I absolutely love when games do that. Just a random, faceless dude for the second player that isn’t acknowledged at all by the plot. My favorite coop games growing up were all like that.

You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.

‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.

You’re making assumptions that I’m some young kid, naively thinking I can change the world with overly simplistic ‘solutions’.

I’ve been in this career for a decent chunk of time, and, more importantly discussed these issues with others that have been here 40+ years (my company has been around for 100+ years). They feel the same.

You see it over and over again, management makes a short term cost saving decision, gets promoted or leaves to a new company and the rest of the people spend the next 3 years dealing with that decision. Things that used to be fixed in 2-3 days now takes 2-3 weeks. Projects that used to be completed in 4-6 weeks now take 4-6 months, etc.

These are things that I’ve noticed after 15+ years in the job and things that my 40+ year co-workers agree with and things the next two levels of my own management agree with (both 30+ years at the company). Hell, these are things executives I’ve been on better terms with have agreed with in the past (only to get let go after failing to implement culture changes).

My experience with executives is that they don’t necessarily want yes men, but there’s a range of acceptable criticism or feedback that they’ll accept. As long as you’re within that range, it’s fine.

If you try to address fundamental problems that might require real change… well those people tend to get suppressed.

They’ll happily take feedback on meeting structure or project planning or whatever. But try to do a retrospective on what the true longterm costs of their decision to go with the cheap, but unreliable solution and they’ll blackball you.

Maga efforts assisted by Democratic leaders that also focus on everything else but class issues as well.

I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.

How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?

Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).

AAA games are legitimately worse now than before, but the gulf isn’t as big as people are claiming.

This is why I think it’s funny people still believe ‘the Internet is forever’. Data disappears all the time. If you really start paying attention it’s scary how ephemeral the Internet truly is and how much is lost all the time.

Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.

It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.

I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

I’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.

I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.

So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.

‘How to treat a sprained neck’

So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else

I think for many purposes, regular people just like cool art. We’ve very much become accustomed to a near overwhelming tide of reasonable quality, but ultimately transient media.

‘Content’ has a much lower value than it once did, simply by benefit of sheer quantity. Even ignoring AI, I have access to endless art, music, video content, etc.

AI art is not really different from the non-artist perspective. It’s just accelerating the flow. But do people really even care where their current art comes from in most cases? The average person might download some art for their phone or computer desktop. They’ll be exposed to marketing and cover materials (that they’d have no clue or care about how they’re made), and they might buy some art for their house. Either from a home goods store of cheap, mass production art, or perhaps on a vacation or art fair for something a little more personal. Beyond that, I doubt most even think about it at all. AI art will be largely invisible to them because the human artists already are.

I do think you’ll see a similar surge of ‘human’ art niches like we have for Vinyl collections today. A small subset of people will pursue the story and mystique of hand crafted art, but this will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire industry. Only a small few will be able to fit into that new niche.

Currently (well in the summers at least) using a noctua fan attached to a length of 6" diameter duct that’s taped to the output of my portable AC unit to put cold air into a windowless room that doesn’t get much air. Works remarkably well to distribute the air even though the duct is pretty long.

I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).

Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.

Honestly feels like we got the worst of both options. The petty censorship, puritanism and lies of 1984 mixed with the lesser and trivial entertainments of Brave New World.

I feel like especially in the last few years at least the part of the left that was so concerned with certain issues with problematic media and addressing issues with overly sexualizing women has joined in some unholy union with the prudish and moralists on the right to spawn a general censorship of a vast swath of concepts backed up by both the lefts moral high ground and the rights religious teachings.

Where before there was the nuance to recognize that women were too often presented as sexual objects in popular media, as well as the fact that we shouldn’t kink shame consenting adults or the sex workers providing what should be seen as legitimate service. Now that nuance is lost in favor of simple discrimination and censorship, only disguised in the original movements language.

Also in several games my ability to join friends in-game broke if I turned my profile completely private. As soon as I set it to friends only I could join them again.

This has never occurred historically. What historical period of workers and owners fighting at a large scale

The battle of cripple creek involved shootings and dynamite explosions between workers and mine owners and was only stopped once the governor stepped in and helped negotiate a compromise.

I wasn’t trying to imply anything close to a full on war, but violence was a lot more common in early clashes for worker rights. Protests and strikes much more frequently were backed by violent behavior including several deaths.

Haven’t we spent the last several years trying judicial reform? And honestly things are worse. We have one of the most openly corrupt Supreme Court Justices right now and they’ve made several extremely unpopular decisions lately. Also all decent chances to enact that reform recently died, with several indications that it will become even more corrupt soon. ‘Not perfect’ is an extreme understatement of the current reality.

It doesn’t create good outcomes directly. It’s indiscriminate, highly subject to individual biases and extremely destabilizing to society. It’s definitely not a good thing if it keeps happening over a long time.

But when the workers and the owners are fighting at a large enough scale (beyond one or two murders), it forces the government to come in and mediate between the two sides. They must reach a compromise in order to quell the violence. Which means the owner class has to give something up in exchange for the worker class to stop the violence. It’s how we got unions and worker protections when voting and political pressure failed. It’s never the right answer, but at some point it’s the only answer left.