Define ‘violent.’

No. You will simply receive a warning if we don’t like your activity on the site.

Really, what are you doing interacting with this website to begin with? Stop posting. Stop commenting. Stop voting.

Just. Consume. The. Content.

We need your eyeballs for the ads. Everything else is driving up our costs.

The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.

BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.

Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.

Citations Needed is the antivenom to the cobra bite that is listening to cable news during your teens/twenties. God bless Molly White and her crusade to do real actual journalism.

The Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s. If Trump was anything, he was an American fence for the looting, the gang warfare, and the human trafficking that followed. The dogged insistence that Donald is a double-super secret KGB inside man intent on serving a government that hasn’t existed in 30 years is a Tom Clancy inspired fantasy.

Indeed, the man went BANKRUPT 4 TIMES. Let that sink in as a clear indication of his incompetence.

If you can go bankrupt to the tune of a billion dollars, walk across the street to another bank, take out a new billion dollar line of credit, and keep shitting in your gold plated toilets, then I’m not clear how you are the incompetent one.

Trump highlights the real dividing line between Rich and Poor in America, and its the proximity to cheap, easy lines of credit. If you can discharge a billion dollars of debt time and time again, while I’m stuck on the hook for a few grand in credit card debts or a tens of thousands in student loans for the rest of my life, its trivial for you to remain rich while it remains onerous for me to escape poverty.

they do demand other services like dissolving NATO

This isn’t a demand from the Russians, its a demand from the paleocons and the libertarians. Long before Putin was mayor of St. Petersburg, guys like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan were lobbying to remove the US from every international organization. And their ideas were well-received, in the same way Brexit and Yugoslavian balkinization and the parsing out of micro-states like Hong Kong and Singapore and Israel were well-received.

Building these ultra-wealthy megapolises, surrounded by high walls and armed to the teeth against working class dissidents, has been the project of the western ultra-right wing for decades. Ayn Rand lionized it in the form of Galt’s Gulch. Heinlein romanticized it in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. Friedman and the Chicago Boys forced it onto Central America and the Caribbean states during the Reagan Era. Now Trump is making this vision manifest in the beating heart of the Republic.

American balkinization is a plutocrat final solution to federal regulations authored by elected authority. It is the mirror side of Lincoln’s dire warning against A House Divided. For the class of American revanchists who revile a democratic state, this is a deliberate end game.

“Trump is unAmerican! He’s sold us out to the evil foreigners!” is the lie we need to keep telling ourselves in order to ignore the extremely All-American Thiels and Adelsons and Mercers who really are pulling his strings.

The end result of this Putin-fixation is a modern opposition Democrat party that clings to neocons in the Bush/Cheney cartel and plutocrats like Bloomberg, Gates, and Buffet in defiance of popular politics. Mass media keeps trying to make Communist Russia the boogeyman behind a very Capitalist, very American brand of corporate fascism.

Tech itself is not the issue. How it’s applied is the issue.

At this point, I would argue that technology is the issue. Or, at least, the current iteration of it.

Internal Combustion Engines, always-on internet connections, and digital financial systems are generating real physical hazards that stretch beyond their benefits. This isn’t just an issue of use. There is no “proper” method of employing - for instance - cryptocurrency or single-use plastics or a statewide surveillance network that doesn’t result in a degradation of quality of life for the population at large. To take a more dramatic angle, there’s no safe application of a nuclear bomb.

When the iEye app notifies you that the enzyme is running low, simply crack open an ice cold, refreshing can of Tesla Cola Zero to refuel your device for another two hours. Need to sleep? We got you.

Except this isn’t a technological innovation, its a Science Fantasy. iEye isn’t a real thing. Tesla Cola Zero isn’t a real thing. Not needing sleep isn’t a real thing. You’re not a cyborg and you will never be a cyborg.

But the science fantasy is still having its own cost. People are making real material nationally-transformative (or de-transformative) decisions based on the fantastic promises we’ve been sold about Tomorrow. We’re underdeveloping our mass transit infrastructure and relying entirely too much on unregulated air travel to speed up travel. At the same time, we’re clinging to old bunker-fuel laden container ships and decimating the aquatic ecology, because we refuse to adapt proven nuclear powered shipping that’s over 60 years old at this point. We’re investing more and more and more money in digital surveillance and personal tracking. We’re off-loading our ability to collect and process information to unreliable digital tools (LLMs being only the latest in overhyped AI as a replacement for professionalized human labor). And then we’re trying to justify the bad decisions we make as a result by claiming secret wisdom inherent in machines.

We’re eating our seed corn after being told technologists will eliminate our need to eat ever again.

This is a direct result of technological developments we have made (or promised to make and failed to deliver) over the last twenty years. Revolutions in racial profiling, viral marketing, planned obsolescence, military expansionism, and genocide have not improved our quality of life in any material sense.

The cow has not benefited from industrial agriculture. And the prole has not benefited from de-skilling of labor.

Me, just plunking away at Super Metroid and Mario 64

What’s this about a new GTA game? Damn! 3D and everything! That’s crazy.

Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then… the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.

What could you really do in BotW that you couldn’t do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem’s Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.

The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.

They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.

That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.

Like telling someone who’s missing both legs to get better shoes so they can keep up.

But it’s not. You’re confusing material conditions with psychological conditions. The brain is far more plastic than the leg (stump). And neuroatypicals regularly develop coping mechanisms that would be the envy of any paraplegic.

ADHD has definitely opened my eyes to how much we humans subconsciously assume we know everything based on our own experiences.

I think people will often divert to “This won’t work on me because I have ADHD” and often miss that lots of advice is just bad or otherwise useless to the public at-large. The “Bootstraps” mentality of self-help gurus constantly assume you have more free time, more financial slack, and more raw dumb luck than the average prole.

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen “just go door to door handing out resumes” pitched as a solution to a few million people rendered unemployed during a recession. I routinely see InsanePeopleFacebook tier “smart savings” advice that amounts to either comically unrealistic spending/savings rates or recklessly foolish investment tips. Then there’s the Common Wisdom that only survives the first two years out of high school. “Just go get an X”, be it a vocational career or a law degree or a ticket to the next boom town or a rich spouse, works right up until too many people take the same advice.

“Haha, you can’t trick me into joining your MLM because I’m neurdivergent” signals that you’ve made the right choice but often for the wrong reasons. As a result, it just opens you up to a different kind of affinity scam (“We invented an MLM for ADHD!”).

Rather than self-segregating and embracing alienation, we need to recognize the fundamental economic game as rigged and tackle it with a unified front.

Movie ads also seem to be particularly misery-inducing. Extra loud, often deliberately gross or otherwise unsettling, low-budget, and cringe. I’ve taken pains to avoid them for years.

Would be curious to see what cinemas would do if they were required to include pre-film advertisements/previews into the show runtime.

Happy Accident.

Does the Networking Effect suddenly no longer apply to internet applications? Seems like we’re just seeing people gradually migrate from older and less functional applications like Twitter and Facebook over to newer and more functional applications like BlueSky and RedNote.

Meta will still influence people, because a lot of the influence is through news aggregators automatically ingesting what Facebook shows as “Trending” and regurgitates it elsewhere.

So much of Facebook is just automated accounts responding to automated accounts in order to milk gullible advertisers. If everyone logged off tomorrow, I don’t know if Zuckerberg would notice.

Balatro is a Poker Game in the same way that Gin and Bridge and 52 Pickup are Poker games.

It’s the thing American IP companies care about the most.

As always US wants the data, they just don’t want anyone else to have it for free

I guarantee you that American data is going to Chinese companies. Temu has your data. Alibaba has your data. Bilibili has your data. They’re just getting it by purchasing from American data centers.