• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Yeah. To my knowledge this is basically the same shit deal that Hamas refused a few months (?) back. It doesn’t do anything other than give israel time to stockpile more weapons and wait until people go back to not giving a shit what happens in the Middle East.

    Which… is terrifying for Ukraine since we know the plan there is “Zeneskyy, you can either take this shit deal or we’ll make sure papa putin wipes you off the face of the Earth. Also, we will probably do that in 3 or 4 years anyway”.

    And people will eat it up as justification for why they helped kill democracy…



  • You apparently have a hateful right wing chud perform “secret” acts that will result in them getting a big push on a new platform.

    Also: Friendly reminder that the Vice of today is not the Vice of olde and that “Waypoint” is a brand that is run by one rando (who likely uses a LOT of AI to generate content…) and has none of the social or political values the old Waypoint had. For the old Waypoint, you are looking at Remap Radio (the three founder/owners are Ricardo Contrarez, Rob Zacny, and Patrick Klepek and they semi-regularly collaborate with Austin Walker and, when she is available, BAFTA Award Winner Natalie Watson. And Janet Garcia is a “newbie” but is fucking awesome).


    Aww, the chuds must be angry that I am not giving their shit goblin his due credit for asking musk for a streaming deal.




  • Just as a bit of a counter to all the Isaac love (and, don’t get me wrong, I love Isaac):

    BoI is probably the best roguelite… from the early 2010s. The gameplay is ridiculously solid but the upgrade design and drop system has too much in common with the roguelikes of old where you would often lose a run because the purple potion was instant death on this run.

    There are just so many upgrades and synergies that you might become completely unkillable on floor 2 of one run and then have your entire build ruined on floor 5 of a different run. I STRONGLY encourage playing with the wiki or https://tboi.com/ open on a second device/display to avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.

    On PC there are mods that integrate this into the game (and I think you can use it with achievements after your first matricide?). And I think Edmund has said he wants to add that to the base game sooner than later?

    But contrast that with games like Hades where basically every single upgrade is a pure upgrade and you have good item descriptions before you pick anything up (so it is mostly a case of deciding what damage types you want to spec for). Or Dead Cells where you can easily swap out a weapon if you decide you didn’t like it. But in Isaac? You are basically chugging mystery potions on every floor.




  • Friendly reminder: Deleting your account won’t accomplish what you think it will.

    Facebook will still keep all data that is associated with other users as per their own disclaimer. They also still keep logs that are "disassociated with personal identifiers. "

    So all training can still occur. And understand what while Jane Smith may have deleted her account, they still have all the data it takes to indicate that User 12345 was tagged in photos with John Smith at the Burger King on 404 Fake St. And, because of that, the data that User 12345 had previously provided is ALSO John Smith’s data. And Fred Wilkerson since he was at that Burger King once. And so forth.

    And ALL that data is still there for training.

    So do what you gotta do to make it less appealing to other users. But understand your data is already out there and is never going away. Same with reddit and all other social media (which includes Lemmy).


  • Yeah. That is, and was, some “All lives matter” bullshit that then proceeds to insist that people who had received documented threats in the past and were seeing the exact same attacks occuring were 'inserting themselves" and then insisting the real problem is people is… people who are angry they are being doxxed and threatened constantly?

    say, we cannot talk about ethics because you won’t stop talking about us allegedly harassing people. What is the first law of the internet? DON’T FEED THE TROLLS. By pushing this harassment narrative, you are giving these awful people victory and marginalizing the moderate majority who do want a serious conversation to happen about journalistic ethics.

    Also: This was not a video on his channel or even his podcast. This was a comment in a relatively low impact video that basically only content creators watched

    Yeah. Fuck that bullshit. If Bain hadn’t died he would be right there with the asmongolds of the world right now.


    And while I won’t talk about the personal experiences of my friends who were formerly in games media and dev (because nobody believed them back then and sure as hell won’t now…), I will point out that a few outlets, when talking about the current “DEI is the real problem in the world” stupidity have alluded to Bain being the reason they initially stayed quiet until it was too late. Because when you have someone with that audience insisting that all old media is fundamentally evil and lying to you? You don’t pick a fight that will just lead to you getting fired.


  • You mean the prick who was one of the biggest voices legitimizing the Gamergate crowd who couldn’t even be bothered to speak against the harassment toward devs and games media? The guy whose entire claim to fame was screaming about “lazy devs” in an era where it was still kind of a miracle to even get a PC port of most games?

    Regardless of him being a piece of shit, his content creation style was still very much “yell into a camera” similar to Sterling but with a lot fewer skits. That is still a popular style but plenty of youtubers outright build up scripts because they want to tell a narrative about the game they are playing or reviewing. Mandalore is a great example of that.

    Which is similar to the old single camera sitcoms. There is a lot of charm to it but there is a reason the vast majority switched to multi-cam setups. And a lot of that is a mix of budget and just being able to do cooler stuff.


  • Because it takes time and money to make Content.

    I’ll stop you right there: I don’t give a shit if they pirate every single game they play. It doesn’t matter. Because, even amongst the streamers, you are looking at hours of prep per game (to dial in settings, weird streaming hiccups, etc) and on the VOD side it is generally accepted that you have hours of footage and editing for every minute of Content.

    And all of that costs money. Being able to stay up late to write a script to make that Dark Souls run really cool? Doing insane after-effects editing to do a stupid joke star wipe? Or just playing the same cutscene over and over so that you can get the right background NPC for your gag. That takes time.

    And you know what helps with time? Money. Which comes from revenue and “engagement”.

    And this is very demonstrable. Plenty of youtubers and streamers have very clear differences from their early work to their new work. A great example is Michael Reeves (who I assume is not cancelled just yet but…). His early videos are awesome. They also are incredibly low budget and often rushed. Whereas his newer videos (even the one where he just drives around in a sandstorm for a while…) have ridiculously good production values and involve some real feats of engineering. The difference? Before he was part time flunking out of school and tutoring for a living. Now? He… nobody is really sure how Michael Reeves makes money but I assume OTV pays him a good salary for showing up a few times a year?

    Also: People vastly underestimate how much storage and bandwidth is required for video. Which is why peertube and the like basically exist for proof of concept one offs and for companies to fork and use in their own products.


  • In a world where we could have stopped doing the fascists’ work for them by calling him old and senile and attacking him at every step? Yeah. I think he would have. Americans like old white guys who enable genocide. Americans hate women. Especially brown women.

    That said? I also think we needed the “We have a better choice” of Kamala and the real problem is just that people don’t fucking care enough to vote.

    So for all my many many many many problems with how the Democrats have handled the election and the fallout of it… I’ll give a mulligan on this.


  • “Gaming Youtube” is the same as any other form of media.

    If you only watch trash reality TV then “Television is dead”. Whereas, if you only watch prestige TV on FX and AMC you’ll complain that “the sitcom is dead”. And if you only watch NBC or whatever the fuck… you’ll wonder why tim allen hasn’t had his legs broken by the dealers he narced on. Err, where was I?

    Anyway. It is the same here. If you just watch whoever has the most views you are going to get the bottom of the barrel trash entertainment because it is specifically designed to cater to people who are browsing, watch for five minutes, then leave it on while it is still going.

    Whereas you can also put a bit of work in. Find creators you do like. Yes, there is a massive discoverability problem (that gets worse with every major update…) but watching a VOD that appeals to you and maybe googling to find out if they were “cancelled” yet goes a long way. And, in that regard, people like Mortismal and Iron Pineapple are WAY better than anything we saw a decade or two ago.

    Which is no different than TV. Nobody expected the TV show about the dad from Malcolm in the Middle becoming a drug dealer to be one of the greatest shows ever made (in that it gave us Better Call Saul but…). But people watched an episode or two and then listened when everyone else on the planet said “the first season is weird but it gets REALLY good by like episode five or six”.

    Or… we can just do clickbait “Everything new sucks except for me” content.


    All shit like this does is indicate how little the creators think of their viewerbase… And the fact that people think this is “true” means said creators are right to assume the worst.



  • I am increasingly disheartened by the obsession over “Desktop SteamOS”. People don’t want Linux or even “a desktop computer”

    They want a video game console experience on their PC. Some other company manages everything and they just run updates any time people post stability memes.

    Which… is not too much of a shock considering the trajectory of things over the past decade or two. But also more or less confirms that things are gonna go real bad from a computing standpoint (as opposed to every other standpoint where we already know this…) over the next decade or so.

    But it SHOULD at least mean Valve can be confident about releasing the Steam Box 2 (meh) and associated Steam Link 2 (woo) and Steam Controller 2 (HELL YEAH!!!) sooner than later. So… silver lining?




  • It isn’t new. We had vance outright complain that facts were being checked while he was lying his ass off in his one debate.

    This is just the trajectory that fascists have been working toward for decades. Intellectuals are villified by all sides (think about that the next time you see your favorite comedic character make fun of a teacher or a scientist because they “lack common sense” and so forth) and now we are at the point where “fact checking” is for liberals and their “fake news”