Good advice from 1901. Especially the bit about not marrying women older, taller, or wealthier than you. Especially all 3. Even if she's like 1 day older, 1 inch taller, or $1 wealthier than you. You gotta man up and not tie that knot!

/S

Honestly, while I don't like what these guys do. I definitely think they have some mental illness issues that should be treated, and some of them may be neurodivergent or have some physical issues with their brains or bodies that might make them unhinged that could be possibly treated with medication.

Dead serious here. People this bad generally have been abused / brainwashed when they were young, and some of them seem to have certain disabilities. Not saying they don't act like total trash, just that there's probably reasons behind it for at least some of these people. Plus, nowadays there are online cults waiting to pick them up and brainwash them when they're vulnerable. Used to be you had to go in person to a cult in the past.

I was like that when I was young. Now all my plans involve me forcing myself to do 1 or 2 productive things a day besides the stuff I have to do, and then just calling it a day and pushing aside the rest of the stuff I probably should do till tomorrow. Or more realistically, the next weekend or holiday.

I don't lie to myself anymore, I just admit that if it's not 100% vital, it won't get done quick, if at all.

Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda's recent track history, it's not negative to be skeptical, it's smart.

Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most "bug free launch in history" it's still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Plus, the recent release of Baldur's Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples' standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we're aware that they're going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.

Bethesda's been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn't be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren't being mindlessly negative, they're looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.

It's not unintelligent. People are extremely adept at reading facial expressions and microexpressions. Years of evolution / survival instinct development have made us extremely skillful at knowing a lot about a person based on their face / eyes. Our lives depended on it, you see.

Your survival instincts (which are smart) are telling you she's an untrustworthy, toxic individual that you probably shouldn't keep around in your community, and in this case they're right. Everything else she says and does backs up your instincts too, so this isn't just a one-off thing.

Honestly, one of the reasons to get a physical copy is to save time on the download. Not everyone has blazing fast or reliable internet where they live. Just having to download a patch as opposed to the entire 80+ GB game can be a big deal to some. I know it was like that for me back when the only thing available in a past residence was DSL. No cable or Fiber, just DSL.

They warned us even back in the 70's that it was bad, then it'd suddenly get worse all of a sudden with little to no warning as things snowballed, but of course the oil execs just tried to shut up their own scientists and block them from influencing congress instead of listening. Even though they were warned that the threat was "Existential".

"Are you kidding me? Just LOOK at these nerds!"

/no self awareness
/selfown

Same strategy as Hitler, staged actors faking an attack as a reason to "counterattack". Not surprising. Russians are the real Nazis.

Kind of, but more "slightly amusing" than funny.

She's not really a good public speaker for one. Not a lot of charm or charisma. She's not good at schmoozing like Bill Clinton or Obama. A good presidential candidate needs that, and I think it's a big part of why Al Gore and Hillary Clinton lost. She can speak well in public sometimes, but at others she sounds flat, boring, and artificial.

Charisma is a big deal. Think about Reagan Democrats and how people to this day love Reagan even though facts and hindsight analysis show that he was a terrible president who was arguably the start of America's modern decline into horrendous oligarchy.

Sad news, but industry insiders have said that even bad, botched games like this one can teach you important lessons that help you make really good games later on. I wish the developers the best, and hope that they won't let this set them back.

Gigabyte? Pshh, no wonder! Should've used Asrock.

If you're joining the Fediverse to take Reddit down and migrate people over... then it makes sense to talk about it. Have to strategize to identify your enemy's weaknesses it order to take 'em down. And while you're doing it, negative things about Reddit will come out. Even if it does end up being complaining, it's part of the process and it'll make people feel better while also doubling as important brainstorming.

Other people have made good points, but one I've noticed is that there's no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there's also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.

I'm on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren't automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.

When step 2 intersects with capitalism, all the other stuff just naturally follows. Sure there are people who legitimately want to help people (read an article about 2 Christians giving up their high paying jobs to spend their time making affordable housing for the poor and indigenous people) but they're increasingly becoming the minority.

That said, money based religions are only one oppressive group that bands together for profit and control. Religions aren't much different than political parties (hence the smashup between many) and corporations, organized crime, etc.

Human nature, rather than being inherently good, tends to be inherently bad. Hence why most giant groups tend to be oppressive by nature. It's why I believe that there shouldn't be giant concentrations of wealth and power.

Thanks for sharing it. I somehow made it all the way to an end, and the insights in this article are ingenious, and so very true. It's also eerie how these companies' behavior is so similar to a manipulative, narcissistic, controlling sociopath that tricks people into abusive, co-dependent relationships that become very difficult to leave.

I think it's because the people in charge of them are also narcissistic sociopaths, and that personality affects the company's culture and works its way down into the product.

I really wish the Sherman anti-trust act were enforced more frequently and harshly nowadays, and the companies weren't allowed to buy their competitors and become megacorps. I'm glad things like the Fediverse exist to help fight back, because we're probably already about halfway to becoming a Cyberpunk dystopia. We're just missing the Cyber, honestly.

Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.

Guys like this tend to have big pedophile energy, honestly. Same with people like Trump. I'm never shocked when they say stuff like that. If anything, I'm shocked if they say the opposite.

It'll prevent indie artists from having their work plagiarized over and over without payment from indie "devs" who honestly shouldn't have the right to exist as "developers" if they can't afford to actually hire artists and such.

It'd be one thing if they made an agreement to get assets from artists for cheap or for free as a favor, but just plain putting them all out of business permanently by letting a machine steal their work forever is another thing entirely.

Oh hey, I like sewing too!

/jk

He almost certainly won't be able to make that happen, but it'd be a terrible idea. If birthright citizenship were ended, the first thing the corpos would do is replace as many US Citizen workers as they could with Immigrants, and increase the amount of immigrants until they could get a workforce of permanent non-citizens who cannot ever vote.

Smart people who hate immigration or who love democracy would realize that getting rid of birthright citizenship is a VERY bad thing. Our oligarchy would weaponize it real quick. The first people to be made obsolete would be the working class, including the White working class, ironically.

Wait until the population declines further and the CCP tightens its grip even more over Hong Kong. I doubt this'll last. It's just how authoritarian communist regimes work. Look at Putin and co. for examples.

Well he's not wrong. Especially the Red States....

Like others have said, this is kind of a broken clock is right twice a day kind of situation. Similar to when he said that prescription drug prices are too high.

Edit: The irony being that almost every time he had a "broken clock" moment, Biden was the one who acted on and fixed the issue he was right about. Infrastructure, pharmacy prices, even border security. Joe Biden actually did what Trump constantly promised and never delivered on.

Sounds about right. When I joined the military I met people from Alabama, and even people from other Southern states had nasty things to say about that state. I didn't believe it at first, but then I saw enough over time to realize, "I hate to say it, but maybe they're right. At least about some of the smaller towns and more rural areas."

I met a few nice people from Alabama, yes. I also met... a surprising number of not so nice types. I'm Asian by the way, not White. I'll let people fill in the gaps.

I don't really understand why Russia keeps doing stuff like this. If they keep this up, they'll end up doing Ukraine's job for them. I read that they're having big trouble staffing manufacturing jobs. Gee, I wonder why?

Everyone else has answered your other questions, but let me just say that I've used KDE Neon (while distro hopping) it's both beautiful and functional. The latest KDE developments are really solid and intuitive, and based on their development updates I've seen on Mastodon and elsewhere, it seems like they're really starting to understand their userbase.

I.E. they understand that most people want to double click icons to launch them even though almost the entire development team prefers single click. They're not doing the tunnel-vision dev thing where they force what they love on users even though the vast majority of the userbase prefers the opposite.

Edit: It looks and feels gorgeous, and even similar alternatives like Kubuntu kind of feel a little worse to me. Then again, I'm a serious Cinnamon / KDE fan, so other peoples' mileage may vary.

Agree. Along with the overly high increase in the cost of living in almost every western society, processed food is responsible for the really low modern quality of life. The fact that both of these things are driven by short-sighted capitalism that doesn't consider the cost to the population or the world just makes it worse.

Yep to all of those, even though Youtube Premium is actually pretty good if you use it a lot and watch the old TV shows and movies they have on there.

Now Raid Shadow Legends: they annoyed me so much with their spam that I went out of my way not to play it. Plus, when somebody spams that much it just screams "I totally suck, so I'm overcompensating".

Rather than doing this, they should work on the reasons WHY people are using adblockers. Some totally unrelated to ads, like those huge end-cards that block the video that you're still trying to watch. I use adblockers to remove those.

You used to be able to turn their predecessors off, but the new ones? I haven't found a way to turn them off without using ad-blockers. Even with Youtube Premium (which gets rid of the ads) I STILL have ot use U-block origin to get rid of those damned end-cards.

Not so sure about that, I feel like average people are waking up to technological bullshit like this more and more every year. Yeah there'll still be an overly high amount of idiots, but I've learned that even older people can change and question things like this.

You can only get so many "We're giving you 2 free years of identity theft protection because we got hacked and your personal information got stolen." from big companies like your cell phone company, credit check company, etc. before you're like "Hey, anything I put online can get stolen by criminals...."

Even if you're a tech-unsavvy type. At some point the light bulbs turns on and you put 2 and 2 together.

Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other's supply lines / storage first.

The way Russia's turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.

True, but if you like looking at them and it soothes your stress, that kind of helps. Stress = inflammation after all. Plus, there's the placebo effect, which is surprisingly effective sometimes.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint's Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they've made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint's Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they'd just made Saint's Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to "reboot" to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn't get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who'd only heard of and experienced Saint's Row 4 would get excited about.

They could've probably taken Saint's Row up to 6 entries if they'd just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn't know, I got distracted and didn't play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could've probably stayed in business if they'd just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible "free to play" multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.

I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it's too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can't do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area's just not possible for me to influence.

I've found it's better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.

Yep, the people who marketed Katanas and Samurai were straight up liars. It was eye-opening to see how much they were shilling. It was the old equivalent of "clickbait" back then, and definitely fake news. I remember reading that they only folded the metal something like 10 times usually because folding it too much would just make the sword brittle.

I was also surprised that Katanas weren't that strong and couldn't really be used to block and might snap if used against bone too many times. And could be stopped by stuff like thick wooden armor. It's why Samurai didn't carry handheld shields. Since Katanas couldn't penetrate their armor, they just used parts of the armor to block.

Then again, most swords weren't useful against strong armor. That's what spears and hammers / maces were for. The more I learn, the more I realize medieval fantasy (and historical fiction) tropes are so incredibly wrong.

This is the reason why they've made sure only their brainwashed nutjob militias have all the guns. And also why the police are a bunch of classist racists too, along with much of the military (which primarily recruits from the south).

I don't want to put my conspiracy hat on, but it also might be why "liberal" politicians try to get states with tons of activists to have the strictest gun laws. I'm not a second amendment wingnut, but if the corpos and their fascist storm troopers every decided to start a shooting war with the civilian population, I have no illusions about who'd probably win, given that the average civilian is just a coward who'll back off and comply when even slightly threatened with violence.

2016, I agree. He was cheated and could've beaten Trump.

2020? Not so sure. Even Bernie himself admitted that Joe Biden's pro working class policies and bottom up, middle out economic plan was very similar to his. He even said that his campaign team was so glad that Joe Biden didn't run in 2016. Bernie himself stated that Joe Biden was so sincerely for the average working American, that even though Biden was basically "Bernie Lite", he wasn't sure he could win against Joe.

If we look at what Joe Biden's been doing for this country, including passing the infrastructure bills, limited gun restrictions, and the Inflation reduction act, we see that he is kind of "Bernie Lite" and honestly, it's SO much better than Trump, that I'll take it.

Good news. Like many suspected, Amazon was only maintaining its unrealistically low prices and actually useful search and features to drive its competitors out of business, after which they (as expected) enshitified everything.

It's why I kept going to physical stores whenever I could. Nowadays physical stores actually can provide a better experience for similar or cheaper prices. Even if you pay a little bit more, there's often benefits that come with that too. Knowledgeable advice, hassle free returns and exchanges, being able to see things in person, knowing that you're only looking at quality products that have been tested and are actually functional and safe, etc.

It's sad that you can't trust that products on Amazon are genuine, safe, and actually functional, but it's where we're at.

I don't want to get a protractor out to measure the angle, but it kind of feels like that's not quite 45 degrees. I didn't get the joke at first until I realized it was a math joke. Like the ones that one "funny" math teacher in school used to make. To be fair, most of the "funny" math teachers I had actually were pretty funny, though.