Orcocracy

No, that joke crosses the line.

Or just nothing at all.

The world would be a better place if YouTube didn’t just ban the kids abut also banned all of the adults too.

I am very adult but unfortunately my ears are somehow still good enough that I can often hear those vile things. They can be quite painful to be around, probably because the assholes who operate them tend to crank up the volume to extremely high and probably unsafe levels. After all, that’s what the kind of business tyrant who would get one of these in the first place would naturally want to do. What an awful invention.

What’s with those boots on the nice hardwood floors in the living room? Tracking in god knows what from outside I’m sure…

The article is a little vague on this, but it seems like this round of price hikes is just for the US and it’s due to tariffs.

The smaller third party companies market and advertise their Hall effect sticks as something special to differentiate their products from the big companies. There are probably overstated claims being made in much of this advertising, as there tends to be in all advertising.

Perhaps this is the great lie of Hall effect marketing. Everything breaks, especially if you let kids use it.

Really, the N64? The N64 stick was not in-practice long-lasting. I’ve never gone out of my way to get modern Hall effect stuff, but if they’re anything like that then I understand why they remain a niche thing for hobbyists who will baby them.

Is it as simple as planned obsolescence, or is there something else about the production or use of Hall effect sticks that causes every single console from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Valve to not have them?

It’s not familiarity thats just a byproduct of the cycle. It’s because New York (and Tokyo, London, etc) is important to capitalists and to capitalism and is one of the centres of global power. So the big studios set their stories in New York, people around the world see films etc about New York, people are made to be familiar with New York, so then stories are even more likely to be set in New York because it is important and people around the world are familiar with it. Or rather, they are not familiar with the real New York, they are familiar with the mediated representation of New York. They know New York from watching Friends and Seinfeld, neither of which were filmed in New York.

I can’t get extra mad at all of those Tokyo games when there’s also all of those goddamn New York and LA games. I wish studios would set their stories somewhere that isn’t the same four or five places over and over again, but a big corporation isn’t going to subvert the forces of cultural imperialism. Quite the opposite, really. This is all part of the cultural industries reinforcing the global cultural hegemony.

After all, many of the big games set in versions of US cities aren’t even made by US studios (eg GTA, Cyberpunk). Just like how many of the films set in the US are actually made in Canada. This is all part of cultural production under capitalism. The market logic says that people already watch films and tv shows and play games set in New York, LA, Tokyo, and London, so therefore all films and shows and games must be set in New York, LA, Tokyo, and London. You want to set your story in Tonga or Malaysia or Chile? No, that’s not allowed, it must be in New York or LA or etc etc.