I’ve definitely seen it used for non-white coworkers and coworkers from other regions, but typically in the context of relocating for corporate work.
But then, I worked for a western corpo but with a ridiculously diverse group of people during that time.
It was used colloquially, for sure… by rich corporate migrants that didn’t want to self-ID as migrants. Or at least by the HR people and corpo consultants handling the international relocations and avoding the taboo word.
Which is what the previous post is saying and it certainly matches my experience as one of the “expats”. I always self-identified as a migrant myself, though.
Screw that. I am forced to deal with US politics and culture in enough areas of my life to be shamed for refusing to care about their self-harming tendencies. I don’t have a need to care about what the US do to themselves in the same way I don’t have a need to care about what Argentina or Hungary or Russia do to themselves. At least Russians don’t have a real choice.
Admittedly, I did have the compulsion to write that down here at all, as opposed to those other examples. In my defense, that’s because a) I literally wrote that as I clicked the “block” button in this community, and b) it’s insanely hard to not pay attention to the US. It requires active effort. This community isn’t even called “US politics”, it’s just called “Politics”. The US dominating my media is the default stance of the world, I have to take aggressive action to make that not be the case.
That’s fair, I hadn’t considered the scenario of a bunch of old GOG-supported games needing updates.
I mean, in my defense that’s because a lot of the older catalogue is just running under DosBox, but there’s definitely more finicky stuff in there as well.
Well, no shit.
I’ve been phasing out US channels from my social media and I think it’s time to block Lemmy politics and other US-focused politics discussion from here as well. I don’t have much compassion for what Americans will endure the next however many years, but man, it does suck for everybody else.
Yeah, I’ve been confused about this. They are basically branding the games they don’t own but are supporting out of pocket, if I understand correctly.
So no, they don’t own Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3, but they did the work to make them run on modern PCs, so they are now flagging them as part of their preservation program. I don’t think it goes beyond that, but it’s useful to have a flag for them, I suppose. It may make it easier to sell the idea to publishers or whatever.
Not being American, I will need some convincing about why the US doesn’t belong in the same bucket as, say, Hungary or Turkey. If you keep self inflicting the rule of strongmen and their oligarch cronies at some point that’s a core feature.
I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…
See, there’s the horrifying possibility that they just did and this is what Americans are.
Eh, forget it. they probably need a minute before reckoning with that one.
I moved to a snow city for the first time well into adulthood.
The big thing I have for you is that walking on snow is awesome for like two hours and then it’s constantly threatening to kill you. Slippery sludge or ice is the worst feeling in the universe and all the locals will just strut right over it like it’s nothing while you’re fighting for your life.
Just buy good shoes and plant your feet vertically, no sliding motions.
In S3 Picard and Bev Crusher at one point sit down to ponder whether to torture or execute a prisoner and decide to go for it.
Yeah, no. It’s not AS bad… but it’s bad.
Hey, you want to hear a spicy take?
Discovery is the one piece of Trek that fixes their dumb AI nonsense.
By the time they are in the post-postapocalypse future they introduce at least one Soong android who is just… hanging out, being a guy. Not even a particularly nice guy. So at least there is that.
I mean… yeah, the episode isn’t as focused on procedural detail, and I do live for legal process minutia, but I can fill in the blanks just fine and suspend disbelief.
I mean, the question being raised is whether Data has been operating as a person willingly joined Starfleet or as salvaged equipment. If Data had been roaming around on his own and then applied to join Starfleet I’d be more nitpicky, but he was found and turned on by Starfleet and he seems to have been in the system since, so I can see the question of how to categorize him coming up retroactively. Especially in retrospect, since we eventually get undeniable confirmation that AGI is very much possible within their normal gear.
I mean, for the record, by the time Voyager comes around we know that they have protocols to use holographic AIs to substitute in for key personnel, so if you can have a “EMH” slot in for an officer you can have a piece of salvaged machinery operate with a rank and then reassign it to a different role… unless that entity has personhood. It IS a sci-fi as hell concept, but a valid one in-universe.
Me, I would have very much enjoyed Noonyien Soong arguing whether he still owns Data and learn what is legal salvage in Starfleet territory but for the sake of 90s network TV I can see “Is this android truly a life form” being the approach to a Trek episode. And thematically… well, I can’t get through the Goldberg and Stewart scene about slavery without tearing up. It isn’t just how good they both are, it’s the “oh, crap, they’re saying the thing” element to it, too.
Of course that means Starfleet straight up condoned slavery later, as per Star Trek Picard season 1. I would gladly remove all of Picard from lore at this point, but nope, officially Starfleet had legal proceedings to determine that Soong androids are people and to remove their autonomy is akin to slavery and then went ahead and did it anyway.
Picard sucks and is the worst Star Trek thing ever, is what I’m trying to say. Yes, way worse than anything in Discovery. Including season three.
So the JerryRigEverything guy just did a Cybertruck video and he says his sponsor backed off because they didn’t want to be in any Musk-adjacent content.
He’s so dumb. You really can’t fail after you break a certain money threshold, because damn, is this guy trying hard.
Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.
I am screaming at this juxtaposition. This is such techbro thinking, where he’s oversimplifying a single data point to pretend he’s making a data-driven decision (people in a survey said media is biased) and then leaning on a confirmation biased, entirely non-data driven stance (people don’t vote based on newspaper endorsements because I said so).
I mean, two seconds of thinking will tell you that people think the press is biased because the press is biased. There is no reason “the press” that is causing this impact is WaPo in a world of Newsmaxes, Foxes and yes, MSNBCs. You’re going to need more than a survey you read once to make that determination.
And obviously, he has done nothing to determine that his choice doesn’t benefit Trump. He doesn’t even claim that, he just… says so.
Or that his choice moves the needle towards lack of bias, because man, it sure seems like he’s diminishing independence here, not the opposite.
It’s the same billionare brain rot. It’s the same wonky self-assured, biased thinking where they can’t pay enough brainpower to consider the facts independently and they’re too convinced of their own infallibility to even address basic human biases or defer to actual experts on their random convictions.
It’s an absurd way to run a business, let alone a country. And there are few enough of these super rich idiots with a direct enough spotlight that we have a full sample size here. We (now) know how Bezos thinks. We definitely know how Zuck and Musk think. They aren’t to be trusted with the decisionmaking their money warrants them under the current system. Their squishy human brains are too weak and broken to handle it without the elaborate, dispassionate social engineering that keeps reasoably designed liberal democracies chugging along.
Well, we’ve gone from 24 and 5 to a 10 year compromise, so we can agree to disagree on that basis.
That said, I do disagree. You are underestimating how relevant arcades were in 2001. Soul Calibur may have been an early example of the home game being seen as better than the arcade game in 1999, but it was an arcade game first, I had played the crap out of it by the time it hit the Dreamcast.
And I was certainly aware of Maple Story before it was officially released here. And of course I mentioned WoW as the launch of the GaaS movement, but that’s not strictly accurate, I personally know people who lost a fortune to their extremely expensive Ultima Online addiction in 1997/98.
I am still not convinced that the experience of those gamers was any better or worse, me having been there in person. The kids in my life seem perfectly content with their Animal Crossings, Minecrafts and even Robloxes. The millions of people in Fortnite don’t seem mad about it. I sure was angrier about that Resident Evil business at the time than people are about the Resident Evil remakes now. Hell, I got pulled from playing a fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2 by an even better JRPG in Metaphor ReFantazio, and neither of those games features any MTX or service stuff. And of course that’s not mentioning the horde of games in the 20-40 range that are way better and more affordable than anything I had access to in the 90s.
People are nostalgic of the nostalgia times, reasonable or not, and time has a way of filtering out the nastiness, especially if you were too young to notice it. I was wired enough to hear the lamentations of the European game development community being washed away by Nintendo and Sega’s hostile takeover of the industry and their aggressive imposition of unaffordable licensing fees. I was aware of the bullshit design principles being deployed to milk kids of their money in arcades. I had strong opinions about expansion packs and cartridge prices. It’s always been a business, it’s always been run by businessmen.
Best you can do is play the stuff that’s good and ignore the rest.
Second best you can do is be publicly mad at the business driving unreasonable regulations that are meant to do the public a disservice.
Third best you can do is start archiving pirated romsets to privately preserve gaming history, blemishes and all, so we get to keep having this argument when the next generation of gamers are out there claiming that Fortnite used to be cool when it was free and had a bunch of games in there instead of requiring you to sign off your DNA to be cloned for offplanet labor or whatever this is heading towards.
They absolutely do. The market is full of remasters, remakes and re-releases. Having the originals readily available presumably diminishes the value of those, by the count of publishers.
That is not the same as saying that old games are available. Most of them are not, the market keeps reissuing the same handful of hits and landmark games (although we’re in an era of deep cuts now, we even have a Pocky & Rocky remaster, somehow). But they can’t set up regulations where you are allowed to lend out Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin but not Resident Evil 2, so here we are.
No, I’m arguing that if you’re trying to identify an era where the industry at large was not overmonetizing that’s your timeframe: From the death of arcades to the birth of modern casual gaming/F2P/Subscription services. By the numbers that’d be 2001-2005.
Before then you have arcades acting as the first window of monetization, where a whole bunch of console games started and where a lot of the investment went. After that you’re balls deep in modern gaming, with games as a service that are still live today, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story.
That’s a handful of years, at best. Any other interpretation has to ignore huge chunks of the industry that were behaving in the same way that makes people complain today. Either you dismiss arcade gaming despite it being the tentpole of the entire industry or you’re dismissing the fact that subscription and MTX games were already dominating big chunks of the space.
So no, it’s not 24 years. It never was 24 years.
And for the record, we knew at the time. We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997. I’ve been stuck in nerdrage Groundhog Day for thirty years.
Well, no, we’re talking about everything. Everything before 2010, explicitly.
I would guess most people just fill in whatever moment of their childhood there was when they would buy a thing and enjoy a thing and not worry about it too much.
Me being me (see the old codger self-identification up there), I substitute in the late 80s and 90s, when I would plead and beg for coins to squeeze in another 60 second gaming session and then go on to save for months in order to get a lesser version of that same experience at home for anywhere between 60 and 90 bucks (140-220 adjusted for inflation).
In the grand scheme of my memories, the five years after arcades were relevant and before Microsoft started charging a monthly fee to play online and Facebook started a games division are too short of a blip to consider a golden age. My nostalgia is on ranting angrily about having to purchase Street Fighter 2 for the fourth time and having Capcom re-sell the PSOne version of Resident Evil a third time for the privilege of having added analogue stick controls.
We had enough of them at a time that “the expats” was a relevant group of people you needed to refer to for specific things. Language lessons, HR support, what have you. I definitely heard the anglo guys refer to themselves as that frequently, and that then became the word people used.
I had a chip on my shoulder about telling people I was a migrant, but I was pretty alone on that. The anglo guys mostly said they were “expats”.