loobkoob

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.

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.

Guys, don’t fall for this propaganda video about the game, it’s actually much better than he’s making it look - Skeleton Bones Ghoulie just has a bone to pick with Will Smith.

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.

Is also worth noting that it’s not just the moderation practices of your instance that affects your experience, it’s also how other instances perceive your instance. Hexbear, for example, is an instance filled with “tankies” and a lot of other fediverse instances don’t agree with them or their values and choose to defederate from them. So a Hexbear user, while they might personally like their own instance’s moderation and values, will not see any content from instances that have defederated with Hexbear, which could impact their experience enough that they’d rather move instance.

(Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comment from a Hexbear user that I’ve loved. And I’ve definitely personally blocked several of their communities from showing in my feed.)

In the past, I know some instances defederated from lemmy.world because it was seen as kind of spammy. Some of them re-federated after lemmy.world tightened up its moderation, but I don’t know of all of them did. (I’m not a lemmy user so it doesn’t affect me personally and therefore I don’t keep too much track of it.)

Inter-instance politics aren’t necessarily a thing you need to be hyper-aware of, but they can definitely shape your experience.

There are definitely technical reasons why saving mid-run is a lot more complicated. With Pacific Drive, right now when you save, it’ll save:

• the state of your car - this will likely be done by looking each individual “equipment slot” the car has, assigning them a number, assigning each possible upgrade for that “slot” a number/letter, and storing its damage state (which is probably just a scale of 1-5 or whatever). So the game will store everything about your car in the format off “slot x, upgrade type y, damage z”, which can just be three values.
• your quest state. The game won’t remember what quests you’ve done or how you’ve done them in the way that you remember it - it’ll just store that you’ve completed quest step 14a and that 14b is your active objective.

It makes for a fairly simple, small save file. Being able to save mid-run would add a lot of complexity because it’d need to save a complete map state, including:

• the map layout
• your position in the map
• the enemies and hazards in the map - their positions, states, etc.
• what’s happened already in the map
• the loot in the map, and whether you’ve collected it or not

And so on. Not only does it massively increase the complexity, it would also increase the size of save files a lot and make saving and loading a lot more cumbersome. And that’s just a simplified breakdown; there are definitely other factors that can make it much, much more complicated.

There are definitely some games where “easy mode” save systems could be implemented without much changing on a technical level, but I don’t think Pacific Drive is one of them.

A reverse image search comes up with a lot of pictures that have been taken in this exact location. I’ve no idea which is the original, unfortunately.

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don’t really think it’s necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It’s probably the most representative demo I’ve ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There’s no narrative to screw up. There’s no “oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess”. It’s the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you “win”.

… and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist…

I’m not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it’s probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don’t need an entire second company’s worth of those departments.

These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it’s good to be realistic about why they happened.

(It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

I’m not a programmer (although suggestions on a language to start learning with - with no project in mind - would be welcome!), but I’ve found similar things with my old musical projects. I look back some old project files and see that I used various techniques all the time that I don’t necessarily use nowadays. Sometimes, I think I probably should use them more than I do now, but I definitely overused them back then when I first discovered them.

I guess it’s just exciting when you learn something and it opens up a bunch of possibilities for you!

“Trump” is synonymous with “fart” in British English. Plenty of Americans already did celebrate and vote for a fart.

My thoughts exactly. I wish it’d been stolen instead, or something else just generally less environmentally damaging.

Thanks, I’m glad you found it useful! Unfortunately, I don’t have any specific recommendations for further reading - it’s the sort of thing I’ve just picked up over the years of paying attention to politics and economics rather than from any specific sources.

However, after a quick search, the US Treasury actually has a pretty good page about it.

The key graph to look at on that page is the one that shows the debt to GDP ratio (which, as it explains, is the most useful way to measure debt because it shows the country’s ability to repay its loans). And you can see, despite the fact that Biden’s administration has hit the highest ever raw national debt number, they’ve actually done a pretty good job at stabilising this ratio after the disaster that was Trump’s term.

(To be fair to Trump, COVID was responsible for some of that big upwards spike. But you can see it was trending upwards - ie, bad - under Trump before COVID started.)

Which means that, yes, the national debt has continued to rise in real numbers under Biden, but the US economy has also been growing at a similar rate, meaning nothing’s got any worse in real terms.

The BBC also has a pretty good overview of national debt. It’s relating to the UK but the principles are still the same.

The significant thing, which is harder to gauge, is how much return the country gets on its borrowing. If you borrow $1B for some infrastructure project, to be paid back over 25 years, but over those 25 years the infrastructure project generates $1.5B in taxes, job opportunities, time saved, etc, and then it continues to generate more money even after the debt has been paid off, then taking on the debt was a good thing in the long run. Sure, the national debt went up, and generally owing money is seen as bad, but it was profitable overall and the country’s GDP maybe have increased at a higher rate than its debt over that period.

And it gets even more complex when you consider less tangible results like the happiness of the population. If the country breaks even on its borrowing but the population’s happiness is increased, I think most people would consider it a success, but it’s hard to measure that.

A lot of the people who get overly panicky about national debts don’t tend to understand them. They treat them like household budgets, or like businesses, where you absolutely need to balance your books every year or you’re in trouble. With national debts, as long as the country can keep paying back its lenders and as long as they continue to grow (economically), national debts aren’t that big a deal at all.

Generally, left-wing economics tends to lean towards borrowing as an investment into the future, and isn’t too concerned with the actual debt number increasing as long as things are improving at a good rate. Right-wing economics tends to lean towards being loud about the national debt increasing and lean towards austerity and other cuts in order to “balance the books”, often calling the left-wing approach “irresponsible”. Personally, if it’s not obvious, I favour the left-wing approach.

The GTA 6 leaks were in September 2022, so a little more than two weeks ago!

Would you kindly?

There’s no inflation in space, just explosive decompression!

If they’re just doing it for money, I agree that it feels pretty desperate. But I get the impression that a lot of them do Cameo because it’s a fun way for them to interact with fans, and because it’s nice for the fans to be able to get something like that.

Regardless of their reasoning, it sucks that people abuse it. Expected, of course, but it still sucks.

“Access your data for all websites” is important because otherwise it doesn’t know what domain you’re on in the first place.