That is quite a headline. I just got on but that’s already enough internet for today.

International politics are pretty complicated.

The actual bubble that needs to be popped is financialization. The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation only through financial valuation. At the same time, people are starving, infrastructure is falling apart, the birth rate is plummeting, and suicide is on the rise. It’s time to stop taking “job creators” seriously and use all this fallow professional experience and skill to restart the material economy and forget this pretend crap that keeps plutocrats busy doing nothing of any value to anyone.

I think that’s the right approach. Once it starts getting old it won’t get better. That being said, the writing of the DLCs does not have the problem of the main story and are often pretty good. If getting access to all your character’s abilities wasn’t attached to playing the main story I would advise skipping the main game and only playing the DLCs.

I, like you, heard the story was bad but figured I could just focus on the gameplay and ignore the writing. Unfortunately, the reason the bad writing is so notorious is that the game is setup to jam it in your face consantly. It’s unrelenting.

Imagine playing a pretty decent game while a dead-eyed 50 year old comedian is making the worst jokes you’ve ever heard in your life while doing a very poor impression of gen-z internet slang they barely understand. The comedian thinks you the player are actually stupid so the jokes are as condescending as they are awful. Now imagine they won’t shut up. Every time you do anything in the game, you get a few minutes of these whacky jokes. Accepting a mission, every bullet of the mission, skits that you have to watch before progressing, etc. You have no choice but to engage with the lazy, insulting, horrendous writing that wears thin after minutes and goes on for the entire hours-long game.

There are mods that disable the endless chatter which I can’t recommend more highly. I made the misake of playing the game raw. The game is actually pretty fun, but the aggressive garbage of the writing is not something easily ignored.

This is really interesting. Faking an endorsement by someone who is accused of preventing thousands of needless deaths to sell shirts is on one level nefarious but on another level incorporating Luigi into mainstream pop culture. The plutocracy wants people to think this kid is the worst monster who ever lived, but the average American is so pleased with what he is accused of doing his likeness can be used to sell clothing. I am not totally opposed to the mainstreaming of this kind of folk hero. Optimally he should at least get some royalties to pay for his legal fees, though.

Definitely. They could do something about this but they would make less profit.

This is, very unfortunately, what happens in every internet space which is targeted towards children and allows communication among users. It is by far the easiest way for anonymous predatory adults to make contact with typically unattended children. I would like at some point to see a child-oriented space on the internet have the highest priority of children’s safety at some point, but there hasn’t been one yet.

And the Nintendo of my childhood was responsible for pretty much every anti-consumer practice and cultural trend concerning videogames during my childhood:

Inventing the idea that videogames are toys only for little boys only for marketing purposes. Betraying and exploiting established relationships with developers. Screwing over partners on disc technology and reversing course to limit technology to be under their control. Supporting Jack Thompson throughout his campaign to ban all videogames with any adult content at all. Lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit to hold the entire industry back. The list goes on.

Haha, yeah. The courier probably has the biggest turnaround of any bethesda game protagonist. They go from a completely anonymous average person delivering packages to being essentially a demigod capable of pretty much anything. No fate, no destiny, no special heritage, just you and your choices.

In New Vegas, it will make sense for your character to look any way they want. In the game’s story, nice clean things are available but restricted to the rich and powerful. The player, however, is the most powerful and the most influential as to who ends up getting what by the end of the game.

To be honest, this is what kept me from playing it at first as well. It’s a pretty old game, but mods can help a lot toward making it easier on the eyes. With Vortex through Nexus modding is super easy nowadays.

Since New Vegas isn’t on your list it has to be my top recommendation. Of all games I’ve ever played, New Vegas is the most reactive to and acknowledging of the insane and unbelievable things the player does. The actions the player takes have permanent effects in the game, and everyone affected will know that the player is responsible for whatever happened and say so. You personally control the fate of every community in the Mojave. In other games, you are powerful on behalf of the story, but in New Vegas you personally are all the power in the entire game.

Tinder is an app where you look at pictures of people and on that basis alone decide whether to go out. It’s even easier to lie about height than to take a misleading picture. I’m really not sure if this would make any difference at all. Everyone frustrated on tinder will continue to be exactly as frustrated on tinder while tinder squeezes them all.

They could be having that effect. Scams that look obvious are to attract people who fall for obvious scams, such as people with dementia. They are designed to be transparent to most people because they don’t need anybody clicking that has the faculties to know better than to fall for the rest of the scam.

$80? How much is that, like 4 bananas?

Honestly, it’s a great source of truly stupid ideas. It’s convenient to have a total idiot on hand at all times to make dumb suggestions when asked, inspiring me to think of something better since the standard was set so low.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, because in that case it usually ends up being nothing. If you have the desire to limit what you described in any way you can as much as you can, it’ll be something. If everyone does as much as they can, it’ll be a huge something.

This is very interesting to me because I wanted to keep going after BoTW ended. ToTK is like a full game sized DLC with all new gameplay elements, so it was exactly what I wanted. It’s kind of like an indulgent victory lap showing off all the cool stuff the engine can do with some new tools to play with. I will say that this is enough for me. Really hoping they do something completely original again.

Cutting out the artist middleman in their money-laundering scheme. What a joke.