A gratuity is just a postdated bribe, and everybody including the Supreme Court knows it.

I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

Dredge.

A very simple concept and gameplay loop that expands out into the bizarre and fantastic.

Honorable mention: Ronin.

Bullet time, effectively turn-based ninja combat. Simple, regularly autosaved “go until you die, then try something different” gameplay loop and just a helluva lot of fun.

Honorable mention: Valley.

Smooth and thrilling first-person mechanically-enhanced parkouring along the way to investigating the mysteries - both ancient and more recent - of a unique and very picturesque valley.

Even “the pot calling the kettle black” isn’t enough to sum this up.

It’s more like “the pot calling the salad bowl a pot.”

That just says to me that no near future Monster Hunter game is going to be worth playing, since that focus just means that gameplay and story are going to be sacrificed in favor of graphics and gimmicks.

Well damn.

No - I very deliberately used round peg in the square hole, initially just to avoid the cliche, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

Conservatives pound on round/natural/organic/smooth pegs to try to force them into square/artificial/contrived/rigid holes.

I liked it anyway…

In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.

They’re sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn’t going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it’s some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they’re fucking morons.

That has to be an unpleasant way to live.

Of course, they’re such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still…

Just another step toward making used-to-be-Twitter a safe space for cowardly fascists.

How is anybody even surprised by this?

This is exactly the sort of thing Beth has been moving towards ever since their first ham-handed attempt to monetize mods deservedly blew up in their faces.

They didn’t give up on the idea - they just shifted to a strategy of doing it incrementally.

And this is just the latest step in that ongoing process.

Think about how bad it’s (very deliberately) going to be by the time TES 6 finally comes out…

That’s so perfectly Turkeyish.

It’s a funny place - so obviously a result of its geographical location. It had its era of power-struggling against other Mediterranean civilizations, but as soon as the known world expanded out to include Asia, Turkey, stuck literally at the crossroads between the two, started playing both sides against the middle. And that’s what it’s done ever since.

Israel has been trying to provoke Lebanon into a war for decades now. They’re not going to stop.

That’s no surprise, and entirely irrelevant.

The US political system is broken. It doesn’t legislate according to what is thought to be best for the country or its people - it legislates according to what will bring the most money from wealthy individuals, corporations and interest groups.

Fossil fuel corporations and industry groups have very deep pockets and have well-established channels by which to funnel that money into the hands of politicians, party officials, and assorted powermongers, so the government is going to generally legislate in their favor, entirely regardless of any other considerations.

This is actually true.

Most notably to me, the ability to sift through and collate enormous amounts of data has led to surprising things like diagnosing diabetes through retinal scans.

But those sorts of things, beneficial and impressive though they might be, remain at the fringe of AI research for the simple reason that those sorts of uses are too niche to provide the revenue stream that all of the bubble-building corporate parasites demand. Their focus is on the AI-as-a-substitute-for-real-intelligence aspect (and increasingly “AI” as just a meaningless marketing buzzword), since that’s where the money is. And unfortunately but not coincidentally, that’s where most of the public attention is too.

And yet again it cynically amuses me that AI has become “artificial” intelligence in the sense of “fake.”

It’s a shabby substitute for real intelligence, used by people who don’t possess any of their own to impress other people who don’t possess any of their own.

Imagine how much better the world would be if there was just a simple process of psychological screening for would-be politicians, and psychopaths were barred from holding office.

I would presume it’s not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.

For the moment, they’re working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it’s hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.

So… by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.

At a “non-profit” (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.

Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We’re watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.

Imagine Israel, of all countries, crying to the UN, of all organizations, about a purported “flagrant violation of narional sovereignty, international law and Security Council resolutions.”

I laughed out loud when I read that. As if that isn’t exactly what Israel does virtually on a daily basis, and has done for decades now, and while thumbing their nose at the UN the entire time.

And again I find myself wondering by what purported authority it is that Israel “approves” the construction of settlements on someone else’s land.

That’d be like reading that the Mexican government had “approved” the construction of Mexican settlements in Texas.

that argument stops working when it’s a large portion of a society.

Not the person you responded to, but I’d disagree with that. I’d say that if a large portion of a society can be said to be insane, then that doesn’t change the standard for sanity - it just means that the society itself is insane.

Our understandings of right and wrong are somewhat a social construct, and so subject to social change.

Only reasonably within a particular range. There are points beyond which societal notions of right and wrong become self-defeating, and thus irrational at best.

For instance, if one holds that the killing of innocents is such an egregious wrong that it justifies the killing of innocents, then one has created a closed loop in which every purportedly justified killing in turn becomes a wrong that purportedly justifies the next killing, which in turn becomes a wrong that purportedly justifies the next killing, and so on, endlessly.

That’s rather obviously irrational at best, and arguably insane, since it justifies that which it condemns and condemns that which it justifies. And that’s the case entirely regardless of how many or how few people believe it.