meaning of life

Nope. No meaning. Any meaning you see is as real as the ‘person’ you talk to when you ‘talk to’ chatgpt.

overcome

Nope. No over to come. Just arbitrarily chosen metrics for ‘success.’

Evolutionary path

Nope. No path. Omnidirectional expansion against inescapable entropy. Random as far as you are concerned.

Muh beer koozie makes it hard ta see the far lane so I mostly just guess. As long as I don’t hear any crunching sounds I figgur a’m okay. Most people jus get out the way anyways so ah figgur I don’t have ta worry too much.

TTRPG play:
Final Show Films (smaller, really dedicated crew. Old friends playing WoD games, like Vampire, Werewolf, etc. and some DnD. LGBT+ friendly if that matters to you)
Apocalypse Players (a crew of professional British actors playing Call of Cthulhu)
Push the Roll (shorter scenarios played based off the titles suggested by viewers, run by Ross Bryant, an incredible improv actor)
Glass Cannon Network (has moments of the money side messing with things, but they have hired great improv actors, like Ross Bryant, to be on the regulars list)

Media analysis:
Morbid Zoo (looks at media, especially movies, both as art and propaganda)
Once More With Feeling (Mariana from Morbid Zoo and a friend who works in movie industry watching and analysing movies that have been remade. S1 is all about the Disney live action remakes and the old originals)
Folding Ideas (Hard to pin down, these days more documentary style stuff)
Hedgehog’s Nonsense (visual novel review and analysis)
Jess of the Shire (literary analysis, particularly but not always Tolkien)
Meeptop (media meets psychology)
Poltergibbst (mostly horror analysis from a diagetic perspective)
Sideways (passionate looks at music in movies and how musical elements can be intertwined with narrative)

Gaming:
Splitsie (Space engineers and other mechanical simulation games)
Conedodger240 (mixed channel, part garage, part gaming) Excel Esports (excel as an export)

Documentary:
Aged Skills (old documentaries about old, often pre/semi-industrial processes for things like stone quarrying, wall/roof slating, etc.)
Andy Ward’s Ancient Pottery (Andy Ward attempting to do experimental archeology to figure out lost pottery techniques of old pueblo Indians of the American Southwest)
Cheese52 (a lady who makes cheese)
Deviant Ollam (Security industry professional who talks about locks, security systems, social engineering, etc.)
Discover Permaculture with Geoff Lawton (permaculture)
Primerblobs (playing with simulations of social dynamics)
Tech Ingredients (the science teacher you wish you had back in school)
Uncle Juff (a jugalo spouting wisdom, odd)
DGQC (an autodidact asshole, vehement in his assholery, but not a complete moron. The trick is looking for where he has knowledge vs confidence. Currently doing a translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-oedipus. Also acts as a platform for many reading groups for texts on philosophy.)
Unlearning Economics (professional economist discusses various problems with learning econ 101 and stopping at that)
We’re In Hell (video essays on how everything is kind of fucked and why)

Music: David Coffin (a sea shanty singer)
Mahogany Sessions (professionally recorded sessions in unusual places) Nataliya Serbina (Ukrainian folk singer)

Nearly totally.

Food: The farmers probably aren’t using electric tractors. The trucks that bring them their inputs and their produce to the store are probably not electric. The power company keeping the store’s fridges running are, even if they were totally renewables-focused, using oil for something.

Water: plastic pipes are everywhere in modern construction.

Housing: plastic parts, sealants, lubricants, power supply, etc.

Computing: filled with petroleum products and built using carbon energy

Change hasn’t really happened yet on the scale where it can decarbonise the general population.

“Comparison” to slavery? You don’t understand analogy. Please, return to education until you do. Analogy is a very basic skill. You should not be without it.

Yes, it is deceitful. All advertising is deceitful. It is inherent to advertising to be deceitful. You liking the form the deceit takes does not change the deceit, only how successfully you are being deceived.

I’m calm. I’m not suggesting we go out in a mob and murder the mod makers and burn down their homes. But we should not ignore its harm simply because it isn’t the most awful thing ever. Whether you are being stabbed with a sewing needle or a zweihander, it’s not acceptable.

“You’re not as dumb as you look,” was always one of the most subtle yet broad insults.

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And? The point is that it’s an ad, designed to manipulate people into thinking of ikea as being associated with fun and gaming, like it’s a fun person, and not a corporation. It’s a lie. Just because you aren’t forced to fully take part in something doesn’t make it somehow not malicious. You aren’t forced to buy a slave. Does that make it acceptable that someone sells them?

Or you could just use a cheap camera (might be less expensive than the hard hat) or your work phone. (Free) They also have the benefit of not being fixed to your head and a viewfinder so you know exactly what’s in frame.

Gross. Keep trademark trashvertisements out of our games.

More effort than designing invasive software to work on all the different hardware and software configurations used by all the players? Still have to pay engineers to work on all of that or, worse, (shudder) contractors. That shit’s expensive.

There is a line. People who make their money from assets have been doing well. People who make their money from wages have not.

Oh, come, everyone. Come see the Moral Man who was so Righteous and Moral that he spent half his response on telling us all how Virtuous he is, and indeed already was, before it was even cool.

/s

You know what system you can really readily predict the hardware and software of as a game developer? The one you use as your server. You know what has access to everything that happens in the game? Your server. You know what could run software over which the players have zero control? Your server. You know what could maybe use that ability to run sanity checks on the values coming from the players?

You don’t have to understand why they want something for them to want it. You don’t know exactly why someone is cutting into your lane either. You just know it benefits their goals. That’s why they do it. So would you think it’s fine for them to do it?

This is theoretically true of everything under capitalism. However, it’s not the only force involved.

On the system designer’s side, unless there is a MASSIVE drop in sales directly attributable to the absence of a particular feature, not including that feature decreases cost which increases profit. Any company that tries to court the minority who like the feature will either have to cut into their profits or charge enough to cover the feature, which will effectively price out a section of the buyers from affording it. Either way, that’s probably a lot of money lost. That extra money the other companies gets can be put toward marketing, which in turn shrinks the market share for the feature-focused manufacturer even further, which nets them less money, which… You get the idea. It’s the same thing that happened in American health insurance. The companies that did all the things Americans hate used their profits to run the companies that didn’t into the ground. Now, all that’s left are the ones with which people are familiar.

On the consumer side, they can only choose from what actually is available. Consoles are just shitty computers for people who don’t want to learn to ‘do computers.’ The options are brand A, brand B, and brand C. That’s it. You can’t demand a console that lets you play games from all three. It doesn’t exist. You can’t get the one with a cup holder. It doesn’t exist. If it’s not available as an option, you can’t do a write-in vote like it’s a ballot. You take what’s available, because the alternative is being left alone with your own thoughts and facing off against the FOMO millions of dollars in marketing has built regarding the latest flagship products.

There are two primary reasons people use filler words.
One is to maintain possession of the role of ‘speaker’ in the conversation because, if you stop for a while, someone might think you’re done (if it sounded like the end of a thought) or have broken down trying to think of what to say. Spending time in environments where people have high demands for time or competition for attention can make these things worse. The other is social fear or anxiety about how your message will be received, or over one’s correctness and certainty. ‘I am claiming this thing for myself,’ has the same ultimate goal as ‘Nah, lowkey f’real, I was kinda maybe thinking of nabbing that,’ but the use of the extra ‘filler’ words and slang is designed to obfuscate the meaning, making it passive agressive, forcing the listener to parse the extra layers of obfuscation before having a chance to object, and leaving a verbal avenue of retreat open if someone does object, allowing them to say, ‘No, I said I was thinking about it.’ Spending time in environments where one has to deal with openly agressive people can often make people seek out these verbal conflict avoidance techniques.

‘In the Miso Soup’ by Murakami Ryu might do what you are looking for. Found it by accident looking at Murakami Haruki. Japanese guy is a local guide for an unusual american.

I didn’t finish it but there is also ‘Baby Jesus Buttplug’ by Carlton Mellick. Been meaning to get back to it at some point. WTF is his whole schtick.

The works of Cormack McCarthy are also wtf books, but less in the ‘WHAT THE FUCK!’ more in the vein of ‘Oh, god. What… the fuck…’

Imagine for a moment you are sitting there, reading this comment, and a stranger comes up and sticks their finger up your nose to look for a bogie. They’ve just done something that minimally inconveniences you for their benefit. It probably didn’t do you any serious damage and almost certainly didn’t kill you. When you ask, ‘what the fuck?’ they say ‘I don’t think sticking my finger in your nose is as big of a deal as you make it sound.’ You didn’t do anything to them. They just decided to do it because they wanted it right now rather than waiting to generate their own. Do you really think you’d take such a philosophical view as to say ‘Oh, well. They, legally, should have just picked their own nose and not invaded my physical space, but it would have taken them time to secrete that mucus so it’s fine.’ I doubt it.