I absolutely love when games do that. Just a random, faceless dude for the second player that isn’t acknowledged at all by the plot. My favorite coop games growing up were all like that.

I think current ‘lifestyle creep’ for many is getting used to things like ‘health insurance’ and ‘something other than beans and rice’. Hard to give up simple human dignity once you’ve had a taste of it.

It’s still possible, but only with a physical Kindle device and I believe only one of the older ones. You can copy files off those devices to your PC and crack them that way.

Otherwise I’m not aware of any other method. It really sucks too as my favorite genre literally only exists in the Amazon ecosystem (small indie authors that rely on KU and so don’t publish anywhere else)

Parents signed up for one of those porn blocker services. I didn’t have the password to the service, but I did have the password to my dad’s user account (shared PC back then). Managed to figure out how to copy his active session cookie to my own user account and was able to freely turn on and off the service.

Ordered food at Sonic on their app. After I ordered, it popped up with ads for travel, various credit cards, etc. Completely crazy to me that they’re triple dipping on monetization now (sell me food, sell my data and then sell me other shit while trying to sell me food.)

I’d have gone with the idiot

I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.

How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?

Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).

AAA games are legitimately worse now than before, but the gulf isn’t as big as people are claiming.

This is why I think it’s funny people still believe ‘the Internet is forever’. Data disappears all the time. If you really start paying attention it’s scary how ephemeral the Internet truly is and how much is lost all the time.

Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.

It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.

I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

I’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.

I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.

So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.

‘How to treat a sprained neck’

So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else

I think for many purposes, regular people just like cool art. We’ve very much become accustomed to a near overwhelming tide of reasonable quality, but ultimately transient media.

‘Content’ has a much lower value than it once did, simply by benefit of sheer quantity. Even ignoring AI, I have access to endless art, music, video content, etc.

AI art is not really different from the non-artist perspective. It’s just accelerating the flow. But do people really even care where their current art comes from in most cases? The average person might download some art for their phone or computer desktop. They’ll be exposed to marketing and cover materials (that they’d have no clue or care about how they’re made), and they might buy some art for their house. Either from a home goods store of cheap, mass production art, or perhaps on a vacation or art fair for something a little more personal. Beyond that, I doubt most even think about it at all. AI art will be largely invisible to them because the human artists already are.

I do think you’ll see a similar surge of ‘human’ art niches like we have for Vinyl collections today. A small subset of people will pursue the story and mystique of hand crafted art, but this will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire industry. Only a small few will be able to fit into that new niche.

I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).

Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.

Also in several games my ability to join friends in-game broke if I turned my profile completely private. As soon as I set it to friends only I could join them again.

They didn’t say AI produces low value art. They said AI doesn’t produce art at all.

I think there’s an argument about art being the emotions it invokes in the viewer rather than the creator. Humans can find art in natural phenomena, which also has no feelings or backstory involved.

I’m not really defending AI slop here, just disagreeing with your definition of art and the relation to the creator rather than the viewer.

I tended to get the impression that implied sex (such as fade to black scenes) were also not appreciated. That effectively they just didn’t want their media to include references to sex pretty much at all.

Maybe most people are reasonable about it, but online at least it feels a bit like the old Tumblr days, except now these people are super anti sex everything and want to erase all mention of it.

Most of the (supposed) younger generation people I interact with online seem even more prudish and conservative about sex than my very religious parents were growing up. It’s super weird to be the older person who’s ok with sexual content. I don’t really get it.

And yes, I know people will claim it’s because it’s only when it’s not done right or when it feels shoved in, but honestly from the way they talk about anything dealing with sex, it feels like that’s just an acceptable excuse and they really just don’t want the content to exist at all, even if ‘done right’. It’s like a huge chunk of the generation is asexual or something.