Helmic [he/him]

Korean gamer chuds are absolutely next level, like taking out blimps to protest companies not having sexy enough swimsuits in gacha games or literally having a character make an incidental pinching gesture, because they think it’s subliminal feminist propaganda mocking men for having small penises. A lot of Korean devs are fucking terrified of upsetting them. I would be unsurprised if there actually is a trend of Korean gamea being more overtly fanservicey as a result.

That is the kind of malicious thing being done, though. It sets the rhetoric that criticizing MTX is motivated by being a schmuck, you only would “genuinely” feel pressure if ypu were a schmuck.

But here’s the thing, virtually no game, even the most predatory, has an undeniable “win for money” option. Having things be hazy creates the plausible deniability required for someone to consider a purchase (people tend to only pay for pay2win stuff if nobody will ever know) and to create this discourse. No matter the game, the communities that play it will at a minimum have a sizable contingent who will insist their game is not pay2win. It is never P2W. They always make a distinction, pay for an edge, pay to save time, and always couch it such that if only the critic were a better gamer then it would not matter. See Star Citizem videoa of people in Auroras beating much better ships - “skill wins” is the message that obscures the clear mechanical advantages that are on sale that are just as usable by a skilles players, or would provide wider tactical options and responses as flex picks.

I’m not saying the MTX here is especially egregiois, but this discourse we are havimg even on an explicitly left wing forum is the intended effect, to blunt criticism for when they take this further, which they always do. The losa in save data control is a further escalation.

The issues.are not neccesarily about the game being fun or not.

First, and most obviously, this is obviously about setting the discourse to then escalate at a later time. It is meant to create Gamers™ who will make pushing back on MTX exhausting, so that people will be less.willing to push back later as these MTX start paywalling more significant aspects of the game. This was done with lootboxes, battlepasses, horse armor, and most successfully MMO’s - every online game’s monetization is exploitative except mine, you wouldn’t need the premium store if you got gud. Deliberately cultivated fandom toxicity.

Second, the shape of the game is being altered to accomodate this MTX. Save data being intentionally limited to make the MTX seem like it has a point has a negative impact on the game overall.

Third, felony contempt of business model. These kinds of MTX can be used to frame modding and cheats as circumvention of DRM with monetary damages. For now, I think Capcom knows better than to push this, but the DMCA is broad and modding amd cheats are a direct competitor to this monetization model; it is inevitable this will be persued at some point, after previous escalations like bans. It puts DMCA takedowns of mods that do the same thing as in their interest to make ppssible.

I mean the game leaning into slavery - and it calls it slavery - is p sus.

Steam Controller obviously still works fantastic, either emulating a 360 controller, keyboard and mouse, or a blend of all of those. Don’t even need Stream, open source configurator works fine.

fedjacketing rust devs on the funny shaped ursine website

It aleady has been. Anything, anything publicly posted and available will be harvested by, at a minimum, Google spiders. The only privacy benefits of any site can only be promises that they won’t share the information that you don’t publicly list.

And even then,.all it takes is the feds raiding a dipshit Kolektiva admin to get that information illegally anyways.

Do not organize serious actions over social media. At most, hold sensitive discussions over private, E2E encrypted chats like Matrix.

Yeah, all they would need to really do is unqueue you when you pause and disable pausing while someone is trying to connect. These are functions that already exist in these games, so there should be effort put into making a pause button.

Starting with someone’s dotfiles is a much better way to start with these minimalist window managers. You can see what they did and only tweak the the things you want to work different. Still not as easy as a DE’s unified settings, but if you like that fine grained control it can be worthwhile. My setup is quite basic, but having everything bound to the keys I want lets me do what I want quickly.

my man posted hog

The sugar cookie will be too grainy and brittle as the sugar crystals aren’t all incorporated.

completeanarchy’s def assholes, yes, though again I refrain from calling anything or anyone a fed because that’s historically been used extremely abusively in leftist spaces. antiwork’s more well known as having been fucked with, as generally when actual fed shit happens on reddit it invovles reddit admins getting directly involved.

What does that even mean? It runs on elected mods, with a separate subreddit that posts notable mod actions for transparency. Do you think there’s any non-fed anarchist subreddit, or are you just fedjacketing as a bit or because their opnions annoy you? Antiwork actually had Laurelai Bailey, an actual known snitch, we actually do know that there was fed shit going on there - I have never heard an actual serious accusation about r/anarchism of all places.

LIke unless your’e going to hand me actual evidence that morrigan or someone is actually a cop, this is the kind of thing that I’m talking about. That fedjacketing shit is toxic, it gets people paranoid, it’s a traumatic thing to go through, so the general expectation is that you don’t ever call someone a cop or a fed without actual evidence to back that up.

Mastodon is the kind of place I referred to in my previous comment.

Not really sure how that’s particularly waned, relative to anything else. Anarchist instances can be pretty large, and Mastodon (and the other twitter-like federated projects) as a whole is a much larger thing than Lemmy at present. That is where you’ll find actual orgs with their “official” accounts after Twitter started banning them.

I don’t know who you’re talking about but Hexbear is more active today than it has ever been.

ML’s on Hexbear are active, yes. I don’t really see other anarchists very often, we’re more often referred to than actually present. I don’t really think I see much other htan ML’s represented in general, which is absolutely a decline from when the website started and certainly from when the subreddit was still not banned.

It used to have a bigger problem with anti-trot sectarianism, far more than anarchism.

The trot in question got orriginally targetted in part due to their association with anarchists, which again the phrase “anarchist cabal” will always be funny. But part of why there was resistance to that sectarianism was becuase there were anarchists present to push back on it, which over time a lot of us have burned out on the community. And so like 90% of the time it seems like posts are mostly complaining about anarchists, which I imagine is probably exhausting for whatever anarchists remain.

Which ones?

GenZanarchism was probably one of hte more notable ones that got cheered on, though people have been trying to fuck with r/anarchism for a while which had that space paranoid as shit. I remember on the Discord we were looking over some screenshots over some drama about needing to disassociate with a server of Reddit subredit moderators where someone told someone else to kill thesmelves, and part of those screenshots was them with a channel dedicated to fucking with anarchist subreddits.

You can just go to the dunk thread for this thread and see the upvoted replies, like those just plain stating they don’t really advocate for left unity either.

Anarchist presence on Mastodon has been fine. Raddle has the issue of Ziq being shitty to people and fostering a space only really welcoming to a specific brand of post-leftist, and so far the fact that Lemmy has been made by ML’s has stifled interedt in a specifically anarchist Lemmy instance. Though even then Raddle still has more visibly active anarchists than Hexbear, and if you go by specifically anarchist discussions the anarchism community on Hexbear has always been anemic.

Having been here from the start and watched people leave, it’s always been the overt sectarianism that gets cited. Hexbear is not a revolutionary movement, it is an internet forum, and while it started out as a space that wanted to specifically be an actual social space for leftists in general it has absolutely become an ML centric soace to the exclusion of pretty much any other tendency. And for all some might say they think we have shared goals, it tends to not mean much when there has always been a contingent that has viewed driving off other tendencies as praxis.

I would agree that it would be better to have an actual anarchist presence on kbin/lemmy and that the objection to using the software is silly, but a lot of anarchist reddit spaces have dealt with specifically ML wreckers trying to to gain control of subreddits for shits and giggles, so I don’t think I can convince anyone this wouldn’t be more of the same.

Sure, but there’s a reason the anarchist presence on Hexbear haa dramatically waned over the years. Like how much is anyone actually valuing left unity while federating with an instance that memes about killing anarchists? A lot of the early drama came out of specifically ML’s harassing people associated with anarchists, like that John Kerry shit, including accusations of an “anarchist cabal” (which to be fair remains extremely funny to this day).

And this exists alongside an attitude that left unity in fact is a waste of time, that communists and anarchists want fundamentally different things. And when you combine that with memes about anarchists being reactionaries and feds (oh, but not our anarchists!) and glorification of figures that killed a lot of anarchists and the occasional “anarchists get the wall” memes, like you can’t be comrades with people who fundamentally see you as a problem to one day violently remove. There cannot be useful criticism without mutual trust, and I don’t think there has been that trust in quite a while.

Wouldn’t want bad actors to find privacy respecting software.

I see this image and I wonder where the fuck else people are going to eat. Tbh this reads as a very urban take, if you’re living in an area that basically exists to service people driving on the interstate it is just all chains. Any “family” restaurants are serving food from the same bulk supplier so they’re identical to one another as well on top of tasting bad and being overpriced. People say chains are bad but like theyr’e at least consistent, paying $20 for really bad pizza that’s worse than the $10 pizza you can get from Pizza Hut of all places is the extent of commercial food culture in much of so-called flyover country.

There isn’t really such a thing as a public space out here. Any other kind of date is simply going to be at a bar or at someone’s house. You simply do not socialize like how people socialize on TV out here, you either have to be visiting your friends’ houses regularly or you’re going to simply go direclty home and watch TV. There’s simply not enough rich people to support anything more upscale.

More generally, just use Libredirect and avoid using a ton of important but shitty websites. Breezewiki in particular is fantastic, so much faster than Fandom and it’ll redirect you to a game’s actual official wiki since Fandom SEO’s itself to the top even when it has shitty misinformation and isn’t maintained.

I don’t hate my coworkers that much.