For those of you who don’t want to watch the video, I’ll explain what’s going on. A player is exhibiting gameplay for Moon Gaze, an open world action RPG developed by Wang Yue.
A quick web search didn’t find much information about the developer, aside from that he was maybe a lone developer in China, though it’s conceivable that he has the assistance of a development team. If someone has more information, feel free to share in the comments, and hit me with a “nice research”.
When I say that the game is heavily derivative, I’m not kidding. It lifts gameplay elements from Genshin Impact, Grand Theft Auto, Tears of the Kingdom, and there’s a creature collection mechanic that’s perhaps reminiscent of Pokémon.
As derivative it is might be, I still wanted to play it. But seeing it got me to thinking: Is this the future of slop?
When you think of slop games, you probably think of low-effort licensed games that are pushed out to make a quick buck, or derivative me-too games that are purchased by parents who can’t tell Pokémon from Monster Rancher. They’re not always bad, but they usually are. And sometimes, we like them, even if it’s just because we’re forgiving of it because it has our favorite brand stickered on it.
But it looks like slop is changing, and that’s because the game development landscape is changing. For one thing, because AI is becoming a tool that can be used in game creation, and a person might not even need to be a seasoned game developer to use it effectively. A person would only need descriptive prompts. People might even be able to generate games at home, using prompts issued to personal AI agents.
If it got to that point, game development studios might end up becoming mostly superfluous. Which could mean the end of the game industry as we know it. Game devs would be quickly replaced with something different.
What’s more, game development has opened up in the Chinese market, where the legal structure is apparently different as compared to the United States and Japan. Recently, Nintendo has gone after PalWorld over how derivative the game is, perhaps to the point of using assets from Pokémon. Both studios are based in Japan. On the other hand, we’ve seen the release of Wuthering Waves, which is basically the same as Genshin Impact, but with a more technological theme, and seems a bit more edgy. Yet Mihoyo, the company behind Genshin Impact, doesn’t seem to have plans to legally confront Kuro Games, the maker of Wuthering Waves. One studio is based in China, the other, Hong Kong.
If some small game studio in China wants to make some Android game that takes heavy inspiration from a Nintendo game, Nintendo might have no choice but to groove with it, especially considering that there’s nothing stopping us from side-loading it onto our Android devices.
Thus, the landscape of slop is changing, from low-effort licensed drivel to high-quality derivative games, perhaps monetized by microtransactions. In a sense, this shifting landscape reminds me of the “video game crash” from the 80s. The game industry speaks of it as though it was a disaster, because for them, it was. But for consumers, it was great, because it meant that we could score piles of games for cheap.
So it is with the changing of the game landscape. Users and small studios are starting to make the games they want, and share them with the world, which has been going on for a while with freeware games, but is now expedited with advanced tools and apparent immunity to legal interference.
Considering this, one might ask: why buy Nintendo games, or games from other developers? The answer is obvious: it’s because people like their games, enough to justify purchasing them.
That might just be what keeps these game makers going in the near future.
Yesterday, I finally got around to playing Wuthering Waves. After everything that I’ve been hearing about it, I was expecting my socks to be blown clear into the next county, and to have been lost in the chocolatey deeps of the most engaging gameplay to have ever been developed by the molecular gastronomists of interactive entertainment.
What I got instead was a Genshin Impact ROM hack.
That’s not to say that it’s a bad game. But if you think Wuthering Waves (WW) is a good game, you might have the same opinion of Genshin Impact. They’re basically the same game.
The controls, the HUD, the basic mechanics, they’re all lifted 1:1 from Genshin Impact. You’re wandering an open world in the same way, you’re switching between characters in the same way, and there’s a similar system to that of elemental skills and elemental bursts.
Even the gliding is the same. But at this point, are you really surprised? There are even monoliths similar in color to Genshin’s teleport points, for how much Kuro Games cares about having its own voice.
Supposedly, at some point, you get to double jump or run up walls. Okay? And this is supposed to make WW any less of a blatant ripoff?
Imagine if I were to take the classic Super Mario Bros., change the appearance of the assets, change the level layout, and then gave the plumber a double jump. Would I really be able to proclaim that I’ve made the better game, as though my achievement in game design would be one in which I could take true pride?
Also, the “Traveler” in WW is called “Rover”. Thankfully, “Drifter” wasn’t already taken, so some other enterprising Asian game developers can make their own Genshin ROM hack.
It occurs to me now that I was way too hard on Digimon for its similarities to Pokémon. While it’s true that Digimon bears similarities to Pokémon, at least Digimon tried to be different enough to be distinct. Wuthering Waves is so similar to Genshin Impact that I wouldn’t be surprised to find Genshin assets after datamining Wuthering Waves.
Also, the characters in WW don’t have any personality from what I’ve seen so far. Remember Amber and Kaeya from Genshin? They practically oozed personality. Even the Traveler had a personality. And voice acting that was actually emotive.
If you’ve played WW, don’t tell me to play more. Instead, tell me about a character you like, and why they were interesting. Convince me to care, or at least do a better job than WW. I want to care. But I don’t. I don’t care what the Rover’s deal is. The woman who held her hand at the beginning just didn’t inspire warmth, though the game seemed to try. The women who found him at the outset were as uncanny as the nymphs from Hylas and the Nymphs, attractive without question, but uncanny in the same way.
But you know what? Maybe WW just doesn’t suit my tastes. Maybe I prefer that anime-style characters be colorful and expressive. If you’re the kind of guy who has been spending the last couple decades trying to convince Nintendo fans that great graphics means that a game’s full color palette is gradients of grey and brown with intermittent laser-pointer red and gun muzzle flare, and that you have more fun playing the same first person shooter every year, then perhaps we’ve reached an impasse, and WW might just be dreary enough for you.
I know that it seems like I’m not giving WW a chance, but I gave it a try. When I see that WW has as many fans as it does, it occurs to me that perhaps I’m a little strange because I give a care whether the game I’m playing is a product of creativity or a blatant ripoff of someone else’s work.
But if you’ve plagiarized your way through college, I have a game recommendation for you.
The race is over. We have a loser. She wasn’t the last one to reach the finish line, no. Before the starting gun even sounded, she was going full sprint in the opposite direction. Her desiccated corpse has been found, and it’s been drained of all fluid by reason of the many nicks and scratches she accumulated in her determined push through the dense bramble of abject failure.
I’m talking about Sammy Sludge, the dirtbag who went on a killing spree in a Christian school before personally ending any possibility for any redemption arc for herself.
And no, Sammy Sludge wasn’t her real name. As I see it, if anyone commits her category of crime, they should lose their real name, and instead be remembered by a demeaning monicker that they’d have been certain to have hated. Sure, she called herself “Sam”, but she also called the people she hated “sludge” in her manifesto (if her writing could be called that), so she’d probably hate to be remembered as “Sammy Sludge”.
So, Sammy Sludge, it is.
So, what did she do? She turned a gun on a few children in a Christian school, before turning it on herself. Why did she do it? Because she hated men. You know, half of all people who exist. A biological sex that is necessary for the continuity of humanity.
I’m not accusing her of thinking this through.
Her “manifesto” indicated that she was a TERF, a form of feminist which rejects even trans women. And her social media footprint indicates that she was interested in mass killings, particularly the Columbine shooting.
She was a TERF-orrist.
So, can we as a society address the brain-rot that drives people like Sammy Sludge to commit the kind of crime that she did, at just 15 years old? Maybe it’s about time that we admit that certain ideologies, when believed in with sincerity, turns people into bad people. Do we need more evidence?
Sammy Sludge, with her final act, undermined her own cause. Is there anything else a person could do to make it look worse?
Obviously, she doesn’t represent everyone from her own cause. I get that. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t undermine it. And that’s just what happened.
If Sammy Sludge was a victim in any sense, it’s that she was fed a completely one-sided argument in favor of a pile of bullshit, which she then believed in with sincerely. Her mind, as defective as it evidently was, was unable to mount a sufficient defense against the assault against her intelligence that turned her into a foot soldier for a debased cause.
What Sammy Sludge left behind was a world in which men continue to live, nearly all of whom are more virtuous than herself.
We’ve all heard the classic example of the loaded question, “Did you stop beating your wife?” While most would recognize the ruse for what it is, it still succeeds in tripping people up.
The question is designed so that its underlying presumption goes unchallenged, if the person being asked is predisposed to giving a “yes” or “no” answer.
In Japanese, there is a third one-word answer that a person could give, where “hai” means “yes”, and “iee” means “no”, the third option would be “mu”, which means “impossible”. It’s a one-word way to say that the question doesn’t apply. The English equivalent could be “wrong”, which could be considered a shorthand way to say that “The question is wrong.”
This is not the only way that dichotomous thinking can influence people. Another would be to split the world in two, as many cults often do.
For example, you might be asked what your market philosophy is, “Marxism or capitalism?” In most cases, you’d probably say “capitalism”, whereas where your life depends on the answer, you’d probably say “Marxism”.
Turns out, the term “capitalism” doesn’t much narrow it down, because it’s a broad term that encompasses many economic schools of thought. The term “capitalism” is as popular as it is because Marxism has succeeded in dividing the world into two, and since then, they’ve succeeded in getting the rest of us to use their language.
Upon learning of this, I had a bit of an economic identity crisis, as I’ve suddenly found myself learning about a handful of economic schools of thought, which would have fallen into the “capitalist” compartment in the thinking of those influenced by Marxism’s memetic legacy.
For those curious, I’m not strongly committed to any economic philosophy, but I do recognize that the Austrian school has some interesting ideas. The Keynesian system embraced by much of the world is problematic, but I’m willing to live non-belligerently where it’s the order of the day, even if I were to point out its problems.
But back to the topic at hand, the dichotomy of Marxism vs Capitalism is one of many ways that the world is oversimplified, and can obscure some of the nuanced ideas that may be worth considering.
Another example that I could think of off the top of my head is the idea of the political right versus the political left. It’s a trick that Liberalism has used to make “the right” appear to be monolithic, when in reality, “conservatism” is most ideas outside of liberalism.
When you understand this, it becomes much easier to comprehend why the right has often struggled to develop a coherent message, while the left has done so much better at organizing. And you’ll recognize their carefully-manufactured image of being a bunch of underdogs for the ruse that it is.
So, what’s the point of this thought exercise? Odds are, you can think of another false dichotomy that’s relevant to you that may have been carefully-designed to limit your choices or perspective. Or it might be that there’s one that you might not have thought of, yet.
I suspect that there’s a great many people whose minds are shackled, though they’ve been led to believe that they have been freed.
The above photograph was taken on June 14, 2024, at approximately 6:11pm, by Evan Vucci, a chief photographer for the Associated Press, at a campaign rally just outside of Butler, Pennsylvania.
The photograph depicts then-former president Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents ushering him off a stage while forming a protective shield, as he defiantly pumps his fist in the air, with a backdrop of a waving American flag and a clear, blue sky. Trump’s ear was bloodied, and some blood streaked onto his face, the result of a failed assassination attempt.
In the minutes leading up to the assassination attempt, the failed assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had climbed up to the roof of a nearby facility, intent on getting the former president in his direct line of sight. A moment prior, he had a close encounter with a patrolling officer, who had spotted Crooks. At that moment, Crooks acted hastily, knowing that the officer would call for assistance. Prior to this, Crooks had already been spotted by event attendees, who had pointed Crooks out as a suspicious person.
The motivation of Thomas Matthew Crooks is still a matter of discussion. But at this point, it is apparent from his social media history that he had a more favorable viewpoint of Democratic policy positions, which would have put him at odds with Trump, who was running for office for a third time as a likely Republican nominee. Days prior to the assassination attempt, the press had developed a less favorable opinion of Joe Biden, calling into question his cognitive ability to serve a second term, and Biden had given into pressure to withdraw from his pursuit of reelection.
It’s possible that Crooks, if he were enthusiastic about a second Biden term, was disappointed to hear that Biden had chosen to withdraw. In any case, it’s clear that he sought to deny the assembled Trump supporters their own candidate.
Thomas Matthew Crooks was a resident of Bethel Park, a community near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was at the age of 20. Prior to this, he had obtained an Associate’s Degree in engineering science at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh. After this, he would be employed as a member of cafeteria staff at a retirement home near his own residence. He lived with his parents, who were both behavioral psychologists.
Crooks had fired a total of eight shots towards the former president. As he began firing from his AR-15 style rifle, Trump had turned to face a chart, facing the direction of Crooks. As he did so, he leaned his head slightly to his left, denying Crooks what would have easily been a fatal shot, though a bullet did go through Trump’s right ear. A few attendees were struck during the shooting, killing one, named Corey Comperatore.
Trump put a hand to his ear, and upon seeing blood on it, he immediately ducked down. Secret Service members rushed over to the former president, forming a protective barrier with their own bodies.
A counter-sniper team, positioned on a rooftop behind the stage, had identified the sniper, and acted upon him, terminating the threat, in what has been referred to as a “one-in-a-million shot”. Crooks’ earthly experiences had come to an immediate end.
Upon notification that the threat had been neutralized, the Secret Service team had been given the clear to usher Trump from the scene. They and the former president stood up, though Trump had expressed an interest on putting his shoes back on, which had somehow been removed during the incident. According to a lip-reader, Trump had uttered, “Blood? On my face?”
On the way off the stage, Trump insisted upon stopping. Upon doing so, he turned toward the front of the stage to face the assembled crowd, and pumped his fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” As the crowd roared in approval, this was the moment that Evan Vucci had photographed, which can be seen above.
Two days later, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Donald Trump accepted the nomination to run for president representing the Republican party. He was not contested in the nomination. It was also at the RNC that Trump named his running mate, J.D. Vance.
A month after the failed assassination attempt, Trump returned to Butler, Pa, for another rally, insisting on finishing what he started, there. He was joined by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and the owner of the social media platform known as X, who also spoke at the event.
Early in the morning of November 6th, 2024, Donald Trump won the presidency in what has been called a “landslide victory”. Trump had won all the swing states, securing the electoral college, and had become the first Republican candidate in decades to win the popular vote. His closest rival, Kamala Harris, represented the Democratic party.
The failed assassination against Trump, which was followed by the moment depicted by the photo above, was an important pivotal point, upon which if things had happened just a little differently, subsequent matters could have played out far differently. Trump’s election victory was the clear signal of where Americans stood on matters of cultural significance. If, for any reason, Trump had not survived to win the 2024 presidential election, it would have been likely that the culture would have continued along the trajectory that it was apparently going prior to his victory, even if a different Republican might have won.
Because, when it comes down to it, Donald Trump is the face of the will of the American people, who are aware that there is a problem with the establishment, and desires a restore of the greatness of American culture. Thus, the slogan, “Make America Great Again”.
Whatever the political views of Evan Vucci may be, it remains that he captured an image of a moment which will be historic in a manner comparable to the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima. History was made this year, and I’m looking forward to next year. We’ll see whether the image that I pick to describe it is an easy choice, again.
EDIT (16 Dec 2024): It’s a bit of an aside, but I wanted to bring attention to how amusing it is that the politics of Thomas Matthew Crooks appears unclear to anyone.
The main thing that seems to throw people off is the fact that he registered as a Republican in 2021. For many people, this appears to short-circuit their inquisitiveness, and they just stop at the assumption that he was a Republican.
Lest we forget, at around the year 2021, it was common for left-wing political influencers to suggest that left-leaning voters register as Republicans. In certain states, this would allow them to vote in Republican primaries, when they could select less favorable Republicans, increasing the likelihood that Democrats could overcome them in the general elections.
If Thomas Crooks was willing to commit an outrageous crime in an effort to deny the American public a candidate, such an underhanded political strategy certainly would not have been beneath him.
It’s also noteworthy that Paul Abbate, an FBI deputy director, has described Crooks’ social media activity as though it would “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes”. These are big claims, but Paul Abbate did not back them up with big evidence.
In any case, I think it’s reasonable to at least characterize Thomas Matthew Crooks as a “never-Trumper”. After all, he attempted (and failed) an assassination attempt against former president Trump.
For obvious reasons, Thomas Matthew Crooks cannot be reached to determine his motives. But his final failure will likely be remembered as the most famous failed assassination attempt in history.
When I heard that the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated, it was easy to guess what motivated the killer.
Because I, like many others, have endured the hell of having the same claim repeatedly denied which was explicitly covered under a health insurance company’s policy, it was easy to imagine that something like this would happen. And it did.
My opinion is going to be a safe one. While it’s tragic that a life was lost, I don’t feel strong pity for the victim. Also, Luigi Mangione is a fulminating fuck belch.
Basic observations aside, I want to point out the amusing effect that Luigi’s “manifesto” has had on political commentators: they’re playing hot potato with him. The right is focusing down on his leftist-sounding language to try to make him out to be a disgruntled left-winger, while those who look at the long lines of Canadian clinics with throbbing chubbies are trying to make him out to be a right-winger.
Both sides are playing directly into his hands. It’s obvious that Mangione’s missive was carefully crafted to keep him and his cause in the conversation. It’s infuriating to contemplate, but this demonstrates just how intelligent the guy really was.
Just not intelligent enough to avoid what’s awaiting him. Prison is a terrible place to be famous. If Luigi thinks his back hurts now, he’s really going to be in for it when he gets punched right in the back by the other prisoners.
A person’s actions play a significant role in determining their outcome.
I’ve read Mangione’s so-called manifesto, which reads as a justification for his actions. While his thinking may be flawed, I can point out that, if he’s forthcoming about the experiences he expressed, it’s little wonder he went insane. Those kinds of experiences could drive even a stoic mind to madness.
And it’s quite evident that he is insane. People mistakenly believe that an intelligent person cannot be insane. But they can be. Another example is Ted Kaczynski, whom Mangione looked up to. When an intelligent person goes insane, their own substantial intelligence becomes weaponized against their own mind.
I held off on writing about Mangione after seeing his auto-post on YouTube, which posted after he was arrested. YouTube has the option to schedule a video post, which was how Mangione’s YouTube channel posted an update after his arrest. It was like a kind of “dead-man’s hand”, with Luigi likely having the plan of pushing the date for his post back until he could no longer access his account.
His video hinted that something would be revealed on Wednesday, but that day came and went with no apparent reveal, perhaps because his channel was taken down.
As for what will happen to Mangione in the future, I don’t know. Putting aside other prisoners punching him in the back, he’s probably going to have a voyeur at all times.
As for the health insurance industry, I can suggest this to improve the situation: that a health insurance company gets a fine each time they deny a claim that is covered by their policy, with the fine proportional to the claim’s monetary value, with repeated denials of the same claim resulting in cumulative fines.
It’s a start, right? But any such bill would probably be lobbied out of existence by the healthcare industry. So, I don’t have much expectation that health insurance will change for the better anytime soon.
But Mangione’s trial is probably going to be entertaining.
When the internet was first made available to the general population, it was clear that it was going to change society, perhaps more so than the printing press.
With access to the summation of human knowledge, ignorance would have less room to thrive. Notifications of spam emails would annoy us. Networks of advertisers could influence society by deciding which viewpoints they’d prefer to monetize. Parasocial relationships would develop to the point where lonely people would give thousands of dollars to streamers whom they’ve never met. So on, and so forth.
Among these changes is that bullshitting has been ruined.
If you don’t know what bullshitting is, that’s when a person parrots a story that they’ve heard, often presenting it as their experience, or otherwise making it out to be somehow relevant to them.
Here’s an example that you may have heard:
At my college, a party got so out of hand that a vending machine was picked up and tossed out a window. When a student monitor came and complained, he was thrown out the window, too.
When I hear a story like that, I’m skeptical, but I still humor the guy telling the story. That’s because, like most people, I like stories, especially when the story is interesting.
Hearing that story, you might be thinking, “Wow Raizen, did you go to the same college as me?”, because you probably heard the story, too.
One day, I discovered the website Snopes.com, which compiles and investigates stories like this. The very fact that this story appeared on Snopes goes to show that your college wasn’t special. Or, at least, that it was about as special as every college where this was said to have happened, which is probably all of them.
Or there’s the story about the college library that’s slowly sinking, because the engineers who designed the library didn’t account for the weight of the books. You probably thought that that was your college, if you’ve heard this story before.
Or there’s the story about “a friend of a friend” who one night was instructed by the police to walk towards them without looking back, because otherwise, they’d see what happened to their friend. I heard this story when I was growing up, and later found it on Snopes.
The internet pretty much ruined bullshitting. Worse yet, any illusion you might have had that you knew someone who was connected to an interesting experience probably just stole someone else’s experience, and might not have even had any of their own.
On the internet, there can still be bullshitting, but a person has to be actually creative about it. Each such story that they tell must be original, otherwise, anyone could easily search it and find the original source which was plagiarized.
But have fun trying to bullshit with your original story. Thanks to the art of the green text, a variant of the story you planned on telling has probably already been told. There are so many stories out there now, that it’s become nearly impossible to tell one that’s entirely your own.
I liked the one about the guy who may have discovered a mafia front business, because they seemed confused when he ordered a pizza there, and after waiting 45 minutes, got the best pizza he ever had. If you’ve heard that one, you may have seen it reposted on X.
If bullshitting does live on, at least people are trying to be more creative about it. And with the internet’s anonymous element, that pretty much defeats any narcissistic motive a person may have had in IRL storytelling.
Of course, the nature of some of these stories has also changed to account for the connected nature of current times. Like the story about the guy who edited the Wikipedia article about Planters Peanuts to show the mascot with a monocle on both eyes, and no one noticed for about a year.
Did that actually happen? I don’t know. But it’s obviously not possible prior to an age where anyone can edit an online encyclopedia. It’s also sobering, because there’s the implication that the bar is so low to becoming an urban legend that it could be as easy as editing a Wikipedia page.
Finally, a post about the art of bullshitting would not be complete without mentioning Reddit. Much of Reddit’s popularity can be attributed to just how much people love stories. Even if you don’t go on Reddit, there’s a chance that you’ve come across a post on some other social media site like YouTube which basically comes down to “look what stories I found by using Reddit!”
Unless you can get down to some exquisite cyber-sleuthing, you probably can’t tell whether someone is bullshitting, and there’s a slight inclination to give the benefit of the doubt if the story is believable.
Considering this, perhaps bullshitting hasn’t been completely ruined. But a person has to learn a new set of skills to continue getting away with it. Until the internet, bullshitting was usually stopped in its tracks with the old “nice try, but I heard that one before”. Today, people can link to the original story, so if a person attempts to steal it, their reputation would go down in flames. Search engines make it a whole lot harder to get away with.
When it comes down to it, humans are the same creatures that we have been for ages, enjoying stories as much as we have throughout recorded history. The internet has changed the landscape of storytelling, and bullshitting hasn’t emerged unscathed. But it’s taken on new forms, and we need new skills to identify it.
As much as we love stories, the truth of a matter is still important to us. Otherwise, the reputation of a discovered liar wouldn’t take a hit.
Niantic has just announced a rewards roadmap for Pokémon Go. Just hearing the name Reward Road, you might get the idea that it’s a new way to reward participation in the game.
Nope. It’s just a way to encourage whaling.
Basically, the more players spend in the shop, the more points that players get. And, to make it clear, it’s not enough to spend the in-game currency of PokéCoins in the shop, the Reward Road feature rewards spending real-life money in the shop, for in-game assets like PokéCoins.
I don’t claim to know the particulars of how Pokémon Go is monetized outside of its in-game shop, but I would have guessed that Niantic had ways of profiting just from the fact that FTP players played the game. But if they’re trying to goad people into spending more money with something as blatant as Reward Road, then things are probably not going well.
I don’t expect Niantic to take my advice, considering that I’m just a guy who doesn’t have a deep understanding of how mobile games profit, and especially considering how obvious it is that Niantic hates the people who played their games. But assuming that they give a shit, then this is something that they may benefit from having gotten out there: People might want to spend money in Pokémon Go if Pokémon Go was actually fun to play.
And the fastest way to achieve this would be to make Pokémon Go a quality experience.
I honestly have no idea what Niantic’s philosophy is when it comes to making mobile games. But at this point, it’s apparent that it involves continually making poorly implemented features that sometimes don’t even work properly, and ignoring all player feedback as they move on to the next poorly implemented feature. And if anything gets rapidly corrected, it’s usually an oversight which has the potential to actually benefit the players who take advantage of them.
Even now, years into the game, players get falsely-accused of driving while playing, with the only way to dismiss the prompt being to tap “I’m a passenger”, despite merely sitting in their living room. Why is this even still a thing? Niantic should have figured out that GPS drift occurs, even when a person is standing still.
And while I’m complaining about Niantic, we can talk about the obvious honeypot events that are designed to catch cheaters, but can result in bans for players who somehow find a way to participate in line with the rules. Like with the recent Gigantamax raids, which can only be participated in in-person, but required something to the tune of three dozen players with optimized teams to even stand a chance of successfully completing.
How is that in any way reasonable?
And among the players who somehow got a raid train together to complete some of these raids, some of them have gotten their accounts banned. And for what? Getting a few dozen other players together to get the raids to actually work out? What a blatant disrespect of the real-life efforts of some of the most dedicated players!
And that’s just what grinds my gears. This isn’t just some game that players are sitting down and playing while completely stationary, Pokémon Go encourages players to “get up and Go!”. If a player goes outside and participates in a raid for an opportunity to catch a Raichu, it would be infuriating if the same player was banned after immediately going outside and walking a mile to get to the raid before it expires.
If Niantic can’t respect the time and real-life efforts of its players, then they’re not the company that should be running a game like Pokémon Go.
I really don’t have much expectation that Niantic is going to change for the better anytime soon, even under duress. It’s because of this that I think it would be better if The Pokémon Company were to somehow reclaim its IP, so that Niantic couldn’t further use it.
When it comes down to it, Niantic never learned to make a decent mobile game, they just benefited from getting their hands on an absurdly popular IP.
It’s finally over. The 2024 election has drawn to a close. There is a winner, and it was the most predictable outcome that there was in decades. Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election, and it was an undeniable blowout victory.
In the months to come, I expect the dead-enders, however few they may be, to convince us that the votes were tallied wrong, that Trump’s popular vote victory didn’t actually happen, and I expect leftists to pretend that they themselves are actually more in touch with the wishes of the typical American. This would all be cope, and a refusal to accept what is now an undeniable reality.
But for most of us, now that we got the outcome that we sought, it’s time for healing, it’s time to put the bookend on what was one of America’s darkest chapters, and it’s time to move on.
Now that we’ve won the victory, it’s time for us to make it count, which each of us can do in different ways. Many of us still have work to do, and many of us have goals that we’ve wished to accomplish in our lives. And we may now do so knowing that we can do these things in a land that is healing.
We know that the left had other plans, because we have seen them in action. Americans have seen tokenism. We have seen divisiveness. We have seen our heritage as it was being given to those who do not belong here. We have seen a bloated, bureaucratic state steal more and more of our prosperity. We have seen cities fall into disrepair. We have seen sexual deviants strut in the open without any shame. We have seen our children being indoctrinated. We have been called names. We have seen our national character being ruthlessly mocked. We’ve seen institutions weaponized against us. And seeing all this, we answered, “no”.
The halcyon days of the American republic are not behind us, they are ahead. And, at this point, what I’d like to see is for the American people to reconcile with each other, as we have largely begun to do as we came together to decide a clear winner just last night.
It’s time for the American people to celebrate. Well done.
Rich from ReviewTechUSA, as seen on his now-defunct YouTube channel.
Consider what it takes to be a dad. You might have thought of virtues such as strength, attractiveness, thriftiness, skill, discipline, conviction, and the intelligence to make a plan and see it through to fruition.
But what it really takes is finding a woman who will let you blow your load inside of her.
This becomes easy to see as one ponders the falling-off of Rich, also known as ReviewTechUSA, who has proceeded to throw his toys on the floor and stomp out of the room because he was designated a “lolcow”.
You can try searching for his YouTube channel, but you won’t find it, because he deleted it as part of his temper tantrum. Instead, if you were to look for ReviewTechUSA on YouTube, all that would be left would be videos from creators who criticized him, in many cases rightly so.
His image took a tumble, so rather than just shut up and course-correct, Rich instead ceded ground to all his critics, destroying a money-making channel with a following that took years to build.
What’s especially disappointing about Rich’s recent behavior for me is that he was one of my favorite gaming and tech world commentators when I was in college, back when he would rant about this, that, and the third as gameplay video of GTA would play. I didn’t always agree with him, but I did appreciate his viewpoints.
We could bring up the irony of the fact that his channel was called “ReviewTechUSA”, even though he hasn’t really reviewed tech as a focus since the early days of his channel. I suspect that this has a lot to do with the fact that he turned heavily tribalistic when it came to brands. He was a heavy critic of Apple, and if your tech review channel is just going to dump on Apple, don’t count on Apple to send you new iterations of their products for review.
It seemed that his early videos were enthusiastic about PC parts, which makes me suspicious that ReviewTechUSA was a means to write off a man’s PC gaming money trap, while raking in that sweet, sweet e-clout.
It didn’t help that he would sometimes spout off about some controversial takes. If what you have to say is controversial enough, tech brands might not want their products associated with you.
From what I’ve heard, Rich also went TDS. To risk alienating as much as half of your audience is highly inadvisable. That’s the risk that comes with approaching political content. It might be tempting to go TDS, considering that Trump supporters are more likely to be able to take a joke, but it’s a black hole. When your audience is composed of leftists, they’re likely to be hyper-sensitive, and willing to cancel you for saying the wrong thing at any given moment, and they’re not known for their forgiveness, even with profuse groveling.
With that framing, you might be wondering how Rich fucked up. Did he point out that men and women are different? Or did he go full Hitler and point out that different people from different parts of the world have different cultures?
Nope. He was a shitty dad. His little girl wanted him to put her to bed, but he declined so that he could continue his stream. Which, considering his typical routine, probably consisted of taking off his shirt and playing with a rubber chicken, while self-deprecating by calling himself a fat fuck (his words, not mine).
Naturally, this pissed people the hell off, because when you’re a dad, your first duty is to your family, and a shitty ass livestream doesn’t even come close to it. And because the current system is fucking over young men who have been trying way harder than their fathers and grandfathers before them to accomplish the same thing in a financially responsible manner, this is only upsetting young men all the more that Rich is not properly appreciating the family that he has, and which is his responsibility.
So, latest development, Rich has been branded a lolcow. But, as the tendency of lolcows is, he takes himself way too seriously, so he’s not leaning into it. Just the reverse, he was willing to torch his own paycheck to avoid confronting his critics, destroying a YouTube channel that could have continued to generate passive income for him if he were to just let it sit, doing nothing else with it.
But Rich took a blow to his pride, and he’s not handling it well.
Where he goes from here, I don’t know. Where exactly does someone go if they were once e-famous, but then deleted their own channel? Does he have a backup plan? Can his lengthy experience playing with his nipples in front of a camera somehow transfer to another career choice?
Considering that Rich has a little person who is counting on him, he needs to figure things out pretty quick. Unlike most young single men, he can’t just fall back on sleeping in a car when times are rough.
But we’ll see whether Trump working as a fry cook would discourage him at all from doing the same thing.
EDIT: Okay, so he has a plan. Rich says that instead of gaming commentary, he’s going to do “grown-up” things like comment on the news and politics.
First, it can be pointed out how this new direction would be catastrophic for a man in his mental state. Few people could get into that kind of content without it frying their brains. People who get into politics tend to become tribalistic, which tends towards people becoming so closed-minded that they refuse to see any virtue in a person in the rival tribe. What’s more, news commentary requires a person to have their finger on the pulse of current events on a near constant basis.
Then there’s his implication that games commentary is beneath his level of maturity. Rich was once one of the guys who argued that it shouldn’t be seen as unusual for a middle-aged man to play video games. And now that video games are no longer stigmatized, he goes and acts like playing them is for less mature people.
But if news and politics are how Rich is deciding to rebrand himself, let’s see how seriously anyone will take a man who played with his man-boobs on livestream when he fires off his mouth about current events, or what can be brought into the conversation about politics by a man who engaged in sensuous play with a cucumber, also on livestream (you could probably guess that there was a point when I lost interest in his channel).
But, if he insists, then he’s free to fire off about how he believes the rest of us should live, and the narratives that we should view the world through, in consideration of the exemplar of virtue that he obviously is.
Magnetricity 