MudMan

And this, kids, is what this “lack of self-reflection” thing looks like in the wild.

Students should start trying to “it’s not me, it’s capitalism” their grades. It’s an airtight defense.

And, for the record, the rise of neofascism was built on the rhetorical template of a grassroots 4chan sexist psyop. It’s not capitalism.

The shocking inability of left-wing parties worldwide to capitalize on literally anything is mystifying to me. How little that seems to trigger self-reflection is, sadly, not.

It’s never aliens.

It’s always clickbait.

Hey, I had a Sega Saturn. Loved my Sega Saturn. Like it more than my Steam Deck, if I’m being honest, but I do like my Deck and I do have one.

I’m just saying, when we’re talking numbers in the millions it’s easy to lose perspective.

To put this in perspective:

Valve has revealed that Steam Deck players accumulated 330 million hours of gameplay during 2024, representing a remarkable 64% increase compared to the previous year.

That’s the equivalent of every Switch owner playing two hours in the entire year. Nintendo doesn’t share their usage numbers in aggregate, but they do provide a “year in review” thing per user and most of the ones I see online are in the three digit range. Even assuming a bunch of people aren’t using these at all, we’re looking one to two orders of magnitude larger than the Steam Deck, which checks out with what we know about the total numbers sold for each device.

Which is to say, the Deck is probably as popular as, say, a Sega Game Gear or a Sega Saturn but nowhere near any of the modern consoles yet.

Pi and Requiem for a Dream as a one-two punch.

“Being smart is such a curse I’d rather get a lobotomy” is boring, self-serving and trite, but the Reefer Madness-level “drugs bad” thing in Requiem is unbearable and requires every character to be entirely nonsensical.

Trainspotting was four years old by that point. How critics let Aronofsky get away with it is beyond me. To this day the closest I’ve been from walking out of a movie theatre. The only reason I stuck around was it was in a festival and I was there with other people.

See, this could do something, far beyond what a grassroots boycott can.

However, I have low trust that the way forward on this is dumping money on local competitors. The reality of it is you can’t build a new Amazon where Amazon already exists, you need to remove the anticompetitive foreign agents before you can prop up homegrown ones. There WERE Facebook-like European competitors before Facebook wrecked them. There ARE Amazon alternatives that work just as well in places where Amazon hasn’t encroached its insane web of fully owned logistics.

You want to create a European tech alternative? Start enforcing digital antitrust. Not fines, break-ups and forced sales of local branches. If the US can do it to Tiktok the EU can do it to Meta, Amazon, Google and the like.

Hm… I’m torn now.

I’ve been messing with Zen recently and comparing it side by side with Firefox 136 there are things I like more in both.

Zen is much buggier, which makes sense, since it’s new and small, but I do like their approach to fullscreen mode, where you can manually set both the top and the side bars to pop up from the corner on hover. In FF’s implementation fullscreen now hides the top bar, but it leaves the side tabs on and you have to pop them on and off manually from the top bar, which is more of a hassle. I also like the idea of the floating search bar in Zen in concept, but in practice I’m always paranoid about whether a new search will stomp my current tab.

They’re both very close now, though. I imagine if you were making Zen and your key selling point was the Arc style layout you wouldn’t be happy about that.

Can’t speak for Germans, but I currently consider the US an outright hostile force. Not just because of Trump. As things currently sit, the country as a unit is currently working against my interests and I don’t have any indication that this will change in the short term.

I hear Gandalf has been using the Palantirs to tell people to stop buying Mordor products.

It’s an awkward example to pick. Human genome research was so controversial someone made an award-winning dystopian sci-fi movie to criticise it.

We did collectively get Maya Hawke out of that deal, though.

Incidentally, that was written by the same guy who made dystopian fiction about reality TV and corporate-sponsored vtubers before either thing existed. Andrew Niccol turned out to be amazing at spotting upcoming trends, terrible at identifying how exactly they would ruin things.

Did you guys get a lot of viruses in the 00s? I remember bumping into it more back in the good old disk days, where we got infected with skin-to-floppy contact, as the lord intended.

Down 30% for the year, but up 47% from where it was a year ago and 600% of where it was five years ago.

How that happened in the first place is anybody’s guess, but here we are.

Still, 30% in three months is not happy times, even if it’s a long way down to reasonable, let alone rock bottom.

It’s also, because the self-indulgence is starting to rub me the wrong way, entirely unrelated to any online organization. This started a while ago fairly spontaneously and I expect it will keep going the same way. I respect anybody wanting to decouple from a hostile regime, but reining in the US or even winning a trade war aren’t going to happen in social media.

Heroic is pretty much flawless for me. It flakes out less than Linux Steam, honestly. I’m looking at it right now, and it picked up all my GOG installs, it keeps them updated and it does support cloud saves on GOG, although it’s in beta and they caveat enough to make you think twice.

Hah. Well, I may be less confident there. That’s something that spent a long time doing the rounds across the industry as a reassurance for people in high cost locations, and particulary in North America. I guess it took them a bit too long to realize that Western devs didn’t have a mystical, nature-given skill to make games, just a generation or two of funding to do the thing on an industrial scale so people could gain the right experience.

I think after The Witcher 3, Wukong, Marvel Rivals and the like they may be starting to notice, though.

In any case, that’s neither here nor there. the point is if you’re boycotting you’re presumably trying to harm somebody financially in retaliation for something in a way you normaly wouldn’t. I’m saying in gaming specifically every part of that is pretty hard to trace. I’m not doing an audit every time I want to play a game, and I don’t think people should be expected to.

Alright, I’m on record saying that “vote with your wallet” grassroots boycotts are ineffectual and policy action is often more workable, but this one is especially weird because who worked on a game and who sees the profit don’t match.

Ubisoft is French but it’s a public company. Epic is American and private, but has a lot of Chinese investment. EA is American, but it doesn’t develop there very much. If you buy FIFA, is that an American game? It’s made in Canada and Europe. Battlefield is made in Sweden, but also maybe LA? I guess it depends on the year. Is Baldur’s Gate Belgian? Well, sure. And also Malaysian, Canadian, British, Polish and Spanish. Is Subnautica American? It’s made there, but the company is a subsidiary of Krafton over in Korea.

I’m not saying don’t favor local product if that’s how the current political landscape makes you feel, but games are super global and it gets complicated quickly once you go past a small truly independent studio working locally, self-publishing and I suppose releasing on GOG.

I mean, fuck antisemitism in any form, obviously…

…but I’m going to say “allow fascists to eliminate freedom of protest” has a spotty track record improving that particular issue.

This guy is in power in no small part due to whatever definition for not-fascist Americans you want to use not showing up because they feel compromise is beneath them. Maybe it’s time to learn that lesson.

Well, no, the time to learn that lesson was November. I guess it’s finding out time. For people too rightfully indignant about the genocide in Gaza to look past their own noses and to people in your situation alike, I’m afraid.

I genuinely don’t think the wrapper impacted much one way or the other (the sequels got tons of praise in any case), but it’s definitely way more cumbersome than it needs to be. Especially when they went from 1 to 2 and they started doing this thing where you needed to transfer not just your saves but the entire first game over to the second game as DLC to put it all in the same place.

The thing is I actually preferred how the first game was released as an episodic thing in the first place. To me that sort of justified having a big wrapper to launch each episode. I get that keeping the wrapper going across the sequels then allows to have seasonal missions and user generated missions across all maps of the franchise, which is pretty cool, but they just never found an elegant way to handle it and without the episodic cadence there is just less of a reason to mess with all the live content anyway.

What I don’t think is that the games are too similar. If anythingI think more games should be like Ryu Ga Gotoku/Yakuza, where they just keep using the same tools to pump out a ton of games with the same tech and leave the iteration for the story and the level design. Games are too expensive and consistent anyway, you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.

Don’t need a massive platform launcher to consolidate all of it, though. If anything, once you’re moving at that speed the game itself rolls back to becoming the seasonal content.

Yeah, last time I was in a place under those same circumstances I was surprised at just how competent their local big online retailer was. It really did most of the same things Western Europeans and North Americans think only Amazon could do. Same day delivery in major cities, free delivery, no-questions-asked returns, the whole deal.

It was a remarkable confirmation that Amazon isn’t deploying some secret sauce. Their model is entirely replicable, they’re just so big that any local retailer doing the same thing is just crushed before they can compete.

You don’t fix that with a soft boycott.

Myeeeeeh, I don’t know about that. Pokemon is deceptively late, given how rudimentary it looks due to being a GB exclusive. Blue and Red are 1996 games originally. Shin Megami Tensei had been doing monster capture and collection dungeon crawlers for a decade and six games by that point. Final Fantasy VII was less than a year away. Dragon Quest V and VI had done monster capturing and VI had “trainer battles” in an arena.

Pokemon was first to break big in the West and the idea of monster capturing as deck building is executed in a very particular way, but it was definitely pulling very directly from existing sources.