I don’t care for the drama on Hexbear. And I don’t care for it here either. This post is drama baiting.

The difference is that before you walked up and got in line or got in early enough that you walk in and choose your seats. And your position was based on your arrival order. Now, you walk up and sorry all seats but the front were bought up and no they aren’t here yet of course. Why would they be? It used to be you just timed it so you got there 30/45 minutes before the start.

I’m just yelling at clouds honestly. It’s not that big a thing, and I reserve seats nowadays often, but mostly because I basically have to. Also, theaters are only ever crowded enough to care during tent pole releases and nowadays I just wait a few weekends.

I just find the social contact of getting to the venue when an event takes place early/on time to get your pick a better experience than choosing a seat on an app early. Probably a condition from growing up pre reservations.

Assigned seats mean you can hardly just ad hoc decide to see a movie nowadays. You basically have to plan it out. Used to be “hey let’s see the showing at 6. Ok let’s get there at 5:30 then.” Now, you go look and people already took the best seats and shows up mid preview. Or people buying literally all the seats weeks ahead of time for blockbusters.

How fun.

I haven’t seen any blockbuster on opening weekend in probably over a decade because I know the good seats are already purchased.

Also, the seating maps aren’t great.

The no seat assignments policy on SW is awesome. You literally just check in on time to get on the earlier groups through a mobile app. Click a button 24 hrs before your flight. Boom you’re in group A. B at worst. It’s straight first come first served. At worst, you can pay $25 extra for the early bird to be in the A group and not stress about check in. Then then line you up based on your spot, and you just walk on and pick which seat you want. Plus SW doesn’t charge you to check a bag.

Egalitarian shit. None of this class based, money grubbing crap. Those types of policies are the reason we have “fast passes” at airports now and then of course then even faster “fast passes”.

Other airlines are also charging you after your tickets to choose your seats and they charge more based on the seat. And charging for bags. And everything else.

Assigned seats also ruined the theater experience for the same reasons.

Games “back in the day” weren’t made with algorithms designed to mess with your psychology to keep you playing, even if you hate the game. They didn’t design the games into evergrinds that only a few sweaty types and professionals can genuinely enjoy either. Old games had a logical, satisfying end where you would put them down afterwards.

Well, many old games were. Arcade games specifically were often designed to get coins from players, with extreme difficulty encouraging grinds and sweaty playthroughs to achieve mastery.

If anything, multiplayer and GaaS brought us back there.

Many new games, especially single player games, are still designed with “fun” in mind, or with even loftier goals and themes, many without exploitative gameplay loops, yet still with distinct, pleasing graphics, art styles, and polished gameplay.

Unfortunately the author has a few paragraphs that miss the mark and strike me as coming from more of a centrist or right-wing “kids these days are too soft” which feels very off-base and disconnected from the issue.

Welcome to The Atlantic. It’s telling they think all these issues are because of phones and not other aspects of society or something like the looming, ever present threat of climate change.

It’s basically The Economist lite at this point.

This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.

GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.

Yeah I sometimes really don’t like the “hours of entertainment” argument because it almost overvalues bloated experiences over tight ones.

I’ve played <=3 hour games that have left more impact than some 200 hour games

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Yes, it can.

When you say dude, you’re referring to…?

Exactly.

Imagine thinking it’s wise to ignore the factors that led to the rise of fascism and believe there’s nothing useful to learn from them.

They are mostly MLs and they often ride the line on their rules on sectarianism, enough where I’ve often reported stuff to moderation that only sometimes is addressed.

But there are definitely anarchists. There has been an anarchist comm for a long time

That’s what Al Jazeera’s claim was. Irrelevance and lack of causal link between the two explosions. Previously, the videos were being used to determine a link and to show a “misfire” leading to the explosion at the hospital, such as in this AP analysis. Now the OSINT groups seem to be saying it is unlikely the munition/rocket can be seen on video.

Now, the narrative is pivoting to a lack of munitions material proving Israeli munitions were used, crater analysis, and arguments about whether or not an air burst explosion could have been involved.

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It’s definitely suspicious that there are no munitions remnants available for analysis. You would think there would be something. If there is anything, independent investigators need to be given access. Otherwise, the perception of impropriety will color peoples’ analyses.

But the idea this has been “concluded” doesn’t seem correct either.

As stated in this article, Al Jazeera, Channel 4, and Forensic Architecture reached conclusions that the air explosion shows the rocket was intercepted and destroyed, not misfired, and there is no causal link between the air explosion and ground explosion at the hospital.

The AP analysis argued against this, but did in fact note this was a possibility. I believe the CNN and others use the same arguments and resources as preliminary OSINT analyses.

Now, GeoConfirmed and other OSINT accounts (Oliver Alexander) are backtracking from their early hypotheses and concluding the Al Jazeera claim is in fact the likely scenario, arguing that the intercepted explosion is too far away from the hospital to be connected. They still think a rocket is the “likely” cause, however.

I wonder if we will ever know what happened for sure, but there is definitely more to this story.

The other strikes they point out are not at the hospital but “in the area”. I guess they are listing a chain of events and noting that Israeli strikes were occurring in the area around the time of the incident.

Everything else about their analysis has to do with potential interception.

GeoConfirmed just posted this, arguing that the rocket was intercepted and the mid air explosion too far away to be related to the hospital.

It looks like a lot of the OSINT crowd are now parroting the Al Jazeera claim if I am reading this correctly

From what I saw, Al Jazeera shows multiple explosions from Israeli air strikes “targeting the area near the hospital” around the time before the explosion, rockets being fired from Gaza and then intercepted by the Iron Dome, and then concludes their footage shows the rocket in question being intercepted (due to similarities with the other captured interceptions) and “complete destroyed” based on their analysis and video.

They conclude there is no evidence that the explosion of said rocket is tied to the explosion at the hospital, and in fact, they seem to say that rocket was “completely destroyed” when intercepted.

The only thing I’m seeing from the AP here to contradict that conclusion is one person basically saying “uh typically rockets aren’t intercepted above Gaza” but noting it’s technically not impossible. Otherwise, AP is saying the rocket in question and the explosion are tied.

I guess it depends on whether Al Jazeera actually captured those rockets being intercepted. I’m not sure what else it would be unless now there’s an argument that all those rockets on their video feed also malfunctioned or are something else.

Opposite conclusions drawn from Al Jazeera, Channel 4, and Forensic Architecture, from just what I’ve seen.

An independent investigation must be allowed.