Agreed on it being a bad replacement for controller games. I got one around the time one of the FROMSOFT games came out (I think it was Sekiro?) and I tried using for that and it was just not usable for something like that. I haven’t really tried it for anything else since then because I don’t really play games away from my PC, so I don’t have a need for a worse but acceptable way to play M+KB games.
The insane thing about it is it’s not like this is an unprecedented kind of racism. Tying your enemies to foreign nations is a great way to separate them from everyone else and take away their rights. The Nazis ranted about “Jewish Bolsheviks” to tie Jews to the Soviets. Catholics in America were thought to be agents of the church, answerable to Rome before the country, hence why JFK was such a notable president. There were the Japanese internment camps during WWII. Obviously for the past couple decades we’ve had right wingers try to tie Muslims/Arabs to terrorists or Iran or something.
Nothing is new if you pay attention to history, which is why it’s so depressing when we just keep seeing the same shit happen over and over again. This time it’s just so much dumber than normal because people who are supposed to be from our group are doing it while claiming that their support of a current genocide is because of them supposedly remembering the history of the last genocide against them. It’s so unbelievably cynical while somehow also being so dumb and shortsighted that I can’t understand how they don’t see that.
There is literally only one season of the year where I get to be comfortable: Fall. Winter is too cold. Summer is too hot. I have allergies in the Spring. Fall is just right.
All I’ll say is:
I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.
That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.
Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.
Most of them don’t seem to give a shit about Jewish people, they just have ulterior motives for supporting Israel. Arm sales, geopolitical strategy, hating Muslims, lebenstraum, and then there’s the crazy Christians who support it because of the rapture stuff. Then there are the Jewish people who delusionally believe that somehow having a state which is solely dependent on the US empire’s support is somehow going to protect them from another holocaust and think that priority overrides everything else. I can’t think of ANYONE I know who can genuinely square support for Israel with any kind of Jewish religious values. Because they can’t. Because that would be insane.
When an actual Jewish person comes out against Israel, they just call them a self hating Jew. Yup. Nothing antisemitic about that. They must just really want to protect Jewish people from… checks notes… ourselves.
Angela Collier: She’s a physicist who does videos on science or science adjacent topics. Most of her videos are pretty funny and accessible and if you’re more interested in math stuff, she has a few videos or segments of videos that go more into that.
Girlfriend Reviews: Comedic game reviews.
Jenny Nicholson: Video essays/rants about various pop culture things.
Lindsay Ellis: Video essays. Although I think she’s mostly been posting on Nebula now. But her old videos are decent.
Simone Giertze: Comedic maker. Started out doing shitty robots but has evolved more into a design channel. The videos are still funny, but the projects are more sincere attempts to make something fun or useful.
Luna Oi!: She’s Vietnamese and does English language videos about modern Vietnamese history and contemporary life/politics from that perspective. Really interesting if your only previous exposure to the country was a brief bit about the Vietnamese war in history class.
My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.
Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.
I was kind of curious if this was close to true in any countries with higher urban population densities and the first one I checked was Japan since it has a rural depopulation issue and Tokyo is a pretty populous city and… it was right on the money. Japan’s pop is ~124 million and Tokyo’s is ~ 37 million. So roughly 30% of Japan’s population lives in one city/metro area. Not that this means anything for US population distribution, but I suppose it’s not THAT crazy to think the numbers could be in that ballpark if you weren’t really thinking about it too hard.