loobkoob

I can definitely think of quite a few non-live-service games with an "end game" that I've enjoyed:

• (Older) Pokémon games with their battle towers, where putting together a flexible team with as few weaknesses as possible is the aim.
• Loot games like Borderlands, Grim Dawn and Last Epoch where I want to make new builds and test their limits against harder and harder challenges.
• Factorio, where I want to optimise my factory. Although there's absolutely an argument to be made that that is the game, but I think it becomes more about player-set goals once you've launched the rocket.

All of them are either offline or have offline modes available. All of them have potentially infinite "content" if you're the sort of person who like optimising, or just being able to set yourself new targets. They're all enjoyable to play for their "campaigns" alone, but they also have very strong sandboxes that players can continue to engage with even after the game stops giving them objectives.

I don't necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment, though. I think MMO-style "end games" where you login for your daily, time-gated quests and do the same thing you always do with no variation or sense of progression (be it narrative, emotional, build-related or some other kind of progression) isn't necessarily healthy. And I dislike the way "end games" have tended to move away from being optional post-game content for people who aren't ready to finish playing yet and instead are often viewed as the main game that you have to get through the sorry excuse for a campaign/story to access.

The past month or so I've started encountering quite a few deepfakes on dating sites. I honestly can't tell they're deepfakes just by looking; the only reason I've realised tell is because they were very obviously Instagram model photos. I reverse image searched them to find where they were taken from and confirm my suspicions that the profile's using stolen photos, only to find that the original photos aren't quite the same. It'll be the exact same shot with the same body but a different face, and with identifying tattoos removed, moles adds, etc.

If they weren't obvious modelling shots that made me want to reverse image search them, I wouldn't have known at all. It makes me wonder how many deepfaked images I've encountered on dating sites already and just not known about because they've been fairly innocuous-looking photos...

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don't really think it's necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It's probably the most representative demo I've ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There's no narrative to screw up. There's no "oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess". It's the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you "win".

... and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist...

Also the visuals change with every episode to reflect where all the key ships and stuff are in the system!

Ahh, that's the same path Facebook went down a decade ago then. Yay, capitalism...

Factorio's demo absolutely convinced me to buy it.

Demos only really work well if the game is fantastic and able to convey that in a small slice of the game, though.

It'll let you see which pages you've red!

My experience with therapists, having dated one for several years and having known several others in my personal life, is that they're usually just normal people - often with traumatic pasts themselves - who want to help others. They don't have any magical therapising powers; what sets them apart from just venting to a stranger is that they're genuinely trying to help you, and generally know how to prompt you to be more introspective.

I think a lot of people put the idea of therapy - and therapists - on a pedestal, and people go into it expecting the therapist to just fix things in a nice, simple way. In reality, therapy is about venting, introspection, and attempting to give the person the tools to change things for themselves. It still takes a lot of work (and time) outside of the therapy session for the person to actually see change, and people who don't put in the time or effort probably won't see much benefit from therapy.

Finding the right therapist for you can also be difficult. You need to find someone you're comfortable opening up to, and who you feel "gets" you, which can be easier said than done. And then there's the pricing which can be an issue, of course. With potentially incorrect expectations, and not finding the right therapist, it's easy for people to try therapy and find it useless or actively bad.

As for my experience with therapy itself: I had therapy for some issues relating to sleep. The therapy itself didn't help me, largely because the therapist didn't necessarily have a better understanding of sleep than I did. Which isn't to say she had a poor understanding; I studied psychology in the past, and also spent time looking into sleep myself to try to resolve my issues myself before I went to therapy, so my understanding of sleep is well above average. But it meant she wasn't really able to help me. She did end up pointing me to a resource that resulted in a diagnosis for me, though, so it wasn't entirely wasted. And with what I was diagnosed with, therapy can't really help anyway, so I can't blame her at all!

I've never officially had therapy for any emotional issues or mental health stuff, although obviously having dated a therapist, there was a lot of "casual" therapy. I feel like I probably would have benefitted from therapy quite a bit before that relationship, but since then I do feel I've had the tools to deal with things myself more. I'm sure I'd still probably benefit from therapy, but I'm quite happy now so I've not felt too much of a need.

What's changed about Instagram? I'm not familiar enough to know, but I don't feel like I've heard anything all that controversial about it outside of Meta's general "pay to remove ads" thing. I certainly haven't heard anything about systemic enshittification like I have with Twitter, Reddit and TikTok; have I missed anything?

Don't forget to knock 4 or 5% off to account for the Lizardman Constant!

I hate that male artists do it, too. Spectacle and visuals are a part of live shows, of course, but I wish recorded music could stand on its own without relying on sex appeal or any kind of visuals in order to sell.

The alternative is requiring 24-hour moderation, which isn't really feasible unless moderators are paid employees, or just having to deal with posts staying up until a moderator/admin comes online and can sort them out. Communities can obviously try to have a mod team comprised of people from a range of time zones to increase coverage, but aiming for 24-hour coverage would make most mod teams far larger than is particularly necessary for the size of most communities at the moment.

Posts being removed and flagged to moderators for review if a certain report threshold is met is the best middle ground for a community-run, non-commercial forum. Sure, someone can set up 10 (or however many the threshold is set at) accounts and report a post on all of them to have it removed until a moderator is online, but is it really worth it to go through that effort just to get a post taken down for a couple of hours before it gets reinstated?

It's the best way to allow the community to self-moderate, I think, rather than requiring all the moderation power be in the hands of those with a moderator role.