darthelmet

It’s mostly just finding some reviews/word of mouth sources that you trust and which align with your tastes.

On the review side of things Second Wind covers a decent spread of indie games. I also occasionally see some new stuff from streamers, but that’s more of a toss up since there’s a lot of sponsored coverage.

My adblocking doesn’t work on twitch anymore, so I stopped using it for everything but one streamer I’m subbed to.

I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.

I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don't know why you'd assume that. I'm pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn't start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn't hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I'm always up front with people in saying that I don't have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That's a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we'd want to live in for very long. It's a cruel system and it's going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don't do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn't going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it's a proposed solution. It'd be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it's important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We've done great things. We're a species who's defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We've created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It's bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don't need to add to it by making it seem like everyone's at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I'm not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they're not trying to do that. Profit isn't enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that's not enough and oh look there are more places we haven't put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don't we sell that too? Hey guys, we've heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small ~~protection payment~~ subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don't like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we're adding ads back into the service. But don't worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don't think that last one's happened with YT premium yet, but it's happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn't put it past them.)

There's no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Reddit API fiasco. Practical issue since I didn't want to use Reddit's shitty app for my phone browsing and it was just the writing on the walls.

Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

Even for the single player games?

2 things:

• Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

• People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.

Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.