That’s being mean to gas station sandwiches, but otherwise I agree

For a the past few years, I had wondered why videogames, movies, and TV shows nowadays feel so… Bland. Meaningless. Soulless. Corporate. Like, I know they ARE corporate, but these industries have all been dominated by gigantic corporations for my entire life. What changed recently? Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly and preferring content that was made back when I was younger?

Then I was watching DoorMonster talk about some show (I could be wrong, but I think it was the video about how Arcane had a great Season 1 that was largely ruined by Season 2) where they kept joking about not accusing them of using AI to write things.

Then it clicked. The Writer’s Strike from May-September 2023. On paper, the Writer’s Guild secured restrictions on the use of AI. And I can’t point to anything specific and say “that was clearly written by AI”. But I can say that for the past few years everything put out by pretty much every company has felt very… “Meh”. Nothing new has grabbed me and said “wow I need to watch/play that”. Could be a coincidence, but I also have to wonder whether AI tools involved in writing and visuals have cost us something intangible that I can still feel.

This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.

I can vouch for MakeMKV as well.

I had so much frustration trying to rip Blu-Rays other ways. Did the free trial and got my whole library ripped pretty cleanly and easily. Eventually decided to buy the software so I wouldn’t have to keep looking up and entering the trial key. There’s not much higher of a commendation I can give than to say that I decided to give them $60 I didn’t have to because it was good.

The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?

You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.

They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.

There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.

So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.

Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.

BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.

Check out OP’s history

OP appears to be another comic bot. A few hours old and posts nothing but a handful of comics.

Tons of these accounts have been cropping up since early January. A lot of the accounts delete themselves after a couple days. I have no idea what the goal is, but the comics these accounts post tend to be either really mediocre (like how this one is more of a premise than a joke) or purposefully have some sort of divisive content (often about gender).

I hope that the goal is just to get people engaged in the comments and grow Lemmy, but this being the internet I can’t help but wonder if there’s something more nefarious going on.

Ah. Another account a few hours old that just posts a handful of comics. Wonder if this one will delete itself later too?

Also interesting to note that it seems common for the ruling party to see a lot of retirements in mid-terms, at least in the House.

Republicans have 30 retiring this time. In 2022 the Dems had 29 retirements under Biden. Trump saw 34 Republicans retire in 2018.

There are other outliers of course. The top year, 1992, was a presidential election and both parties saw a lot of retirements.

The message should have been “take accusations seriously” rather than “believe women”.

Justice can be messy and unsatisfying. The “me too” movement highlighted a lot of patriarchal flaws in the current justice system, but it also sought to create its own separate “cultural justice” system even more flawed in the other direction. Believing every accusation is how we ended up with so many innocent black teenaged boys getting lynched in the south.

We will probably never know the real numbers- how many sexual assault are unreported, or how many sexual assault accusations are false (or perhaps target the wrong person). But there is a very good reason that the justice system applies “innocent until proven guilty”.

I swear every time I start looking into a romhack that claims to just be a mostly vanilla QoL update they always add in a bunch of random stuff to “fix” the difficulty.

Like, yes I am aware the games are incredibly easy. They’re for children. I originally played most of them as children. Just let me get high and stomp all through FRLG with a perfect-IV Feraligatr and the Gen 4 physical-special split. If I wanted to do Nuzzlockes I would… Do Nuzzlockes. If I wanted a game with difficult gym leaders and level caps, I would go play one of the thousands of romhacks that have that.

The article was updated in 2023 with the most recent data.

Almost all of the sales of videogames are front-loaded. Most at launch (or at the launch of a re-release), and then it falls off hard over a couple of years. Morrowind came out in 2002. It’s incredible that Bethesda even released any sales data still by 2010. The units sold since then would be immaterial to the conversation.

Morrowind only sold ~4 million units. I think you’re overestimating how big the fan base is. The fan base is loyal, opinionated, and vocal, but small.

So you’d rather be spies on by the formerly largest panopticon ever created AND not be able to side load?

If you think Apple is some paragon of privacy you might want to do some research on that lol.

I mostly agree with you, but I don’t think this is just a distraction story. The more interesting thing is the rift forming between MAGA influencers. Candace Owens clearly has beef with Erika Kirk.

Bigotry is bad. Segregation is bad.

In progressive spaces this is USUALLY met with agreement. That’s easy whenever we are talking about equal rights for people who have been historically been oppressed. However, a dark corner of progressive spaces likes to hate. Hate on men, cis people, white people. It’s usually just one or two people, who have probably been personally hurt by people who happen to fall into those groups, and the rest don’t feel like they can say anything.

I strongly believe that things like segregation are fundamentally wrong and make the world a worse place. Not that they were tools that were used for evil and can now be used for good in the right hands. Not just temporarily as balancing measures for society. Equality isn’t just something you can pick and choose when to believe in, when it’s pretty and convenient and makes you feel good.