loobkoob

Unfortunately for her, too. She might be successful, but she seems fucking miserable all the time.

You can just say “well they’re stupid that’s what you get” or you can ask yourself why aren’t we getting these people on board while some greasy billionaire can?

I don’t necessarily like to just dismiss people as stupid, but a lack of education and the ability to understand complex issues is both a big issue for these people and a reason why the greasy billionaires can get them on board. Convincing someone that them paying some of their money into a union will actually result in better working conditions and more money for them - rather than just being poorer - is a lot harder and takes more understanding on their part than someone convincing them there’s less money to go around because there are more immigrants, for instance.

On top of that, people like to be able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility if they are given the option to. That’s not exclusive to right-wing people, but when that’s coupled with people wanting simple “explanations” because they don’t understand more complex systems with all their consequences, knock-on effects, etc, it makes it easy for right-wing politicians and media to offer simple scapegoats and get people on board.

To use the immigrants example again: not only is it not your average right-wing voter’s fault in any way - it’s the immigrants’ fault - but also, they don’t personally need to do anything to fix the issue, they just need to let the right-wing politicians get into power and it’ll all be solved for them. It’s all very comforting for them - much more so than being told it’s going to take ten years and some work on their part to improve things.

Those underlying issues are what left-wing people are trying to resolve already, though - wealth inequality, poor mental health, too much power in the hands of corporations and the mega-rich, removing outrage politics, etc.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

It’s worth pointing out, I think, that TalkTV is Rupert Murdoch’s latest outing, and is owned by his News Corp, which also owns The S*n and The Times. It’s no surprise it’s awful.

I agree. As much as I agree with the idea of universal basic income - because I think supporting society while reducing the work necessary is something we should aim for, because it’s the best way to ensure everyone gets a fair lot in life and because I think it’s a necessity with the direction the labour market is heading - this isn’t really the kind of thing I want to see in this community, personally. Hell, UBI doesn’t really have much to do with the thought of “if X is Y% of Z then 1000X is Y% of 1000Z” - it’s just basic maths really (and OP seems to have got the maths wrong, too).

Those are the best kinds of compliments in general, I think, whether it’s a parent complimenting their child, someone flirting, a platonic compliment, or whatever else! Compliment things that are within their control and that they can feel pride over and it feels a lot more meaningful.

Is the fully casted radio version not the best version to listen to anyway?

The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.

I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.

Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!

I agree, but at the same time, I think a lot of people are still trying to build out their subscribed communities list here - especially because a lot of would-be communities are fragmented across multiple instances. Outside of just stumbling across communities you like because they’ve been mentioned in a comment section, or checking out communities that links have been crossposted to, looking at the all feed is the best way to discover things, I think - unfortunate though it is.

To be honest, I’d love to see a “weighted all” feed, if that’s even possible. So include everything, but let the user set custom weights for communities, so ones you weight highly show up more often (and nearer the top) and once you weight lower show up less often. There are some communities that I only really see if I look at my subscriptions because they don’t tend to show up in the all feed much. And there are some communities - a lot of meme ones, for instance - that I’ve blocked because they were clogging up the all feed; if I could just weight them lower so if still see them but far less often, I would do that instead of blocking them.

Base 12 being the best is probably why AI keeps trying to give people six digits per hand.

That’s part of it - they don’t want to lose their investment. The other part is that if they do stop propping up Israel, they know another country like Russia or China will happily fill the void and reap all the benefits of the influence in the region. The US could cut ties and not be involved at all but it’s not likely it would change much, unfortunately; Israel would just continue with new backers and the US would be in a worse position.

Not that that justifies the war and all the weapon sales on the US’ part, of course. But I think, with that information, it’s easy to see why there’s some nuance to it, and why the US isn’t keen to sever ties or be too harsh a critic.

They’re both certainly people who know how to burn bridges when they see them.

“He who controls the spice(y content) controls the universe” - Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

that game is over for me once I’ve launched the rocket

Ahh, well that definitely isn’t the case for me! I usually keep playing long after I’ve launched the first rocket. For me, launching the rocket is a somewhat arbitrary “ending”; it’s a good objective for people to focus on - especially new players - but I don’t think anything really changes before or after the rocket launch in terms of gameplay loop (and there’s no narrative to change). Just like before the rocket launch, there are still things to optimise, new ways to build, etc, (some of which are supported by the science you get from launching rockets, in fact).

I suppose it partially comes down to whether you’re an objective-driven player or someone who enjoys the process. For me, it’s all about the process/journey, and the objectives are more of a guide than anything. If the objectives are complete and I’m still enjoying the process, and there’s still room for me to enjoy the process, then I’ll keep playing.

I can definitely think of quite a few non-live-service games with an “end game” that I’ve enjoyed:

• (Older) Pokémon games with their battle towers, where putting together a flexible team with as few weaknesses as possible is the aim.
• Loot games like Borderlands, Grim Dawn and Last Epoch where I want to make new builds and test their limits against harder and harder challenges.
• Factorio, where I want to optimise my factory. Although there’s absolutely an argument to be made that that is the game, but I think it becomes more about player-set goals once you’ve launched the rocket.

All of them are either offline or have offline modes available. All of them have potentially infinite “content” if you’re the sort of person who like optimising, or just being able to set yourself new targets. They’re all enjoyable to play for their “campaigns” alone, but they also have very strong sandboxes that players can continue to engage with even after the game stops giving them objectives.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment, though. I think MMO-style “end games” where you login for your daily, time-gated quests and do the same thing you always do with no variation or sense of progression (be it narrative, emotional, build-related or some other kind of progression) isn’t necessarily healthy. And I dislike the way “end games” have tended to move away from being optional post-game content for people who aren’t ready to finish playing yet and instead are often viewed as the main game that you have to get through the sorry excuse for a campaign/story to access.

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

I don’t think all adverts are propaganda. For instance, someone in my village has a sign outside their house that says “EGGS FOR SALE” - that is 100% an advert, but I’m not sure you could convince me it’s propaganda.

I agree that there’s a lot of overlap between advertising and corporate propaganda, but they’re definitely different things.

You’re right about osu! Although it’s probably one of the few competitive games where there’s no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn’t directly affect your gameplay experience.

It’s not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don’t think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.