Is the new one better than Tears of the Kingdom?

I’m not sure proffering apologetics for war crimes is appropriate for Beehaw. Especially not when you clearly label Hamas as a terrorist organization and specifically not a legitimate steward of the civilian population’s will.

GTA Peace is kind of weirdly named for the content of the game. Maybe it’s meant to be ironic?

Having played Palworld a bit, some of the monsters are distinct from Pokemon, but some of them are incredibly obvious clones.

But like, looking back at some of the knock-off toys I remember seeing in the 80s and early 90s? It definitely seems like copyright has gotten more robust in its attempted overreach.

Wouldn’t that be the case with most people who’ve moved to a new area? Like, presumably unless they’re there for work, school, or family or a spouse they moved because they wanted to get out of wherever they were. I’d imagine that if you go to Ohio and ask people how they like it, you’d probably find more people who are happy living there.

This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.

You’d be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don’t really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it’s made with passion and emotion.

Given the responses in this thread, it seems that the same bias exists even in ostensibly leftist spaces. Yikes.

Y’all need to get out more.

Using someone else’s IP, such as claiming that something you’re distributing is an episode of their show, most certainly qualifies for a valid DMCA takedown notice.

Check out this modern day Holocaust-denial level bullshit. Eventually this will be known to be just as malicious. It’s weird that it isn’t already.

Putin only pays to derail Democrat energy.

Oh, sorry, and Xi.

I literally mean political manipulation. Fully bad faith attempts to derail the Democratic party via arguments that the person in question doesn’t actually believe. Again, this may not be that, but I think it’s a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

We are in a notably leftist, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian space with users who clearly speak their minds and bring the conversations had here into bigger spaces. It is ripe for being targeted by bad actors.

To be fair, Beehaw has been clearly inundated with bad faith arguments about the election for weeks. Let’s not pretend it hasn’t. This may not be that, but it’s not appropriate to scold users for calling out dead obvious political manipulation.

Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump’s supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to ‘start moving forward’?

I’m honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren’t? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn’t about to do it. But like, that can’t be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn’t work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.

When we’re focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That’s not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, “See what monsters they think you are? We know what you’re really like.”

If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn’t mean we can’t also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.

This is why the Obama campaign’s “Yes We Can” slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying “this is wrong”. Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of “Yes We Can” and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.

“Or We’re Fucked” isn’t a very good campaign slogan, as we’ve seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they’re not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don’t have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.

Dress for the job that you want.

If you want to get something done, you’re a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that’s passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.

Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.

Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they’re in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they’re a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.

If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.

Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I’m skeptical.

Yeah, it very much depends on the person. I find that just my voice isn’t as helpful as my voice and visible body and face, but only if I’m in a space where I feel confident and self-actualized.

A biiiig part of that though may be that I’m trans and my voice is the least passing part of me. Also my voice and text don’t have dimples.

Agreed. The people on the internet are real, living their lives out somewhere else in the world. They are just as important as anyone else. I’ve had times in my life where I’ve socialized extensively offline and times where I’ve socialized extensively online. I don’t see a fundamental difference to the relationships I make. The people I’ve become close with who I exclusively talk to online and haven’t shared physical proximity with are some of the most important people in my life.

I do think it can sometimes be harder to build an initial rapport online. The lack of body language can make it tricky to convey meaning sometimes in the same way you would offline, and you don’t get these other cues that tell you about what a person is thinking. That said, though, sometimes face-to-face interactions introduce a lot of noise that isn’t necessarily helpful either. The body language of anxiety, to me, isn’t typically super usefully communicative, and it can often become a component to offline interactions.

Also, like, some video games do have pretty compelling body language. DayZ, in particular, is incredibly good at being emotive. It does a great job of translating tiny movements that convey a lot of personality. Everything from moving your head around to different ways of gesticulating while talking and even the way people walk can have a huge impact on communication. A lot of the time I can spot my friends, even in totally different outfits, just based on the way they move around in-game. It kind of reminds me of the ‘body language’ of vehicles on the road, but with much greater articulation.

Personally, for me, I find a lot of comfort in online spaces and in the relationships I’ve developed with people I’ve become close to through those spaces. As someone who isn’t always super comfortable with eyeballs on me, and as someone who mostly grew up in a place where people were pretty fucking hostile, I think it’s enriched my life substantially.

Also, like, I get to have relationships with people all over the world. I feel like it gives some perspective that it’s tough to have otherwise without extensive travel.

Honestly, my reading of Marxist theory makes me look to the inverse of this. The uprising Marx and Engels talk about is a reaction to the injustice and instability of capitalism. As resources are consolidated, as capitalists become more entrenched, the forces that create a change increase. More people see it for what it is until eventually we reach a critical mass spontaneously.

Authoritarian communism doesn’t work because it’s trying to jump the gun. It comes from people seeing changes down the road, but they’re not changes that they can force to come too early. The fruit of the proletariat ownership of the means of production and the withering of the state literally isn’t ripe yet.

Ironically, it’s acts of suppression that ripen that fruit. From active attempts to keep it from ripening to socially destructive capitalist practices like elevating C-levels and chasing quarterly profits.

An authoritarian imposition, to my reading, not only won’t work, but slows down the process by essentially letting off steam as well as creating a negative association between communist social structuring and authoritarianism.

At least reform has positive results in the short term, potentially building greater association between distributed resources and greater social benefit at large. But even then, it may literally be the reverse that brings us closer to the end state of universal proletariat throwing off of chains and the eventually withering of the state.

Presumably this will mostly affect Republicans. Nice own goal, Elon!

Awww is this headline too effective? 🤭

Nah. It works. The fact that it isn’t true literally doesn’t matter. This is not the time to worry about what strategies come with the integrity of accuracy. If it works and has steam, at this point, we need it.

Fuck em. Flipper Couch-Fucker Vance doesn’t deserve our careful accuracy.

Also, like, have you seen this guy? There’s no way he’s not fucking couches.

Rip 'em apart! Make them into 6 different companies with single letter names and force two sets of two to share their letter to fuck with their marketing!

How cool would it be if Trump straight up killed the Republican party and they replaced it with something more grounded and centrist?

We might actually be able to push left!

Yes! What was that about unity?

Hah!

Imagine being so fucking lazy and uninspired that you outsource your political propaganda to an overgrown spell checker.

This honestly feels like the left taking back the social position we had in the 90s, which the right has spent the past few years attempting to be a pale, unfunny imitation of. Irreverence is our jam. Defiance is our bread and butter. The left does best when it saves the analytical brain for getting shit done and confidently mocks the presumption that some stuffy authority knows what’s better for us.

Don’t waste your energy arguing with these trolls, just call them weirdos and move on with your day!

Dino Land for Genesis was a lot of fun!

Honestly I mostly just know because I have a big stack of old Game Pros and Nintendo Powers from the 90s and I only ever remember seeing Game Informer in Barnes and Noble once those became a thing.

But you may still be right! xD

2006 is a bit late in the game. Game magazines as a relevant medium peaked in the 90s. By 2006 you have a pretty robust internet, what’s the point? Yeah, sure, if you stick them in every single B&N they’ll sell, but Game Pro and Nintendo Power were institutions in the 90s. If you wanted to know about games, that was the way.

Bummer. Game Informer was the leading game magazine when Game Pro and Nintendo Power were around, though? I think not. Game Informer was third fiddle at best.

I don’t know that that’s an operational definition of Christianity. It seems to me that a great many people who don’t seem familiar with love or forgiveness, but who seen intimately familiar with avarice and greed, self-identify as Christians. You can say that they’re not, but I don’t think that’s how religion usually works.

Ooohhh, that does look promising! Good to know there’s some kind of viable alternative!

That’s cool! I only really do thumb-ball mice, though, and I haven’t really seen alternatives to Logitech in the same form-factor. I imagine they might even have a patent on it.

Buuuut I’m betting I can do stuff like repair the couple of MX Ergos I have lying around if I need to if I get motivated about it. Or like, maybe there’s a way I can have replacement parts fabricated or use the shell of a Logitech mouse as the basis for something similar.

You hear that Logitech? Charge me a subscription fee and I will absolutely figure this out and distribute blueprints and repair guides to the whole ass internet. I appreciate your ergonomics, your unifying dongles, your precision mode, and all your hotkeys, but $90 is plenty for a mouse. Don’t get greedy or I will personally bite you in the ass.

I have used nothing but Logitech thumb-ball mice for the past 20 years. I love my MX Ergo.

If Logitech ever sells a mouse with a subscription, I don’t care how nice it is, I’ll have my own fucking PCB made and design my own QMK capable mouse before I’ll pay for it.

Just sell me the $90 mouse that lasts 5 years. I refuse to accept mouse feudalism.

I saw this on Ground.News this morning. None of the articles even listed the name of the bill, and all of them had zero criticism to offer. Not great.

Good to see wheels seem to be turning! Time to quit being pushovers!

Here’s hoping Harris uses the weight of the presidency to push for a breakup of Microsoft.

I’m excited to give her a chance to put her money where her mouth is, considering she’s offered about the most substantial criticism of Israel’s genocide that we’ve seen from this administration.

Not only am I able to get my medication at all because of Democrats, I get it for free because of Democrats. If Trump were in office? I’m not even sure if federal regulations would allow me to even access estrogen or hormone blockers at all. Even if my own state ignored federal legislation (which I would frankly expect in that situation), I also have to worry about wherever it is that my medication is produced and the pharmaceutical companies that I get it from still being willing to provide it.

I have never once heard a Republican talking about substantially raising the minimum wage. Meanwhile Bernie Sanders literally ran in a Democratic primary with the campaign promise of a $15/hr federal minimum wage.

Do you think we’re going to get an increase in the federal minimum wage if Trump gets in? It seems more likely to me that he might just straight up eliminate it.

Democrats got us loan forgiveness. Democrats got us ACA. Democrats got us subsidized cell phones. Democrats offer real solutions to homelessness, like, you know, fucking homes, instead of proposing to burn tent cities and make everything harder for the homeless.

Are the Democrats perfect? No. Not remotely. There’s a ton of problems with the party’s establishment, mostly that they hug the center and are, as you say, still susceptible to corporate influence.

But when you consider the alternative? Are you kidding me?

It’s like saying that there isn’t enough water to put out all the fire around us when we’re considering whether to pour some on a blanket and shield ourselves with it. Meanwhile there’s a cheetoh in a diaper with a fucking gas can that’s about to douse the blanket if we let him.

Don’t let him.

What does that even mean?

Neither of these choices are going to do anything meaningful? Harris is going to protect my access to my medications, she’s going to protect the environment, she’s going to protect our ability to actually elect another president after her! Because those are all things Trump is threatening!

You think when corporations are even less regulated they’re not going to be squeezing you from both ends?

I really, really do not understand this thinking.

Good! We need to get the energy up and keep it up!

Gloom! Doom! Oh no!

Harris is going to save us from Trump. Are you really going to complain that a hot house tomato doesn’t taste like anything when choosing to put either it or a literal chunk of human shit in your mouth?

We need to get excited about this BLT whether it ends up being a little watery or not if we want to actually eat.