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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

    Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

    MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

    Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

    … Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

    The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

    … It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

    All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

    Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

    But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

    Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.




  • I had a hunch, looks like I was basically right.

    I… come from a family that’s… well let me just put it this way:

    The last time I talked to my dad, I think 3 years ago now at this point, he was fully, fully down the QAnon rabbit hole, told me about how Tom Hanks’ son rapes and kills children, after extracting their adrenochrome… and he then proceeded to show me how he partially mills, taps, and assembles AR 15s and 18s in his garage, having sourced parts that don’t have serial numbers… thats what you call a ghost gun.

    He is exactly the kind of person that does these 180 flip flops and … either doesn’t remember he did, or has an elaborate nonsensical excuse/explanation.

    I am unfortunately way, way too familiar with basically nearly every right wing conspiracy theory that’s existed in the last 40 years.

    … I actually have Jewish cousins, and … yeah, basically since as long as I can remember, he’s made bigoted ‘jokes’ either behind their backs or occasionally even actually at family functions.

    My dad is my archetype for MAGA people: an abusive alcoholic narcissist asshole with no friends, who is never wrong, proficient in gaslighting, life didn’t go the way he wanted it to, and it’s all the fault of whoever right wing AM radio/ Fox News/ insane facebook posts and shit tier ‘journalist’ grifters told him to be mad at in the last week.

    … thats all probably a bit more info than necessary, but I’m still pretty traumatized from a life time of that, and venting helps lol.


  • I don’t think that’s what is meant by that comment.

    Back about a decade ago now, the USS Liberty ‘incident’ was a bugaboo of Alex Jones and many other right wing conspiracy theorist types…

    …who were correct in that yes, that is a thing that happened, it was basically covered up for decades, and almost no one knew about back in the 00’s and 10’s, and that the Israeli government and AIPAC have a huge amount of influence over US politicians and political discourse generally…

    … but were very incorrect in then just slap dashing it into their growing conspiracy centric view of the entire world, which very, very often actually was just anti-semitic generally, utterly oversimplifying and overnarrativizing their understanding of ‘how things actually work’ into insane nonsense.

    Fast forward 10 years, and basically all the people that were really concerned about the USS Liberty attack, you know, anti-Israeli government/military… well now they are basically all ardent Trump supporters, they all love violent Israeli genocidal expansionist Zionism, but also somehow simultaneously think Trump is … anti-war or something?

    I am of course guessing and cannot read Birch’s mind… but yeah, if you come from a right wing upbringing and then later realized how bs that worldview is, like myself, and possibly like Birch…

    It is indeed quite notable how much of a total 180 shift that is, amongst the right wing conspiracy theory types, and I think that is what they are referring to.

    I don’t think they are saying that those (mostly liberals, progressives and leftists) who’ve been vocally opposed to the Israeli genocide of Gaza (and everything else its now grown into) in the past few years suddenly changed their opinions about that in the last few months.