GenX/Millennial media addled Gnostic/Pagan heretic. I'm apprehensive about using the label because of the new-age whackos that morphed into a core segment of today's superficial, gynocentric hysteric left-leaning society. These hugboxing loons don't stop to ponder that priomordial Woman is partially responsible for original sin, as in mainstream Christianity. There's also the older usage of Gnostic as a byword for two-faced conspiratorial arrogance. To me, it is merely a heterodox exploration of metaphysics.
When asked, I just say nondenominational Christian or Neo-Platonist, and I avoid the confusion of the other person hearing 'agnostic'. If the other is familiar, I have no desire to discuss whether he serves Yaldabaoth, like we're having a fanboy flamewar over football teams or gaming consoles. Good Christians (or any other religion) serve the highest god of our universe through virtue.
Progressives decried free market healthcare in America, not realizing that it hasn't existed for 45+ years. Populists do the same with NAFTA, not realizing it wasn't a free trade agreement. Free trade is about independent individuals and businesses trading with other independents, without artificial middlemen and barriers. These satanic multinationals don't go away with managed trade agreements, antitrust fakery, and similar bait-and-switches. All these do is open up regulatory capture, to raise the water level so that more independent competitors drown while the politically connected float.
Same with the celebrity culture crap. He was a risk as formerly being part of that upper class Democrat city crowd. I thought his latching on to the birthed phenomenon was opportunistic attention seeking. But around his official run, he was willing to say stuff like "Haiti is a shithole" (whether he said that specifically post inauguration). I still voted libertarian, but Trump surprised me by doing the most a president can do to cut spending and regulations, with the hand he was dealt.
Voted for him 2020/2024. I don't like his continuation of Perot's proposed protectionism, and I would prefer Ron Paul's idea of true free trade. At least Trump is threatening tariffs to get other countrys' shit together where it concerns American citizens' interests. I can't support the libertarian party until the Mises paleo-libertarians break away from the LP, so Trump is the best we will get in my lifetime. Maybe another small country will figure out a controlled border, gun ownership, and constitutionally constrained government scope.
In the Gervais Principle Trinity, people are psychpaths, fanatics, or losers (as a large society or organization progresses to the natural state of dysfunction). I wonder if these moderators are dumb psychopaths, reacting to whatever social trends are flowing with shallow dedication to ideology. Or, are they fanatics w/o an inner dialogue to distinguish between corporate intersectionalism from academically grounded (if deeply flawed) progressivism?
The article states that product placements are permissible.
First game suffered from decades of brainwashing that the crusades were bad wars against natives, but at least portrayed war profiteering by unloyal bankers.
2 and/or Brotherhood had a shitlib writer, from the Daily Show, for the riddle minigames deciding that FDR and Al Gore good, Churchill Stalin (class traitor) and G.W. Bush bad; betraying the cynicism of the first game. At least 2 had Ezio give a speech clarifying the creed.
Unity might have portrayed monarchists as good, never played it.
Using Sowell's typography, the series always had a wrong leftwing slant. Are human beings assumed fundamentally trustworthy or fundamentally flawed?
The series would have been better if it emphasized the flawed worldviews of the average assassin, but that would require heterodox writers working for a privately owned company. Star Wars suffered similarly with it's prequel era Jedi. It's fine to have objective good and evil, but show the damned order as evidently flawed. Make Yoda an exile preceding the start of episode 1.
The modern day protagonists have a very weak presentation, written by people who listen to NPR and soyface over Nintendo Wii themes. Reminds me of 2:23-2:27 of https://youtu.be/9VvmixeowNI?si=nTc2RbuDWCOzYjIY . That modern day stuff where I'd pinpoint the vulnerability to wokeness, the same retards that would attend a BLM rally than topple the CCP.
Title is premature. Are any of the lead maintainers insufferably woke? It is part of SPI, which may or may not have cancer CoCs.
How much is this sheer unfettered conformism from spineless nerds and industry tourists orbiting the arbitrary generational pop fad? If they separated the T+, the artificial self-reported statistic would be irrefutable
I'll take the upside that console generations have had longer lifespans for 2 decades now. Even phones are getting half-sane support periods, still not at the 12 year span to stem manufactured consumerism. I haven't looked at the leaked specs yet, but I hope Super Switch Mii (best names I saw in other comment threads) is not grossly underpowered at release this time around. Then, another 8+ years where innovation happens on the software side.
If hardware as a whole can get past the upscaling/frame-generation fad, some developers might rediscover lost low level engineering arts of pre-Zoomer games. Or, at least clean up some of the engineering bloat of modern engines and content slop of failed triple-As. When we're ready, an actual post Moore's Law computing breakthrough will make it's way to the consumer side.
I'm also boycotting Nintendo because of their worse-than-Disney policy on copyright. Steam Deck and emulation will be enough for me after I'm done with my Switch.
Linux is staunchly C, not C++, but the point still applies.
Personally, I wonder if Rust will have any relevance in 2 decades. C, Zig, or a cleaner C++ like for low level systems programming (with better tools to write memory safe code), and a automatic memory managed language with good enough performance for newer hardware. If Rust were such a developer improvement over c++, why hasn't a Rust game engine displaced Unity and Godot?
I think this acutely narrows down why 'Left is the real racists" just won't work. It concedes that their teachings of racism are valid, emphasized as the great bogeyman of modern Western civilization. Something like Sowell's typography is discarded, a down to earth overview of rational discrimination spanning the entirety of written history. Not conflating generational slavery with sound border policy and enforcement is tricky for so many because of inherently weak personalities compounded with far-left indoctrination steadily applied since the 19th century.
How many teenagers and young adults take too long to realize that capitalized Anti-racism is but a lasting fad, more dangerous than the worst racism ever accomplished.
If one is worried about targeted state-level surveillance, he will double anonymous VPN or stick to TOR, in addition to paranoid opsec. Mullvad has resisted/nutered legal orders before, if one is doing garden variety piracy.
In my early 20s, I figured dealing with shit-tests, general rudeness, and shallow interests of many modern women was just stupid. The ease life-ruining accusations is a bonus. I stay the hell away at a hint of crazy or lack of virtue/independent thought, and don't bother dating or sleeping with sane ones I can even stand having a conversation with.
This drives up to no end how so many Christians were taught the wrong version of this. If you were in a captive situation, you mock your captor by showing the ineffectiveness of his slap. Not that you let yourself become captive of an aggressor in the first place.
I still advocate mgtow with modern women. One uncouth shit test, one abhorrent impulse to fall in with societal consensus, etc.
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792
The 20 or 50 part essay series clarifying this.
For about a decade, I've gone over to Nietzsche's "what is Evil? That which stems from weakness". At least as I interpret, this isn't any kind of aspiration to return to when Spartans enslaved the Helot population, at least based off birth instead of virtue and merit. Merely that you see evil men and women capable only through the masses of sheep to feed on. Preceding that, weakness and self-centeredness weakens the societal environment, and lesser beings thrive.
It's basic psychology, if you provide forgiveness, state-welfare, etc, the conscious or unconscious mind incentive structure adapts to abuse said charity for granted. A related term that's popularized in recent years is the banality of evil.
Look today at the UnitedHealth CEO murder. 100s of millions of Americans; sympathetic, apathetic, or antipathetic towards the man and his family; are just as guilty of the dismal state of American healthcare costs. We have a faddish zeitgeist, like we have to dozens of news events in the past, without the economic and sociological literacy to fix a damn thing. Don't look for the evil public enemies straight out Fahrenheit 451 to sacrifice, look at the bozos who thought they were sticking it to the man when they had policy encouraging employer provided healthcare.
Don't forget 4, which populations do the catcalling on the streets
Well fuck, now I know what the Budweiser drinkers felt during the Dylan nonsense. Guinness was my go to at random restaurant I'm at, but that's a luxury easily dropped.
I'll try the simplified version. Equipment pieces gives stats, usually 3-4 of them. Celestial is an attribute prefix that spreads the stat points among 7 stats, buffed to 9 stats a few years ago. First a player gets to the point of equipping top-level exotic/ascended gear; sadly enough gamers are utterly oblivious and run leveling gear. Often times they will be recommended a Celestial build, as it's boon, tank, power+condi damage, healing but master of none. This popularity lengthens the time of big-group open-world event chains (plus semi-afk leaches during some events), and leaves them utterly unprepared for instanced content (skill level and statwise). If one calls this out in that section of the game, you will be anti-gatekept HARD, as one must always let people enjoy things.
Content-creator mightyteapot, among others, tried to rectify this amongst the community, but there is so much inertia to sail upstream against. These open-worlders are the majority of ANET revenue.
Like the first game, competitive suffers from a decade of bloat. At the very least it's fast-paced and opaque. I finally started playing a mesmer in the past week to figure out how the hell they work, and would say their complexity rivals the GW1 mesmer's sheer oppressiveness.
It's hard for me to put this in a short response. Gaming as a hobby is more mainstream than it was 3 decades ago, and our general culture has gotten softer. There's always been the Eternal September effect, where pioneers in an area of life have said thing experience rapid growth of newcomers. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, they aren't able to acculturate the masses with healthy norms that ensured the success of said thing or community in the first place. With games in particular, monetization shifted towards post-purchase micro transactions, so devs put more resources into retaining a lowest common denominator playerbase, oftentimes with whales. This coincides with the general cultural shift of expecting competency (or in-group compatibility) towards unqualified inclusivity, even when said inclusivity weakens a hobby or makes it dangerous (ex: skiing and snowboarding at a popular resort). This effects singleplayer and multiplayer games, like Total Warhammer removing what little campaign logistical depth there was.
Multiplayer games in particular shifted away from the high-skill, always alert Quake/Unreal. Battle Royales (disclaimer: I've play them for 40 hours at most) are the prime competitive example, where one can relax and mess around. But a player struggling to win can blame their teamates or random item spawns instead of their own lack of skill and coordination. MMORPGs forever changed with the massive success of WoW which, despite being skillful game, was a casualification of earlier MMOs; this got much worse past the 2nd expansion. I'll explain further down.
Just looking at the Guild Wars franchise alone, the first and second game are stark contrasts. GW1 is basically a party RPG with shared lobbies, and GW2 a regular themepark MMO. The first punishes you if you try to level without any thought put into your skill selection and traits, and required you to find other players to progress missions, or rely on AI henchmen. The game did change with expansions introducing heroes to make other players unneeded (this had to be done as content grew and playerbase shrunk), while certain infamous missions like Thunderhead Keep got nerfed.
The second game targeted the wider MMO audience and changed industry trends. Starting off, they neutered any leveling or open-world that they were afraid scared off enough casual gamers from other new MMOs. IIRC during the beta, there was a trio of Ettins guarding a hero point (needed to make character stronger before reaching level cap) that stunned players (each would telegraph their attack sequentially) that didn't dodge or block, leaving piles of player corpses. Stuff like that had to go to maintain a soft leveling experience. There's actual skill and creativity in the game mechanics and buildcrafting, but most the time it wasn't needed, leaving a large gap between launch content and intro endgame, in addition to an equivalent gap and good players doing the rare slices of challenging content.
With the advent of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and similar coincides with the above to have a multiplayer and MMO scene to replace the declining past-time of watching network television. Whether it's Bob who instead of plopping down on the couch to watch Jerry Springer, picks up the latest game to not talk to anybody or learn mechanics, if the game has them. Or it's Jeff, who instead of watching the latest sportsball game with his buddies heads to a multiplayer game to bad unskilled while downing a few beers and having a grand ol' time with other online folk. This creates a giant vacuum to be filled activists, hall-monitors, or opportunistic devs can be 'anti-gatekeeping' gatekeepers, who then cultivate what I call a gaming underclass to steadily build-up and be exploited. The hidden costs of this dysfunctional social structure accumulate until playerbases of games result in swathes of shit, whether it's the mishandled toxic players, a lopsided skill distrubition, and an over-representation of what Javier Milei deems shit-leftists. It wasn't nearly this bad in 2005.
I barely played wvw till last year, but mounts really changed the under-5 roaming play, and more specs have high mobility.
Story has been saturday-morning cartoon garbage since first game, and pioneered superwoke since at least 2nd expansion. I only play it for the almost-bloated gameplay.
Spears are fine gameplay, but everything from SOTO and Janthir points to them winding down the game. Recycled assets, 1 old mount revamped per expansion, spears being an existing underwater weapon, unfinished launches and seasonal releases. Don't forget bugs existing since at least first expansion, and powercreep contrasting with the game direction at launch. This leaves pvp, small-scale wvw, and newest CM content having any sort of challenge; open-world I just avoid because its piss-easy or the players are new-gen gamers running low-damage gear/builds; some of the most egregious anti-gatekeepers in all PC gaming since 2017.
Whether fakeedgestreamer is right, I'm at the point where if the establishment targeted spend happy simps like they do the dissident right, we'd have an socioeconomic boom to dwarf the 1920s.