NEW ATB!!!!! Dragon Quest 2 is a weird sequel, with some revelatory evolutions and some very frustrating choices. we wonder when does making a better game make a worse adventure: alltimebangers.com/dragon-quest...

All organization seems futile if your main concern is enumerating the people you can't persuade

It's very surreal getting deep into a conversation about something like this and realizing the other person's signpost for meaning/respected time is a bar filling or something. I love to fill a bar and make a number go up but it's just a reflection of how little value I can place on my own time.

This article envisions Silksong as the bellwether in this scenario but I think the fact that an article about criticism dying will probably outperform any impressions or critique indicates that criticism is already as dead as it will ever be and Silksong is just another marker

I'm a millenial and understand the despair but the fact that people are in their 30s and 40s and imagine themselves as passive viewers (essentially consumers) of the world feels way more damning on this issue compared to whether or not the "techno-optimist euphoria" switch is on or off

"Ambient" and "pervasive" being qualities they think they should signal in external messaging really speaks to how much big tech either can't or doesn't care to perform even basic salesmanship to their captive audience

Humanities vs STEM is just console wars for the professional-managerial class; a bored, distinctly middle class kind of desolation

I think the net effect of this idea and a few others permeating thought has mostly been disengagement no matter how correct they are, because what it amounts to is permission to shift ethical concern into some abstract future

not a huge fan of the narrative that people were simply tricked by capital into centralizing the web into 5 websites in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was definitely a choice made around convenience and comfort that capital positioned itself to exploit, this will repeat until you acknowledge it

Nintendo Switch Announcer (gravely): What is the true origin of man's inhumanity to man? What fate awaits our souls in the next life? Death and oblivion await all of us, this September. <fade to black, slight pause> Nintendo Switch Announcer: Who's up for ice cream? That's right - Hello Kitty!

It's nonsense but "This NPC behavior having logic is actually AI" really has been a marketing mainstay in the games business for basically half a century now, so it really slots in perfectly into AI hype

So many institutions whether explicitly political or moral have failed to take action (even when action is as simple as condemning something as morally wrong) because they saw calls to action as challenges to their authority instead of appeals to their basic function

A tribute to no one's favorite rapper by no one's favorite writer

I think there's two modes of consideration: it's never an object of consideration as a suitable, preferable replacement. It's always an object of consideration as a known medium for online contraband transactions. How much it matters is a function of how bad repression gets and not preference

> the long arc of history bends toward a bunch of vital services on the internet being run as a commons

my has wife asked me to stop my running Werner Herzog commentary during our Donkey Kong Bananza playthru

An insidious online vice is the notion that sometimes seeing bad people get their comeuppance is a justification for systems and conditions that fundamentally contort human sociality into steady streams of spectacle and judgment, where being seen is likely to ruin your life but it IS content

All the political apathy I have ever felt is basically a result of the idea that I am supposed to believe these people are competent enough to rise to any moment when they can't even be bothered to leverage massively unpopular stuff against their opponents for free

I have invented a machine to control the weather. It uses 825 oil refineries, 62,500 power plants, 10,000,000 factories, 14,000 flying machines, 100,000 ocean machines, and 1,750,000,000 land machines to turn 100,220,000 barrels of oil a day into chemicals that cause wildfires and hurricanes.

There’s a nonzero chance you will die from a cancer that could have been curable because people who couldn’t pass 7th grade biology and are scared of things like “mRNA” and “riboflavin” and “walkable cities” decided to make their ignorance everybody else’s problem

I think bluesky is such a popular topic because it's probably one of the only ways to guarantee real engagement in a world where social media companies are trying to trap you in their ecosystem, whether it's instagram and threads or X and /pol/

It really speaks to the state of this country that finance is so allergic to investing in people they can't even produce a candidate, and instead peddle a cavalcade of well-known disgraces they know are for sale. Finding a new, almost likeable shitty guy to scam everyone was just too much work.

"Online safety" as a vector for policy has always been much more efficient at exposing vulnerable people to hostile governments than anything else

Here’s the bottom line for what’s going on with Grok - if the owner of the website is putting his thumb on the scale hard enough for the chatbot to turn into Goebbels, you should be deeply concerned about what he’s doing to the algorithm that you can’t so easily see, and what it’s doing to you

Can't enjoy anything, can't make anything either. Trapped trying to make a future modeled after a past that never existed from pieces that prove its falsehood

Electoralism is a grim ideology to build a world on because when things are bad it reveals itself as borderline Calvinist in its deference to the whims of Majoritarian God. Texas Democrats are more damned than California Republicans because electoral God wills it.

There's never been a better encapsulation of the mentality that guides the "self-aware" holdouts: nihilism via learned helplessness with splash of self-deprecation. If anything they prefer X so they hear only themselves, being victims of circumstance while judging people that choose either outcome

The mythological self-empowerment was always more in the hearts of the users than the minds of the architects of social media, and it really made them enthusiastically enclose whatever online commons might have existed before in favor of reach and convenience

There's a distinction to be drawn between "turned away by the barriers to entry" and "beholden to inertia." I help like 3 people replace the Win 11 start menu a week and nobody is talking about the "Windows 11 isn't a good solution for normal people" crisis because it's where they will end up anyway

They seem to think there’s a right to anonymous policing, but not to anonymous protest.

This is the weakness of conspiracy theorists in the sense of rationalizing a given conspiracy, but the greater weakness is that once people think like this their capacity to solve any problem is massively undercut by their ability to just find certainty (and comfort) in an ever broader conspiracy

Elon is less a person to Noah and more a stand-in for his fragile just-world hypothesis where the most famous 21st century tech business magnate has to be "Tony Stark meets John Galt meets Jesus" and not "awkward ketamine-addled 4chan poster that already sabotaged America's growth for a generation"

All Time Bangers checks in at its second waystation with Ultima IV: alltimebangers.com/ultima-iv-qu...

The honest reason I don't have microtransactions/season pass/ads/100 DLCs/etc in Balatro isn't just about the ethics of those practices but because when I play other games that have those things it makes me want to put my computer in the dishwasher and set it to pots & pans

FFT and XCOM are pillars of game design identity and many of their modern descendants are more fixated on game design competency. The whole zodiac compatibility system from FFT is unhinged and missing throwing a rock because of astrology is a game design crime but it is undeniably FFT's domain

Using Aaron Swartz as an argument for IP enforcement when he killed himself over it is probably the closest an argument about "fairness" can be to evil because his legacy-defining aspirations for a better world are sacrificed to the punitive altar of revenge