Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx’s story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented… Oh man, now I’m worried I can’t remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again.

The moment they drop their new headset I’ll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I’d say I’m excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that’s the polish or maybe that’s the massive amount of testing I’m led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it’s so good.

Swapped to Linux 3 or so months ago, and have loved it. Doing Arch Linux, wanted to see every component go into the OS and just get a slightly better understanding of my computer - even though I think most educated people could use it with little complaint.

Games mostly just work, most software I use is there, I’ve found some fun new programs like an ASCII art and dithering image converter which has just been fun.

Last night I broke my system by trying to use my yubikey as the sudo requirement following some instructions that weren’t explicit about the caution I should have had. Loaded a backup via the Konsole and was back to before my fuck up in 5 minutes - mess up to fix (through freakout). That’s given me a lot of confidence in the stability of the system.

I also got to play the Arc Raiders Alpha test. I’ve written about this story before but it didn’t work the first day but it was clear to me it was a server issue or proton issue. Second day a patch came out and I was able to play it no problem. That gave me a lot of confidence that good games, even good online PVP games, will come to Linux without much issue.

Between those two events I’m pretty confident I’ll be on Linux for the rest of my life and if Arch continues to get support that’s where I’ll be for the foreseeable future (which it seems like it’s only speeding up and not at all in question of their funding).

Where are you getting that opinion? Is that backed by data or literally anything that would give weight to what you’re saying?

Otherwise you’re just defending landlords. Cause that sounds so wrong it’s unbelievable someone would just assert that.

That’s sorta my point, it shouldn’t be seen as a start. We can agree that the AfD would be an immediate loss, they would make things immediately worse and the country would very quickly decline for everyone but the elite who would be insulated from their own policies.

I need people in Germany to see the CDU as a slow loss, because they make things worse at a slower time scale, and the country will continue to decline under their guidance for everyone but the elite who will benefit from their policies.

The AfD losing is good. The CDU winning over the AfD winning is better. But both scenarios are still a loss, and they are the signals that the system is organically producing worse results and it’ll continue to increase the magnitude of those poor results until we improve the system.

The CDU should barely be considered a win in Germany. They pave the road that the AfD will walk down. Conservatives make everything worse and fascists thrive in poor conditions.

The future can and should be about getting better! That means more efficient, that means more money for more people for less work, that means less hours spent working.

Merz and conservatives want a worse future for you and your family and your kids. They want to enrich themselves and their friends while asking you to work yourself to death. Don’t vote against your self-interests, don’t vote in the AfD or those that inevitably bring them to power like the CDU.

Vote for progress, vote progressives.

Merz is in power today because Germans feared the AfD gaining power if they voted for more extreme parties capable of change so they voted for safe choices. The catch is voting for the CDU guarantees things get worse, which then further cultivates the AfD.

Merz wants the AfD to exist because it helps keep him in power. People most vote progressive, must vote to tackle wealth inequality, or the AfD is inevitable. We either fix the root problems or we decline into fascism. The CDU are incapable of fixing the root causes because that is where they thrive.

Someone put out a patch for the Arc Raiders tech test and it allowed me to play after only the first launch day. Very grateful to the steam/arc team that did that - was a great game experience.

I was able to get once human to work using protondb’s suggested launch settings before this patch.

Why would we want to increase working hours? That’s the opposite of progress in society. Why would we ever think this is necessary?

Conservatives will put our country in debt, they will make it less safe, they’ll blame the most marginalized groups as they enrich themselves and their friends, and they will ask you to work more and for longer.

This is why the AFD are succeeding, because what people see as the most safe options are also the ones destroying their country and worsening our lives.

Educate your friends, educate your neighbors, organize with your unions, don’t give an inch to the conservatives. Demand progress, not societal decline.

I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.

Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.

That’s a stupid comparison and I think that’s self-evident. I’m not interested in having a conversation about this with the quality of output you’re displaying. I hope this does as well as it deserves and that you’re getting paid upfront.

I’m responding to your advertisement buddy. I don’t have to go to a landfill to know it’s a dump.

A social media platform advertising to “centralists” or the anti-modding crowd is actually advertising to the right wing crowd and likely the worst of them.

This sounds like truth social but instead of being pro-republican it’s just pro-hatred, misinformation, and extreme takes.

Seems like the opposite of what an educated (or intelligent) and good person would want.

Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.

Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.

That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.

That’s the joke and it’s good you picked up on it.

People need to face the consequences of their beliefs within the circle of their loved ones. If that fails, the next social circle upwards like their friends. But right now it feels like even that has failed and now people are okay with letting awful beliefs fester in their neighbors because it’s “politics”. That’s not okay, as this comic relies on.

I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.

Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.

I’m waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.

Which I understand and agree with. But to come to LateStageCapitalism and claim people who want to minimize taxes have the same motives as the people who want to minimize worker wages is I think too reductive for my taste.

I think the working man shoots himself in the foot when they push to minimize taxing. I think people need to hold taxation and public services in high esteem and it needs to be a pride for people. I think at the same time we have to be honest and outraged by how our tax dollars are spent (in the US at least.

The US being corrupt doesn’t change the principle, it just changes how we address this specific instance. But the people who shake their fist at union dues are doing LateStageCapitalisms’ work for the oligarchs, just the same as taxes. We should be pushing for more taxes on the wealthy, tax billionaires out of existence and cap millionaires at something reasonable and safe for democracy like let’s say 5 million in assets.

Taxes can be a formidable tool against corporations and for the people.

But building a good community through the funding of public services via taxation is a moral/ethical good.

Striving to reduce labor costs to enrich yourself, especially to the detriment of that labor and to an excessive degree of wealth for yourself, is a moral/ethical evil.

Taxation, when run by and for the people who generate it, is a good thing that people should strive to support. It’s a misunderstanding to not view taxation in a well working system (examining individual systems, not the whole in some binary fashion) as a cost efficiency for things you already want - childcare, education, healthcare, public transportation (busses, trams/railcars, trains, bicycle infrastructure), insurance, energy, food, research, protection, charity, infrastructure, etc.