Perhaps i’m too optimistic, but I think these conflicts tend to be resolved much earlier on. I don’t think someone just wakes up one day and says “hey I want to be an evil selfless despot”.

Not a dictator, but I think a close enough example is Mackenzie Scott, formerly Bezos. I don’t know her or Jeff personally of course. We know about Jeff’s privelege of course, but Mackenzie was the daughter of a financial planner and granddaughter of a natural gas executive herself. The two of them met working at a hedge fund. I hate hedge funds and think they shouldn’t exist, and I suspect there was some nepotism and privelege that helped them both get there, but i’m not going to call everyone who works at a hedge fund or benefits from privelege evil.

Then they quit to start Amazon. Privelege aside I am sure there was a lot of hard work and risk in those early years. She reportedly did a lot of work while also having 3 children (and they adopted a 4th), and she also put off her passion of writing novels to do so. I’ve known a lot of people who own their own small businesses, and there’s a lot of hard decisions and sleepless nights involved. I’m sure they both made mistakes and learned lessons, and occasionally made selfish decisions.

To use a scientifically inaccurate idiom- the frog boiled. Amazon became more ruthless, certainly unethical, and most likely violated antitrust laws that never get enforced. They applied more pressure to everyone - their employees (which led to union suppression tactics), their suppliers, their customers, governments, and that’s just what I know about.

It’s possible that Mackenzie knew about all of that and was fine benefitting from it until Jeff cheated or grew distant or whatever. But from her quotes and her actions afterwards, it seems like she had enough of the exploitation. She divorced him in 2019, getting half of Jeff’s net worth and making Musk the world’s richest man instead.

She signed the Giving Pledge, which at face value is basically a promise to give away most of her wealth to charity in her lifetime. The efficacy of the Giving Pledge is beyond the scope of this comment, but according to her website she’s given away over $19 billion. Philanthropy like that can often be a shady scheme to funnel money to friends and family, avoid taxes, or lobby governments for favorable legislation. It’s possible that she is doing some of that too, but I haven’t seen an expose yet. So maybe she actually is giving that wealth back to the world.

She also has written and released a couple of novels. Maybe she hired a ghost writer, and I’m sure her money helped her get published, but it does kinda seem like that was her dream and she followed it. She also married (and shortly thereafter divorced) a private schoolteacher- not skme celebrity or politician or billionaire.

Maybe it’s just a well-crafted facade, but from a distance it looks to me like a rare case of someone actually realizing that such wealth accumulation was bad for the world and stepping away from it. She’s still quite wealthy, allegedly with a net worth over $30 billion left, but that kind of money takes time to get rid of and she seems to be making progress.

Questions like “how much money should a person be allowed to have” are details that are going to change over time and I’m not sure what the answer is right now, but at the very least i think the world would be a better place if more billionaires did what Mackenzie Scott is claiming to be doing.

Oh yeah it’s setting the table for a terrible hellscape.

I moreso meant that Elon won’t be the first. Whoever the first is will of course be a terrible precedent.

For what it’s worth, from quotes from Kimball Musk, Elon himself, and their associates, it seems as though Elon may have been an illegal immigrant himself at one point. Snopes has collected a lot of the potential info, though they don’t go so far as to reach a conclusion one way or the other.

I think Trump is going to revoke citizenships and deport people anyways. Which is terrible, but I don’t think him doing so to Musk will be a precedent. If anything it might be interesting to see if he gets any pressure to deport Melania too.

God of War. I played 1,2, and 3 and they were all pretty much the same. I think a lot of the hype was from marketing and edge lords who were thrilled to have so much blood and some low-poly tits on the PS2. Once you get past the spectacle, the combat is a slog of mashing the Square button until the game decides to stop spawning HP sponges for you to hit. The puzzles are tedious and annoying. The platforming they try to force in just doesn’t work with the physics and controls. The music is bland and generic “epic symphony” stuff that may as well just be from a stock music library, with no Greek influence at all. The story is a generic and modern story with a thin vineer of Greek mythology. Kratos is less of a character and more of a reason to move the game along to the various locations. I know it’s not a completely fair comparison, but Hades used Greek instruments to create greek-influenced and interesting music that I still find myself humming and drumming to years later. Hades also did a way better job of using actual Greek mythology to create a narrative that would actually fit in that cannon.

I remember playing Knack 1&2 and thinking “wow, this is like if the old God of War games were fun”. Knack is far from perfect of course, but is largely a similar series that cares more about being fun than being mature.

I’m playing through the 2018 God of War now. Completely different, and honestly a few hours in I’m still not sure why they chose to make this a God of War game staring Kratos instead of just making it a fresh IP. Maybe more lore reasons will be revealed, but so far it seems it was just to capitalize on the brand for marketing reasons. The music is still not a strength, but it’s better. The environments are better. The combat is still pretty boring with way too many boring enemies with way too much health, but it’s better. This is the first game where I’m starting to get tired of the same UI and over-the-shoulder perspective that other Sony games have used lately (Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Horizon, Spiderman). GoW, like most of those games, has an unnecessarily complicated itemization and leveling system that just bogs the game down, and feels almost inspired by MMO’s or gacha mobile games.

It does a great job of characterization, with plenty of small, subtle, beautifully written moments that grant insight into personalities. The boy is annoying, but I can see that’s the point so I mostly don’t mind. It’s really annoying how the game won’t shut up- there’s always someone saying something, and if you even just stop moving for a second someone pipes up to remind you of what you should be doing. It doesn’t have space to breath. The puzzles are better than the prior games- they are an acceptable tool for pacing but aren’t great by themselves. The story seems a lot better, with much more attention given to original Norse mythology.

With Uncharted I could push last the mediocre puzzles and bullet sponge enemies because the cutscenes were really good and the stories were fun. For Ratchet and Clank I can ignore how the humor has gotten worse and more juvenile over time because it’s still fun to platform, dodge, cycle through weapons, and kill tons of enemies. For Horizon Zero Dawn… Actually I don’t have many complaints, that was a solid title. For GoW (2018) there’s just nothing pulling me back to it.

Twilight Princess is worth mentioning too. It was rated Teen, and had this scene (no gore or sex or anything, just weird surreal horror).

Zelda is such a diverse franchise it really depends on the game. I love Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask, but didn’t like BotW or Windwaker at all. It’s almost like 2 or 3 different franchises crammed into one.

My personal theory is that a lot of the love for The Witcher 3 in particular stems from the fact that very early on it has a sex scene with full nudity, with a female character who is supernaturally hot according to the lore. There’s several women Geralt can seduce, and I suspect a lot of people who mostly play hentai games were in shock to play something with more exciting gameplay than match-3 grids or a jigsaw puzzle.

The Witcher 3 doesn’t seem like a bad game, but I’m similar to you in that I’ve bounced off it a couple times after a few hours. There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing that really grabbed me and made me want to keep playing more either. I still plan on giving it another shot eventually.

I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.

I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn’t die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki’s to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn’t think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.

Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it’s better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it’s fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.

I still don’t have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn’t need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn’t have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.

The multiplayer barely works. It’s restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like… Why can’t my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter’s Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren’t the damage types explained anywhere? I’m still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.

The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say “it gets good after the first 100 hours”. For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.

The beautiful irony here is that you are believing in and spreading IDF propaganda for them.

It would be a logical fallacy to jump to such a conclusion without interviewing a randomly sampled and much larger population. It is possible you may be correct or incorrect, but you are jumping to a conclusion about a topic with insufficient data to do so.

Your evidence supports that there are members of the IDF who are enthusiastically engaged with what they’re doing. I am not debating that- i think you’re right.

But it’s important to remember this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen interviews of IDF members objecting to what they are doing does not mean those members do not exist. I would expect the IDF to have systems in place to minimize the external visibility if any such objections, which makes a generalization like that dangerous.

They aren’t going to let you see the unenthusiastic ones.

Lol what a strange stretch. I’m not Christian, I’m an atheist socialist annoyed at how the US government has historically worked to overthrow socialism everywhere in the world.

NYPD has offices all around the globe. Because… 9/11 or something.

Socialism has failed every time it’s been attempted, for one very good reason.

I fully expect the CIA to get involved. Probably before the general election even happens.

So they can go work for EA? Or Ubisoft? Or one of Take-Two’s dev teams? Or something owned by Tencent or Embracer or Epic?

This isn’t just “Microsoft bad”. It’s “Microsoft is one of many giant mega corporations that are ruining the entire industry”.

Maybe some of these people could join or found smaller indie studios, but there are reasons why they didn’t do that already.

The regulatory bodies of several nations really dropped the ball by allowing the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard acquisitions.

This isn’t the result of a market being “overextended”, and it isn’t about finding efficiencies. It’s about Microsoft doing what it’s always done- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Just one more offenses added to the pile of anti-consumer tactics employed by tech companies.

The EU is slightly further ahead than most, but globally most governments have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting consumers from anything digital.

Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?

I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.

Steam Link just… Works. It’s an official Valve thing. There’s a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it’s not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I’m on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b

I can’t hear Richard Horvitz without thinking of Invader Zim. He does a ton of random voices in the more recent Ratchet and Clank games and it’s very distracting.