I mean honestly you might be on to something here, quitting smoking is hard as fuck, you might expect the signal of desperation induced quitting in smoking to reliably cut through the noise of other factors given how difficult it is for other factors to push people to quit.

brutal on so many levels if true tho…

I was around back then and if you think post 9/11 US wasn’t a conservative hellscape of intolerance and jingoism I don’t know what to tell you?

The reason you don’t see advertisements like this is because the kind of investment entities that control game companies big enough to buy ads in playboy don’t consider it a profitable venture vs marketing on violence which is considered more family friendly than even the mere presence of a naked body in western globalized societies.

This has been true for a long time and as with anything there are exceptions… and conker is one of them… but it was an exception then as it is now.

If you want to talk about the diversity of topics and tones around sexuality that have been explored in modern indie gaming vs what was acceptable in the past well yeah… nowadays indie artists are able to do waaaaay more without being silenced by christian rightwing fundamentalism and its claw like grip on our society. I don’t think that was your point though.

Video games are fundamentally experiences of agency, of being in some kind of environment that is dynamic, spontaneous and in conversation with the player.

Modern life on the other hand is fundamentally the experience of having no agency and being in a car choked landscape where nothing is dynamic, spontaneous or in conversation with you (especially as pedestrian when not driving).

I am goind to spend time where I have agency, where the landscape was designed in joyous anticipation of someone like me existing in it, the real life human spaces around me have been exhaustively rectified to the brutality and logic of latestage capitalism and thus these “real” landscapes around me are dead.

Society seems to every day increasingly hate and punish people who want to explore, play and create. Why the fuck would I want to spend time in real life spaces when they were designed out of a specific hatred for the kind of thing that makes me feel happy, alive and welcome?

Playing video games is something I do because I am poor AND because I gravitate towards landscapes and communities that were designed by people who don’t hate my brain and the way I think and live.

in many ways all we’ve done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.

What we have done is even worse because by and large the marketing around AI has worked and people categorically trust what a single AI will tell them after asking a question only once and if that doesn’t terrify you, you aren’t paying attention.

What I miss about Morrowind was how unconcerned it was with being weird as fuck, it isn’t that Oblivion or Skyrim are bad it is just they feel like they got a crew cut and a Linkedin and I am like no!?! why did you sterilize all the most interesting parts of yourself!? … even though I know why, it was a career decision.

next get drunk and play oblivion while listening to young scrolls

https://youngscrolls.bandcamp.com/

how about starting with Star by Adoring Fan?

https://youngscrolls.bandcamp.com/track/star

I think for me this weirdness is most obvious with books, the best novels that change you, stick in your memory and make you see the world differently are never 10/10s because that would mean they simply fulfilled the expectations you had before picking the book up.

A 10/10 novel is still awesome but it is more of a comfort food experience which while wonderful isn’t the same kind of experience.

Beyond All Reason is the kind of rts that makes you realize chasing after Starcraft style gameplay (when Total Annihilation presented a totally different and arguably more approachable experience with shift clicking and less obsessive micro) was a fatal error for the broad popularity of the rts genre.

A competitive rts hyper focused on apm and units that move in artificial and uninteresting ways (especially airplanes) was never going to inspire a new generation of rts fans with diverse interests and brain types to dip their toes in instead of leading to a narrower and more constrained vision of what rts games are and what kind of brain types can suceed at them.

BAR is both a living breathing cryptid (descended from the ancient TA itself) that somehow survived the great RTS extinction event and also paradoxically a vision of the future of RTS games.

I also get the feeling the VR market started out a lot like the mobile gaming market in that mba business majors who have zero ability or to desire to make genuinely artistic and compelling experiences choked out any other kind of person being in leadership positions in the industry.

Similar to mobile gaming the rush of business majors who “think” they know how to transform vr gaming when they don’t know the first thing about game development and have never bothered to pursue a creative venture in their life that wasn’t just a thinly veiled scheme to scam other people out of their money has severly stunted the growth of the vr industry indefinitely as it did the mobile gaming market.

The very structure of the largest companies in VR (besides perhaps valve) precludes the possibility of any actual artists and developers with a vision getting into positions of power in these companies and even if they do, they are never actually listened to or you wouldn’t get embarassingly empty visions of VR like “the metaverse”.

VR, like mobile gaming cannot be understood as an out growth of the traditional gaming world, rather VR in particular must be understood as a market constructed by non-experts who didn’t give a shit about learning gaming development or how to create compelling fantasy worlds because the objective was always to be a digital landlord speculating and monetizing on an ownership of large swathes of digital communities that artists showed up and made into actual spaces people desired to be (artists are an unpaid detail though, that kind of fluff is easy, an AI could do it and besides it is fun for them!).

Unfortunately for VR fans I don’t think the industry will take any significant strides until those kinds of people are kicked out of the boadrooms of these companies and I don’t see that happening anytime soon given how long mobile gaming has been a squandered wasteland of casinos that nothing with any vitality or soul can grow in.

Hey, make sure you get a balanced diet of board sports though.

You got your downhill longboarding racing with Driftwood

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2223700/Driftwood/

and your realistic, park/trick focused realistic snowboarding with Shredders

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1874170/Shredders/

All part of a healthy breakfast

For me it is loading up Xonotic to strafe jump around and blast bots. The movement in Xonotic is hypnotic, and while I usually play in short bursts I don’t think I will ever get bored of returning over and over again to learn the nuances and creative opportunities of combat and movement in Xonotic. All it takes is the first strafe jump to put a stupid smile on my face.

https://xonotic.org/

Also I love open world driving games and Motortown is my jam. I do urgent taxi jobs and just let my mind relax as I drive like a complete madman. The tire grip and burnout mechanics along with the vehicle handling in general is the best I have tried in any game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/

There’s actually not much info on how often other jets break down.

…what?

This is…one of the single biggest metrics people talk about in evaluation of military aircraft development projects?

Why has everyone temporarily lost their critical thinking skills in this thread?

…and the third option was a nextgen fighter development aircraft program that didn’t have horrific ballooning costs?

The F-35 would be good if they hadn’t wasted so much time and energy and weight on having a pilot in it. On board pilots are a complete waste.

no, as a manned fighter the f35 is an embarassment of an arms development program independent of any discussion about the effectiveness of future manned vs. unmanned fighters. The program is a historic cost overrun and makes the litoral class of us navy ships look downright functional and frugal in comparison.

Because anything you make with 1.7 trillion is going to look impressive unless you just throw all the money into barrels and just burn it?

Excluding the context of astronomical amounts of money like that is fundamentally disgenous to any accurate description of reality.

edit go on people, keep downvoting me to feel better because you don’t have an actual response, the jet looks cool and Musk is a pathetic loser with a billion dollars, but to admit the f35 is the same species of rot that the rise of oligarchs like Musk are an indicator of is too high a dose of reality for you :)

I mean everybody is right by accident some of the time…

I love libs defending the f35 like the good warhawks they pretend to not to be.

Yes the f35 is a good fighter jet, if you ignore THAT IT COST 1.7 TRILLION and completely forget about the concept of lost opportunity cost.

Lol downvote me you fools the f35 was set in stone as strategic catastrophe before it ever entered combat by virtue of destroying an incomprehensible amount of our shared wealth. The f35 is a tool of the military industrial complex designed to suck up as much cash as possible, the functionality of the plane is a distant concern in practice which explains why it barely works even given the obscene amount of money spent on it.

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!