I felt the same way when I first got online in the mid-90s. I thought it was gonna bring all people together. Seems pretty quaint at this point!

Things are obviously pretty bad right now but for me the jury’s still out. It could be really good a hundred years from now!

Shamelessly stolen from a Simpsons meme group I frequent.

I never use AI. Can’t stand it. Wish it would go away!

I also think it’s completely stupid and overhyped. I took a course in 4th year on building and training neural networks with PyTorch. I know how it all works at an intimate level. It’s not going to lead to a singularity any time soon (as so many people think).

I think there’s a lot of explanations for the decrease in value of the ads:

• ad market saturation
• user ad fatigue
• rampant ad blocking
• less engagement overall

I’ve heard YouTube video ads pay a lot less to the creator than they used to. A lot of creators are struggling and feel pressured to release a lot more videos and more consistently. But this can all be measured by view counts where the numbers drop off as engagement disappears.

One of the worst things a YouTube creator can do is completely change the type of videos they make. This often gets people to stop clicking videos and YouTube’s algorithm takes this as a sign to stop recommending that creator, causing their views to drop off a cliff.

I wonder if there’s a similar issue with the ads on game review sites today. I have seen some YouTube video reviews that include a sponsored segment for a game I’d never in a million years consider playing (which has no relevance to the video at hand). Maybe if people are reading reviews the ads aren’t relevant to the games they’re playing so they never bother with them?

Video game reviewers used to provide a valuable service. Back when all video games were Nintendo expensive, we needed trustworthy reviewers to guide us towards making the correct purchase. Paying the inflation-equivalent of $100+ for a single video game made a single bad purchase really hurt.

Nowadays, people log on Steam and scroll through hundreds of previously purchased (never played) games they picked up for a few dollars each during a Steam holiday sale 3 years ago. They can just click download and start playing anything that tickles their fancy!

Plus I’d also add that many gamers have found games that have enormous replay value (especially multiplayer games like League of Legends or Hearthstone or Fortnite) and they sink thousands upon thousands of hours into that one game.

What room is there for professional game reviewers reviewing new games every week and writing about them? Most gamers seem to have more games than they could ever want, plus single games that could last a lifetime by themselves.

The same could really be said for music reviews. People used to read magazines like Rolling Stone in order to get reviews of the latest songs from the hottest bands. Nowadays people just listen to the music themselves and decide whether or not they like it, no reviewers needed.

Edit: I forgot to mention streamers and lets players. People can watch a lot of these videos by amateur or professional content creators and judge whether or not they like the game based on how it plays. Reading an article, even a very well-written one, pales in comparison to a gameplay video at the job of communicating how a game looks and sounds in motion.

Yeah. Sometimes I think people are so used to media (TV, movies, video games) and the distancing effect of being in a vehicle (looking out a window at people) that they’re actually capable of travelling to another country without actually believing that they are there in person.

Apart from stories like this, there are countless other stories of clueless travellers who walk around treating locals like NPCs, not really realizing how annoying and offensive they are. These big blowback stories are just the tip of the iceberg on that whole genre of stupidity.

It’s self-consciousness (less charitably called hack writing or selling out). These are game developers trying to chase market trends rather than following their hearts.

Some are honestly trying to make games that they themselves would love. But it does have a bit of the feel of “I love ice cream and I love dill pickles, so why not dill pickle ice cream?!”

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Thailand’s lèse majesté laws are very strict. The government treats insults to the monarchy as a harm to the entire country.

Just don’t do it! If you’re not a Thai person then what business do you have with the monarchy anyway?

Just don’t wear an American flag on anything and you’ll be fine!

Yes! And we need to build out our rail networks. It should be really cheap to move stuff across country by rail on manifest trains. Additionally, we should have a high speed rail network connecting all of our major cities so that we can travel anywhere without flying, without driving, and without crossing the border.

I’ve always admired the parliamentary tradition of having to drag a new speaker of the house to their chair. Reluctance to have and to use power is such an important, admirable quality.

That said, I do believe our Canadian system is much better than the US one in one particular respect: parliamentary accountability. The leader of the executive, the prime minister, cannot remain in power if they lose the confidence of their own party. We witnessed this most recently with the resignation of Justin Trudeau after he had lost the confidence of his party.

In the US, the president has a lot more power simply because he is insulated from his own party by the separation of powers within the system. Trump is fully engaged in his destructive tariff campaign despite any opposition within his party because of this. The Republican Party, as bad as they are, are never as bad (or as good) as any individual within their ranks. This moderating effect does not extend to the White House due to the aforementioned insulation effect.

I do want chicken. Just not chicken nuggets which are made from mechanically separated chicken aka pink slime. If I’m having fried chicken, it’s gotta be whole muscle meat.

I don’t see the appeal. If I want vegan fried snack food / street food I’m going for falafel, pakora, tempura, or even beer-battered onion rings. Fried chickpeas, fried plantain chips, potato chips, fried tofu skins, vegan fried spring rolls, blooming onions, fried wonton nachos topped with vegan pulled pork (made with jackfruit), vegan empanadas, vegan pizza rolls, …

The list goes on and on and on. There is so much better stuff to eat than highly processed nuggets. Even if you aren’t vegan, there are much better things to eat than chicken nuggets.

Ahhh okay. It’s one of those things that has been debated for a long time. It’s kind of a Star Trek thing if you ask me. Captain Picard gets paid the same as Ensign Slacker from the lower decks (both 0). Well, except Ensign Slacker probably has a tiny apartment in NYC (when not on a tour of duty with the Enterprise) whereas Picard has his luxurious wine estate in the French countryside.

Are you asking or making a rhetorical point?

I don’t think any of these issues will wipe us out completely. Maybe they’ll reduce the population by 99% but that still leaves 80 million people, enough to raise a new society from the ashes of this one.

Anyway ignorance, greed, stupidity, and selfishness are not specialities of the human race. They’re common to all animals.

Our unique problem is that we’ve created an environment which is radically different to the one in which we evolved. Look at one simple dimension: food. We evolved to survive scarcity and famine. Our new extreme abundance of food is killing us with obesity. We’ve cracked the code on the molecules our brains used to detect nutritious food and used them to engineer fast food that is addictive like a drug.

Our collective humanity hasn’t grown at all in 100k years. It isn’t growing.

We have constantly evolving social norms and rules, but these things are now struggling to keep up with mass communications technology. Also people’s susceptibility to cognitive biases is really showing its ugly side these days.

No? The SNES was in fierce competition with the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. They didn’t call it the console wars for nothing.

That’s probably why I haven’t bought a Nintendo console since the original Wii. I keep looking for a reason to do so but coming up short.

I still love the NES and SNES, as well as some N64 and GC games. I definitely would like to try some of Nintendo’s newer games, just not at the prices they’re asking for! I am absolutely spoiled for choice on games to play.

Because I don’t think it’s worth it to pay $650 Canadian for a console based only on a few Mario/Zelda/Metroid games?