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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • I mean, up to you. As I said above, it’s not like owning one of those means actively supporting Facebook or whatever. I find the whole “engaging with these companies products implies endorsing them” capitalist view of money as support very strange, but I know it’s popular these days, particularly in anglo cultures.

    But like I said above, it’s not like a Meta account used for a Quest used on PC will give Meta any view on your data, or like they would have made any money out of you from a device they built at a massive loss that you’re then purchasing used. But hey, you do you. There are other older, crappier headsets you can buy used, but Quest 2 listings out there start at sixty bucks, which is absolutely nuts for what they are.






  • Screw that. I am forced to deal with US politics and culture in enough areas of my life to be shamed for refusing to care about their self-harming tendencies. I don’t have a need to care about what the US do to themselves in the same way I don’t have a need to care about what Argentina or Hungary or Russia do to themselves. At least Russians don’t have a real choice.

    Admittedly, I did have the compulsion to write that down here at all, as opposed to those other examples. In my defense, that’s because a) I literally wrote that as I clicked the “block” button in this community, and b) it’s insanely hard to not pay attention to the US. It requires active effort. This community isn’t even called “US politics”, it’s just called “Politics”. The US dominating my media is the default stance of the world, I have to take aggressive action to make that not be the case.





  • Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

    That’s the argument.

    That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

    I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

    Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.






  • Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

    Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

    I am screaming at this juxtaposition. This is such techbro thinking, where he’s oversimplifying a single data point to pretend he’s making a data-driven decision (people in a survey said media is biased) and then leaning on a confirmation biased, entirely non-data driven stance (people don’t vote based on newspaper endorsements because I said so).

    I mean, two seconds of thinking will tell you that people think the press is biased because the press is biased. There is no reason “the press” that is causing this impact is WaPo in a world of Newsmaxes, Foxes and yes, MSNBCs. You’re going to need more than a survey you read once to make that determination.

    And obviously, he has done nothing to determine that his choice doesn’t benefit Trump. He doesn’t even claim that, he just… says so.

    Or that his choice moves the needle towards lack of bias, because man, it sure seems like he’s diminishing independence here, not the opposite.

    It’s the same billionare brain rot. It’s the same wonky self-assured, biased thinking where they can’t pay enough brainpower to consider the facts independently and they’re too convinced of their own infallibility to even address basic human biases or defer to actual experts on their random convictions.

    It’s an absurd way to run a business, let alone a country. And there are few enough of these super rich idiots with a direct enough spotlight that we have a full sample size here. We (now) know how Bezos thinks. We definitely know how Zuck and Musk think. They aren’t to be trusted with the decisionmaking their money warrants them under the current system. Their squishy human brains are too weak and broken to handle it without the elaborate, dispassionate social engineering that keeps reasoably designed liberal democracies chugging along.



  • See, this is the part where I’m not going to dismiss your experience, because a lot of this was super regional, but I’m going to say my experience was not that at all.

    I definitely spent most of the money I put in arcades AFTER I had a 16 bit console. The “arcade>marketing>console port” hype cycle went on for a decade after the NES first became a thing.

    And Live Gold is just a sign of something that was going on everywhere. The first free to play hits were happening, WoW was taking over the world and making GaaS mainstream… and yeah, online gaming was becoming a thing on consoles and getting monetized in brand new ways.

    But also, I’d say expansions were a thing way before DLC became a dirty word. Because Groundhog Day I distinctly remember having conversations with angry nerds in the mid 2000s explaining that there wasn’t much of a difference between DLC and a lot of the expansion packs and shovelware content expansions being pushed around all through the late 90s.

    And of course there are tons of games you can buy as a complete thing. As I said above, I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, Metaphor and a bunch of other stuff that is very classic in its structure. Another constant of gaming nerdrage is that people don’t care if what they like continues to exist, they are mostly clamoring for the things they dislike not existing, which I’ve never been on board with.