MudMan

Not being American, I will need some convincing about why the US doesn’t belong in the same bucket as, say, Hungary or Turkey. If you keep self inflicting the rule of strongmen and their oligarch cronies at some point that’s a core feature.

See, there’s the horrifying possibility that they just did and this is what Americans are.

Eh, forget it. they probably need a minute before reckoning with that one.

Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

That’s the argument.

That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.

I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.

So… “vote for whoever” seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.

I moved to a snow city for the first time well into adulthood.

The big thing I have for you is that walking on snow is awesome for like two hours and then it’s constantly threatening to kill you. Slippery sludge or ice is the worst feeling in the universe and all the locals will just strut right over it like it’s nothing while you’re fighting for your life.

Just buy good shoes and plant your feet vertically, no sliding motions.

In S3 Picard and Bev Crusher at one point sit down to ponder whether to torture or execute a prisoner and decide to go for it.

Yeah, no. It’s not AS bad… but it’s bad.

Hey, you want to hear a spicy take?

Discovery is the one piece of Trek that fixes their dumb AI nonsense.

By the time they are in the post-postapocalypse future they introduce at least one Soong android who is just… hanging out, being a guy. Not even a particularly nice guy. So at least there is that.

I mean… yeah, the episode isn’t as focused on procedural detail, and I do live for legal process minutia, but I can fill in the blanks just fine and suspend disbelief.

I mean, the question being raised is whether Data has been operating as a person willingly joined Starfleet or as salvaged equipment. If Data had been roaming around on his own and then applied to join Starfleet I’d be more nitpicky, but he was found and turned on by Starfleet and he seems to have been in the system since, so I can see the question of how to categorize him coming up retroactively. Especially in retrospect, since we eventually get undeniable confirmation that AGI is very much possible within their normal gear.

I mean, for the record, by the time Voyager comes around we know that they have protocols to use holographic AIs to substitute in for key personnel, so if you can have a “EMH” slot in for an officer you can have a piece of salvaged machinery operate with a rank and then reassign it to a different role… unless that entity has personhood. It IS a sci-fi as hell concept, but a valid one in-universe.

Me, I would have very much enjoyed Noonyien Soong arguing whether he still owns Data and learn what is legal salvage in Starfleet territory but for the sake of 90s network TV I can see “Is this android truly a life form” being the approach to a Trek episode. And thematically… well, I can’t get through the Goldberg and Stewart scene about slavery without tearing up. It isn’t just how good they both are, it’s the “oh, crap, they’re saying the thing” element to it, too.

Of course that means Starfleet straight up condoned slavery later, as per Star Trek Picard season 1. I would gladly remove all of Picard from lore at this point, but nope, officially Starfleet had legal proceedings to determine that Soong androids are people and to remove their autonomy is akin to slavery and then went ahead and did it anyway.

Picard sucks and is the worst Star Trek thing ever, is what I’m trying to say. Yes, way worse than anything in Discovery. Including season three.

So the JerryRigEverything guy just did a Cybertruck video and he says his sponsor backed off because they didn’t want to be in any Musk-adjacent content.

He’s so dumb. You really can’t fail after you break a certain money threshold, because damn, is this guy trying hard.

About damn time.

This thing is my favorite MMO by some margin and it’s not even a MMO at all.

Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

I am screaming at this juxtaposition. This is such techbro thinking, where he’s oversimplifying a single data point to pretend he’s making a data-driven decision (people in a survey said media is biased) and then leaning on a confirmation biased, entirely non-data driven stance (people don’t vote based on newspaper endorsements because I said so).

I mean, two seconds of thinking will tell you that people think the press is biased because the press is biased. There is no reason “the press” that is causing this impact is WaPo in a world of Newsmaxes, Foxes and yes, MSNBCs. You’re going to need more than a survey you read once to make that determination.

And obviously, he has done nothing to determine that his choice doesn’t benefit Trump. He doesn’t even claim that, he just… says so.

Or that his choice moves the needle towards lack of bias, because man, it sure seems like he’s diminishing independence here, not the opposite.

It’s the same billionare brain rot. It’s the same wonky self-assured, biased thinking where they can’t pay enough brainpower to consider the facts independently and they’re too convinced of their own infallibility to even address basic human biases or defer to actual experts on their random convictions.

It’s an absurd way to run a business, let alone a country. And there are few enough of these super rich idiots with a direct enough spotlight that we have a full sample size here. We (now) know how Bezos thinks. We definitely know how Zuck and Musk think. They aren’t to be trusted with the decisionmaking their money warrants them under the current system. Their squishy human brains are too weak and broken to handle it without the elaborate, dispassionate social engineering that keeps reasoably designed liberal democracies chugging along.

Yeah, that’s the thing about it, right? It has all the pieces of the architecture of a modern console in a world where none of them make sense. Even with the 360 I was probably an outlier, and the reward you got by being able to access 720p video on a CRT PC monitor was much higher compared to a SDTV.

Specifically the VGA 480p output, which was a big deal for most use cases.

I imagine there is some regional differentiation here based on HDTV adoption and SCART vs component, but for reference VGA out was still the sole way I had to get any progressive signal for gaming all the way down to my day one Xbox 360 in 2005, which did not have an HDMI out (not that I had any displays with an HDMI in, for that matter).

Yeah, in some ways I think playable content vs cosmetics is a more functional distinction than DLC (or MTX) vs expansions. The big thing that changed is that games now will sell you visual items for bragging rights, rather than stuff for you to play.

I would suggest that not buying those is a good idea, but clearly a bunch of teens and rich people disagree with me on that one.

Or the weirdly anachronistic mess that is the Dreamcast in general. I mean, it’s not easy to visualize today because a lot of the “just a tiny underpowered PC thing” approach ended up winning the day, but the Dreamcast made no sense whatsoever at the time and produced entirely absurd looking games.

Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.

See, this is the part where I’m not going to dismiss your experience, because a lot of this was super regional, but I’m going to say my experience was not that at all.

I definitely spent most of the money I put in arcades AFTER I had a 16 bit console. The “arcade>marketing>console port” hype cycle went on for a decade after the NES first became a thing.

And Live Gold is just a sign of something that was going on everywhere. The first free to play hits were happening, WoW was taking over the world and making GaaS mainstream… and yeah, online gaming was becoming a thing on consoles and getting monetized in brand new ways.

But also, I’d say expansions were a thing way before DLC became a dirty word. Because Groundhog Day I distinctly remember having conversations with angry nerds in the mid 2000s explaining that there wasn’t much of a difference between DLC and a lot of the expansion packs and shovelware content expansions being pushed around all through the late 90s.

And of course there are tons of games you can buy as a complete thing. As I said above, I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, Metaphor and a bunch of other stuff that is very classic in its structure. Another constant of gaming nerdrage is that people don’t care if what they like continues to exist, they are mostly clamoring for the things they dislike not existing, which I’ve never been on board with.

Well, we’ve gone from 24 and 5 to a 10 year compromise, so we can agree to disagree on that basis.

That said, I do disagree. You are underestimating how relevant arcades were in 2001. Soul Calibur may have been an early example of the home game being seen as better than the arcade game in 1999, but it was an arcade game first, I had played the crap out of it by the time it hit the Dreamcast.

And I was certainly aware of Maple Story before it was officially released here. And of course I mentioned WoW as the launch of the GaaS movement, but that’s not strictly accurate, I personally know people who lost a fortune to their extremely expensive Ultima Online addiction in 1997/98.

I am still not convinced that the experience of those gamers was any better or worse, me having been there in person. The kids in my life seem perfectly content with their Animal Crossings, Minecrafts and even Robloxes. The millions of people in Fortnite don’t seem mad about it. I sure was angrier about that Resident Evil business at the time than people are about the Resident Evil remakes now. Hell, I got pulled from playing a fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2 by an even better JRPG in Metaphor ReFantazio, and neither of those games features any MTX or service stuff. And of course that’s not mentioning the horde of games in the 20-40 range that are way better and more affordable than anything I had access to in the 90s.

People are nostalgic of the nostalgia times, reasonable or not, and time has a way of filtering out the nastiness, especially if you were too young to notice it. I was wired enough to hear the lamentations of the European game development community being washed away by Nintendo and Sega’s hostile takeover of the industry and their aggressive imposition of unaffordable licensing fees. I was aware of the bullshit design principles being deployed to milk kids of their money in arcades. I had strong opinions about expansion packs and cartridge prices. It’s always been a business, it’s always been run by businessmen.

Best you can do is play the stuff that’s good and ignore the rest.

Second best you can do is be publicly mad at the business driving unreasonable regulations that are meant to do the public a disservice.

Third best you can do is start archiving pirated romsets to privately preserve gaming history, blemishes and all, so we get to keep having this argument when the next generation of gamers are out there claiming that Fortnite used to be cool when it was free and had a bunch of games in there instead of requiring you to sign off your DNA to be cloned for offplanet labor or whatever this is heading towards.

They absolutely do. The market is full of remasters, remakes and re-releases. Having the originals readily available presumably diminishes the value of those, by the count of publishers.

That is not the same as saying that old games are available. Most of them are not, the market keeps reissuing the same handful of hits and landmark games (although we’re in an era of deep cuts now, we even have a Pocky & Rocky remaster, somehow). But they can’t set up regulations where you are allowed to lend out Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin but not Resident Evil 2, so here we are.

No, I’m arguing that if you’re trying to identify an era where the industry at large was not overmonetizing that’s your timeframe: From the death of arcades to the birth of modern casual gaming/F2P/Subscription services. By the numbers that’d be 2001-2005.

Before then you have arcades acting as the first window of monetization, where a whole bunch of console games started and where a lot of the investment went. After that you’re balls deep in modern gaming, with games as a service that are still live today, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story.

That’s a handful of years, at best. Any other interpretation has to ignore huge chunks of the industry that were behaving in the same way that makes people complain today. Either you dismiss arcade gaming despite it being the tentpole of the entire industry or you’re dismissing the fact that subscription and MTX games were already dominating big chunks of the space.

So no, it’s not 24 years. It never was 24 years.

And for the record, we knew at the time. We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997. I’ve been stuck in nerdrage Groundhog Day for thirty years.

Well, no, we’re talking about everything. Everything before 2010, explicitly.

I would guess most people just fill in whatever moment of their childhood there was when they would buy a thing and enjoy a thing and not worry about it too much.

Me being me (see the old codger self-identification up there), I substitute in the late 80s and 90s, when I would plead and beg for coins to squeeze in another 60 second gaming session and then go on to save for months in order to get a lesser version of that same experience at home for anywhere between 60 and 90 bucks (140-220 adjusted for inflation).

In the grand scheme of my memories, the five years after arcades were relevant and before Microsoft started charging a monthly fee to play online and Facebook started a games division are too short of a blip to consider a golden age. My nostalgia is on ranting angrily about having to purchase Street Fighter 2 for the fourth time and having Capcom re-sell the PSOne version of Resident Evil a third time for the privilege of having added analogue stick controls.