JDPoZ

She was in the Capitol when the Jan 6th insurectionists showed up ready to lynch her.

She knows what will happen if his people win. They took to a hammer to her husband‘s head and Trump joked about it. She’s finally realizing that this whole capitulating to capital in order to stave off the left - resulting in economic stratification and consequent ripening of the populace for demagoguery might spell the death of the Republic, but possibly also her very life as well.

Obligatory Keith Olbermann video about Citizens United ruling that kinda started the rapid exponential acceleration of our descent in to full on oligopoly.

But without even just the cool space station to just stare at longingly…

I’m so tired of the “Bible Belt.” Really the US in general, but especially that area in general.

Agreed with you on Sanders - he is an incredibly rare occurrence in politics. He is someone who was :

1. Not ever rich so he understands from a very real perspective the economic stratification that many of those in higher government offices ignore or are oblivious to.
2. Didn’t seek politics as a means to enrich himself (unlike Sinema for example)
3. Right in almost every instance of history when he’s gone against the grain - whether in the with Civil Rights, or the 90s with Iraq and NAFTA, or the 2000s with Occupy Wall Street, bailouts, etc.

The closest other analogs I can think of are a few members of the “squad…” but even a good number of them come from some sort of modest means… although - again - that garbage pile Sinema shows us that’s no guarantee when it comes to class solidarity… :(

Beto on the other hand - who I actually met in person once and shook hands with - although he is a thousand times better than Cruz or Abbott - is basically backed by his very well-to-do in-laws and more of the “New Democrats” coalition - aka Obama / Buttigieg / thinly-veiled neoliberal “look how cool I am but don’t check my voting record too closely” group of pretend-progressives backed by a lot of capital trying to appeal to the folks who like the politics of Sanders, AOC, Warren, etc.

Although Beto’s better than some of the others in my opinion, his voting record shows he’d be another Obama policy-wise so no public healthcare probably, no ending massive private-kick-back driven “Military Industrial Complex” contracts, probably not great on foreign policy, and I wouldn’t expect him to crack down on billionaire tax evasionists.

Am I the only one who thinks any Republican insisting they’re “<insert bullshit here> instead of <worse shit the Rs keep doing>” is just lying?

Like Romney and Liz Cheney and the rest of the “rEaSoNaBlE” Republicans - none of what they say matters because in the end (unlike say pieces of shit also like Joe Manchin or Sinema who actually help the Rs out all the time too) the Romneys and Cheneys still tow the party line when voting on those same issues they supposedly have opposite spoken views on happens to come up in a committee or bill.

How about instead of getting excited about someone who may take moderate voters away from democrats in the general, we instead shit on all the Rs as they deserve it and should be ashamed of running as - regardless of how supposedly “reasonable” their latest spoken views supposedly are?

I agree we need both, but it just feels a little lower priority… like if someone was giving a speech in a room filled with a bunch of starving children and said speaker was preaching about how we needed to “protect animal rights.”

Like they’re not wrong, I guess, but it would seem kind of strange to focus on the welfare of cattle when there was obviously a much more dire situation of “kids starving in the room they’re in” that maybe should be the initial target of focus before someone talks about the ethics of free range vs organic food production.

Umm, how about we focus on actually getting a strong game industry for people working directly in it first… 😄 I mean… have people seen the layoffs just in the past two years within the game industry?

Here’s a video showing everything iD worked on related to what was referred to as “DOOM 4” from like 2007 to 2013 before scrapping a huge part of it and coming out with the critically acclaimed 2016 version (which was only shown starting around 2015 at QuakeCon and E3).

Note that not EVERYTHING was scrapped, as you can see things like the super-shotgun model are close to the final release - as well as what you can tell were early slower iterations of the execution-style animations the game became famous for doing, but a lot of what is shown in that trailer was never to be seen again outside of these old videos people have attempted to archive.

I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…

Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?

This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.

Pretending that Biden / Democrats don’t have any power to even attempt to address this in even the most mild way is plain stupid.

And please don’t reply with a “you think Biden has the power unilaterally force them to lower their prices?!”

No, I don’t.

But what I DO think is that power of the bully pulpit of the highest office in the land allows the president to openly target and vilify (righteously I might add) companies and even individual CEOs that are doing things like this and turn the public ire against them in a focused manner.

Additionally, Democrats can do things in a Machiavellian manner that would make life a fucking nightmare for some of these people. Just get the IRS to go after some of these CEOs. Investigate them for this price gouging that we know that they’re doing. Suspend their business licenses.

Have the FDA tell them they’re not authorized to sell milk anymore or some shit I don’t fucking care.

Don’t tell me the Supreme Court’s gonna overturn it because I don’t care. In the meantime that they hadn’t overturned it we get wins and even if the Supreme Court does overturn it it’s more ammunition to point and say “look at what they’re taking away from us! We’re trying to fix things, and these Republicans in office keep undoing what would help make your lives better!”

Instead, they do nothing and say “well we couldn’t do that even if we wanted to because the Republicans would stop us” and then when you get angry and complain they say “oh well what do you want Trump to be in office instead?!”

This fucking handwaving shit has got to stop or Trump is going to fucking win again. Jesus Christ. Fucking forgive medical debt. Fucking forgive student loans. Just do some sweeping shit. I don’t care if everyone’s going to complain about the legality of it. Push the limits of your power. Trump did it and got away with it and it was evil shit like the Muslim travel ban.

AT LEAST ATTEMPT TO DO SOME GOOD WITH THE POWER YOU HAVE TO SHOW US THAT YOU ARE TRYING!

Hey neolibs, now are we allowed to say how things like this help give credence to the often-cited but obviously not completely accurate “both parties are sometimes the same” statement?

Or am I going to get a billion downvotes, and someone replying to me with an amazing list of accomplishments that breaks down for me how Biden reduced the prices of not only ketchup BUT ALSO mustard packets (although technically it’s starting in the calendar year of 2025 assuming Congress passes his new bill via a one time partial mail in rebate for those who qualify via income cap rated at 4.312x the current rate of poverty based off your income tax return average from 2020-2023)?

They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.

Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.

Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.

But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…

for those not from the US, I highly recommend watching the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes” to get a better understanding of how absolutely dogshit the US is for anyone without a car.

Not only is public transit non-existent… you are nearly constantly under threat of being hit by a car as a pedestrian - as things like sidewalks, street crossing safe areas, etc. are all spotty at best… not to mention how trucks and SUVs now are bigger than ever so chances are higher than they’ve ever been before that you won’t be seen before being run over.

Want to hear something depressing?

I used to work in games.

I was really fortunate, as I got to work with an incredibly talented pool of guys and gals who’d worked on games for decades. They were once basically a third of the legendary game studio “Ensemble Studios” - aka the guys who made Age of Empires.

When they were shutdown, all of them split in to basically 3 different new companies from the ashes :

• Robot Entertainment
• Bonfire
• New Toy

From those 3 companies we got things like “Orcs Must Die” as well as “Words With Friends.”

Bonfire and New Toy eventually got bought by Zynga - and eventually were merged into a single studio in the Dallas area.

I was there for a couple of years. Was my first real game job after a couple of smaller gigs, including some contract work and a few months beforehand at a very small studio. Yes, it was Zynga, but I worked with guys who’d been making games like Age of Mythology since the 90s and they were MASTERS and were actually making stuff that was pretty fun to play - considering it was “Facebook” game work.

Then, a new CEO was hired at Zynga… A guy who’d been at Microsoft during their “Project NATAL” days where the Xbox One had been all about TV and SPORTS… rather than video games…

This CEO was Don Mattrick.

I remember when we’d be having lunch in the cafeteria, they’d often do things like play E3 stage presentations on the big projector… and a lot of the older guys would just boo and get up and walk out when Don Mattrick was on stage during his Microsoft Xbox tenure.

I never had put it together why they hated him so much until I realized who had shut down Ensemble. It was Don Mattrick.

And in 2012 when Mattrick became CEO of Zynga, one of the first things he did was start shutting down satellite studios.

One of those studios was the one I was at.

Now, I was of course upset, but I landed on my feet and am okay… but do you know what that means for those guys in their mid to late 50s that I worked with originally from Ensemble?

It means they had the studio they worked for… shut down TWICE… by the same guy at 2 different companies in a row.

So FUCK Don Mattrick.

“Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”

The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.

Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.

Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.

Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.

Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.

I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.

Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.

And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…

They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.

And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.

Yeah I’m going to disagree. The community manager got fired for standing up on behalf of the players.

I don’t know what else people expect Arrowhead to do realistically to “make this right,” but that community manager guy had always dreamed of working for Arrowhead and lost his dream job by NOT acting like a corporate shill when it came to choosing the players or his bosses.

SONY was in the wrong here. Please let’s stop being so harsh to the guys killing their careers by saying to the people like the community manager who lost his job (by doing the right thing no less) that they “should’ve done more.”

Direct your ire to whatever Sony executive was pushing for this. Please just let Arrowhead devs continue to polish this game that most of us are really enjoying otherwise.

My exact same thoughts. Still like him more than Don Mattrick.

This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”

Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.

I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.

Said this in another thread :

First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.

Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…

So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.

Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.

I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.

This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.