The economy is terrible with both hardware and software becoming more expensive, theres a good selection of free and long-lifetime games (be it live-service or just very long and replayable), and a lot of the newer paid games have become worse.

I’d be significantly more suprised if this wasn’t the case.

Mastercard? Yes, but then they’d have to admit that they were in the wrong, so it seems unlikely.

Tl;dr: Mastercard says they didn’t “force” Valve to remove nsfw games. They just told them that if they didn’t remove the games that were complained about by Collective Shout, they’ll block them.

The UX is just so much better in every aspect. UI is clean and (mostly) intuitive, but more importantly, supports alternative frontends and apps offering better and personalized UIs. There isn’t a half-dozen roadblocks and annoyances put in the way of accessing content, like VPN-bans and ads. There isn’t even a particularly high-bar to join and participate, so no worries about entering a phone number or building up karma.

I can just use the site. Now all I need is content thats actually relevant to me.

My orange cat loves pushing things off tables. At this point, he knows he’ll get in trouble for it too, so he tries to be sneaky about it right up until whatever it is smashes on the floor.

The comment, for convenience:

In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.

Assuming you’d have to re-buy Minecraft, I’d.say at least give Luanti a try. At the very least, Its free, so you can switch if you don’t like it.

That said, personally, I had too many issues with it. Specifically, I had performance issues, found that the graphics that looked worse (subjectively) and were much harder to modify, and kept running into roadblocks that were annoying to fix, like having to figure out how to grant myself permissions for a bunch of different actions.

While Luanti is much more accessible for modding, isn’t it more limitted? Maybe the documentation was just out of date or that, but I was trying to look into custom shaders as well as optimization mods (since I was getting suttering on block updates) a year ago or so, but from what I saw at the time, there wasn’t any way to modify these.

Edit: Was trying to find any information to confirm this, or see if its changed. I did find a couple recemt refrences to custom shaders (although they seemed very limitted). That said, there was no official documentation, nor refrences to it on any official page, so I have no idea how functional or supported it is. I found nothing at all about other methods of modifying rendering.

For now, Reddit. Not because its good, but because Lemmy still doesn’t have enough users to fufill its use case unless you want to talk about politics or IT-type tech. Hopefully, that will change in the future. Once a few of the semi-niche communities like Dota 2, painting, cats, or city-based communities takes off, I can hopefully stop going back to Reddit.

Lemmy and the Fediverse have a stronger foundation, but without a userbase, its kinda pointless.

From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarely leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.

Edit: I’m wrong. See sp3ctr4l’s comment below.

As much as I like Valve’s work, I don’t think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.

Same thing applies, but the article suggests that its probably PayPal in this case.

Not suprising, and given the nature of most of the games removed, debatably reasonably, but it still highlights the need to reduced reliance on the few big American payment processors like PayPal when they can effectively regulate what can and cannot be sold online.

The problem isn’t the length, its the fact that stories are warped or straight-up built around every single (often not even) loose thread from the original trilogy and to a lesser extent, the prequels. For example, the Madalorian was great for the first season, where yes, it was episodic, but it did still have an overarching plot that built up to a climatic final battle. Where it started to run into problems was when it had to tie back into the original plot. Mandalorians lost all mystique, pacing was hampered by exposition, and the focus was draw away from the main characters and the plot in service of tie-ins to Ashoka and the main franchises.

Ultimately, it should be about telling the best stories. Sometimes, that might be episodic as worked well for Mandalorian, sometimes a continuous plot like Andor, and sometimes it is a full movie that does fit alongside the original cannon like Rogue One.

I’m not sure how recoverable it is at this point, but if you want Star Wars to act as a forever-story, don’t treat it as one single story. Its okay if plot doesn’t directly build with each release. Its okay if it doesn’t connect to other parts of the cannon. Its okay if you have no shared characters. Hell, its even okay (if not ideal) if some media contradicts each other. The important part is making good stories, and if a new peice of media wouldn’t work when attached to a larger plot, don’t attach it to the larger plot. Simple as that.

Look at something like 40K, for example. While yes, there is a “main” plot, its only a small part. Honestly, fans often outright ignore the “main plot” Horus Hersey books, in favour of the more fun and compartmentalized books like the Eisenhorn Trilogy or the ork books because those are the books that most revel in the setting and themes of 40K and aren’t burdened by dozens of other books that they have to tie in to.

From what I’ve heard (although I have no real sources) a lot of the rich Africans are similarly wealthy to many of the rich Americans. Its mostly owners of resource extraction sites and refineries, similar to oil barons and mining companies in American history, but with even less regulations. That said, you don’t really hear about them as much because the local governments aren’t strong enough to challenge them (or even collect accurate information on them) and they’re less interested in flaunting their wealth to the poor.

To try and answer what you’re asking genuinely, since I don’t see indication that this is bad-faith:

The reason African-Americans and some black people get a “pass” to use it isn’t because it isn’t offensive. Its because they’re expected to have a better understanding of their own oppression than someone who hasn’t lived with it, and because it can generally be assumed to not have racist connotations. The word has such heavy history that if someone who isn’t black uses it, it is usually (and reasonably) assumed to be racism. Even among those who are black, theres a lot of nuance, with many feeling uncomfortable with saying it, either because the word is so loaded that it can be offensive reguardless, or because they don’t feel like they’re connected enough to the history to have the “right” to say it (I.E. someone who grew up in a black-majority country might feel this way.)

Making immigration more difficult already benefits the wealthy. Not having birthright citizenship won’t change that.

I think you’re misinterpreting my intentions. I believe that making immigration and citizenship easier is best. I just also believe that Jus Soli is an ineffective band-aid solution, that doesn little to help the common man.

I’m not informed enough to be very specific in execution, but in my mind, immigration should be extremely generous. Ideally, I’d say it should be effectively unlimited, but I know there are economic considerations that need to be taken into account, such as the rate of housing construction. That said, I don’t feel confident enough to outline specifics beyond that. I have nothing against immigrants or immigration.

Its purely citizenship, and the political power it involves specifically that I believe shouldn’t be given out based on geographic location at one instant alone. Given that its effectively giving you power to change how the country is run, it should be given to those who are directly affected by how the country is run. Ideally, I’d almost want a system where someone can’t be more invested in a different country, although again, I’m not sure about specifics. Prehaps something along the lines of a limit of how much property can be owned outside the country relative to within the country, so regular people qualify easily, but someone can’t get citizenship while they own a dozen houses elsewhere. Again, I’m not an expert, and not trying to advocate for a specific solution, just that immigration be made easier and citizenship shouldn’t be something you can buy.

Edit: fixed a couple typos.

We don’t know for every one for certain, but we have plausable explanations or backgrounds for nearly every cryptid and mythological creature. Usually, the explanation is either a diseased animal, misidentified bones, or someone looking to make money.

So we give up with a half-measure, that helps the rich moreso than the poor without addressing the underlying issue?

This isn’t a helpful or sustainable approach. Should we give up on climate change because reducing carbon output is hard, or say, “Well, as long as you don’t use coal, its good enough.” Of course not. Not to mention that making immigration and/or citizenship more accessible isn’t an impossible task at all, esspecially relative to climate change or weath inequality.