Everyone wants to run a subscription service, until they have everyone on a subscription. Then instead of celebrating that they won capitalism, they go and start with the exclusive extra addons and upgrades. Because unfortunately no company in the history of companies has ever said that’s it, we’re making enough money, let’s relax.

I believe some of the rich assholes really do see birth rates as a sort of global crisis. Mostly because it poses a threat to their bottom line. Less workers = less labor to exploit, less consumers to buy their shit, pay subscriptions or blast with ads. And a demographic shift where the size of the older generation is greater than the younger generation massively screws up social security systems that depend on taxes from the young to pay the benefits for the old. And, more nefariously - because parents necessarily consume more and become more reliable workers: when you’re living paycheck to paycheck you can’t afford to quit, take unpaid leave, turn up overtime or go on strike. But perhaps too, some may be experiencing the existential crisis that there is a real, natural limit to the growth of the human race, that we are not god-destined to just expand forever and ever, but rather finite in our place in the cosmos.

To be fair, showing no historical correlation and just assuming the problem or separation started this year because it’s specifically indexed to the start of the year, is garbage math. Like, you got the correct answer, but you did the problem completely wrong.

See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.

And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.

Lol. They were trying their damndest to get me and my family to install that. I’m like… there’s a bit of a conflict of interest there. I can see some value in having location data of your family, who’s driving too fast, if someone’s in an accident. I will absolutely not be sharing that data with the company that earns money for its shareholders by outperforming the statistical likelihood of paying me money, by finding every way possible to not pay me money.

NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it’s because I don’t engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven’t really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.

But…

I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren’t the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.

But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.

I never used to understand the people that just left a poop bag alongside the road, but suddenly now I feel like I understand exactly what exchange led to that choice.

It’s in a bag, though, right? I mean, if old lady is just naked hand fisting shit into the trash can there’s bigger problems to tackle there.

Judging by the stock price decline that didn’t start last week, but rather has been ongoing for monthsyears, you’re spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It’s not just an acronym they made up, though it’s definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a “DEI” hire is their way of saying the person wasn’t qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I’m wondering if there’s maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don’t really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one’s arguing that game’s success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn’t handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it’s got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don’t know. Despite their popularity, I just don’t play that many shooters.

It feels like there’s a lot of potential here. One of the most loved colony sims, Dwarf Fortress, thrives on this concept of emergent behavior: yes, the descriptions of the individual characters, their motivations and backstories does have a sort of hollow, procedural generation to them. But the stories they enable, the wacky quirks like an engraver going nuts putting up murals to cheese on everyone’s walls, the fact that when you get an unlikely hero or battle outcome it isn’t the author’s giving them destiny but a true random fluke, the unexpected disaster of opening an unseen water or lava flow or awakening some ancient evil - that can create a wonderful sandbox where players encounter and create their own stories.

There’s a balance in story telling, especially interactive story telling, between romanticism and realism. Between what we want to happen, and what actually happens. And sometimes, oftentimes, it’s the things we didn’t want to happen that make a story more compelling and memorable.

I had a good laugh when I noticed this tag on steam yesterday.

I think the reality is, “boomer” as a term is here to stay and a moving target: as gen x ages into 40+, they’ll become boomers. One day when gen Z becomes old, they’ll be called boomers. At least here, there’s a fun double meaning to the term. For me, I came into the Doom franchise at Doom 2, at an age where what I played was still very much influenced by my parents and friends’ parents. So yes, Gen X were the primary player base, but it’s not unfair to say the boomers often paid for the game and maybe sat down to a round or two of it. And given that, it might have been one of the last games they were able to sit down and enjoy. I don’t know if anyone else experienced something similar, but my dad in the last 20 years of his life or so really locked in on the 1997 MTG: Shandalar game, and despite several computer upgrades along the way was never interested in any of the newer MTG digital offerings, preferring the cards and UI and experience he was familiar with. And while similar with Doom that game was played by many Gen X and Millenials, I think those demographics mostly continued to follow the franchise through newer releases: but maybe not the boomers.