Hell yeah, love Mike! Super chill dude who deserves every penny imo.

As somebody who almost went into the game industry and didn’t because of the low wages, horrible working conditions, and just generally poor quality of life, I think I know more about how devs get paid than some rando on the internet.

And I haven’t pirated a game since the Bay went down like 10 years ago. I just hate people who get so holier-than-thou because a handful of dollars from their purchase will go towards paying the devs’ salaries on the studio’s next game while ignoring how much of it will go to stock options for the shareholders and buying the CEO another Ferrari. You wanna pirate games or not, I don’t care. Just don’t give me this “my money is going to the devs” crap. Because it isn’t. That’s just the excuse you use for your pearl clutching.

I will happily buy more expensive games that are shorter and with worse graphics than modern AAA games, so long as the devs are getting paid well and aren’t crunched. Because my money isn’t going to the devs, but it certainly tells the company what I do or don’t care about.

Well, art is political by its very nature. It is inherently filled with the views and beliefs of the artist, and it’s important to point out the dangerous ones so people are aware and to prevent a potential slippery slope to radicalization. Or to prevent moments like that time Smash Mouth unknowingly retweeted art from a famous lolicon artist.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the ways to deal with a shitty person is to take their propaganda and meme the shit out of it.

Yup, it’s the same old song of fascists and cultists.

“Are you lonely, sad, angry, or just generally dissatisfied with your life? Have you tried blaming your problems on a minority with less power in society than yourself? Act now, and I’ll throw in a second minority, free!*”

*Just pay shipping and handling.

Which dev did you write your check to?

I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.

You forgot the part where they also want women to carry dead babies inside them until they rot and kill the women.

I was confused as well because the industry standard (Maya) natively supports Linux. Until I looked up Solidworks and realized we’re talking about 2 different 3d modeling/design fields.

Plenty of the “classified” documents aren’t actually classified. Oftentimes it’s a case like this, but I remember one person posted a link to the Wikipedia page for a WW2 tank to show how the in-game stats were nerfed compared to the actual vehicle, and they said they couldn’t use data from classified documents.

It’s in the contract and rigorously enforced by the union. Clause 41, section 182: You must be at least this much goblin to art.

I think both drag performers and Broadway actors have the perfect skill set for reading books to kids. It’s like the difference between reading the lyrics to a song and hearing a musician sing it, regardless of whether they’re a country singer or an opera singer or a movie music composer. An actor, whether Broadway or not, would know exactly when to pause to create dramatic tension, be able to give characters their own unique voices or personalities, etc. And the fantastical, exaggerated costumes of drag I imagine just make it all the more exciting for the kids.

As for how drag performers reading books to kids started, I have no idea, but somebody else said it started from people volunteering to read books to kids at local libraries, and the LGBT community got into helping out in that way, which led to drag performers doing it. And that makes sense to me. The LGBT community seems to be heavily made up of people who want to support their communities. Probably because they’ve often had to band together and create their own.

One of the common data points used by organizations to rate a country as “third world” or not is the state of its infrastructure. In that department, the US is certainly closer to third world countries than we are to our European brethren. It’s been ignored and underfunded for so long that there are many places where it’s quite literally falling apart, and that’s not even getting into the state of public transit (or lack thereof) or how the single family suburb sprawl is slowly bleeding cities dry of their capital.

There are other horrible things like parts of the US that have never had plumbing (Appalachia comes to mind) or things like the Flint, Michigan crisis (do they have drinkable water? I think as of last year they still didn’t. They might be able to take showers again, though, without causing permanent health issues for their kids). We have higher rates of women who die during childbirth than some third world countries. The quality of healthcare here is ranked the worst out of the first world nations while also being the most expensive. The wealthy go to Canada for prescriptions and surgery, or Mexico for dental work - Mexico apparently has better dentists than the US from what I’ve heard. We are #1 in number of incarcerated citizens per capita. The wealth disparity in the US today is supposedly worse than it was in France in the years just before the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread was more than a day’s pay for the average worker. Upward class mobility (being born into a poor family and being able to become wealthy) is the lowest it’s been, I think, since the country was founded. A year or two before COVID happened, I was looking into starting a side business and found studies saying that a new business was more likely to fail today than in the Great Depression. If I remember the stats right, it was something like 40% of businesses fail in their first year, another 20% in their second year, and by year 4, 80% of new businesses have gone under.

I’ve heard the US described as “a third world country in a Prada belt,” and I think it’s an apt description. Policy-wise, we’re closer to third world countries than we’d like to admit. We’ve just been living off the postwar economic boom from WW2 that centered the US as the world’s largest economy and wealthiest nation to ever exist. The sheer amount of money circulating in our economy has kept the nation chugging along through whatever stupid things the corporations and the politicians have done over the years.

As a whole, the Dems are pretty center of the aisle, because America as a whole is fairly conservative compared to Europe (despite 60% of the population being more liberal than the government at most times). Europeans generally consider the Dems in the US a conservative party, and corporate Dems are definitely closer to the right than to the left. The other issue besides the general conservative leaning in the country though is that there’s about 50 other groups of various left leaning shades that would be their own separate parties in Europe but are bunched in with the corporate Dems and therefore have little say in the party platform.

Here in Massachusetts, we still call it Romney-care because, spoiler: it’s still the same thing

Republicans don’t like having that pointed out either, but, as the bumper stickers said after Nixon carried 49 states for his second term, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts.”

Wage theft (when employers don’t pay their employees what they’re owed) in the US accounts for more stolen value every year than grand theft auto, larceny, petty theft, and breaking and entering combined. Yet wage theft is not considered a crime.

It’s the same story all over the world. The real issue isn’t the economic system but rather greedy people in positions of power with no accountability.

There’s a reason they’re called “Human Resources” and not Human Relations.

Far-right extremists stop telling on themselves challenge: impossible

I’m pretty sure this isn’t about early access games. It looks like it’s about AAA games like Cyberpunk that release in a completely broken state and take multiple rounds of post release patches to make them even close to what was promised.

I wasn’t here for what happened, but I saw the thread on both servers about it, and here’s the whole thing as I understand it:

A user here saw a photo they thought was of a minor, reported it as such, and it was also thought to be so by whoever followed up on it. They reported it to Lemmy .NSFW, who, upon further review, found out it wasn’t and was of a porn actress who often does “cute” looking pictures.

While this was going on, Ada looked at the community it was posted on, which was focused on porn in a “cute” aesthetic. The description of the community had some concerning language in it that made it sound like it was hosting pictures intended to look like porn of minors. Ada asked .NSFW to do a clean sweep of their communities and do something about this specific community, and they refused.

This came to a head that resulted in Ada defederating from .NSFW and posting a thread about why. They also posted a thread on the subject on their own server, which, from what I read, largely consisted of them saying Ada was overreacting and personal attacks against Ada, with screenshots of messages out of context to make Ada look bad. While this was going on, the community in question also quietly changed their description, removing the concerning text.

TL;DR: Blahaj had concerns over possible photos of minors on NSFW and asked them to do something about it. They refused and posted a thread basically saying Ada was a triggered snowflake (not in those exact words) when Blahaj defederated from NSFW.

It’s probably a uniquely American thing, similar to how many malls are dying here while they thrive in Europe. Cities have been dying a slow death since like the 70s here because suburbs are a net loss in terms of revenue because they’re more expensive to maintain than the taxes they bring in, so the only way cities can afford them is to sell more land to developers to build more suburbs, which then cost the city money, and repeat into infinity.

Cities have also had a general decline in the population within urban areas during that time, with people moving out to the suburbs for the “American Dream” of owning your own house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a cat or dog (and to avoid having to look at any poor people, immigrants, or black people). This was exacerbated further during COVID as people fled denser areas. The house prices in my town that’s about an hour away from one of the most expensive cities in the country (comparable to LA prices in the city here) jumped up practically 50% during COVID while prices in the city dropped something like 20% during the first year. Prices in the city have since come back up and are now above what they were before, but prices here never came down.

Cities here also tend to have a business district, sometimes even a “central business district” that’s at the heart of the city, which is made up almost exclusively of office buildings/other companies, with workers commuting into the city. Even my town has people who drive every day to their job in the city. With many of these buildings sitting empty during COVID, there’s been a push for urban renewal by converting them into apartments, but that’s easier said than done. Offices simply don’t have the same infrastructure that apartments need in terms of basic things like plumbing, and would need to be entirely gutted, but it would be a much needed fresh supply of housing that would probably help reinvigorate these city centers.