LadyLikesSpiders

"This is Melody Crescendo"

"Oh, that's pretty. What's her middle name?"

"Well Melody is her middle name. Her real first name is Hurdy-Gurdy"

"It's not a sequel or a remake, it doesn't take 400 hours to beat, has zero microtransactions, no pointless open world grinding..."

All of that sounds pretty great, though. I hadn't heard of this game until now, so I'm wondering how efficient they were with that 40 mil in marketing

Or maybe the idea is good, but the execution is bad. Maybe meeting strict deadlines meant the game had to be pushed out unfinished, or concepts had to be cut or changed. I don't know jack shit about this game, but there are a lot of things worth looking into besides "These games just don't sell these days"

Editing to add that it's currently 60% off on steam, sitting at a "mostly positive"

Finally got around to playing Disco Elysium. I don't think I'm very far, but I love it so far

Besides that, also doing a first person run through Elden Ring, and occasionally a bit of Lethal Company here and there

O never played any of these games, so I don't really know exactly how these stereotypes come off, but if you're gonna release something old into a world with changing sensibilities, this is honestly how I think it should be done. If whatever was in the game was really all that bad, it is important to still remember how we did things. It's important to remember the past as it was, both the good and the bad

"Good thing could happen unless GOP" is pretty much American politics since at least Reagan

Right? He looks like he's 16 at the absolute oldest

And yeah, photos were actually colorized fairly often back in the day and there were a bunch of different techniques

It's funny because my phone battery is fucked because my ADHD doesn't let me remember to put it to charge

Floridian here confirming that 0%

Art, beauty, and pleasure, and the desire to see more of that in earnest in a world that seeks to convert anything and everything into profit; The beauty and humbling significance of nature in its indifferent power, and the grand scope of the endless nothingness that stretches beyond what our eyes will ever hope to see; People, real and true, speaking against cruelty and injustice, seeking to better spread love instead of otherness, to show a less conditional love than that of any state or religion

Have you seen the world? Shit's irrational as fuck. I'll argue here that rationality has an aspect of subjectiveness to it; It is based on your ability to understand and perceive things. There is a very very small number of things you don't know, and a practically infinite ocean of things you will never even know to not know. Even things that behave rationally may behave irrationally under some variables you will never even fathom, and so, to you, that would just be irrational

You wanna see something rational? Read fiction. Truth is always stranger than fiction. It was Mark Twain who added that "fiction has to make sense."

I'm pretty sure the US IS considered meritocratic. There are just countless other factors that also impact your ability to succeed

That's too vague a definition. Like, if person A is an accomplished athlete, the best basketball player ever, I do not think his position of power or success should be, say, president. I think this is actually a very dangerous mindset derived from the capitalistic notion that success determines your--I'll call it value. If you're successful, you must be smart; If you're smart, you can be anything, even the president. Success is equal to wealth in these talking circles, and it sort of ends up as a backwards meritocracy. You gain merit measured by your success (wealth) instead of the other way around

But if you define it as a place in which positions of authority are given to people who have proven themselves knowledgeable and capable in the field in which the position of authority is being granted, I do believe in it in principle. I say that because principle and practice are rarely the same in politics and sociology. There are countless other factors that will impact your "success" that are not actually based on your expertise in the field. Better people have designed public transport, electric cars, social media, and spaceships than Elon Musk, yet the man sits in a position of tremendous influence. In a just meritocracy, we would never have heard his name

Which brings about the point that we have certain ideas as a culture (or maybe system) that awards some merits disproportionately more than others. Some will say his merit is in being a ruthless business man. He's good at that, I guess, so he should be the leader of the company. His "merit" of being a bad human being is being disproportionately rewarded compared to the merit of the scientists that actually design his spaceships, and the engineers that make them work. Meritocracy only really works in a closed system. The most capable archaeologist will be the head of the expedition. If you let the ideas go beyond that, and start comparing apples to oranges, you start seeing instead a system's idea of what's important, and by extension that of the society built in that system