I am in this picture and I don’t like it

I think it’s not about money. It’s the audience.

Maybe this arc leads somewhere better though. He might be big enough to cause a paradigm shift eventually.

For whatever it’s worth, I never finished it, as an avid crpg fan. It’s not the hours it takes, it’s the constant feeling that you’ve got so much to do but no real idea where to start, or where to go, or what to do. If it was a world map with clickable places, like the original baldurs gates or even the somewhat intimidating but still much more digestible owlcat’s pathfinders style “railroad” experience, it’d been much nicer. But the free map to roam just makes both decisions harder, and also the seashell collector inside me awaken and suddenly I have to explore each pixel of the map in case I miss something, which is very exhausting on top of the already exhausting freedom.

Well, just an anecdote:

I simply deleted my WhatsApp and moved to signal. Just did it.

People installed the app, at least the ones that cared about staying in touch. Which was most everyone I cared about staying in touch with. A few of my friend groups also moved the group chat to signal, though all of them do have other ones with the people who didn’t care enough to move too, but I hear it isn’t that big a deal, they had multiple groups before and will have in future, doesn’t really feel like any extra hassle they say.

It’s been fine. No problems. I’ve had more trouble trying to explain to my extended family why I’m no longer posting on instagram. Those I never had in WhatsApp either back in the day, so they “stayed in touch” by watching my pictures I suppose. But I just consistently tell people they can reach me always via signal or plain old sms.

I guess the biggest thing to be scared about would be fomo for most, but I don’t really care enough, I’ve got so much going on already that it’s more of a blessing that I don’t have to be involved in every conversation or meme sharing or whatever.

It really gets so easy after simply switching. Just do it and that’s that. The people worth anything come with you, it’s just another app and another group chat or personal chat. Most already have discord and the meta messenger whatever its name is these days anyway. I know zero people with only one messenger/chat app and unsplintered groups across them. It’s not a big chore, and if it is, there’s always sms.

Okay yeah, you got me there. I did mean generative AI in general here.

Yeah I mean this really gets to me. AI is a very fundamental part of games. But not creating games. At least not the LLM stuff we got nowadays.

A game without AI is just a sandbox for emergent mechanics and events by the players. Probably not what most would mean with a “no AI” sticker.

If I saw a “no AI” sticker on a steam page, I’d skip the game because I like to play singleplayer games and those almost always require various kinds of AI to actually be interesting at all.

I think calling the LLM stuff just generally AI makes things increasingly confusing.

I noticed using the explicit driver directly instead of pulseaudio in the game settings got my game crackless. It was an amazing experience!

Btw, just wait. The second one is even better, it’s so good.

I do wish to understand the core message, and I’m sorry that I came here for a laugh in a very unfriendly way. But you have to admit it’s extremely hard to infer the message, maybe you can clarify it a bit here

What is there to relate to, though? That page is trying so hard to sell you on something, but never really explains what exactly. And it’s only goofy marketing speech, how would one relate to any of that? I’m probably missing something here.

I guess they were serious when they advertised “zero theory”. There’s zero coherence or actual information as far as I can find

Huh. This has to be the worst promo site I’ve ever read. Whatever you described here does not seem to be reflected on that notion page.

You are very clearly selling something, so obviously this is a bad post to begin with, but in an attempt to make fun of the substance itself, I found none that is coherent. Can’t even joke about this, it’s so goofy.

Edit: I mean come on, what is this even

Not all digital products are built to protect and perform.

ZOKO is built to do both with zero theory, zero fluff, and zero BS.

🧠 You get:

• Real income systems tested in global markets
• Scam-prevention + gov-supported survival strategies
• Multilingual-ready, instantly applicable info
• Verified insights from field execution (not guesswork)

No vague advice. No bloated nonsense.

Just pure tools to earn smarter and safer, anywhere.

“No vague advice”, aye…

Edit2: This is actually pretty funny

• Built for clarity, not gimmicks.

✅ You’re not buying ideas. You’re buying results.

Yeah. The controls, the fighting. Even with all the patches and community stuff laid on top, it was a bit too uncomfortable to actually play through for me.

The second one was brilliant. And to this day, despite me having almost 200 hours in Witcher 3, the only Witcher game I’ve actually finished. I think second’s format was perfect. 3 is just too open and beautiful, I get lost in wandering around too easily.

This is a sane take, though I personally do generally tend towards understanding and even valuing the walled garden to some degree. But this is what I’ve always felt underneath it, you found the words.

You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.

For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.

Thanks for the perspective!

Fair enough, those are good points.

I might have gotten a little defensive there for no real reason. It’s a thin line to walk, and unfortunately I find myself often approaching the forbidden (and rightly so) lands of some variation or cultural exceptionalism, and even worse, based on nothing actual or concrete, just vague “what-if”s and imagination.

Sorry about all that

I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.

But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.

But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.

Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.

I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.

Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…

But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.

I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.

Just an anecdote, but I have a much smoother experience playing with the original steam deck than I did on my desktop. I mean the frames aren’t as high, the screen is small and resolution is low, but for whatever backwards reason, it just feels so smooth to look at and play with. I guess you see and feel the graphical artifacts better on a large screen with large resolution, and everything feels so uncanny somehow with high refresh rates and 100+ fps. Can’t really explain it though. Weird stuff.

Just finished the last of us 1 remake and 2 remaster with the deck. It just looks so gorgeous, I ran both with mixed medium-high settings, and it was an amazing experience. Before those I played cyberpunk with some crazy 500+ mods, and it was just excellent to play. Same with Witcher 3, though that’s getting old by now, so less surprising it runs so well.

In fact, I’m yet to play any lightweight games on this thing. Or even indie ones. These graphically intensive games have been such a joy to play, I haven’t even had the time or motivation to attempt anything else. I’m finally getting through my dusty, cobwebbed library, especially these more expensive games, and that’s been almost miraculous! A desktop requires sitting down, dedicated time and focus, but I can bring this thing with me pretty much anywhere and play a checkpoint or two or whatever while on a bus, a train, waiting for an appointment… anything. And it fucking runs all these games I’ve dreaded to play on the gaming rig because it just never felt good because I couldn’t hit ultra settings on everything, and the artifacts just were too noticeable and things weren’t as immersive as I’d have liked.

But this small little thing? So enjoyable, it’s so weird.

This is something I want to yell so loud every time I see anyone underestimating this thing talking about playing less demanding, smaller or older, indie, or otherwise more basic games. Thanks to some black magic I can’t make any sense of, the exact opposite is what you’ll want to do I bet!

Well initially it was. Later down this thread in my second reply I was just trying to point out why it got the reception it got. As I said initially, I agree with the sentiment, it was just not well put at first, even I misread it. I get you now.

You should’ve probably responded with something like this from the start, but I’m glad it was my misunderstanding your message, not you advocating for what I, along with some others apparently, interpreted from it.

Sorry about the tone in my first reply. I hope you see it came from a well meaning place in defense of safety in terms of staying alive and unharmed, not in opposition to being bold, as the inverse of “safe”.

We lose a lot in the translation when our only medium is text, and we are all from across the globe, trying to communicate in a language that is foreign to me and many others, I bet. But c’est la vie.

Please stay safe, AOC

No, don’t.

That is a direct quote from you.

What would you yourself deem “not being safe” to mean in context of people in general? Now what would you take it to mean when the commenter you quoted there said that the opposition is dangerous and deranged, hoping AOC stay safe, and you responding hoping AOC not to stay safe. In the same context where the clear danger and derangement is stated? In fact, quoting the very comment doing just that?

You can keep acting shocked and mistreated as though everyone around you is stupid or malicious or both… or, you know, you could maybe consider that maybe whatever way other people interpret your words might just be reasonable and you could perhaps stand to benefit from admitting that, then elaborating what you meant, instead of lashing out on everyone and playing a victim with overly dramatized tone that is pretty much guaranteed to get people confused and vocal about your behavior.

Just saying.