I think every few years I’m reminded this game exists, and go in to try to check it out - and I still have some account issue where my email is in use but it also won’t send a reset code.

I know it’s easy to see Zionists and Christian nationalist psychopaths, and fear the irrationality of so much of the world, but that’s not the full nature of religion - and many of us see much more than that.

I mean, many of us have faith beyond that. I gave $10 to a homeless guy today. I trusted beyond rationality he wasn’t going to spend it on a bottle of scotch. Even when it’s trust in other humans, that’s faith. Even when it doesn’t make sense, trust and faith in people’s empathy, or a higher purpose keeps some people going.

I’m definitely an atheist, but occasionally I’ve seen spots of really nice elements to religion - that have often become less visible in the recent cases of religious extremism.

Actually, that’s Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD.

Mario!? Who would have thought Nintendo would revive one of their oldest properties?

Would we ever have a chance of tying employee termination to a “reason”? Eg, if the company has decided to end a certain venture, downsize, or is down in revenue, each could be a reason - but if investor releases contradict those, then they could be investigated for it and possibly have the termination reversed, much like many of the recent DOGE firings (because no one in Congress said to downsize)

Probably a vague and incomplete thought.

When that’s characters, I just accept it. Like, “Oh, I guess I don’t get to try out this character? I’ll level up others instead and see how well I can do.”

Oh, what a fucked up world we live in that we see a school shooting as “not so bad, all things considered”…

I’m undoubtedly kind of frustrated about this “proving tariffs right” - but it remains to be shown whether this works. Very likely, even if/when they achieve scale, prices won’t come down for a very long time.

And it skips over the fact that there were so many ways to achieve this end without causing so much harm to so many industries that can’t do the same.

I play a gacha game and have spent $0 on it. But I can imagine that sort of psychological insulation is not quite so common.

So in a lot of ways, it’s just the Asian term for loot box games, something that western games shied away from a bit after the Battlefront 2 controversy and EU attention, which Disney got embroiled in.

I’d counter with examples like Gabe Newell and Steam.

Gabe’s estimated worth is around $6bil. Steam is commonly regarded as the cheapest source of games, and has some of the highest average pay at Valve. There are absolutely arguments to be made around exploitation within the CS:GO gambling market, but that’s still probably not a majority of Valve’s business and income, and they’d have similar numbers regardless. They made a good product, and have generated value from it.

Fine, one exception, right? Except with low visibility on their own internal practices, there’s probably many other wealthy people like them - who have contributed something valuable, which puts them on the first rung of a machine that will, almost through comparatively little effort on their part, catapult their wealth.

There’s something to be said about what happens naturally through inertia, rather than due to willful malice. We are seeing lots of willful malice, make no mistake - but quite a lot of it is simple indecisiveness. A CEO who is shown a study by his shareholders that if you offer one raise, everyone will want one - and decides to just go with the suggestion not to give any raises. A wealthy person whose accountant has the idea of hiding taxes offshore, just because “everyone is doing it”.

These people would not be harmed by tighter restrictions on investment opportunities, closing the loopholes letting people borrow from themselves in so many absurd ways. But many of them are not nearly so active in the exploitation as you seem to suggest.

To extend the example to someone like myself; I would generally say I make more income than I need to survive. I’m no millionaire, but to support myself I don’t need much. I also have no workers underneath me. In these current times, I have done my best to locate worthwhile causes to give up some of that money to. But that act takes time and energy I don’t always have, and given my habits I have a LOT of mailers and spam from less reputable charities of many kinds. Bill Gates founded a charity, but it’s easy to imagine many billionaires won’t bother.

And to further extend my own example: I would be okay with paying more in taxes if it meant a safer world for people with less means than myself - people who often do more valuable work for the world like teachers, nonprofits, and social workers. The task of allocating that distribution and sending checks myself just isn’t something I know how to do easily. I do my best, but it’s stressful and I often worry about whether I’m getting exploited by bad causes.

Again - I’ll emphasize that everything you’re saying is horrible about billionaires is very true about a sizable number of them - probably most we could name. And, I think in a fair future system, it would be much harder to become a billionaire due to tax nets redirecting wealth to better causes. But I also think some current billionaires have been riding a wave of a broken system without actively wanting it to be harmful.

The point, though, is not to garner sympathy for a small minority of a small minority. The point is that their capacity to effect change through their wealth is important enough for the act of change that we shouldn’t actively antagonize them all by incorrectly grouping them. We’re coming for their wealth, yes, but not for their heads (unless they’ve cheated or stolen their way up). And that wealth is meant to be put to good use.

And newsflash, any of us with retirement accounts are making use of that same stock market.

It’s like blaming anyone with a smartphone for exploiting rare mineral mining. It is absolutely fair to hate the game instead of the players (even the successful ones), especially when so much of its designed to disconnect you from the elements of dehumanization.

The issue I have with this sentiment is that some percentage of the rich made active pursuits to deny our freedoms and destroy democracy; while others were…just quiet and uninvolved in politics.

What’s more, much as it makes sense to change our hyper-capitalistic society, this is the society we’re working within in order to make change. Even printing a poster that explains why capitalism is bad costs money. By that token, we will likely need some support from some wealthy people to make change. And yes, that support exists to some degree, and no, we don’t literally need to have “more money” than the opposition.

So maybe you were just shortening sentiments for the sake of a snarky post, which is fine. We can pursue better tax rates for wealthier people, while also pursuing criminal investigations and metaphorical guillotines for the Heritage Foundation. Literally seize all their money. If I’m to make one point though, you don’t want those quiet wealthy people to feel that the Heritage Foundation are their only friends.

I know, man. There’s lots of people I dream about taking a crowbar to. But when I’m done with the violent rhetoric in my head, I think of the most practical actions.

Two hours is the length of some high-budget media; eg, movies and plays.

I know that some games are slow-burn, but that’s something people have to weigh themselves. Ideally, you’d enjoy the slow burn itself. When I tried to “force myself through to the Good Part of Nier Automata”, I ended up hating the whole thing.

Given the tariff position, I’m curious if this will be the first time Nintendo decides to eat the loss on console hardware sales; something usually only other console makers have done.

Perhaps they think Trump will be on his way out. Or they’re eating into their cash reserves to prevent discussion of their consoles from getting political.

I found that this candidate’s campaign made a mistake. See? They jaywalked to reach their stage for a rally.

Now, raise your hand if you actually find that mistake to be important. That is an important and personal decision. By any normal standards, every candidate in every election has made mistakes. Just that the mistakes of the opponent were rape, insurrection, and repeated business failures.

Campaigns are short in some other countries; people aren’t often helped by getting signals about someone 8 months before elections.

In short, I accept basic adult criticism of Kamala, but not nearly enough to forgive people who voted against her. Yes, AIPAC has staggering influence in US politics, and sadly we couldn’t fix that with an election.

That’s the thing though; it has most definitely entered Duke Nukem Forever / No Man’s Sky levels of development hell wherein the result will never be satisfying. The best we can hope for is a Halo Infinite result where it’s “kinda fun” but inevitably comes nowhere near the hype.

My understanding is this has been the price of thousands of gaming communities enacting a “No politics” rule - people want to keep it external.

“This fucking piece of actual trash! He’s using the most broken character this game has ever put out, and trash talking over it like he’s ever fucked a woman. Literally eat a dick. What do you think, chat?…Oh. Holy shit. Sorry, I just saw some stuff about Trump, listen, I’m sorry, but we don’t talk politics here. It can get really toxic.”

Beyond Good and Evil 2.

I’m not even mad that we didn’t get the multiplanetary open world new-tech live-experience cooperative second coming. I’m mad we didn’t even get a simple, short singleplayer experience living off of the charm of the first one.

It’s possible translate has gotten better with AI. The old versions, however, were not necessarily using AI principles.

I remember learning about image recognition tools that were simply based around randomized goal-based heuristics. It’s tricky programming, but I certainly wouldn’t call it AI. Now, it’s a challenge to define what is and isn’t; and likely a lot of labeling is just used to gather VC funding. Much like porn, it becomes a “know it when I see it” moment.