I gotta. The Rogue-like genre being the classic example of the indie game

I wish it did. Unfortunately, conservatives seem to rule our world far more often than not.

Everyone here saying they still exist.

That’s not the point.

:-/

It kinda is, though. “I’m here, rather than over there, because I’d rather product content complaining about a lack of a thing than adding to the content of the thing I say I wish I had”.

I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever.

I think its easy to mis-remember the past. But the idea that people on forums weren’t competing for attention, or that whole communities weren’t competing for degrees of participation, is a product of nostalgia. Jump over to 4chan - a very Old Internet relic - if you don’t believe me.

The thing you remember was the fun you had in your younger days doing a thing you were passionate about. And the thing you hate about Social Media is largely the absence of fun.

I’ll tell you what was good about the old school forums. Once you got up the right combination of browser add-ons, there were no ads. I go on Instagram now and I’m getting 2-3 ads for any given real post. I’m getting a flood of click-bait “Suggested For You” content I didn’t subscribe to or ask for. I’m getting pop-ins and notices and updates and reminders shoved on me. That’s what fucking sucks in Web 2.0/3.0 Just a deluge of corporate shit raining on you at every interaction.

But this dogged insistence that the newer model of forum organization - the Reddit or Wikipedia content ranking formula, rather than the traditional Groups organized by Last Update - is somehow ruining the internet… I just don’t see it. What I see with the newer model is more images and videos, which would have sunk an old school dial-up powered forum 30 years ago.

And I think what old-heads are really asking for is a community that doesn’t use thumbnails/images/videos in the feed. And I’m sympathetic to that. I’m just not nostalgic for fucking WoW forums or SomethingAwful posters or 90s-era content rings. Just like with the modern internet, that era was choked with shitty posters, bot posters, and endless scams. Those things just weren’t memorable in the same way as the fun stuff.

A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland

Shrug

The Eastern Block got the same fuzzy treatment from NATO that countries like Afghanistan and Columbia and Iran enjoyed.

Americans love a color revolution when your government aligns with Russia or China. But they have zero tolerance for dissent once their friends are in charge.

Sure, that’s a work around. But it relies on a trusted third party, along with wiki mods who don’t yank the entry because they don’t recognize the archived source as a valid citation.

It isn’t a feature integrated into the encyclopedia.

40 years ago poland was the most progressive country in europe regarding homosexuality because unlike everyone else they never criminalized it.

Damn, that’s wild. What was Poland like 40 years ago?

flips open history book

Omg, you’re a fucking tankie! TANKIE! TANKIE! Mods, get this guy out of here!!!

I still have my dad’s 1957 edition sitting on my childhood bedroom shelf.

It is genuinely kind of wild to read through that thing, in light of modern history.

I mean, just having the ability to roll up your own Wiki is very handy.

I would appreciate a way to archive the citations, so that a link-break down the line doesn’t cause the raw data to be lost. But that’s a problem with copywrite and IP more than anything Wikipedia does natively.

That’s Free Markets, baby!

It can’t pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.

The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn’t pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they’re doing.

We’re increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government’s leadership believes they need to maintain the illusion of control over the public.

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS SO MUCH!

Conservapedia already did this something like twenty years ago. It missed the entire purpose of the project, which was to invite a kaleidoscope of specialists and journalists to document the volume of known information categorically, primarily through citation to other online works.

Instead, you had a basket case of ultra-orthodox ideologues carving out a very niche set of contrary opinion posts that weren’t well documented or continuously maintained.

Conservapedia isn’t a right wing vanity project because of it’s hot takes on Hitler, it’s a vanity project because of the yawning gulfs in it’s data set. Nobody engages with the site, because it is so heavily censored.

I get the sense Grokapedia will suffer the same fate. If a subject doesn’t tickle Musk’s interest, it’ll either go undocumented or be a naked plagarization of some other online encyclopedia. And as soon as Musk loses interest entirely, support for the service will go the same way as so many private vanity projects.

Incidentally, Wikipedia’s fate is also an open question. What happens when Jimmy Wales can’t administer and fundraise for it anymore? How long until some hacks get their hooks in and corrupt it like so many other private media outlets?

Unpopular American Opinion

Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero

I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.

I think one thing that really gave Blizzard and Nintendo titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.

I’m sure that plays a role. But it might also be worth noting that the market is absolutely saturated. You don’t need to go out and get The Latest New Game to enjoy yourself. There are titles that are 20 years old and can stand up to anything the AAA titles will put out next week.

The marketing budget is what’s driving a lot of the prices of these bigger titles. You see a Superbowl Ad for the new Call of Duty or GTA game? That’s $5 of the sticker price right there. Sometimes firms are spending 50-100% of the actual production cost of the game to tell you to buy the game. Other times they’re just going out to the gaming mags/influencer groups and leading you with “The game is coming!!!” news articles for years at a time, hoping to build a critical mass of pre-orders to fund the next title in the pipe.

Once the game is out, though, its done. Anything you can flip it for is free money for the owner of the property. So why not re-sell the SquareEnix back catalog for $10/ea? Tune up the graphics a bit, maybe spring for a few new cut scenes. You can take a title that landed on shelves in the mid-90s and turn it into another eight-figure release just by hyping it back up again.

Russia running into all the same problems of a prolonged ground war that plague any imperial power.

Strangely, I see so many of these posts indicating this as some kind of weakness Ukraine should be expected to exploit. However, you can see all the same problems of conscription on the opposite side of the front lines. Ukraine has increasingly turned to South America for expendables, with 40% of new recruits coming from across the Atlantic this year. Incidentally, a lot of these recruits are coming from the drug cartels.

Sort of like how “Al-Qaida in Iraq / Syria / etc” wasn’t a real organization, just a way of publicizing the War on Terror in a language Americans reflexively accepted.

We’re going to see random people persecuted as “Members of Antifa” in the same way we spied on and harassed anti-War Quackers and anti-Genocide college students by affiliating them with “terrorist groups”

Okay but that was very useful and generally beneficial

Chinese/Russian which are obvious no

Say what you will about the MiG, they’re cheap.

Is this a contest to crash the most aircraft?

Because my man, the GOAT, John “New Plane” McCain would like to have a word.