Achievements have made games worse.

I discovered this after buying a steam game that I had pirated. All of a sudden I’m doing boring and repetitive stuff that I don’t enjoy, just to unlock some dumb trophy.

Any enjoyment for the players and creativity by developers has been long eclipsed by the lazy paint-by-numbers boring achievements who’s only function is to artificially extend “engagement”.

They should just sell the platinum trophies.

It’s so gratifying to hear from people on the internet who are older than I am. And this article reads like it bounced off a Listserv to a yahoo email address.

E.S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent is a great place to start. You can skip most of the book honestly, (it’s out of date), but the “5 Filters” part is like a decoder ring for American Legacy Media.

Dr Strangelove saw one possible future and it had 10 women to each man.

I think I loved about a dozen women relatively recently tho I haven’t even kissed them

Romantic love is always both ways. Crushes are normal and healthy, but no matter how strongly you feel, it ain’t nothing like when they wanna kiss you back.

When I was young I had anxiety about getting betrayed or abandoned. Well, all that came to pass, but what I didn’t know then was that I am perfectly capable of hurting people who care about me. These days, I regret the harm I did way more than what I suffered.

I liked Nakatomi plaza better.

Alcohol. Sometimes it takes 30 or 40 years to be effective. Not very good for murder, but wildly popular for suicide.

This is dumb. If you don’t have any balls, how can you pee?

Just use a contraband cellphone. That gives you access to powerful encryption.

Hamburger Helper is one of the biggest rip-offs in the grocery. You get what? $0.50 of noodles and $0.15 of spices? You have to provide the beef and the milk.

I was a sucker for years buying those salad dressing packets before I figured out how to make my own.

It’s like every business is out to rob you if you’re not paying attention.

We learned about a study in Psych class where the researchers asked elementary school students what their favorite activity was. Drawing was the popular answer. So the researchers paid the kids $8/hr (even 6yo get better than Min wage) to draw. Then they would poll them again about their favorite activities. Guess what was on the bottom?

These devices are a great help to the elderly and disabled, and Amazon’s offerings are the least expensive. My buddies Mom can call emergency services from anywhere in her home with just her voice. I don’t think that’s foolish at all.

It’s always been this way for the cheap speakers. They’ve no processing power on-board and need the cloud just to tell you the time.

The best way to burn off bad faith is to ask them to affirm their standard: “so you think it’s dishonest to intuit intention when you have no proof”? and if they’re stupid enough to claim they believe that, hit them with something like:

“What do you mean video games have a woke agenda? You can’t know the intentions of game designers”. “How do you know that the media is biased against Trump”? “You can’t read their minds”.

EDIT: My point is that debate should cut straight to a question of values, not argument. Talking about values (which cannot be disputed or proven with “facts and logic”), divides good and bad faith like a lightsabre.

Scribes and the whole Priest class

I don’t care who’s fault it is that hardware probably won’t work, just that it probably won’t work.

Setting these games up is an undertaking even when all the software and hardware works as intended. Hell, just pulling the equipment out of it’s storage is enough friction to keep me from playing sometimes.

Even after more than a decade of using Debian as a server, I don’t have any confidence in my Linux knowledge. So the proposition here is tons and tons of homework with no guarantee that I can find a workaround or cobbled together solution. What I can be guaranteed is that if I get everything working, it’ll be a slightly to moderately worse experience.

Again, I’m not saying Linux is bad or even at fault for these issues, but these issues exist and I it’s valid that some people don’t wanna deal with it.

I like to remind the chuds who think that game quality is the same thing as sales that the greatest game of all time is Clash of Clans. Elden Ring, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and BG3 are pathetic in comparison.

That’s great! But what about HOTAS support? Pedals? What about TrackIR?

DCS and all my gear are the biggest obstacle to dumping Windows.