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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I want to offer another perspective.

    I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

    I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

    We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

    Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.



  • You guys aren’t gonna like to hear this, but being super wealthy and successful is always going to confer some degree of cool.

    That being said it doesn’t sound like they are doing this because they think it’s fun/sexy. The users in this article all seem to frame their usage in the context of mental health. While the merits are questionable, it’s objectively better than some Wall Street exec doing coke or slamming booze. I feel like a better article would be questioning government policy that allows billionaires to experiment with psychedelics, but ensures that an actual FDA approved treatment that the average joe could access will never happen.

    I can’t help but notice these authors all exclusively focus on tech, while giving other high compensation and influential industries a pass. It really feels like a ton of journalists have a personal vendetta against tech that goes beyond the substance of any of their actions.



  • Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

    It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

    I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.



  • I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

    I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

    Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.






  • Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

    Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

    I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.



  • Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

    Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

    Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

    This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.


  • I actually have more respect for Pelosi after this.

    She willingly stepped down in 2022. Her first reaction was to refuse to comment, and not exert pressure. She seemed to genuinely want either Joe Biden to come to the conclusion that he can’t run on his own and/or Hakeem Jefferies to lead the charge to have him step down.

    It was only after Jefferies proved himself pretty much useless that she inserted herself back into the primary role. She proceeded to prove that, despite everything ,she’s incredibly capable in a way that no other democrat can match.

    Regardless of how the election turns out, I think we can all agree that Biden was a massive liability for Democrats. While I have personal issues in regards to the Harris/Walz ticket, most Americans seem infinitely more amicable to it than Biden/Harris. None of that would have been possible without Pelosi.


  • I feel like Jquery is unfairly lumped in here.

    While other solutions have eclipsed Jquery, it doesn’t mean it’s in any way bad. Unlike the other products here, it’s still a capable library that solves the tasks it sets out to do. It never became a bloated mess or sold out to the highest bitter.

    That being said I wouldn’t really use it today. It doesn’t play that well with modern tooling, and it is extremely easy to write anti patterns into your code. I would recommend either VanillaJS, a web component library like Svelte, or React depending on what you’re trying to do.