On that, I agree.

This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).

Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.

The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.

So you’re now posting images of people being mocked for having mental illnesses. Yeah, sure dude, you’re an exemplary pillar of morality. Perhaps hold on from having these discussions until you grow up.

The ruling party in Spain is socially progressive, so they’re shooting themselves on the foot with this one.

No one wants to tell the government they’re watching porn, especially in a Catholic country like Spain.

Spain is majority Catholic, but in terms of people having mostly secular lives, it’s very similar to France. If anything, religion has more weight in institutions in relation to its social significance than it should as a leftover from our fascist dictatorship from 50 years ago.

We may be talking about someone who handled logistics, or cooking, or maintenance; they might have been punished by life enough in the 30 years have followed; they may be someone who didn’t know what they were getting into, but once they were on the ground, tried to minimize the harm they brought upon others; they may be someone who realized what the army was doing was wrong too late, and was branded a traitor for refusing orders or revealing evil shit that was going on behind the curtains.

All in all, you’re either defending that once a person does one bad thing, regardless of their context, they have become essentially tarnished forever, and no matter their growth or already suffered punishment they should continue to suffer forever; or else you’re just rationalizing the fact that you want to throw fireworks no matter the harm you bring upon others. Think about this all for two minutes before you say something stupid.

If you join the army because you’re fucking stupid in your 20s, and by your 50s you’ve become a wise, anti-war person who still has PTSD, you don’t deserve to get your PTSD triggered because you were dumb 30 years ago.

If you have any kind of anxiety disorder, sensory hypersensitivity or heart issues, the sudden noise of fireworks will at least startle you. The constant barrage of noise that takes place in some places through some celebrations or through the year provoke people to develop even more serious health issues. Ah, but don’t you dare to suggest that the health of vulnerable people should take priority over some brief dumbfuck fun, or that there exist less harmful ways to celebrate, or that constant fireworks in places with certain population density means annoying a lot of people for the sake of very few, because then it turns out that you just “hate freedom”.

My point is that plenty of high-information Democrat voters ultimately fall in line, but the party fails to reach further beyond, while Republicans don’t actually have to “fall in line”, because they like what they’re voting for. Is this not the opposite of the quote?

On top of that, it’s an issue that will easily change the leanings of a lot of low-information voters. Republicans know that the 2025 agenda isn’t popular with moderates, and while most of Biden’s policies have been short-reaching, they’re generally considered a positive (save for Gaza), so they attack at the very obvious and glaring weak point that isn’t actually policy-related.

I actually disagree with this sentiment.

There’s clearly a split in the Democratic Party regarding the candidates and leanings of the old guard, vs a very large portion of their voter base that wants structural reforms in the country (universal public healthcare VS increased access to insurance, for instance), and I bet a large portion of the latter feel whipped into having to vote for a lesser evil rather than for a political project they actually have passion for.

Meanwhile, Trump was an outsider of the Republican party who managed to get their voters in love with him, to the point that he managed to hijack the party and leave it ripe open for a transformation from neoconservative to proto-fascist, despite the Republican old guard initially being hostile towards him.

The Republican party has managed to stay competitive, despite their political goals being less popular overall in the US than the Dems’, precisely because they allowed themselves to mutate and stay responsive to the changes in the electorate, the obvious tragedy being that democratic institutions (mostly referring to both political parties) have been far more willing to incorporate far right nutjobs who want to end democracy than they have for left-wing populism that wants to make housing affordable.

Do you know what’s worse than stimulating your fear response? Stimulating your anger response. And millions of people choose do that daily in their interactions with social media.

Not “an”. Plural.

Ah, yes, good to see Republicans are focusing on the most pressing issues their voters face.

You’ll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone

…Those won’t go away, right? People aren’t going to start talking on the bus for their phones to auto-type the text messages they want to send through chat, right…?

Not really? Bruxism is heavily linked with stress and anxiety, which we have too much of in our contemporary society (meaning: a drop of water in our whole evolutionary history), and it’s very rarely going to incapacitate anyone, so evolution doesn’t care, and has cared even less before civilization.

AI and its consequences have been a disaster for Google.

POTUS puts the ‘fed’ in ‘fediverse.’

Thanks I hate it.

Also too bad that the White House has joined Meta, specifically, rather than the decentralized Fediverse, but libs gonna lib.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of money for a CEO who kept insisting that he had to kill 3rd party apps because Reddit still isn’t profitable.