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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.

    Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.


  • The only thing happening in the industry is the same thing happening in every industry and most of the first world:

    The wealthy owners and executive leader roles have learned that COVID, COVID supply lines, interest rates, ‘consumer sentiment’, and inflation, are all very easy scapegoats that both the public and investors will easily buy as reasons for lowering product quality and availability, while also firing employees, squeezing the non-fired ones to death, and raising prices. This has lead to almost 2 straight years of corporations showing record profits (even adjusting for the inflation that they are largely responsible for in the first place).

    This downward spiral will continue until some force with nearly as much power pushes back.

    This is typically and ideally a representative government in the form of regulation or taxation. But the US government has suffered decades of regulatory capture and congressional gridlock.

    So the only other potential option is a large amount of highly populated unions. Which have to fight against nearly 100 years of media and political demonization and nearly 150 years of ‘american independent attitude’.

    The perfect modern system has all 3 parties; unions, government, and corporations, equally strong and antagonistic. Just as the perfect modern government would have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches equally strong and antagonistic. Neither could be much farther from the case here.

    Stronger bigger unions. Weaker smaller corporations. And a government that actually functions. All are necessary to fix our current shit show.




  • Luckily mods have already addressed the menu problems for PC. StarUI and Undelayed Menus.

    Shouldn’t even remotely be necessary for a studio this size. But whatever.

    The only other actual negative I feel for the game at this point (20ish hours) is the skill points/system feeling like 5% good choices and 95% pointless garbage.


  • The fact that it’s Chinese really isn’t even a blip on the radar imo. The censorship sucks and a lot of US platforms do it too ( I mean shit look at YouTubes content rules).

    Their content algorithm being really good at showing you what your brain craves in an endless stream is the real big problem. It’s creating such strange micro cultures. Live streams of people slowly filling balloons with food coloring and water, on a bunch of white printer paper. Teasing the water. Like an hour before it pops. 1,200,000 views. It feels insidious in such a weird way.



  • The country people of the 1890s are not the country people of today. Big city folk were a significantly smaller part of the population then, and the college educated population was miniscule. The ability to become educated is the largest relevant metric here. Now you can hit up khan academy and stanfords YouTube channel and get a world class education for free. Back then you had to be straight white wealthy connected. The excuses for ignorance are gone, for current country people.

    But yes, these problems can and should be reversed, and done best communicating outside of the specific “lie-beral pedo demonrat vs racist Jesus warrior firearm creep” paradigm; placing things in terms of labor vs ownership class.












  • ice sheets form as snow builds up, with each year’s snowfall preserved as a single, visible layer. There are measurable chemical differences in snow formed at different temperatures, so ice cores provide a record of polar temperature going back around 250,000 years for Greenland and 800,000 years for Antarctica.

    Yearly banding is also found in fossilised corals and lake sediment deposits, and each band has a specific chemistry that reflects the temperature when it formed. Growth rings in tree trunks can be wider or thinner depending on the climate at the time of growth, so fossilised trees can reveal the length of growing seasons. And fossilised or frozen pollen grains allow scientists to determine what plants were growing in the past, which can give us a good idea of the climate at the time.

    Marine sediment cores provide temperature records spanning millions of years. They contain the fossilised shells of tiny marine creatures that preserve a chemical record of the sea temperature when they lived.

    -the guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/07/past-climate-temperature-proxies