You will never know the hunger of a 15 year old boy unless you were one

Jellyfin doesn’t have this problem

A great deal of the industry is powered by debt financing. And the CEO typically holds the job by gatekeeping access to that borrowed money.

Labor solidarity is predicated on being able to participate in the market. It isn’t as if people don’t try to Unionize. But if your office or your business or your entire industry can be casually strangled to death by the financial sector when a plurality demand a raise, there’s quickly nothing left to unionize.

Maybe. Or maybe companies like EA would implode under their own dysfunction and leave a multi-billion dollar hole in the industry for China to fill.

A lot of American companies do seem willing to commit suicide before they pay their workers equitably

Excited for Battlefield 7

When you’re working on a big enough project, you’ll inevitably find yourself acting as a condom between people who don’t understand your niche field and the thing you’re all building together.

That’s not unique to Claude. However, the fact that Claude can drop big salty loads far faster than you can catch them does present additional challenges.

I thin we can all agree there is a happy middle ground

I don’t think there IS a middle ground. These are two very distinct historical styles. And if you tried to find a spot in the middle, everything would clash and it would look horrendous.

Nice and personal… Soulless.

Is a black/white color actually scheme soulless? Or is it merely the absence of clutter, no accumulation of wear-and-tear, and the blue filter used for the lighting?

Put six people in that black/white house for a week and it’ll be a cluttered mess. Throw a yellow-filter on the lighting and it’ll look more warm and inviting.

The only correct response

It would have been goated if it wasn’t a gacha game and battlepass timesink

I really loved the primary storyline and the artistry of the world.

I absolutely despised the grinding, especially the dungeons, where it feels like they just gave up on anything being fun. You’d walk through those big double-doors and be in some endless hallway full of slightly-too-difficult encounters. Then you’d get “Pay2Win?” dangled in your face.

Definitely understand how they made so much money. But fuck, what a waste of art assets.

I think DOTA2 came quite a long way from the cheese factory that was the original WC3 map packs.

I actually went with a friend to a tournament, and was genuinely impressed at how the game felt watchable in a way you’d hope for a football or basketball game to be entertainment. The gameplay was fast-paced and full of reversals. The announcers helped fill in what a newb wouldn’t immediately know about different builds and strategies. You got a steady buildup of excitement into those final minutes, when a timely save or kill could swing the match. Even the creep farming had a bit of tension, as you watch the teams race for the upper hand.

MOBAs were a natural fit for eSports. I get why it took off. Shame it hasn’t endured.

There was an incredibly steep learning curve with Elden Ring. But once I got to the Midgame, I was having a good time.

I didn’t actually ever finish it, because I kept fucking off for 20 hours at a time just looking at all the pretty buildings and exploring dungeons. And I absolutely agree, it’s really hard to pick up on what even constitutes as “Quest” in the traditional RPG sense. You just kinda find stuff and talk to people and hope you’re moving in the right direction.

But I kinda consider that its charm. I feel like FromSoft can keep moving in this direction, shedding more and more of the interface, and eventually end up with a game where you’re just a fucking person in a world who gets to do things. And maybe one of those things is to save the world. Or maybe you’re just in this incredibly rich and deep sandbox, full of wonder and beauty, and you have a good time until you’re done.

Can I play on my cell phone, though?

So hard to find a good cell phone game. It’s basically Slay the Spire, an old FF remake, or go fuck yourself.

I had a really hard time with the interface. Kept accidentally hitting attack buttons (particularly, that grenade trigger) when I was trying to socially interact. Failing missions because you tickled the wrong button and got the entire screen filled with angry cops really was not my style.

You know, I had a good time with the original.

It was the sequel that really put me off. They messed with the interface so that I couldn’t figure out how to play the damned game anymore. But they didn’t meaningfully vary the core combat, such that I very quickly got the sense I wasn’t playing anything new.

Really deeply disappointed by Claire Obscura: Expedition 33

The combat is semi-turn based, so it feels unnaturally slow and clunky. But then it requires you to respond to the boss animations with twitchy reflex commands if you want to have any hope of beating even the first couple of levels. So, I’m supposed to strategize on offense but twitch-defend on defense? Bleh.

The game also took a hard turn into gratuitous gore very quickly. And the gore didn’t really add anything to the story or even the atmosphere. Especially when the opening scene is people turning into flower petals, implying the much more romantic melodrama. The scene on the beach is this sharply contrasted pile of mutilated corpses that took the game from sweetly sad to needlessly gross.

Like, if you want to do an Elden Ring knock off with some French flair, cool? But this got a zillion awards. It shouldn’t feel so derivative and hack.

I tried to click “Purchase”, but my computer just ordered me the full Tenshi Muyo series instead, while displaying a waging finger and pipping in Arthur Knight’s voice saying “Nuh-uh-uh” on a loop.

I’d go one further and note that environmentalism isn’t exactly endemic outside the capitalist sphere of influence. The USSR was dirty af. Chinese Communists were openly antagonistic to environmental movements until the early '00s, when air quality in Beijing got so bad that the national leadership was forced to reconcile with it.

The real virtue of socialist policy is in it’s ability to adapt democratically, while capitalists are bound up in authoritarian modes of production. But if the public at-large doesn’t see the benefit of a good policy, there’s nothing inherent to the mode of production that makes it cleaner.

Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.

Regulated capitalism is just a tiger by the tail. As soon as you lose you grip, it eats you.

The only way to keep mega-corps from writing policy is to abolish them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t wealthy people try to beg, browbeat, or business plot a state government?

At some point, you need to eliminate the bourgeois class entirely. It’s us or them, over a long enough timeline.