MudMan

Is this a big deal? I realize I have a skewed view because I dropped Google search ages ago, but… when I need maps results I go to a maps app, I never really relied on the search bar for that, even when I did use Google search.

Gasp. How dare you, my good sir/madam?

No, seriously, I get it, but no. PoP, Flashback or Another World are way more playable. They look worse, though.

There are more. The most famous are a duology of side scrolling action adventure things in the 16 bit era. They adapted Tintin in Tibet and Prisoner of the Sun.

They look great for the time, but frankly, they’re both a chore to play.

Worth taking a look if you haven’t heard of them, though.

Yeah, you still have to wait over a decade to use him in the US, which is a pretty big deal.

You do get to use Tintin with an all-new look as long as you don’t use the newer blue sweater and long coat design, though.

I’m not sure what that would look like, frankly. I guess you could go for a narrative Telltale-style thing? Making an Uncharted game with a Tintin skin would be missing the point. And you´d have to come up with almost entirely new story ideas anyway, the only story in the public domain in the US is the original version of In the Land of the Soviets.

But hey, I would have said the same thing about Indiana Jones and there it is, so… maybe somebody has a clearer picture in their heads than I do. I genuinely doubt the license was what kept something like this from happening, though.

Ugly Popeye and ugly Tintin. In the US specifically. A lot of these public domain announcements tend to be a bit too vague.

Now who is confusing weather with climate?

It’s an article telling you that inflation wasn’t as high as intitially expected. Doesn’t mean prices went down, but it’s still good news against the alternative.

We’ve looped back around to arguing about the meaning of “positive”, which mostly tells me this is entirely a discussion about vibes, and maybe that’s the best takeaway anybody can get from it.

Ironically that is genuinely all I’m asking for. And yet I don’t think that’s true.

Yes, we do, you wonderful unique genius of an angsty fifteen year old.

It’s not that hard to understand, you are not possessed of a unique insight that somehow has eluded every economist on the planet.

You just haven’t figured out that getting angy on the Internet about how everybody is dumb is not the game changer you think it is. Turns out meaningfully altering the collective behavior of eight billion people, each with their own individual set of incentives, is less responsive to an earnestly worded social media post that one may think.

Also, you may have to be more specific about who “we” is supposed to be. Whose economic model are we talking about? Everybody’s? Just how much granularity are you considering here, if any at all?

You think the pandemic shutdown was simple?

I mean, man, I am more of an introvert, too, but… yeah, I’m gonna say “humanity isn’t willing to transition to Covid rules permanently as a matter of climate change policy” is not the rhetorical killing blow you think it is.

You can’t enact global behavioral changes as solutions to economic problems. That’s the kind of adolescent social media thought process that ends with retirees radicalized into fascism. “If everybody agreed with me this would not be a problem” is not how large scale policy shifts happen.

On the plus side, you not quite grasping this is far less problematic than Elon Musk not grasping this, but the underlying issue is pretty much the same.

So it was nihilism, then.

Look, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not that special. You’re not the only one who “gets it” and you don’t get to be done with the species.

You will have a much easier time at it if you at least try to factor in the concept of the issue being complex and ongoing as opposed to building your entire online footprint around the idea that we could fix this by flipping a switch if we were all committed enough. Not only that, but it would also be a lot more productive in terms of helping promote better outcomes instead of serving as a useful scapegoat for some fashy troll to show how all climate activists are emo kids or something.

Which is not to say that drastic, sometimes painful action won’t be needed. Alongside, I’m afraid, significant unavoidable human and economic cost from checks that we’ve already cashed in.

It’s data. Valid data, at that, that captures an important metric.

It’s a weird, paradoxic stance to claim that you are deeply motivated to push for genuine climate action while actively and publicly being mad at any report that may hint at progress because anything short of absolute doomerism is automatically a distraction tactic. By that standard you’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards energy transition, complaining all the way that nothing is enough until the issue is entirely solved.

Which, of course, is never. Because again, this isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a situation to manage. Forever.

Man, there’s tons of bad news for you to latch on to when it comes to climate change. You really don’t need to spend your days actively mad at the few bits showing actual progress. Taken to the extreme, and this is close, it honestly feels just as much like a disinformation tactic, very much in line with the “climate change is real but there’s nothing we can do to change it” deflection.

Well, from where I stand it’s a useful number to understand the value of electrification. You hear a lot of misinformation along the lines of “why move to EV/heat pumps/whatever if the electricity they use is made by burning gas”.

Which is a big “if”, and knowing what the energy mix is in your country/area is an important rebuttal and answer to that particular question.

I want to hear the counterpoint to the progression being made. By all stats I can see, the adoption of solar power specifically is actually beating projections across the board. Overall CO2 reductions are not, and heating targets are out of the question, but this is the one element that is going better than expected, with the relevant asterisks.

You are out here raging virulently at the notion of acknolwedging that, so there must be a specific thing you want out of that process. Or, hell, at least some sort of mental model for what it is that acknowledging the reality of the changes in the energy mix towards renewables is doing to hamper the rest of the climate goals.

I just find it aggressively unproductive when purported climate activists make their online persona into outright denial of any and all possible steps towards curtailing climate change short of… well, I don’t even know short of what, which is my point. The implication here is that there is some silver bullet or a switch that we can flip to be done with the problem, as opposed to… you know the foreseeable future being some mix of increasingly sustainable generation and mitigation of the near-inevitable human cost of the processes that have started and can no longer be stopped.

No toxic positivity here.

I will note, though, you haven’t met the brief. The closest thing to a target I see there is “great leaps, not baby steps”. I’m gonna need something slightly more specific than that.

For the record, see the guy’s response below for exactly what I’m talking about.

Okay, so beyond nihilism, what’s your point?

I mean, obviously this is at least an intermediate state towards whatever survivable endgame we want to reach. We need to be at this stage at some point to get to where we want to go.

Should this stage have happened sooner? Probably. Was it possible? Maybe.

But we’re here now, so… what’s your take? Because you seem concerned about good news discouraging people from something, but you also seem to be claiming there is no valid path forward, which seems way less productive to me.

Kinda, but I’m frustrated with both sides of the argument. There is a cohort of very online people at the ready to clarify how whatever initiative or proposal is “not it” or “greenwashing” and will not “fix” things.

The activist argument is not so much that this is an ongoing thing we’re going to be considering forever, it’s that this or that solution is a corporate trap or a fake solution or whatever else. Often there isn’t even an agreement on what the “real” answer is supposed to be, just a willingness to be the savvy, jaded one that calls out the latest snake oil handwavy solution.

So yeah, we probably don’t disagree on the first part, but that post really tickled my sensitivity to the second part.

The hell is “doing okay”?

I am so frustrated by the discourse around renewables and climate change. Everybody online seems to be treating it like a puzzle or a board game, where you “win” at climate change when you find the “right” solution.

That’s not how it works. I don’t care about the “carbon neutrality” of Germany any more than I care about the “carbon neutrality” of a patch of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a global process that is never going to end. We’re always going to need energy, it’s always going to come from a mix of sources and we need to eventually find a global equilibrium we can strive to maintain.

Data is data, but taking issue with news, and particularly positive news, as if they were propaganda in a campaign where eventually people will have to elect the one source of energy they consume is kind of absurd. Yes, renewables are gaining ground, solar is moving faster than expected and no, that doesn’t make the issue go away and we still need to accelerate the process and remove additional blockers to that acceleration. There are no silver bullets and there never will be.

I was saying below that I wonder how much the work in modding VR into games, which has led to some very portable frameworks, would help support for 3D monitors if they were to return…

…but that said, that’s still a per-game mod thing, so I expect at least some work would remain, and you’d ideally want built-in out of the box support, rather than having to mod it in each time. Still, it’s a possibility. I’d love to find out in practice.