Like I said, I was agreeing with your title. Thought we were going to have an interesting conversation on AI generated rage bait. Here we are instead.

Technically, I didn’t read the post, but agreed with your title. Then all of your comments after I’ve accused of baiting, but yeah maybe the post was just to bait too.

Stop trying to bait us.

No. No it was not. None of them have been.

Let’s take your first question.

Honest question, are you good just passively watching all this MAGA shit spread?

There was nothing honest about this. I said I didn’t want to read the Facebook post. An honest question would have been:

I know there are many reasons why not you but why don’t you want to go on Facebook?

That’s an honest question.

You had a very obvious agenda. You are obviously trying to bait me into some argument, which I am not getting into with you. Your question was completely dishonest, because it both did not ask me about anything relevant to what I said, and there was also no way for me to answer you without you having a fully planned response.

We aren’t taking the rage bait. That’s for Facebook. Stop trying to bait us.

Why do you turn everything into an inflammatory question?

Me watching it isn’t going to help anything.

Not going to look at the link, but I see it’s Facebook, and from my last experience over a year ago it was well over 90% AI generated rage bait

I’ve learned that any bar for entry significantly cuts down on spam. Turns out people are lazy and reactionary. Some may do that, but it’s very few compared to those who want to troll right now.

Same thing with basic things like asking a question at sign up, or email verification. The most basic sign up things block 95% of spam

That brand new accounts coming here to stir shit up should be banned. Actually I’m pretty sure everyone here thinks that.

Do you have hotwings?

This is honestly so heartwarming. Adult dudes have such a hard time meeting other guys, this actually makes me happy seeing two dudes just meet and say hello

My take is that you keep posting hot takes on here, trying to stir the pot, and then when called out you say it’s just a joke bro

Yeah I tried tabby too and they had like a mandatory "we share your code " line and I hoped out. Like if you’re going to do that I might as well just use claude

I put this much on because I can’t smell it anymore! They weakened it!

Uhhhhh noooooo, no they did not

I told him he could either have his racist and hateful views of people, people that include my friends and mentors, or he could have a relationship with his son.

So it’s been 9 years now, I’ll let you know when I hear back on his answer.

Yes you see while you were under care they administered 2 aspirin to you, you can see that under the line item for $300

How dare us peasants have concerns about what they are doing

Exactamundo. OP expected this guy to be a criminal, and noticed when he did criminal things. How many people has OP assumed weren’t criminals based on the way they dressed who got away with whatever scam they were pulling?

All it takes is one asshole to ruin a whole production. The funniest bit is that the church could have told him “hey Dave, they’re working hard, and they have a point. Take your kid to the back or something until they’re done”, but couldn’t be bothered. Great story.

I’ll bite. (Note I do notice you do have a 12 day old history, and we have had a wave of spammers trying to incite bullshit, so we’ll see how this goes)

So, why play long games? Why read long books? Why watch long movies?

For me, I like a good well-told story. A game like Red Dead Redemption 2 has such a good story that it is worth investing 120 hours into. It’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan, is so well written that he is arguably the most well-written fictional character of all time. Over the course of 120 hours you get to know him so intimately that you truly feel like you know and understand him, and over the story that will both make you laugh and cry, it culminates in an amazing climax, truly a story that could only be told over 100 hours.

To answer your other points:

For me personally, I tend to look at things in terms of costs and benefits. Through that lens, most games seem like a bad deal

This goes counter to what you said at the beginning, they are actually ridiculously cheap compared to other forms of media. Going to see a 2 hour movie now costs about $18 in the states, that’s $9/hour. RDR2 was $60 and for only the first playthrough of 120 hours that’s $0.50/hour of entertainment value. Now, take playing it multiple times and it’s one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. (arguably the hardware to run it needs to be calculated in, but it depends on preferences etc etc etc)

When I was in HS, I had a band. Has that type of interaction simply been replaced by video games?

No. Apples and Oranges.

I really want to understand the interplay between video games and psychology.

I like good story telling. I like being enveloped in my media, and feeling truly immersed. Gaming does that in spades.

Cuz it seems like FPSes are dominant whereas not too long ago they were a single niche among many niches.

Maybe in your friend group they are, but in the circles I’m in it’s simply not true. Everyone is different. Everyone has different preferences. I just played Dispatch over the weekend, a fun 8ish hour romp that also made me both laugh out loud and well up with tears, it was an adorable game. I see 98% positive ratings on it with almost 100k reviews, so I don’t think we need to jump to “FPS is dominant”.