys wouldn’t simply edit out everything but the most extreme people to use as evidence for their claims.

I have a line from a song I like to use when talking about these sorts of people: Spread the facts out like a fan on the floor, throw away the ones that make you feel bad.

Cognitive dissonance is a requirement for this kind of thinking.

There’s also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.

I would assume that figure takes into account not just how many homeless there are, but renters and home prices vs wages as well. There isn’t a single county in the US where a worker with the average annual wage can afford to buy a house at the average price range in that area, for example.

Unfortunately, the “used intelligently and responsibly” part is why people dislike AI - they don’t trust companies or people to use it that way (and for good reason based on the results so far).

Plus, it’s not gonna put everything back into Pandora’s Box. What we’re in is a societal and cultural arms race where AI is just another escalation that’s being used by both sides.

Everyone who disagrees with you is a bot, probably from Russia. You are very smart.

Where did they say that? They just said bots in general. It’s well known that Russia has been running a propaganda campaign across social media platforms since at least the 2016 elections (just like the US is doing on Russian and Chinese social media, I’m sure. They do it on Americans as well. We’re probably the most propangandized country on the planet), but there’s plenty of incentive for corpo bots to be running their own campaigns as well.

Or are you projecting for some reason? What do you get from defending Putin?

Because Bluesky is centralised.

You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.

The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.

The short of it is that he was an entry point for the MAGA pipeline years back. I don’t know if he still schills for white supremacist podcasts and the like anymore, though.

I mean, he did a little more than “one too many Nazi jokes.” Including, but not limited to, supporting white supremacists and advertising their social media and books on his channel and social media platforms.

The number of people that I’ve heard (especially teenagers) arguing that “it’s normal over there” was honestly disheartening. He was a major component of the MAGA pipeline in the years leading up to Trump’s first presidency.

There isn’t one. The exact same thing happened to every brand that tried to market to Tumblr users as well, and it’s as easy to set up and use a Tumblr account as it is a Twitter account.

Becoming unmarketable is not the same thing as having a difficult account creation process.

Instantly reminded of this gem of a game:

Edit: forgot to name the game in question: Cortex Command

This is greed, pure and simple. At $60, the industry was more profitable than Hollywood, and they raised the base price of games to $70 just a few years ago before immediately talking about raising prices again.