.

Doomguy is actually a post-doomer:

He knows that the mega-corporations are evil and that the world’s future is hopeless. He knows he isn’t going to save anyone.

But he keeps killing the demons, because it’s simply the right thing to do. It’s who he is. Why did he get sent to Mars in the first place? Because he spoke up about the injustices he witnessed in the Marines. And as every Marine knows, that’s the worst possible thing you could do for your career trajectory.

But doomguy doesn’t care. Because doomguy doesn’t believe in other Marines, in corporate bigwigs and other cultists, in the scientists naively working towards enslaving the galaxy, or in ignorami such as you or I. Doomguy has been liberated from the chains of hope.

Now he lives a simple path, following his own dharma: Doomguy sees fucked up shit, and he fucks it up.

A true role model for those seeking reason in a life bereft of hope. Doomguy teaches us how to find meaning in the process, rather than the outcome.

Flowers can grow even in the most barren desert, and a Zen master can arise among even the most despondent. The demons cannot bear one with such control over the elements of their own faith and despair. And so, generation after generation, they taught their spawn to fear the coming of doomguy: The one who would overcome the trappings of hope and ego to selflessly deliver justice against his masters.

Only one who would sacrifice it all could destroy it all - to pursue ruin as progress - and only one who truly spites the mortal coil can offer such a sacrifice. Doomguy is the best of us.

Kirby is perfect. They are my hero. And they could eat all of your heroes.

Well, dear author, your mentor is an idiot and your shit take is hardly even superficial.

“I’m not an RPG player and I don’t want to play an RPG so why is this RPG an RPG?!”

Is BG3 a bad game because it has not “solved” ease-of-play “problems” that no other game has ever “solved” either? Only if no game to date has ever been a good game.

I feel attacked.

By my own Python hammer.

nginx Popular HTTP server

lol. but i dig it.

I saw you mention that you were working on this - props for getting it out so quickly!

Have you seen all of the statists saying the worst about Snowden must be true because the only place he could get to was Russia?

If Russia wanted, they could accept him and sit back while America destroyed itself. Let him say whatever he wants, and let the Americans think he’s being fed propaganda. Easy money.

A commodity is defined by fungibility, and RE is fungible for the firms doing most of the buying and selling affecting prices - even if it isn’t so much for you or I.

they’re not a commodity

Oh, but they are.

(I totally agree they shouldn’t be.)

I commented elsewhere in this thread that I love JSR cell shading!

I’ve really been wanting to replay that game, but I’m not much of a gamer anymore.

I thought they looked great but there was a lot of hate for cell-shading at the time, at least as I recall.

From being a power mod to just pestering mods. Is the planet healing after all?

It was sarcasm. I was making fun of LW’s double standard when it comes to how they treat other instances, and the narratives they use to justify it.

i’m guessing they got caught in their own circlejerk that tells them that all of that is normal.

Yeah, I consider it the reddit 2.0 instance fwiw.

Those who talk about it do. I’m sure many already scrape without going around telling the world about it.

I turned on Bungie when they shifted Halo development to Microsoft. Although I no longer use a Mac lol

My prime motive for piracy! The current model is exploitative of the artists and must be ushered quickly to its own defeat.

They shouldn’t have to strike until they lose their houses like so many do now. Every year they receive less and less of the profit of their work (and its certainly not because of any excess going to those in need). It’s a shame and an embarrassment on society.

They’ll never tame the party animals over at beehaw, LW will just have to defederate themselves instead.

I gather they might be a little more biased than they let on. I’m not sure how self-aware they are of it, though.

Someone is going to at some point. Whoever it is might do it behind-the-scenes if they are risk-averse.

Think of what the granular user data is worth on an instance that big.

Want to buy user data? If reddit tells you no that’s that, but in the fediverse you can go and ask the next largest instance if the first one says no. The game theory is a little more complex here in the fediverse.

When it does happen, I hope the backlash will be appropriately large. I don’t think any of the key stakeholders here want to see a normalization of lemmy being monetized in this way - through donations sure, but not by selling the users’ attention and privacy to 3rd parties.

Now, why the fuck he cares so much about pirates at this point, I haven’t a clue…

Look at the username they are so attached to. Bungie fan. This person appears to have tied their identity to a video game studio that doesn’t even know they exist. My guess is that they’re playing white knight for their corporate waifu.

Oh, really? That seems imbalanced, but like I said I have yet to play so what do I know.

I agree, they made the absolute most of the early access when it has become so common for that stage to just be a money-grab or an excuse for not finishing. There’s no way it would have been as stable as it is if they hadn’t done that.

Great to hear!

How many other studies are making games like BG3 or D:OS? Essentially zero.

Larian found a killer formula with D:OS and brought it into the limelight by getting the chance to develop BG3, probably one of the most anticipated games of all times… but also one that some younger generations were nearly blind to. I recall it being a Diablo vs. BG thing back in the day, and while both were awesome, kids weren’t picking BG.

And Larian is working on the backs of giants. They didn’t get egotistical and reinvent the wheel, they went with DnD 5e exactly as they should have. (I’m not sure how closely they’ve followed it, though, if anyone has more information on that. I’m not ready to start it quite yet.)

The stars aligned and Larian is receiving long-due acclaim as a result. I’m very excited for them.

I think it actually did largely disappear for a short time before wireless controllers became the norm.

A lot of these sites also give you imdb ratings and a bunch of other things that regular streaming sites don’t.

Oh look at that, free services devoid of corporate hijackery outperforming the paid options yet again.

his current stance reveals a fundamental tension in our understanding of power and accountability

The hierarchy of power is backwards.

It subjugates humans under a tyranny abstractions, when it should be organizing abstraction under humanity.

Power shouldn’t flow from the top down.

It should rise from the bottom up.

My theory of systems is that only the system matters, not the actors. Capitalism needs sociopathic CEOs so that’s what we get, whether: 1. It turns people that way, 2. people who don’t fit don’t survive long, or 3. only those people make it to those roles.

Likewise, if you have a system that is relying on honour to function, you do not have a functional system. That might not become apparent in one day or even one year, but statistics will win and the exploitable will be exploited. The superorganism will burn through individuals until it finds the right fit, the one that exercises loopholes like a fistful of knuckles.

Another day, another step closer to balkanization.

There’s a spin campaign going on around this, just fyi. I don’t see it at play here. But there are neolib think tanks pushing the idea that:

Reductions in SOx emissions due to recent regulations are causing additional warming

while the truth is:

Reductions in SOx emissions due to recent regulations are exposing warming that is already here

When you look at it like this, you can see that SOx emissions aren’t a solution. In fact there is a very good reason these emissions were regulated. It’s because it causes acid rain and ocean acidification. Certainly, we don’t want to increase SOx emissions to further mask the warming in the atmosphere, because the oceans turning too acidic is also an existential threat. And acid rain has a real cost to society. In fact this was all driven by EU regulations, and recently they looked into the data of what the SOx emission reductions were doing in terms of warming, and came to the conclusion that the acidifying effects of SOx were far worse compared to the warming effects and that the regulations were still a good idea.

You might have heard SOx proposed for counteracting the warming effects of GHG. I think that’s probably not a good idea, but I support as much research as we can muster into these things. My understanding is that CaCO3 has a far more favorable profile than SOx. Personally I am far from comfortable with the amount of confidence we have in the adverse effects of this technology but I also believe that desperate countries are going to take desperate actions regardless.

This guy proposes using seawater. That’s an interesting idea. I’m not going to watch the video and the details aren’t in the text, but I’m not sure what exactly he is proposing and based off of what studies. He may be talking about doing this at a lower altitude for a certain effect, but in general water vapor is a key GHG.

I haven’t played 3 yet, but BG is a classic and this studio killed it with Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2. You should play it if you get a chance!

Your second bit is exactly the case. The copyright protects artists here, and Japan doesn’t care about indie artists. The megacorporations will benefit more from AI than they will lose out from it.

It sounds like you’re familiar with Japan, so I’m guessing you also know what the political climate is there. This makes a lot of sense.

Piracy is always justified. The issue is with private property rights, which is further exacerbated by their lack of updates in the digital era.

Artists shouldn’t be dependent on distributors. Artists should be supported because they are artists and our society needs artists. Artists deserve to live and thrive whether or not they are successful, just like all people deserve.

We need to decouple the profit motive from every aspect of life and the human experience. Piracy is one such decoupling in action. It is an attempt to live by one’s own ethics instead of a corporate ethos that dictated to us, even if that is not directly the individual’s motivation.

People will say that piracy hurts the creators. But it really hurts capitalism, and capitalism then passes the pain on to the creators to disincentivize change. Alternate modes of consumption exist, but they would cause a collapse in the power/economic hierarchy which is unpalatable to those on top.

Sees headline: The fascism or the climate disasters?

Opens link: Ah, the fascism.

I got sealioned on reddit not that long ago for sources when I said that Meloni was lionized by media and her fascist ideology memory holed. II obliged, but this was sanity-reinforcing right from the opening:

By this summer, everything — her youthful admiration for Benito Mussolini, her party’s links to neofascists, her often extreme rhetoric — had been forgiven. Praised for her practicality and support for Ukraine, Ms. Meloni has established herself as a reliable Western partner, central to Group of 7 meetings and NATO summits alike. A visit to Washington, which takes place on Thursday, seals her status as a valued member of the international community.

But the comforting tale of a populist firebrand turned pragmatist overlooks something important: what’s been happening in Italy. Ms. Meloni’s administration has spent its first months accusing minorities of undermining the triad of God, nation and family, with dire practical consequences for migrants, nongovernmental organizations and same-sex parents. Efforts to weaken anti-torture legislation, stack the public broadcaster with loyalists and rewrite Italy’s postwar constitution to increase executive power are similarly troubling. Ms. Meloni’s government isn’t just nativist but has a harsh authoritarian streak, too.

You’re saying the world is ending

Civilization at least, yes, the science is quite clear on that.

so it’s time to be a kind of unhelpful anarchist.

Are you using anarchist properly here, or as a pejorative? And if properly, what do you mean by ‘unhelpful?’

I am an anarchist, yes. I think more people should be too, yes. One reason why I am an anarchist - which means I oppose vertical power structures with lots of hierarchy - is because horizontal power structures are more accountable to their stakeholders. Our society is paralyzed in the face of climate change, because we rely on a few powerful individuals to take action even though that action is against their personal interests. Instead of saving us they mislead us and cling to their power. Anarchist power structures do not give rise to unimaginably powerful actors that can no longer be controlled by society, because that is a feature of hierarchy.

People don’t want to accept that millions are going to die in the near future due to climate change. They want to keep going with Business As Usual, and reform it to hopefully something better as we go along. But that isn’t an option. Replacing all of our infrastructure with ‘green’ tech like EVs and solar cells would send us right over the limit just from the emissions of mining the minerals. Arable land is decreasing and predicted to continue to decrease at an accelerated rate. Even if carbon capture technology is improved by an order of magnitude, you’d still have to cover most of the land in the world with it to achieve a meaningful level of capture - which is of course entirely infeasible. Fusion power would make it possible, but fusion would solve many of our problems. But we’d have to have the fusion plants up and running by the end of the decade for it to matter and that is far from the consensus timeline.

We can look at this another way. Jevons Paradox tells us that when capacity is expanded, usage expands keeping utilization more or less constant. Building more lanes on an interstate does not significantly benefit traffic and throughput. When you add more power to a grid, it gets utilized. As the US has added greener power sources to its grid, those additions have been entirely eaten up by increases in usage - meaning in terms of the environment, there has been no net benefit. The motives in our society do not properly value externalities like the environment, so our damage to the environment will remain unmitigated until we change our motivations.

The AMOC is slowing. The Jet Stream and Gulfstream are turning chaotic. IPCC scientists are screaming and leaking drafts because the final IPCC reports disagree with the science they are based on (it’s politicians and lobbyists that have final IPCC editorial control). A new ocean temperature was set off the coast of Florida. India lost count of how many people died in their last wet bulb event, and now the US is experiencing them. Antarctic Sea Ice has entered a new state (or else we’re watching a 6.4 sigma chance event… lol). Wheat and rice harvests are abysmal this year, with some countries implementing export controls.

This is dire and I am not being hyperbolic.

But that won’t achieve anything, no matter how sarcastic you are.

Collapse is almost certain at this point regardless of what actions we take. However, we can be confident that our current behaviors are what led to this collapse, and it logically follows that to change course (if possible) we must change our behaviors.

Nothing except changing our behaviors will achieve anything.

I know I am not the greatest and most eloquent proponent of our planet’s vital systems. That’s never who I wanted to be, I just fill in for the role as best I can when no one else is around. I encourage everyone to join c/collapse and keep an eye on some of the studies that come out. With so many bad faith actors around, the most reliable thing that we can do is to inform ourselves through primary sources.

Nice dodge.

What if it’s the only mentality that would prevent extinction? Would it still be abhorrent in that case?

A few decades too late for something like this to make any difference.

I, for one, do not put the value of private property acquired through an unfair system over the value of life on Earth. I honestly don’t care about private property all that much in the grand scheme of things.

At least blocking traffic gets attention. Climate change is killing people already - why would I care if people can’t get to their jobs, when those jobs are killing everything and everyone I love?

Why should I care about the consumerism these BS jobs keep running? My mental and physical health does not depend on a Funko Pop’s existence - quite the opposite actually, it might be dependent on the cessation of Funko Pops’ existence.

I’m not even allowed to vote against the system that is so clearly our enemy. I assume the difference between these activists and I is that they believe the system will allow itself to be reformed out of everything that makes it the system.

I’d be fine if it all crashed overnight. In fact I’d be ecstatic, because that is the path to the least painful (remaining) outcome. I mean I would be completely screwed, but it would at least give future generations a chance.