I can at least understand that line of thinking. He spent a lot of his first term golfing. He didn’t build the border wall or repeal the ACA or do a lot of what he promised his supporters he would.

Still not an excuse. He did incredible damage in his first term and I expect this one to be worse.

And he’s not even saying he’s going to do Project 2025 but I expect him to.

I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

Gonna be weird.

Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?

Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.

I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.

What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.

I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.

I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.

My thought is that it’s revealing the construction and weak points of the death star. It may have been constructed in two hemispheres that were joined together, and that seam might have been the failure point where gassed were released when the internal pressure got too high.

Except then we should see the two hemispheres blow out from each other a bit, which they don’t.

It’s neither as simple as the article states nor what I see in the comments here.

It’s not just about staying on Trump’s good size to avoid his wrath, getting lucrative government contracts, or getting personal tax breaks. It’s also about stopping or rolling back regulations that would hurt profits.

Keeping the minimum wage down. Eroding worker’s rights, allowing the union busting tactics that Amazon is famous for. Removing consumer protections. Allowing mergers and acquisitions without all those pesky antitrust lawsuits. Rolling back environmentally regulations, staying on fossil fuels. Foreign policy that allows these companies to exploit cheap global labor and sell to the wealthy. Heck, Musk at least seems rather cozy with Putin- i would not be surprised to see these billionaires try to roll back Russian sanctions.

Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.

Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

But would sovcits even register? Or would they just show up to the polls to harass workers with a bunch of made-up pseudo-legalize documents they found on the Internet?

That’s a good point. I’ve decided I’m not going to vote for Obama.

Tragic that someone so old still has to work a drive through to make ends meet

I’m trying to verify these numbers and I’m not finding much.

The closest I can find to a source is that these were claims from Moshe Elad in articles in Tablet Magazine and Algemeier.

In Mashal’s case, he was the treasurer of Hamas at the time and Elad seems to be just attributing the entirety of the organization’s assets to him personally.

I’d be really interested to see if anyone else can find more concrete proof of this claim than I could.

Except that’s not the whole story.

The song was co-written by Victor Willis (the lead singer) and Jacques Morali (their producer). Originally, executive producer Henry Belolo was also credited, but his name was later removed after lawsuits.

Willis is straight (as far as I can tell publicly in any case) and has indeed claimed that the song is simply about the YMCA and has nothing to do with gay culture.

However, Morali is gay. He was essentially the founder of the group and has been quite explicit that the group was created to because he “[wanted to do something only for the gay market”](wanted to do something only for the gay market). The name “Village People” is a reference to Greenwich Village, a gay community.

So we have 2 writers credited. One of whom was the singer who was hired on and later left while the group continued in without him, who claims the song was not about gay people at all. The other was gay, was basically the founder, and has been explicit about how the whole project was intended to target gay people all along.

So I suppose every listener needs to judge for themselves. But my own conclusion is that it’s 100% about gay culture, just like most of the rest of their catalog. I could only speculate as to why Willis wants to distance himself from that.

Maybe he never expected to become a gay icon and was never comfortable with it. Maybe he’s trying to to make sure that the song appeals to the largest market possible for the sake of getting more royalties. Or maybe there’s something else going on.

Yeah it sounds like something mainstream media would accuse TST of doing. Like, I strongly suspect that most of the “movements” to include pedophiles in diversity conversations are really just bigots astroturfing because that just makes more sense.

And I still think it’s worth supporting TST just for the legal work they do alone.

Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!

Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.

I’ll admit I’ve never been a member of either organization, but I have friends who were TST members and last year a good chunk of that congregation split off to join GoS. And they’ve since helped others so the same. So this is basically how they’ve described it to me.

From Wikipedia, it looks like GoS started in 2018 as a UK split-off for various concerns. Wikipedia focused on specific issues the UK branch had, but I was also told a huge factor was the logistics and goals. TST is a very US-focused organization that puts a lot of resources into US legal battles. They also had strict controls over branding, policies, and structures that just didn’t suit them.

The main reason for the schism in my local chapter was more specific. TST regularly streams online services and last year had a leader from a chapter who advocated for welcoming, accepting, and celebrating people regardless of sexual preference. Which sounds great…, except he also explicitly called for the inclusion of pedophiles as part of LQBTQ+. Despite pedophilia being in direct opposition to tenents 1 and 3. The local chapter (and several other chapter) complained to their national representatives and the response was… Nothing. No statement from the national organization, no consequences for that leader. Just swept under the rug.

Also of significance was allegedly there was some sort of documentary released in 2023 called “The Lies of the Satanic Temple” by Dead Domain that claims to expose fraud and abuse from TST leadership. I have not watched it (although coincidentally I have watched a couple of her videos on videogames- she had a really interesting interview with the creators of Paradise Killer), but I heard that it caused several other congregations across the country to split off of TST.

GOS is much less centralized. It’s more of a collection of guidelines, resources, and suggestions. Some chapters keep their own branding, like the House of Heretics in Seattle.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to me like GOS is more focused on replacing the role of the church in an individual’s life with a secular alternative. They do charity work like adopt-a-highway, food drives, clothing drives, etc. A lot of the members are young, queer, alternative people, and if their families disowned them they don’t have a support system. They have support for things like non-religious sobriety programs. I almost get the impression it’s like a religious rehab for people who grew up in very restrictive or abusive churches. At Pride this year the local chapter was doing “un-baptisms”. They have potlucks and parties and other social events. I think some of these things they might have carried over from TST.

They keep a much lower profile than TST. They don’t engage in the legal battles that TST does, and a lot of the people I know who left TST still respect the organization for fighting that fight. Personally… I’m really confused as to why GOS still keeps the “satanic” imagery of TST because I thought the point of that was to serve as a counterpoint to Christians in those legal battles.

Personally I’m just introverted and not interested in all that “community” and “networking”. But I’ve donated to both organizations for the work they do.

Edit: in the interest of fairness I’ve seen claims that the Dead Domain documentary has been debunked.

I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.

Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.