MudMan

The Beginning got TONS of crap when it came out. DK2 as well, although a bit less so because it’s less of a departure.

I’ve gone back to both since and I agree with you that Populous was way ahead of its time and holds up much better than other strategy games of the time.

It is exactly the same beast. The beasts are the same. It’s the same picture.

I mean, respect to your extremely wrong preferences, friend. Not everybody has the same use case. I’m not too sure who feels the need to come all the way out to do PR for a multibillion dollar corporation specifically on the basis of not being super into playing the stuff they buy from them, but you guys are clearly out there and I hope you are living your best lives. I’m not gonna say the cultish vibes one sometimes gets from the Valve apologia aren’t concerning, but if it works for you it works for you.

For the record, I don’t even dislike Valve. They’re just a gaming first party like any other gaming first party. I buy stuff on Steam just like I buy stuff on PSN. It’s all good. And I do like most of their first party stuff. If they ever decide to get back in the business of actually making games I’ll probably check them out.

Also for the record, I do download and back up everything I buy on GOG. It all goes to the same backup space where I dump my BluRays and my CDs. And I absolutely have purchased most of the 2000+ games I own on GOG through sales, so I don’t know about the value part either. Just today I played a 30 year old game and bought a brand new game from 2024 on GOG, so…

Well, most of these run on Dosbox and you can download DRM free installer packages directly from their website, so there’s that.

But the Linux gaming crowd here keeps telling me how well Lutris and Heroic are supposed to work when I explain to them that I use a Windows handheld while my Steam Deck is gathering dust, so I’ll point them to this next time instead of just telling them those don’t quite do it for me.

All joking aside, yeah, I’d love GOG having a better client overall, including a Linux port, but the quality of the packages and the lack of DRM easily trump that, so still buy these on GOG.

All of these were already on GOG.

Buy them there instead.

dark

We do “my dick sweats”, for the same thing, which I now realize sounds super gross.

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

I haven’t faceplanted, but I have punched myself in the headset repeatedly. Turns out looking at things up close is not advisable when your face happens to have an invisible box strapped to it.

It’s not a matter of science vs belief, it’s a matter of law versus dogma.

Law is a consensus that, at least in a democracy, aims to set some rule and the consequences of it in advance so that whenever a case applies it is at least relatively predictable and applied equally in each case.

If you pass judgement based on the things you like, or in the religious beliefs you profess you’re not following the law, your imparting dogma. Imposing it, in fact, over others.

You can absolutely make unjust laws, but at least those are the result of a process. In a democracy you can at least understands what steps lead to rectifying an unjust law.

If a person with power decides they don’t like you and they apply that belief inconsistently, irrationally and without following consistent rules there is no recourse or path for society to correct itself (beyond violent revolt, presumably).

Judges don’t need to listen to their heart. Judges need to apply laws generated in a functional system that captures the will of an informed people in a predictable, equitable manner. Judges ruling based on personal beliefs, whether you agree with them or not, are a tyranical manifestation and a very scary thing.

Well yeah, but that’s not the one I’m talking about. I’d be referring to The Batman, the 2022 film starring… well, let’s be honest, starring Zoë Kravitz, but yeah, with Robert Pattinson as Batman. There are so many of these now that giving out titles is starting to be useless.

That one spends a bunch of time talking about how Bruce Wayne isn’t doing anythign with his money to help because he’s too busy seeking revenge and gets into the weeds about how charitable donations from billionaires end up being used. It’s weird. And long. But it’s actually alright.

I mean, somebody must have agreed, because they made a whole movie about it.

This tweet is the entire premise of The Batman.

It does end kinda going back to justifying why he’s more useful in the suit instead, but at least they spend a bunch of time talking about it, I suppose.

Yeah, ok.

I don’t want to speak for the OP, but… I’m guessing that’s what they’re saying.

I mean, this issue is not on the ballot elsewhere. Even conservatives who are actively trying to dismantle public health care won’t dare suggest that they want less public health care. At most they’ll tell you they found ways to invest more and then turn around and give that money to private managers. You certainly broke through the propaganda. I don’t think I’ve spoken to an American anywhere who has made a case for the current health care system. Polls suggest this issue, among other “aren’t Americans weird” stuff are wildly impopular with the actual population.

But I also constantly hear from Americans that it’s impossible to turn it around, that candidates who support these common sense moves are unelectable and that there is nothing they could ever do about it.

That part is what I don’t get. I mean, I’m familiar with elections not going my way, it happens to everybody, but holy crap. There’s a reason why this is not on the ballot elsewhere. You wouldn’t need an election to figure this out. Even in countries with the bare minimum of democratic guarantees and no money you would have the mother of all endless riots under these circumstances.

Me, personally, I’m not so much judgemental of the American public as I am baffled at their defeatism and conformism.

To be clear, I think being part of the problem isn’t the same as being malicious, hostile or stupid. I think being stubbornly naive about the system working the way it’s supposed to has its uses. It’s a powerful tool to get the corrupt to shy away from breaking the rules if enough people assume the rules will be followed.

But I also think we punched through that wall like a bunker buster dropping from orbit years ago and a lot of the US is a toad that has been simmered to being full-on al dente by this point. Well meaning people hoping to get through this as if it’s… you know, an actual democratic election are part of the problem despite themselves.

Honestly? The real feeling I get from this is being scared for the future. I do know that there are powerful forces seeing a business opportunity in that status quo that can be exported. And you can see the impetus towards eroding the safety nets here following marching orders from the far right, anarchocapitalist mothership all throughout the world. In some of the countries I’ve lived in there is already a push towards this model, just moderated by the existence of some sort of universal health care. Sure, even the bare minimum of public service care takes a TON of the edge off. Those ER bills are what some of my friends in those places paid for, say, having major surgery or good care while having a baby… but it’s a slippery slope.

Best guess, the left of the democrats in the primaries, for a start.

It’s not that you lack politicians who agree with the changes that are needed, it’s that they are seen as less electable than the guy who did tons of fraud and at least one confirmed rape, somehow. I don’t know that Americans are “bad people”, but the fact that these common sense positions aren’t the default, centrist view across both major parties is baffling.

It’s a clumsy way to put it, but it’s not wrong that the lack of universal consensus around these things in the US is confusing and unreasonable.

Stewart wasn’t retired, mind you. He’s had a show for the past two years. He only recently got cancelled for speaking of subjects Apple didn’t like.

Also, please don’t rehash our conversation. It’s still written up there. The only possible purpose of that exercise is to put together a straw man. I remember what I said.

You could have skipped to the last line, which is where we disagree and where I think democrats and their larger sphere of influence are repeating a catastrophic mistake.

He’s a campaign staffer. You’re a campaign staffer. Everybody is a campaign staffer until such time as the opposing force isn’t a fascist cult of personality.

If you don’t see that, you’re part of the problem. If Stewart is back to pretending that he can “restore sanity” by acting as if the other side had legitimate concerns that should be heard, he’s part of the problem. That’s not the game we’re playing anymore. If you didn’t realize the rules had changed when Trump won the first time, surely you must have noticed after January 6th, or when the poll numbers of the, again, actual rapist refused to climb down.

So no, his honest statements aren’t irrelevant. They’re a drop in a pond of, once again, information warfare. The wilful blind spots and bothsideism may be naivete or disingenuous misinformation, but my entire point is at this stage it doesn’t mater. They don’t belong. We’re past those. You either play the game we’re all playing or you’re playing for the other guys.

Yes. I don’t care about his mind.

He can speak his mind at home. He’s been doing that for years.

Can we at least agree that Stewart’s mind has many things in it, and choosing to turn a specific one into a TV show is a conscious decision? I’m not gonna convince you that we should be treating this entire election as an act of information warfare at all times, that much is clear, but man, for the sake of a shared reality, at least let me shake off the blindfold where framing is a random event and the most notorious political voice in a generation lacks any sort of influence.

If Jon Stewart doesn’t shape the political viewpoint of at least some liberals, then what the hell is he doing on TV? He can’t possibly be “injecting sanity into the discussion” and also be a completely harmless, neutral event in the political conversation.

Trump is just as old. Ask a Republican, a conservative pundit or a vaguely conservative voter and Trump is the peak of the human form, strong as an oak and in full posession of superhuman intellectual prowess.

You want to complain that a candidate is old? That’s the one you are supposed to be focusing on.

For the record, Sanders didn’t criticise Clinton. His followers did. Ruthlessly. Constantly. With this exact playbook. He tried to stop them and we all realized in horror he couldn’t. The berniebros didn’t lose the 2016 election, because they didn’t really influence much either way, but they sure as hell didn’t help.

What nobody is saying is that if you go into a test with a near-empty ink cartridge your hipsterism has outpaced your skill.

Refill that stuff going in or bring a second pen, you pleb.

Dragged out by whom?

Because we all watched and nobody did anything meaningful. The trumpies didn’t even win the last election and were willing to overrun the Capitol to complain about it being stolen. At some point all the violent fantasies have to either trigger some action or get realistic.

For now with “everybody shut up about Biden’s age and go vote when the time comes” I’d be just fine. Because, in case we forget in all the fervor, that stuff would also not have been a problem had Cinton won.