Because then they can advertise their other games to you along with other things, at least going by the blizzard/Activision launcher.

Can also do environment checks or setup and some troubleshooting/debug/repair from them.

Which is when your penis has an Eating Disorder (for blood).

Going through the postal service might have been safer than other forms of travel because there would have been more explicit exchanges of custody. Like put a kid on a passenger train and they could just get off and get lost before getting on a connecting train and who knows what happened to them? They arrived on train A but never got on train B.

Whereas with mail, the kid becomes the operator’s responsibility. If the kid is handed over to the operator to ride train A but then is nowhere to be found at the destination, then that operator is the prime suspect. Or the operator hands the kid off to the next operator in the journey and the kid is now their responsibility.

And even if you have a babysitter, passenger stations are going to be a lot more crowded than cargo stations, so keeping track of a kid will be a lot easier, plus the driver is the babysitter for the postal service, so they won’t miss their train or take the wrong one by accident (unless they are routed incorrectly lol).

In the past, making money and making great games had a lot of overlap.

But then the big studios realized how much some people are willing to spend on either the latest version of the same thing, to not have to wait for a timer, to skip a grind (especially one tuned specifically to make people want to skip it), to gain an advantage over other players, plus a bunch of psychological tricks and are so often chasing that money, which probably kills a lot of the passion for their staff that actually knows how to make good games until they either leave or start phoning it in.

But indie studios, while they can also be run by people just chasing the money, can also be run by people more interested in the creating a great game aspect than the money aspect.

You can see the same thing across the entire economy. The main difference is that regulatory capture and the amount of resources required to make a video game aren’t set up to prevent new players from entering the market and since games are digital they scale much easier than physical objects. Like some people have de-enshitified their cars or even made their own from scratch or an older one, but it’s not like they can just sell those de-enshitified cars to anyone, they’d need to ramp up production quite a bit to get the same reach viral indie games can get.

I finally checked out itch.io recently to look into steam alternatives and was disappointed to see that a lot of games there have “graduated” to steam and stop updating the itch.io version in favour of their steam version.

Though I’ve noticed that some non-porn games are adding “nudity” and “sexual content” to their user tags when the game has none to attract people looking for good porn games, but then it turns out to just be a good game without porn.

I noticed when looking through some of my unplayed games’ tags and saw “dating sim” plus the ones above in a bunch of SAO games, which are unfortunately not very good games from the ones I’ve tried so far, which is kinda ironic given that a great game is central to the story.

Yeah, IMO they should either be priced cheaply because anyone who buys is essentially testing the game. Then it’s an ok gamble IMO, cheap game that might never get better and could be full of bugs.

Or they should be priced higher to attract people who specifically want to support the idea and avoid review boms from people who expect a full game even though it says “early access”. But this model then puts a requirement for communication and transparency with those who did support it, as well as a commitment to release what they did produce as open source if they end up abandoning the project.

Though I think there should be some buyer beware involved. Read reviews before you buy, especially negative ones, and look for trends (to avoid being overly influenced by one reviewer’s bias). It’s impossible to predict which will continue being developed and which will fail (and out of those that fail, which ones intended it from the start and which ones were trying to make a great game in good faith but it just didn’t work out), so buy early access games for what they currently are rather than what you hope they’ll be. Even if they do get finished, that final product might not be what you’re hoping for.

Other than banning the account after it happens, I can’t really see any way to punish the bad faith actors without catching people with low resources just trying to make a game despite the system being stacked against them.

Is sound air being disturbed or a brain interpreting vibrations in the air?

Boomer solution to having a child out of wedlock: lies and shame.

Millennial solution to having a child out of wedlock: who gives a shit and why was that even a thing?

I’m not sure whether I’d say your first paragraph overestimates or underestimates people but I disagree with that premise. The fact that there exists people who willingly take their own life is a counter example, and I’d say that it would be a slow suicide (as in the work they do isn’t going to immediately cause them harm) makes it even easier, even if they see the eventual harm as inevitable.

Personally, I think the idea of AGI is dangled to build credibility for future attacks to be blamed on a rogue AI system. After which, the ones who really control the AI will come in and “fight” it and be treated like heroes, with repeats happening coincidentally when people start getting tired of shit again and need to be reminded about how the rulers saved them.

Edit: forgot to close my bracket.

After noticing that I had a harder time enjoying being around water because of concern about my phone getting wet, I’ve just been getting water resistant phones. Haven’t really tested how resistant they are but it’s nice not caring about that anymore.

Edit: fixed a word

But why male models?

Yeah, true. I mean, there’s probably some that do, some that are in denial themselves, some that think they are on the winning side, and some that think anything negative will hinder the process. The formal parts of the process itself could have been coopted by the ruling class such that therapists are trained to perpetuate the system like cops and teachers are.

I’m going to push back but only slightly, as I agree that society itself and this hierarchy we’re stuck in is the root of a lot of mental health problems, maybe even the biggest sole contributer.

But where I’ll push back is that improving your mental health is different from improving your material situation. Both are important. The latter is about survival and between the two, arguably the far more important one. But the former is about how you react to the latter.

If you’re having panic attacks each time you think about your material situation, that’s going to make it much harder to deal with that situation. If you have trouble motivating yourself to get out of bed, that probably also affects your ability to do anything about your situation. If you lose your temper to the point where you destroy objects or relationships around you, that doesn’t help either.

Or on the perception side, if you’re constantly paranoid about everyone around you to the point where you don’t let anyone get close, it can help to recalibrate your expectations or where you draw your line for not trusting others.

Or if you recognize a pattern of using or manipulating people and want to break it or figure out why you keep returning to it.

I think in regards to how society is, therapy can teach you acceptance. I don’t mean “accept that this is the way it is and that it is fine”, you don’t have to do that second part. But the first part is true: the world is the way it is and unhealthy reactions won’t punish the world or change it, nor will allowing your nervous system to go into overdrive.

Whether you want to change it or just find a place in it, you need to first accept it for what it is, for better or worse. Then when you have that foundation of understanding and healthy coping skills, you have a much better chance of accomplishing, well, anything. Note that that is relative, I’m not going to try to push BS platitudes like “you can do anything!” It’s just “if you have a healthy mind or healthy ways of dealing with an unhealthy mind, you’ll have a better chance at doing anything compared to if you don’t”.

Anyways, therapy is one potential path to that. I see therapists as guides for a journey of introspection and getting to know yourself better as well as understand how you interact with the world and find new ways of doing so. Ultimately you are the one that needs to walk that path and the destination is still this reality, just with a healthier way of seeing and interacting with it.

Fixing this shit will involve a lot more than therapy, but it will require healthy minds.

Though I also don’t think the “gee thanks I’m cured” mindset is a healthy one. While I agree that it’s easier said than done, mental health is heavily influenced by your mindset and deciding “this won’t help” can be the reason why it doesn’t. Part of getting better, an essential part of it, is deciding that’s what you want and fighting the part of you that wants to just keep going like you have been because you’re comfortable with your habits, both good and bad.

And it either still commonly used today, used in a few rare places, or not used at all anymore.

Personally you had me at “top 5 tourist destination”. That just sounds like a miserable experience.

Seance results for someone trying to make contact with someone from gen z: nothing; they let it go to voicemail. You need to use an ouiji board because they are text only.

Maybe, but they’ll patch that as soon as they notice people doing it, forcing you to slightly modify the method because they aren’t very good at their jobs, plus every now and then an update will just revert your changes for no apparent reason.

Hollow Knight (both orig and SS) and Gravity Circuit, though Gravity Circuit did end up working the 2nd time while both HK games failed to launch without error message. I see each of those games on gog.

That’s if you even consider AI generated frames to be “good graphics”.

I love beautiful graphics. I’m not picky about them and don’t insist on photorealism only (Valhala is a beautiful game and uses this strange mix of high and low fidelity graphics), but I do love me some good photorealistic rendering.

I’m not interested in this “AI tries to predict the pixels between actual rendered ones”. It’s just a push towards average, like everything else big data, when it works well. And maybe this one does work well but I still dgaf because I don’t want slop frames.

And I suspect that’s a reason you don’t see true frame to frame comparisons between AI upscaling and that same frame fully rendered at the higher resolution. It’s difficult for random reviewers to get the exact same frame rendered like that so I mostly see frames taken from the same viewpoint, but you can’t do apples to apples comparisons because the scene is dynamic and things other than the camera have changed. But nvidia could generate the same frame both ways for a direct comparison but only seem to want to show comparisons like DLSS off (at low res) vs DLSS on (at high res) or different DLSS versions against each other, which I think is telling.