From my perspective, this is another reason it’s a bad idea to have an American company (even a somewhat user-focused one like Valve) be a steward of modern digital services. Local culture puts too much emphasis on the theatrical elements of morality.

Yeah, I hear you. It should be based in a sane country like Australia or the United Kingdom or China or Japan.

Point is, making this an ‘America bad’ problem is just ignoring that it could be so much worse if it was based elsewhere.

Antifa Ost in Germany

Aww man, I didn’t know there was an official soundtrack for Antifa! Germans get all the cool stuff.

My favorite experience with this was driving on a two-lane highway with a good bit of traffic in both lanes, going maybe 5 under the speed limit (and driving right behind another car in front, so it’s not like we could have gone faster). Car comes up behind, weaving from lane to lane slowly advancing, and ends up behind us. Rides our ass for a good 45-60 seconds, doing that thing where they start to move into the other lane, realizes (when they have a better view) that that lane isn’t going any faster and there isn’t an opening to pass, then pulls back in behind us, and repeats that for a while.

Finally they saw an opening and pull into the other lane, zips past us, and pulls in in front of the car in front of us. Blue lights come on instantly. We had apparently been driving behind an unmarked police car and didn’t know it. We got to look real smug when we passed the asshole driver after they pulled over.

This was from 2021, so prior to the Steam Deck… that was really their break-out moment, I think, with regards to hardware. The Steam Link and Steam Controller were neat but didn’t really capture their respective markets, and the Index was widely considered one of the best VR headsets on the market but that’s a relatively small market, and it priced out all but the enthusiast tier consumers. The Steam Deck on the other hand had mass appeal and basically ushered in a golden age of handheld PC gaming… not to mention the immense hype around their recent hardware announcements. Could be that their hardware team is making more now.

That’s funny - MW2, BF: Bad Company 2 and BF3 were the last competitive shooters I really enjoyed, too. I had a good time playing Apex Legends for a while, but not because I was good at it… more because I could have fun playing my own version of The Running Man until someone inevitably found me. I was that wimp that would drop in some remote corner of the map and spend as much time as possible avoiding combat.

You’re welcome! It’s a topic I find intriguing, and it’s always interesting to discuss the different ways people experience these things, now that I realize we’re not all the same. :)

Sure, but the point I’m making is, it’s not Steam’s fault; they’re simply doing a better job than their competitors of making their storefront attractive to consumers. Rather than blaming Steam, you should be blaming the other storefronts for not being able to capture market share.

He was a politician who was caught having accepted a bribe, basically, which seems bizarrely mundane today.He said something to the effect of “Don’t look, this will affect you” before he did it, too… petty self-aware for someone who’s about to kill themselves in front of a crowd.

Edit: The wikipedia article actually has it in there.

After he had finished speaking and handing out the notes to his staffers, Dwyer grabbed a manila envelope and drew a Model 19 .357 Magnum revolver from it, causing others to panic. Dwyer backed up against the wall, holding the weapon close to his body, and said, “Please, please leave the room if this will — if this will affect you.”

[…]

Several people in the room pleaded with Dwyer to surrender the gun or tried to approach him and seize the weapon. Dwyer warned against either action, saying as his last words: “This will hurt someone”. Dwyer then killed himself with a single shot through the roof of the mouth. His death was recorded by at least five running news cameras.

When I was a kid, I had this fantasy that gaming 10s of years later would be fantastic… Schooling all the kids with my 20+ years of experience they lack, running circles around them.

Turns out dulled reflexes are a bitch and it’s exactly the opposite.

Competitive multiplayer games are nowhere near as much fun as they used to be. I do still feel good about being able to complete (non-dexterity-based) puzzles and make complex deductions a lot faster than them, though.

It’s possible that you’re a 3 or a 4. My understanding is that people who are 1s can see the apple as though it was there in front of them. They can rotate the image in their minds, break it in half and examine the insides, see the seeds and the veins on the leaf and the discoloration near the stem. Zooming in or out isn’t problematic at all.

If you’re a 5, you can certainly be aware of these things - that they’re features of an apple - but if you really focus on seeing the apple - as though with your eyes, rather than just thinking about the features of the apple as qualitative properties - you can’t do it. It’s just blackness.

It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.

This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners… Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn’t nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.

I’ve seen a recommendation for the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory.

I’ll give this a look! Thanks for the recommendation!

I’m not really an artist, but for myself I resolved this problem by making decisions like that when I come around to those details. I.e. I’ll choose the fitting shoes when it’s time to draw the shoes. And of course, sketching is for planning this kind of stuff before drawing proper begins.

I don’t think I’m really explaining the problem well, but like… If I don’t have a visual reference, I just can’t imagine (or draw) what the minute details actually look like in those situations. An artist might be able to take a side-profile picture of a shoe and visualize what that would look like if it was a front or back or diagonal viewpoint, and draw it into their scene. I know what a shoe looks like… I can describe one, I know a shoe when I see one obviously, but when it comes to needing a level of detail sufficient to actually draw the lines - to know where the next line should go - I come up blank. I can draw something and recognize that it doesn’t look like what I want, but it’s difficult to actually identify what it is that I do want unless I stumble on it.

I can draw very low-detail things. Stick figures, say, or basic outlines, but the details come very hard to me.

If you close your eyes and focus on an apple, what do you see? My understanding is that people without aphantasia / who are “1s” can actually see an image of the apple, as though they were looking at it. If you just see black, no image at all, you might be a 5.

Unless I’m misunderstanding your question, the specific server is more important than the software they’re running; it doesn’t matter if the software is being developed long-term if the server shuts down in the short-term… your community will go down with it.

Thoughts are a weird thing to describe. I bet it just never really occurred to anyone to discuss specifically what they see in their head when they think of a thing - everyone just assumed what they saw was the same thing everyone saw.

It’s like the theory that the color you see as green might not be the same color I see as green - how do you actually determine that?

I used to want very much to be an artist, or at least, be able to draw capably, but it’s always seemed impossible. I can think of what I want to draw in a macro sense - like, if I was thinking of that famous Norman Rockwell painting with the boy with the bindle sitting at the diner next to the police officer, I can certainly imagine the scene. Just thinking of that painting from memory, the officer is looking down at the boy who’s looking up at the officer, there’s a man behind the counter in a white outfit looking at both of them with an amused expression, there’s some pastries or donuts or something on the counter…

But to draw something, it feels like you’ve got to be able to imagine the micro details, and without references to look at, I just can’t do that. The same is true if I was going to try to describe the minutia in the painting - what color is the officer’s hair? Are any of the characters wearing glasses? What do the wrinkles in their clothes look like? What kind of shoes are they wearing?

I even have a difficult time commissioning artwork as a result of this, because it’s difficult to describe what I want without having something visual to reference.

It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.

Can’t visualize faces at all; I think you pulled that quote from a different post. ;)

The thing to remember, though, is that… I didn’t even know this was something that I “couldn’t do” until it was pointed out to me that others can do it. I just assumed everyone else was being metaphorical when they said they “visualized something” in their head, or whatever. So whereas you hear it and think “Oh gosh, these people can’t do this very normal thing! That must be awful!”, to us, it’s more like we’ve just been living our lives as normal and then 30+ years in, we discover that most people have a superpower that we don’t have.

I have sexual fantasies, but they’re more like reading erotica than watching porn.

I imagine I describe things just like I expect others do, except that instead of having a catalogue of pictures to reference, I have a filing cabinet of documents with descriptions of those things. The concept of a ‘photographic memory’ is completely foreign to me. If I’m walking down the street and I see someone get mugged, then I get asked about it later, I can recall and recite the things I specifically took notice of in the moment, but if I want to be able to give a description of e.g. what the person was wearing or what color their hair was, I need to consciously observe those things and commit them to memory at the time. As I understand it, some folks can just recall the event and ‘replay’ it in their mind, and recall things they might not have taken direct notice of originally; I definitely can’t do that.

I’m a #5 on that scale.

And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.

I won’t say I’m not jealous of people who’re #1s. However, to directly answer your question, it’s not like our heads are empty. You think apple and (apparently) ‘see’ an apple. I think apple and it’s like thinking of how you’d describe an apple. It’s red, it’s round. It has a stem. It’s juicy. It tastes good… but I can’t see it. Or anything else. They’re just thoughts.

I have a very difficult time with facial recognition, presumably as a result of this. If I’m watching a movie where there’s a lot of characters that are shown but not named, I have a difficult time following that. I need to be able to assign names to them to keep them straight in my head, and often-times if a character isn’t named but they’re important, I’ll assign them a name myself just to have something to track them with. I can recognize people I interact with a lot obviously but if you asked me to describe what someone looks like who I’m not currently interacting with, that’s very difficult for me to do, beyond very surface-level stuff, like their gender or their build. If I had to describe someone for a police sketch, I’d be useless at that. Remembering facial features is like remembering a list of words; I can’t just call up an image of them to describe… if I haven’t already committed that description to memory, I can’t describe the person.

It’s funny, honestly, because I never realized this wasn’t how everyone is until I saw the image you linked some years back. I actually called up my mother immediately after and asked her what she could see. The conversation went something like:

“When you think of an apple, can you see the apple?”

“Yes…”

“Yeah, but like… you can actually see it, though?”

“…yes…?”

“Yeah but I mean like… you can see it, as if you’re looking at it?”

“…yes, what is this about?”