I am so glad to hear this! Thank you for sharing, I was anticipating the results of this!

Well, the Monster Hunter Wilds Beta test ended. I’m devastated honestly, because I didn’t get to play it enough! It started the day I had work and ended 2 hours after I got off today. I misread the timezone and I thought it ended on the 4th and 11:59am in my timezone. It ended at like 8pm or so.

So that’s too bad! Other than that ~8 hour treat that I thoroughly enjoyed, I’ve finally gotten around to Dragon’s Dogma 2 and I’m enjoying it as well (though slighted now after my favorite series was ripped away from me). It feels a little floaty for some of the characters, but it so far has been a good experience. I’ve been in a bit of a gaming slump so it’s been nice to relax some and play some nostalgic games right as winter is hitting.

The gaming slump I was in had me pretty much only playing Phantom Brave and sifting through little games like Sonic Mania, so I’m looking forward to the games I have on my radar cause it’s really the first time in a while!

Oh also, Amanda the Adventurer 2 came out and my partner and I played through it a little bit. It’s pretty good, although it isn’t the most straightforward. We had to use a guide for quite a bit of it and, while we were close to the right track for each puzzle, we just were not on the ball with what the developers wanted from us. I think the first game was a lot like that though if I remember, and so really what matters more with that in mind is how they continue the story and the atmosphere, which they really nailed. The perfect amount of corporate conspiracy supernatural demon cult technological red herring horror.

All in all, I guess being an adult means winter is gaming time cause I’ve been pretty much too busy the rest of the year to really want or have time to game. For me, a big part of gaming is how I’m feeling, sometimes I want point and pop, sometimes I want laid back, sometimes I want something new, and sometimes I want to make numbers go big. And sometimes, I want to do other things that aren’t gaming, which makes actually gaming feel a little guilty.

That’s funny, I feel the opposite about Deadlock! There’s not really a MOBA first person shooter that is out there, particularly one with such an in depth movement system that is fairly ubiquitous for each character. It does have a skill ceiling, but I would say for casual play, especially starting out, it’s mostly about being patient brick wall and playing the denial game to force mistakes that you can punish.

It’s effectively a first person MOBA with characters that you might see in Paladins. It feels really good, but it is intense for sure – my biggest issue is map navigation and learning it as a whole. But I also really like technical gameplay, one of my favorite games is Smash Bros. Melee so this is just an extension of that love.

I would say if you wanted to give it a shot (if you haven’t already) give each character a shot in the training ground. Get a small feel for their abilities and it’ll help you get a sense of not only what feels fun for you, but also what to expect from the opponents! Edit: I had read your comment over again after I posted of course and I had forgotten that you did go into the testing ground. Sorry! lol. End edit. And for items, that’s a bit harder, I personally don’t care much and just go by passives that sound helpful. Just click once though, double clicking will buy and then sell the item.

Which, in a way is a testament to my first paragraph. Patience is key ;)

In regards to the beans -

Buy dried if you want to have beans for dinner tomorrow night, and begin preparing them with dinner tonight.

Buy canned if you need dinner tonight and don’t want to begin preparing tomorrow’s dinner in addition to tonight’s

Yes and no. Some games you just cannot be patient about, as part of the whole selling point is the community in the moment. For example, the way in which hype went for Helldivers 2 pretty much necessitated that if you weren’t part of the community in the first 3 months then you missed out on a lot of “storytelling”.

This would go for most multiplayer games. Single player games though have a lot more freedom to be late to the game, so to speak ;)

Otherwise, for me personally it usually just comes down to the IP. Monster Hunter is my go-to, so it’s sort of a no-brainer for me to go for the new game as they come out barring any major issues or personal life events, I get them. I did buy Cyberpunk on release, however that was more because I wanted to see what my new 3080 could do and I was looking for a solid single player game, and I didn’t encounter nearly as many problems as other players did. But, I haven’t gotten the DLC for it because I haven’t been looking for that kind of game again yet.

Being ready for the game is another aspect I take into consideration, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was something I was pretty highly anticipating, but after hearing about the release issues and remembering what DD:DA was like to replay, I realized that I wasn’t ready for it again at release. However now it’s on sale and I’ve been out of gaming for a few months outside of small old games on my Steam Deck once in a while. I picked it up and I’ve been enjoying it.

So I think patient gaming really comes down to having the understanding of the social aspect the game is trying to sell - sometimes it’s marketing (2077) and sometimes it’s the nature of a game that’s fun to play with other people. Getting games like Phasmaphobia, Dale & Dawsons, they aren’t really going to be that fun if you’re multiple years late to the game. Similarly, if your friend just finds out about the game late, it’s just a smaller niche, being your friend group instead of random people in public lobbies, at which point you can expect to play that game a handful of times before your group drops it forever, lol.

Is the average fortnite player of voting age?

10 Billion, 10 decillion, a lotta suing going around.

Why criticize your country when they allow you to do great things like run a business! Why be afraid of your government if you have nothing to hide and nothing to criticize about it!

AI does give more reasoning than a forum might, that’s true.

Most arts are exempt due to the nature of them. Music, visual art, etc, the resources they take can be fairly ecofriendly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be.

I was actually just thinking about this from an article that got posted, “Can music be sustainable?” and I was thinking about the production and supply side of it, like with records and CD’s, or in the case of books, print and cloud. As an author, there’s options for how you publish your book, but I would imagine not many think about how they publish being more or less eco-friendly than other alternatives.

It’s an interesting question – do paper books take more resources than cloud-streamed books (via Kindle)? I would imagine not, but they do need to process the paper and then ship the copies. But, Kindles need to be produced, and AWS needs to exist to serve them via the cloud.

Similarly for music - does the process of making records and shipping them have a bigger impact than we realize? The article itself was talking about touring emissions, but it got me thinking about the product side of things too with CD’s, records, and streaming music.

Also, back to the topic at hand, I think any service business could have the potential to earned a million dollars ethically, a lot of the factors just come down to luck and opportunity. My father is a photographer, he could earn a million dollars with his business if he had the right number of clients. All it could take is a viral TikTok and suddenly he’s the most requested photographer in the state. In a way, businesses have a social media lottery now, where virality can make you a millionaire as long as you can keep up with the demand. We see it happen with individuals too who get meme status and a bunch of interviews.

You’re spot on with that, I would think.

And to the end user who doesn’t know what they’re doing, the end result is the same or the AI one will get them “further”.

I say this because if you’re following forums, chances are you’re following guides, which means you don’t understand what it is you’re doing. Which is fine, I typically don’t either, which is why I have a harder time with Linux.

But realistically, following the guide of Stackoverflow will hit a hiccup and you will be stuck. Following AI, things might not work and need to be troubleshooted, but it will continue answering questions until the two of you put together something that sort of works.

Not because of AI, but because the person kept trying. AI only made it so they didn’t need to understand.

Third world Bitcoin miners, the energy it costs to run block chain math and transactions, and the harvesters of the materials of the hardware.

But in terms of capitalism, only 3 exploits is pretty low so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, you’re no different than myself or anyone else existing with a computer, you just got a bit luckier.

(This is really only to point out that there are few businesses where exploitation cannot exist, namely those of small businesses, and even then, they exist in capitalism which bred the exploitation. That is to say, you just can’t get away from it. This is not a critique of you, and also, congratulations! That’s quite incredible :) )

The Boys is a good one, and an interesting one specifically because it plays to the StarWars-Imperialist / DC-Marvel-Authoritarian types. Garth Ennis, who wrote for The Punisher comics and of course, The Boys, is vehemently anti-everything that these types of authoritarians stand for.

Yet despite his hatred of them, he writes them exceptionally well in a way that is lost on the less observant viewers (man I just love that phrase lol). The people who love the Punisher for the wrong reasons are the very same people who love The Boys for the wrong reasons, it’s actually crazy how much crossover there is between the two pieces.

I think The Boys (show) also played up this aspect as a way to vilify power seeking behavior to the Conservative crowd by mocking Homelander outright, and subtly by showing the effects on The Boys (the group themselves and their struggles with power and how they use it). Very similarly to Sunny, there is a shift in the way The Boys is perceived by the conservative crowd around Season 3, as the writers were amping up their highlighting of the issues specifically because idiots were perpetuating Storm-lander’s sexualization of weaponized dehumanization (i.e. getting off on Nazi romance) - in the show so much so that even Homelander was like dude that’s fucked up.

The issue of course is that Homelander is justified to these idiots, so making him look silly and dumb comes to be one of the only ways that a specific demographic will understand that his actions are bad – which of course, they get offended by and do not like, because they’ve wanted to emulate Homelander the whole time. Characters like the right-wing Stepdad and the Podcaster Listener at the convenience store show how an individual can fall into the cycle of hatred perpetuated by the media and the entire point is completely lost on them because Homelander lasering those liberals was exactly what he should have done.

Part of it is scary, because I don’t believe it’s Marvel and cartoons that are breeding this mindset. These people are conservative christians who listen to talk radio and watch the news, and they are not being inspired by characters like Homelander, they were already like this. Characters like Homelander or the Punisher are just placeholders, scapegoats, a way for these hateful individuals to self-insert themselves into media. This does not mean that the answer is culling these characters existence, but rather continuing to highlight their faults and flaws in order to re-engage people to show them what it is like to actually be a good person.

I feel like the real reason Democrats would be attacking her would be due to her happily accepting donations from Republican led sponsors, aiming to actively sway Democratic voters instead of specifically both, and the distance that she has from actual election given that she’s not on the ballot in a number of states and is posing herself as the anti-war candidate despite saying that Russia invaded Ukraine because they needed to defend themselves from nukes. Odd how it’s okay to be apologetic to Russia but not Israel. You must understand - as a third party they can claim to have a plan for world peace, but what members in Congress will sponsor those bills? Even if Jill Stein did become President, who is approving her policies?

All that aside – she does very little in between election years. The Green Party as a whole has accomplished less of its supposed goals while having far more funding than the SRA. I would also expect that the leader of the Green Party practice what she preaches, as her and her husband have stock in just as many oil companies as the Democrats do. So quite honestly, it’s hard to see her as anyone but a faux candidate who shows up to take money from Green Party voters, preventing actual change from happening with that money because it’s going into a candidacy that will go nowhere.

If she cared, she would campaign for her donations to be given to something that would actually have meaningful effects, and she would push for more local candidates to run. The sad fact of the matter is that the Green Party has candidates who start out Green then move to a different party and are completely happy taking donations from Big Oil just like Kyrsten Sinema.

To call the Democrats a joke party when the tactics of the Green Party have been laughable is just one reason why they aren’t taken seriously. Another would be this quote:

there are more open socialists in just the New York state legislature right now (8, all caucusing together, will be 9 next year) than have been elected total above the local level for the Green Party (5). even accounting for party switching, this expands to just 9 people in history.

We can also just look at the Public Office Holders for the Socialists and the Green Party.

In short – The Green Party is the vote of choice because there is a Presidential candidate, but they offer nothing else through the four years. People are asking where the Democrats have been for them, what about the Green Party? Why are they all too happy to take money from you but do nothing in between for local activism? People are saying that the Democrats only provide lip service when they say things like supporting a two state solution, but lip service from the Green Party is totally fine? The Socialists or the DSA seem to at least aim for actionable goals, but is there no support for them because there’s no Presidential candidate? We’ve also seen that they (Socialists) actually have a chance of being elected if they run on a democratic platform and push bills that we can be proud of, something that historically cannot be said for members of the Green Party.

I hope this provides some insight on why people, not just Democrats, don’t feel like the Green Party is a worthwhile option.

What are some of the things you can’t find outside of Amazon?

For me, I’ve noticed that a lot of items just seem to be resellers from Alibaba or wherever else to get vast quantities for low prices. Amazon even has it set up so that sellers can just ship from the source, so the reseller has nothing but the listing.

Other more niche items can exist, but I think they could be found. Recently I was looking at stuff for record players, and there’s a fair amount f ones on amazon that don’t seem available elsewhere, but I think it just requires searching a bit harder for longer.

I formed a barometer for measuring comedy and it’s perceived ripple effect on society. Look at the comedy piece, the joke, the theme as a whole, whichever element, and then ask - does it highlight the issue, or does it perpetuate it? It may be the case that the intention of the piece to be a commentary denigrating fascism, but if it does a poor job conveying that message it might just look like an over-the-top approval of it.

An example of this that hit me close to was for It’s Always Sunny during 2016, the insane “I can do whatever I want” antics that some Americans were replicating was seemingly getting higher and the crossover between people quoting the show in the wrong ways just made me realize that maybe the show hadn’t done a good enough job presenting itself to less observant viewers. Well they also felt the same way because they really ramped up the highlighting of the issues after season 12, in a way that is presented in a different fashion.

This of course, was disliked by that specific crowd - there’s a few people who aren’t hateful who just don’t like the new presentation and that’s fine (they’re wrong of course! lol). It wasn’t uncommon for a few years to see people rage about how the show went woke, and still happens but less often now because they all got angry and dropped the show (Newsflash asshole, they were talking about you the whole goddamn time!).

Anyway, as mentioned with Starship Troopers, this happens with a lot of popular media in the conservative sphere, as can be seen with Idiocracy. There’s a ton of other examples too, but we’re all aware of how often this occurs.

It seems to be what’s popular these days

Spotify playlists I guess?

What a weird show that was lol

How ephemeral.

I can’t wait for it to be used for important long term information.