uriel238

uriel238, 10 hours ago

I gave up on Far Cry and Watchdogs not because the games were deteriorating with each iteration (they were / are) but because the sexual harrassment ring on which the upper management fed and HR silenced the victims made supporting the company untennable. At least for me.

Since then I’ve found alternative indie projects that have scratched some of those itches pretty well. I don’t play Ubisoft, even those games I already own have licenses for.

uriel238, 15 hours ago

Extinction by AI takeover or robot apocalypse does seem cooler than extinction by pollution rendering then environment uninhabitable.

I’d rather not go extinct at all, but if we’re fucked regardless.

uriel238, 14 hours ago

But, according to Das Kapital (and the last two centuries) capitalists will always capture the government and regulators, neutering their ability to fulfill their role. Greed and the susceptibility to corruption will always drive the system to where it is today, in which only revolution will free us from the established system.

But even then, civil war rarely heralds a communist revolution, but usually a run of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next. We have to get very lucky or be tired of fighting before we can install a public serving state. And we haven’t yet tried pre-writing and publishing the new constitution.

uriel238, 13 hours ago

Take a look at Abiotic Factor a love letter to Black Mesa in the form of a crafting survival game set in a New Mexico laboratory complex.

I haven’t played it yet, but am sold from the LPs I’ve seen and am waiting for a sale.

uriel238, 15 hours ago

I’m pretty sure Jeff Bezos owns WP, but I can’t speak to how much he intervenes, or if he has pressured WP to suppress stories critical of Amazon.

Bias-wize, it was pretty solidly neoliberal when I last read it consistently (which ended when the paywall became too hard to circumvent, and I switched to AP and Reuters).

That said, protests are commonly not good for business, especially if they’re big and loud. Doubly so if they become a riot.

On the other hand, police brutality almost assures success of the protest in some essential ways, even if its at the expense of protestor life and limb: Bystanders become sympathists. Sympathists become activists. Activists become radicalized (saboteurs and revolutionaries). It shows that the grievance is serious enough that the state needs to suppress it. And when you’re lucky, folk songs get written about how The Man did you wrong. ( Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming… )

This figured largely into the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy in the Civil Rights Movement, which was to become a nuisance enough that the police would get violent. And while some protestors got hurt (or killed), it amplified the message and escalated sympathies for the cause. BLM is trying to do the same thing these days, but with the addition of phone cameras, so recordings of violence from the incident gets leaked to the internet, and people can see for themselves how the police treat their fellow Americans in minority and lower-class neighborhoods, hence the 2020 unrest in the US after the killing of George Floyd.

The thing is law enforcement is supposed to know better, as are elected representatives like the Mayor of New York or the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. When they get hawkish about putting down unrest with force, it is a sign of incompetence and a clear disinterest in good governance, which itself fuels even further grievance and unrest from the public.

uriel238, 14 hours ago

Standard haxor uniform for posing for pictures.

uriel238, 16 hours ago

I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

Oh goodness, as one who has a bad habit of putting responses into essay form, I hope this doesn’t refer to me. I’m not an LLM. Honest!

Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m human. It’s a damn convincing hallucination.

uriel238, 1 day ago

Super long spaghetti noodles are dried in coils and are pretty fancy.

uriel238, 1 day ago

This just makes me think the soldier isn’t intending to shoot anyone anyway, say if he’s more sympathetic to the local civilians than his political masters.

And if I recall correctly, American troopers often made more friends with chocolate and beanie babies than with bullets.

uriel238, 1 day ago

It’s more that if you own your house, then you can replace that sucky fixture with one you like, whereas if you rent, you’re stuck with the sucky fixture, and when fixtures break, they’re replaced with sucky fixtures.

uriel238, 1 day ago

Well, then precarity is also bad for fertility. No one wants to have sex or have kids when they’re permanently a month away from homelessness. And that means after the alphas, we might see a severe labor shortage for our landlords and industrialist masters.

Curiously, this was a permanent problem under feudalism.

uriel238, 1 day ago

Some people need sexual activity, and not all children are intended. Few of the children we have are actually adoptable, though there are safe surrender sites, and it would be interesting to see if they’re being used more.

But sexual frustration figures largely in the motivation of the alt-right, also for rampage killers, spree killers, and Ted Kaczynski.

So sure, we can swear off sex, and some do. But it results in hundreds of thousands of War Boys eager to serve Immortan Joe and get witnessed all shiny and chrome into Valhalla.

There’s also the problem of how the German Reich dealt with a population implosion. Himmler started his master-race program, arresting and detaining German women for a breeding program. It was highlighted recently in an article about the historical that inspired Margaret Atwood for the atrocities of Gilead in A Handmaid’s Tale We’re already seeing interest in rolling back women’s rights and women’s personhood here in the US.

So don’t blame the victims.

uriel238, 16 hours ago

Then you don’t understand the complex reality in favor of a simplistic view. If that’s what you need to do to cope in what is, granted, a terrifying reality, then you do you. But I cannot follow. Do what you will.

uriel238, 1 day ago

As someone highly susceptible to dark patterns, I’d like to see more regulation and investigation of them in commercial practices.

Heck, some kinds of commercial fluffing are outright lies.

uriel238, 1 day ago

I thought it was dark as in manipulation that isn’t readily visible. For instance, a micro-transaction for a character reskin accompanied by default skins being crap. In Watchdogs Legion all the Londoners you could recruit generally had poor fashion, then money was scant and clothes were super expensive (but you could by more money with micro-transctions).

In one of the Space Quest series, as a joke (black humor in theme with the series) whenever an airlock interface was opened, the mouse cursor started on the Open Outer Door button, so an accidental double-tap was deadly, so dark patterns were known about in the 1990s, though not yet given a name.

Click-wrapped TOS and contracts for software and services were one such strategem, though we’re more aware of it today, and more judges are willing to reject contracts and TOS that didn’t include a clear, announced disclosure of their odious terms.

uriel238, 1 day ago

When you rule, you get to pick what qualities have merit, which is how we end up of administrations of The Master Race or lispy Spaniards, or ruthlesd billionaires.

We’re still trying to figure out how to get to government tha implements public-serving ideas.

uriel238, 2 days ago

I’m very tempted to choose a brain worm of your own and push that agenda at him to assert dominance, but that’s because I can be a passive-aggressive fuck if I feel someone is being overly aggressive.

Judgemental religious folk can bring out the Azathoth Hypothesis in me.

uriel238, 16 hours ago

My shirt says Gunpowder, Gelatine.

My face says I’m momentarily out of action.

uriel238, 3 days ago

This makes a strong case on the discovery side of the discovery vs. invention controversy.

Ironically, my dad idolized Pythagoras and the notion of discovering a scientific fundamental to be remembered for thousands of years, for which the secret is not to actually do science, but raise a cult of scientists who attribute their inventions to you. Like Thomas Edison.

uriel238, 3 days ago

Too spicy for Facebook! Her apperance on a art museum Facebook page was enough to get the page suspended.

uriel238, 3 days ago

White handsome Jesus is always ironic Jesus. Like Buddy Christ.

uriel238, 3 days ago

Funny, marines and wait staff are the two work forces we point to as counterexamples when someone suggests poor people are just lazy.

The ownership class will certainly tremble when they gear up for a rumble against the Man.

uriel238, 4 days ago

I picked up shizzle for rizzle from Tiny Tina and works as a rated G version of the shit meaning either the genuine article or the diggity dank.

uriel238, 4 days ago

Yep. But it has an unusable interface. And I’ll try the LLM, Call mom! and find that I can’t get it to place a call.

uriel238, 4 days ago

Wait, other Gen Xers and Millennials don’t fear becoming homeless?

I have a lot of friends who were homeless at least once during life, and all the others have been on the verge of homelessness. Is this atypical in the United States?