pigeonburger
3d ago
I'm not sure it's so much complexity I'm avoiding now but games that don't respect my time.
I used to love JRPGs, it was my favorite genre. I can't really do it anymore. They seem like so much pointless busy work. Closest thing to one I've been able to play a bit of (and even then) is Triangle Strategy, and that's a tactical JRPG. I guess tactical RPGs I can still stomach a bit because fights feel like distinct chapters that I can do one and feel done with for the night while feeling I've actually moved forward.
On the opposite side, three genres I never imagined I would ever enjoy, have become my favorites: hard simulators (the harder and drier the game, the better), shmups and fighting games. All of which are so much more challenging and complex than JRPGs, which are usually only difficult if you're impatient and don't level up properly, but all of which feel so much more significant than raising arbitrary numbers because I need them to move forward.
pigeonburger
7d ago
In a sense, but homelessness has two crucial distinctions, it can be a temporary state for people who are very much "polite society material" but have hit a rough patch, and it also interacts a bit too much with said polite society, being a nuisance to its members and that chafing is encouraging them to be tougher on it. It's harder to feel compassionate towards the homeless if you have to endure their litteral excrement everywhere in your city.
pigeonburger
8d ago
It's often negative in the short term, but there are a lot of small causes that the news just doesn't care about and wouldn't mention if it weren't that some people made themselves a nuisance. It's a long term play, to not let your cause be forgotten or ignored. It's better to make people angry about you than let them ignore you.
For those specific examples, climate protestors have full elite backing now, the strategy is different. It's intimidation, they're used by the elites to show what they are willing to destroy if people don't bow down.
pigeonburger
8d ago
There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.
I would love to be proven wrong and for the officials and the police officers who went along with this to be thrown in jail, but at worst the police officers might be sacrificed. And while they shouldn't have executed unlawful orders, I have a harder time blaming them as it seems likely their fault is mere carelessness and not checking that the order was legitimate (after all, the government probably almost never sends bogus warrants to them), while the Agricultural Department would have to be power tripping for things to have happened as they are alleged to have.
pigeonburger
11d ago
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).
pigeonburger
11d ago
Americans can correct me if I'm wrong but from what I hear, their votes are worth the same. Seniority matters as to who decides who gets to write opinions. The most senior member of the majority (which is automatically the chief justice if he is in the majority) assigns redaction of the opinion to one of the members of the majority. Same happens for the dissenting opinion (most senior judge in the dissent, automatically the chief justice if he is dissenting with the majority, choses who writes the opinion).
So seniority is important, but not THAT important. What does matter though is that their opinion is taken into serious consideration by other judges. Ideally, a judge to the Supreme Court should never be a blindly partisan hack, but in practice it can (very charitably) said that they are at least preselected for an extreme adherence to one school of thought with regard to how flexible the Constitution should be. But a particularly eloquent opinion might be able to sway swing votes or even peel off a justice or two from the other bloc, so experience and quality as a justice matters.
"Tax Fairness for Every Generation"
Proceeds to increase how much money they'll siphon off the upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer
I'm quite pissed at this. And to add to the annoyance, since this is a budget change, it is unlikely an incoming Conservative government can realistically reverse it, as the assumption of the income this represents for the government will baked in to expenses. Cutting any spending here ends up being a battle, so it reprends more energy and focus the incoming administration will have to expend, and if they just reverse the change without cuts the Liberals will smugly say "but I thought we needed to get the deficit under control?"
pigeonburger
14d ago
Without the urgency of the current war encouraging the West to transfer arms to Ukraine, and especially if the West loosen economic sanctions on Russia following peace, Russia will replenish its arms stocks for the sequel war way faster than Ukraine can.
I got to agree that the highest achievement for a game is to be able to carry its narrative in its gameplay. To do the opposite of the often mentionned ludo-narrative dissonance and achieve ludo-narrative convergence.
Another example that attempts to achieve both kinds of narrative crafting (both through writing and ludo-narrative convergence) I'd say is Death Stranding. It only achieves ones of them (ludo-narrative convergence), the writing being symptomatic of a man who has been told too much he is a genius and started believing it. But the way the gameplay is structured seems to be tailor made to reinforce the game's theme: cooperation is better than isolation. The game forces you to forge ahead in areas that are without any infrastructure, and that is where things are at their most risky. Once the region is connected, you can build infrastructure, but the costs are usually exorbitant, requiring unfun grinding to achieve. But the online system sometimes puts other people's constructions in your game, the more time you spend in a region helping the NPCs the more help you get from other players, and what was once difficult treks across inhospitable terrain becomes trivial milk runs due to all the roads and bridges you've made. And eventually you're spending hours building a zipline network in the most challenging region of the game not even for yourself since you don't have to stay there anymore, but for other players to enjoy. The game makes you altruistic. Not by forcing cooperation onto you or by heavily incentivising it, that would be meaningless, but by making you feel grateful for other people's help and by making you feel the gratitude of others (those almost meaningless likes you get when someone mashes a button on infrastructure you built).
I don't know if I can think of any game in older generations that have achieved such a tight integration of narrative in its gameplay. It's the exact opposite of Spec Ops: The Line.
I think part is that the audience on Mac skewing older and more well-heeled, and that outside of multimedia, Macs were not very well equipped to play games for their era, especially for the price. If you wanted a computer for the kids to play games, there were usually cheaper and better suited alternatives. Cheap 8 bits micros were better for games than early monochrome Macs with only beeps, then Amigas were much better equipped with their dedicated sound and graphics chips, then with 486s and above and VGA and SVGA PCs were able to push more complex graphics.
pigeonburger
19d ago
What your narrative doesn't explain is why the US is considering dropping charges now - assuming that they actually are considering that and it's not just another deception.
Leftists and young democrats voters have to be thrown a bone because they're threatening not to show up to vote for Biden over Israel. It's just that.
Ultimately this is the reason why I consider Trump to be easily the best option americans have had in a long time. Of course a wise and devoted to the population's well-being president/king would be best, but at least a vanitous president is a lot easier to keep aligned with the population's wishes than the puppet of a PMC that believes they should be the one deciding what the population should desire. The former just has to be reminded that the population will love him if he does what they want. The only thing that seems to motivate the PMC to go along or pretend to go along with the population's wishes is the threat of losing to a populist who could undo their long term sociocultural engineering projects.
Nothing special really, my friends and I were mostly living in or around the same neighborhood, the bar in question was opened by a friend of ours and was the only pleasant place in the neighborhood, so it made for an obvious meeting place. Tuesday evenings were convenient for everyone the first few weeks, and after that we were just explicit in calling it our weekly tuesdays hangout. I think what helped is being explicit about it, and doing it on an "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" basis. There's also an open invitation to any friends, SO of the regulars. Anyone who wants to be there is welcome, but from the start we were already a stable core group of relatively mature and easygoing men, so there was little risk of personality clashes or drama spoiling it.
What strategies do Mottizens follow for a good social life?
Creating and following a tradition. For over 12 years my friends and I made a weekly habit of meeting at a specific neighborhood bar every tuesday evening. Not everyone is there every week, sometimes life gets in the way, but being there is the expected default, and we can assume we're busy those evenings and try not to schedule anything else then.
Sure, once a week is nothing compared to the socializing people used to do, but most people I mention this tradition to seem to envy it.
I was a big user for a couple of years here, after we got full legalization. Saying it kills motivation is right; I wouldn't say it does it directly, but indirectly by making you boring and okay with being bored. I've mostly stopped not because I made a choice to stop, but because my wife is now living with me, she doesn't use it and I don't think it would be fair for me to be so boring to be around when she's there. When she's not there, I usually have other things I want to do that would bore her but entertain me so I don't really need to make myself okay with boredom.
pigeonburger
21d ago
Yeah, the USSR almost kept up with the US militarily at the cost of the well-being of its citizens, while the US more than kept up with the USSR militarily while at the same time enjoying unprecedented growth and prosperity for its citizens.
pigeonburger
21d ago
And without that motivation, your experiment starts functioning far worse than capitalism.
Exactly, because capitalism is unique in not only assuming humans are greedy but counting on it.
seek and destroy
It's more remind and dissuade.
With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.
All true, but I'd point out that these are the reasons why the US is currently on top. For the most part, it's where the US is coming from, not necessarily where it's headed. For many of those, the US is headed away from them. Like for (2), selective scrutiny of business dealings and of regulatory observance for being on the wrong side of politics is increasingly visible in the US; I don't know if it's more or less the case than before, but it's certainly more high profile. Musk might not be facing jail right now, but there's a large group of people, in some states a majority, who would electorally reward public officials for finding any reason to go after him. There's a large (and growing) group of people who believe Musk (or anyone) should not have been able to make that much money in the first place and that such wealth can only have come from some illegitimate or immoral acts, and while these people are not in power right now (because the elites don't believe it, they just use it for electoral purposes), it could only take one populist rising at the wrong time to ruin the idea that the US is a safe place to do business in.
I don't think Metal Gear Solid would have been nearly as iconic if it didn't successfully replicate the look, sound and feel of an action movie. Sure, by today's standards it's not "hyper realism", but by the standards of the day it was.
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