Conservatives do well because their ideology is compatible with the interests of capital. No party that is a serious challenge to those interests can win any notable power through elections in the US.

As far as the idea of focusing on local races: If your main concern is immediate and substantial action on climate, what good would winning a local race do for you? Yeah maybe it would be easier to get a left wing candidate on a school board or whatever, but that’s because it holds no meaningful power.

Not that I think they have any particular chance of success at the national level. I’ve just found that “local races” argument… most charitably put, confusing, less charitably: bad faith or willfully missing the point.

It’s just what you do when your side doesn’t have a justifiable platform on it’s own merit: See: All the people who keep telling us to ignore all the bad stuff corporate dems do because Trump would be worse.

IF you could actually run on things people liked, you’d talk about that and perhaps only call out your opponent’s opposition to the things you support or show how they might be lying about claims that they want similar things.

But when your core platform is “let rich people keep doing what they want,” you have to find ways to deflect from that.

It’ll be one of those photos from a ride at a theme park where everyone is screaming in terror.

Not a niche game, but: day (???) of waiting for Sony to put Bloodborne on PC.

Also, this is a bit of a tangent, but I really wish Nintendo would start putting some of their games on PC. Not even so that I can play them, I do have a switch, but because there are quite a few of them that just don’t do well on console, either performance-wise or in terms of UX. For example, I’ve been playing the new Zelda game. The game’s core mechanic involves scrolling through a MASSIVE list of objects to find what you’re looking for and the best solution the game has for this is a handful of sorting options that only get you so far when there are just this many things. Without changing any of the gameplay, you could make the experience soooo much better by:

• Letting you use a mouse on the menu.
• Adding a basic search filter.
• Letting you hotkey some echoes.

Some games just deserve better treatment than what they got from the limitations of their original platforms.

Yeah I think you’re right to some extent. It’s definitely harder to get invested in the ones with no or less VA. However, I think there’s also something to be said for the tutorials/starts of these games. The Larian games I’ve played had relatively punchy tutorials that lead into a nice amount of structured freedom very early into the experience. Disco Elsyium also gets you into the the thick of things without much explicit tutorializing because it’s so mechanic light your “tutorial” ends up just being gradual introduction to your main characters, the setting, and the case, which is what you’re here for anyway.

The other CRPGs have hit me with the double whammy of tutorials that lead me by the nose for way too long while also just dumping paragraphs of exposition on me that have almost nothing to do with the immediate characters or plot.

EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more: While you don’t need all the voice acting and cinematic to make good, dramatic, character focused story bits, I think the converse is true: It would have been a waste to get all these great VAs only to have them stand around and dryly deliver exposition. So it kind of had to be very character focused if it was going to work and be worth the effort.

Imagine how much worse the start of BG3 would be if you run into Laezel and you just stop for like 5 minutes while you exhaust all her dialgogue options so she can explain the entire history of the Gith and the Ilithid. Even fully voice acted that would have killed the pacing.

The funny thing for me with CRPGs: DOS2 was the first one I played and I really liked it. Followed up again with BG 3 when that came out. Since then I’ve tried a bunch of other CRPGs and… I don’t think I actually like CRPGs. I just like Larian. The one exception is Disco Elysium, but that’s so far removed from most others of the genre because it has no combat.

But aren’t people carbon based? We should just compost them instead.

I feel like at different times either the Klingon or Romulans kind of stand in for the Soviets. Certainly TNG onward the Klingons shift in their representation and the Romulans stay as that analogue to a secretive geopolitical rival that they maintain an uneasy peace with.

Yeah I guess. Although I guess the question is how much energy does warp drive use or how much energy does the engine output given some amount of dilithium or whatever? No real way to know since it’s sci-fi. As far as I know the only physics we have on this is that paper that showed you’d need negative energy to make warp happen. Which is obviously not super helpful for figuring out what it would be in the hypothetical world of Star Trek where they found some way to make it physically possible.

I just imagine that their energy production has to be absolutely insane for warp travel to not only be feasible, but a fairly common thing more akin to launching a boat than a NASA mission.

Yeah this feels like a critique from someone who’s never watched Star Trek.

The bit about the food is pretty funny. Like sure, a few times people have mentioned liking some non-replicated food better, but in general it seems like it’s about as good as the real thing and you can get ANYTHING you want anywhere you have a replicator without needing the skills of a chef.

Then there’s Voyager where the crew prefers to use their limited replicator rations rather than eat the slop Neelix makes lol. Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me: Why were they so limited on replicator usage? Doesn’t it just convert energy into matter from the reactor powerful enough to power a warp drive? In general I find it kind of silly when they turn off the lights and stuff to “conserve power” when there’s trouble. Like the lights are drawing any meaningful amount of power compared to warping the fabric of time and space.

Mine is that in Star Trek, at least all the computers advanced enough to be used on a starship are actually sentient. At some point you have enough self aware hologram programs and rogue AIs that you should start to wonder if they’re actually anomalous.

The links didn’t work either. But thanks for the suggestions. I’ll look into other app options.

It depends. Usually I’m just looking for some game or show I like. The few of those I’ve looked into that have a community have like a handful of users, infrequent posts, or auto-posted threads with no comments beyond the bot post.

EDIT: Also, do you know how to get to your link on Memmy? For me it just brought me back to the main feed.

The only real issue I have is that there aren’t that many active communities for more niche topics. I hope it’ll get there someday, but for now we have Linux or Star Trek, take your pick. :P

Yeah. It’s not hard to see why people don’t trust the media anymore. Amongst other things, the big ones I can think about in my life: They uncritically parroted lies the government used to justify the Iraq War and they regularly gave equal air time/consideration to climate deniers as though they were equivalent to climate scientists.

It’s still crazy to me how much of the bad shit the government has done has been declassified and publicly available and people still just kind of ignore it. Who needs censorship when people are just willing to overlook reality? Or even worse, just make up nonsense.

It’s mostly just finding some reviews/word of mouth sources that you trust and which align with your tastes.

On the review side of things Second Wind covers a decent spread of indie games. I also occasionally see some new stuff from streamers, but that’s more of a toss up since there’s a lot of sponsored coverage.

My adblocking doesn’t work on twitch anymore, so I stopped using it for everything but one streamer I’m subbed to.

I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.

I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.