I have an odd question. Does Islam have a position on corporate personhood? If corporations are not people, can one steal from them at all? Piracy is already not quite the same as theft because it does not remove the original from the source’s possession, so can copying something ‘owned’ by something that isn’t a person count as theft?

It feels like so much of the games industry is a weird circle jerk. Big game companies feel this weird pressure to make giant games that have 3TB of textures because they’re building everything to be cut into a trailer that looks as flashy as a big blockbuster film, requiring hardware no one can afford. Meanwhile, they add 13 layers of organizational overhead, so no one can do anything on their own because the writing team have to have a meeting with the texture art team and the modelling team and the voice acting and SFX team just so they can even ask the question of ‘How much time will it take to add this NPC in this area and will it justify that much extra artist time/pay by selling another X units?’ much less actually make a good estimate as to the answer. Then you have players, a bunch of whom somehow still get suckered in by those trailers but then spend the next year complaining how much the AAA game sucks but unable to play anything else because of network effect lock in, only to do it all again the next time they see another flashy trailer. Nobody learns the lesson. Everything just repeats until it breaks down as is replaced with the next generation of misery.

If you pay $14 for YTP and watched literally only one channel, ever, that channel could get up to a max of $7, less transaction fees. Alphabet eats the other $7. If you use uBlock and SponsorBlock, you get the same ad-free experience and can then control how the $14 gets distributed. I technically spend more than the cost of YTP each month on the creators I support, but I can see my contribution going directly to the creators in nearly the full allocated amounts. That’s a huge difference to small channels. Corporate lackeys will go ‘but the server costs!’ but Alphabet made ~$34B off of other people’s creations last quarter alone and have consistently made the user experience worse since they acquired YT, so any complaints from Alphabet’s C suite can be safely filed under BS.

You mean you don’t want to watch the same three things on repeat forever and ever?

I mean… so, yes?

Those skills being taught are there to help you come to a state of acceptance, an emotional place of ‘It is what it is. It happened, but I don’t feel thrown into an emotional spiral by remembering it.’ Shitty ‘be a man’ therapists or ‘counselors’ might try to get you to just repress the feelings to pretend to have reached that space for the sake of fitting in. Grifty ones might have you come in and talk endlessly about it so they can charge you for all the time while you effectively talk yourself through it enough to suck some of the power out of the memory. It all seems to land somewhere on a spectrum within the space of ‘it is what it is,’ whether it’s a healthy version or not.

Isn’t that all PTSD therapy if you take out the varying levels of tact and skill of the therapist?

‘Tis wha’ 'tis.

Leedvermaak: the experience of joy or satisfaction at someone else’s pain or displeasure, but whilst standing on/near a dike/dam/floodgate.

Or we could direct the ire at both. There’s no shortage of ire here.

I now pronounce you barbarian, cleric, mage, a-- oh, look, they’re fighting amongst themselves again.

And then, since she had a speech impediment, she could no longer handle the verbal component of the spell to put it back.

Diminishing is, I admit, a rough word choice. I actually tried thinking of something else but couldn’t quite find the right word. It’s… Perhaps denormalizing? Demoralizing? Diminutizing? Denaturing? I’m still trying but can’t quite land it.

Perhaps I can find a way to talk you around the perimeter and you can get an idea what I mean. Complaining serves a purpose in making a problem known so that it can be addressed. Complaining about others complaining doesn’t directly diminish their ability to complain in that they haven’t been physically or coercively stopped from complaining, but it does delegitimate their complaints, which is not inherently bad (some complaints are dumb) but when the delegitimation is carried out based on some broad class like ethnicity/nationality/etc. rather than the legitimacy of the particular complaint, that reads like prejudice, of which I’m generally not in favor.

You mean it’s not SLR punk, in reference to the cameras?

I end up explaining this a lot:

Just because something ‘more X’ exists, it does not mean things that are ‘less X’ cease to exist. If someone else has been murdered somewhere in the world, it doesn’t mean non-consentual gropings are to be ignored. If your older sibling was given three slices of pizza, it does not mean you will starve with your two slices. The fact that we have a concept of a googleplex as a number does not mean the number one is meaningless.

Whether something is good or bad, it remains good or bad, regardless of its scale.

And complaining about things, though annoying, is the best form of feedback we can hope for. If something is wrong, no feedback leads to the continuation of the thing being wrong. If people complain, something can be done to fix the issue. If people take direct action to end the problem, that’s usually violence.

By diminishing people’s ability to complain, you are advocating for either ignorance of harm or violence.

Haha, as if they could afford armor.

Only one I got to try was Approximately Up. I’ll probably get it if they keep going with it. I might over-simplify it as Archean I can run without a raytracing GPU.

Got the first one purely because it had soundtrack by Sidewalks & Skeletons. Turned out to be a pretty good game. Hopefully this one won’t go the way of Wizard of Legend 2 and turn into a big disappointment.

I like the doodle, though I think your model would prefer belly rubs over art.

3 seems fine. The balancing was tied into the number of deaths so more players will have more power to do things but fewer retries and, while 1 would be brutal or impossible, 2 would make it harder to complete certain actions but you’d have the revives to make a few mistakes and still come back as long as you have good teamwork.

If only flamethrowers could be used to defeat the monster that is ‘scheduling difficulties…’

Absolutely better than Phasmophobia. Phasmo is terribly designed. S:U is nicely paced, doesn’t have a system of in-game information with gaping holes and outright lies, does have nice pacing, legible design, and has the potential to become even better. It’s definitely a good group game if you have the right number of players.