Law. I was pretty hyped up when i went to university to study it, but the more i learnt on the foundations of it and discovered the people it created, the more i hated it. Now I’m doing completely different things, and i’m glad my parents didn’t force me to keep doing it.
Nintendo.
Things got worse once Bowser got ahold of the American castle.
The fun dissolved with Iwata and Reggie gone.
The line to far for me was their retroactive bs patents used to attack Palworld. It’s one thing to be strict on your own systems, but another to do it to others. 80s Nintendo is back and possibly worse than before.
I haven’t played with a switch very much but I think the joysticks are worse than what they made for GameCube. I am under the impression that switch has what amounts to a directional pad underneath a joystick. Like that Gameboy peripheral with the lights, magnifier, and joystick that clips over the D pad. The joystick is there on the switch but output is only an analog 8 directions.
Pardon me if I’m wrong here but what I see with Nintendo is them making bad hardware. I know it’s made for kids but even they deserve better. The switch version of any big AAA game that got a switch port is generally really really dumbed down and looks and runs like garbage. I can’t wait to hear about Cyberpunk 2077 looking and running like garbage again. 5 years after it came out.
The joy cons are legitimately awful to use. The buttons are like needles after a while and the sticks just feel weird on my thumbs. What’s weird is that the switch lite fixed both of those problems. (None of this is about drift lol which is awful and another problem)
None of this is about switch 2. Idk anything about it.
It wasn’t Bowser, it was the finance guys that were placed at the head of the company after Satoru Iwata’s death.
Many moons ago I thought Israel was just defending itself. For two decades now I’ve come to believe they are the problem, and are now committing wanton genocide
This is something that bothers me. Every time something like this come up, there is a non-trivial crowd of people saying things like “no shit. In the right circle, everyone known for a long time”. Often they come with specific anecdotes that should raise all the red flags.
Well, I had no idea. Not a clue. And it’s not like I was not interested. I was fallowing his work, social media… live in general. He was a very close friend with a woman who was vocal about being an abuse victim. Nobody told her?
Even in the power of hindsight, when I was looking for articles or comments from the past, there was not a lot. I found like one, “there is nothing he wouldn’t do to lure a goth girl” (paraphrased), that got zero traction.
If there were signs, why did we let that happen? What can I do, not to fall for something like this again?
Institutions. Courts. Media. Religion. Law Enforcement. Politicians.
The institutions are captured. The courts, media, and politicians are corrupt. Bought and paid for. Law Enforcement are just class traitors. The enforcement arm of Capital. Protecting the interests of the ruling class and taking a bludgeon to the people. Religion is a tool of control. Used to control the ignorant and guide their ire.
Ironically this take is entirely self-validating, since this is the primary mechanism for that degradation.
Idk I’m starting to think dystopia began when we figured out agriculture
When aristocracy discovered mercantilism and mutilated it into capitalism.
Most life eats other life to live. It’s been a bad time from the very beginning.
Christianity and the Democratic Party.
The video game industry. (Indie games are on fire lately, though.)
I am screaming at this sentence both internally and externally.
AA is where it’s at now. There’s still insanely good games coming out, there just not by companies like EA and Activision anymore.
In some ways I think the good development studios are the same size they’ve always been, it’s just that a new class of mainstream games has risen to profit on the masses. If you ignore those, it’s not so bad. At least not until one of the AAA publishers gets their hands on them to ruin the IP and layoff the original devs
A lot of AA studios have been cramming in a ton of microtransactions still, whereas indie is mostly devoid of it, but it definitely gets a lot better the more A’s you remove.
Police
Cops (1989) ruined america, taught us to trust these ass holes and they royally fucked us over.
Not making light of everything before 1989, but even after all that shit, the show painted them in a decent enough light to where people spill their guts and trust them, just because they have a uniform and they took full advantage of us.
Police propaganda goes way back before Cops (1989). Dragnet started in 1951 and inspired dozens of police procedurals that made cops look like street smart scientists who studied at the intersection of crime and humanity. In reality they are just a disappointment. ACAB
I wasn’t alive during that, but I remember the cop propaganda from the 90s well.
The US. Believed in the “American Dream”, but the more I learned about the country, the more I grew to dislike it. It’s all a facade.
And I used to have a lot of respect for old people, but that also changed. They are just as flawed as the rest of us.
They are just as flawed as the rest of us.
Or even more so! They also know a few social tricks to get what they want. Oh, I’ve seen it. Lol
Old people who are assholes were probably always assholes. They were once young assholes and got older. Conversely, old people who are good, were probably good people when they were younger, they just got old.
Most people don’t stray far from their roots. Few are those who make a meaningful change. Some choose goodness as a goal, some get their asses kicked by life and turn bitter.
I guess the lesson is don’t be an asshole. if you are one, work toward being less of one until you aren’t one anymore. Try not to let life get you down. If all else fails, drugs.
I disagree with this as it’s a prejudgement with little to no knowledge about anybody’s roots, circumstances, history, etc. It categorically puts people into boxes and is the flawed reasoning of racists, anti-semites, homophobes, and so on.
For example, Islamic terrorists aren’t born terrorists. Some of them are born into the wrong family and fed hatred all their lives. Some had to live through hardships you and I can’t even begin to imagine surviving. Others are bullied, ostracised, and made feel worthless only to find belonging and recognition in the only group that would listen to them and make them feel seen.
Ask yourself, if you grew up and had to go through the same things as some people, would you still be the you that typed what you typed?
Yes, some people have always been assholes and never changed, they do exist. I’m not denying that.
Liberalism
As in like you support absolute monarchy or dislike neo liberals?
The Internet. Social media in particular.
I used to be a “information wants to be free” pure techno-optimist who thought the availability of data at all times would immediately cause a massive boost in awareness, education and intelligence worldwide.
I was super wrong. It was all a mistake and it should be burnt to the ground. Yes, including this place.
Ive been crashing out thinking about the internet. Its so beautiful in its ideas and so simple in its core design but its grown into something truely horrible. I love the internet and I spend time in the out rim of the internet still finding websites and meeting anonymous stangers but thats dying and the cancerous megalopolis in the centre is thriving and no one seems to care.
Why do 100s of millions of people still use Facebook that site has been outted as a psychological lab countless times. Yet people wre perfectly fine spending their time there.
Because people don’t think about anything that way. Individual action won’t make large scale changes.
That isn’t news, either. We just happen to also suck to find ways around that problem, in general.
I mean, in a lot of ways the social media takeover is the antithesis to freedom of information. It’s all siloed off echo chambers where it used to be free flowing, publicly available, indexable and searchable.
I still believe in the freedom of information goal more than ever, but fighting for it in the post information era is increasingly difficult (and important)
It’s the Web 2.0 model of corralling people into walled garden platforms, where they’re driven insane. One day people will look back at this time and wonder what we were thinking.
I was having good time until Smartphones got invented. Letting the masses (morons) get access to instant communication effortlessly and cheap fucked us.
Neil Gaiman. He poisoned so much…
In 1994 Neil was at a signing at my university campus. It was a big to-do. My friend, a big fan, came for a signing and whispered a few words.
Suddenly Neil is vaulting the table trying to choke the living shit out of my friend. Friend’s backpedaling, eyes wide, Gaiman’s face a rictus of rage and fury, and then many people jump in and slow it down
Friendo booted, things calm down, minimal mention in the uni rag. Never learned what was said, but now I suspect it was a pretty badly-kept secret for a long time.
You friend didn’t tell you about what was said?
Google. It was once a good search engine. Now I find myself getting only the most irrelevant results based on my keywords and more often than not an advanced search turns up nothing of value
Corey Doctorow’s podcast Understood: Who broke the internet? does an amazing job of explaining this. It’s only like 5 episodes and worth everyone’s time.
It went downhill when they got rid of search within results, I don’t know why they did that
Me neither! Really frustrates me when companies remove good features for no apparent reason
They had a reason; money. It’s always about money. The worse the results, the more time you have to spend searching for what you want, the more revenue they can generate.
You can usually trace all decisions a company makes, good or bad, back to money.
Apple, and a number of the other big tech companies as well. Shit used to be easy to use, repair, customize to your liking, etc.
Now they don’t want you to be able to fix a damn thing, plus all too many services and features and stuff have gone to the subscription model.
Fuck all with that, give us our stuff back and let us just use what we paid for.
Right To Repair!
I’m gonna say Tim Cook.
The way he signaled his authority was by sending out an email to the entire company announcing that he was expanding the company’s match program for employees who wanted part of their paycheck to go to NGOs. I thought that was a classy way of saying, “I’m in charge.” I had a lot of respect for that.
But his leadership with the App Store and regulators has been abysmal. He led Apple to make all the wrong moves, ensuring a (now active) fight with regulators instead of just making some small concessions voluntarily. It was completely unnecessary, but he just couldn’t help feeling entitled for Apple to do whatever it wants to make money. I still believe there are people in leadership positions who would choose to do the right thing, but the buck stops with Cook.
Apple might be worthy of my respect again when he’s gone.
Apple have always done what they wanted. In the Jobs era the biggest Apple Store in the world was on Regents Street in London, and Apple paid the local council vast fines each month because Jobs decided that the required illuminated fire exit signs would have ruined the carefully designed interior.
Wow, that’s terrible.
You have to go back like 30 years to get to a pro-repair Apple
More or less yeah. Though back around 2013 or so, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by how they designed their Mac AIO desktops, they actually were somewhat repair tech friendly.
The front glass was magnetically attached, so it only took a suction cup or two to start disassembly, and basic screwdrivers to remove the screen and get access to the motherboard, hard drive, RAM, DVD drive, etc.
And yes you could replace or upgrade parts as necessary, none of this newer soldered on storage shit they do these days.
I’ve lost a lot of respect for companies that solder on important parts that should rightfully be fairly easy to replace or upgrade.
Plus, now the big companies have taken to forcing encryption on the storage devices, effectively locking the drive to the system. Well isn’t that just cute for the backup operator that’s trying to recover your late grandmother’s family photos…
The original iMac G5 was designed to be repairable by the customer. You could even call Apple support and do free part exchanges under warranty.
Yeah it’s pretty bleak, although there have been some moves towards right to repair in recent years.
Respecting companies is always a bit fraught though. Even the ones you like are only doing it to profit off of your niche. It’s thanks to us that they even have a profitable niche to serve
The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture
I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire”… then got old enough to see through the nonsense