Pops gets confused sometimes …

Either this Georg Szalai has managed to make a 20-plus year career out of being a mediocre writer or he turned that one over to an AI…

Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.

So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?

Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…

If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

Which “he?”

Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

The author then goes on to say though:

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.

I can’t speak for Harris, but if I was her, I sure as hell wouldn’t give any time to that smug, petulant, self-absorbed twat, unless maybe it was to indulge my desire to punch him in the nose.

Thinking about it though, that last might be worth it - I would think that punching Bill Maher in the nose would almost certainly gain votes.

Most similar to Advance Wars:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis

Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation

Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Just in general:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2

Drill Dozer

Golden Sun 1 and 2

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Guru Logic Champ

Metroid Fusion

Metroid Zero Mission

Medabots RPG

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

Yes - that’s exactly what it is. Vichy Twitter is to historical Twitter as Vichy France was to historical France.

I stole it myself, so you’re welcome to it.

I have no idea who originated it, but from the first time I saw it, I haven’t used anything else. It just so perfectly sums it up.

So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it’s such a poorly run site that it’s not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.

Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!

Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!

The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.

I’m so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.

I would say that he’s entirely and completely correct.

And I would also say that that doesn’t change the facts on the ground - if Trump wins, democracy is dead. He and his backers and his coattail-riders will enact the plutocratic/christofascist autocracy of their dreams, and many, many Americans will die and the survivors, outside of the ruling elite, will be reduced to peasants and cannon fodder.

If Harris (or whoever the DNC saddles us with in an 11th hour switcheroo) wins, we at least have some chance, however small, of saving this country. Maybe.

Maybe is a helluva lot better than no fucking way.

Oh wow, I really riled you up.

Presuming, for the moment, that this laughable, trite and terribly cliched rejoinder is in any way true, how would it be relevant to anything?

Never mind though - that was a rhetorical question. I know, and I suspect you do as well, that it’s not. It’s just a casual, and at this point entirely predictable, bit of disparagement tossed out to give yourself what you erroneously believe to be an edge.

the real problem is the idiots who are paying.

I mean, I think that this is contentious enough to be worth picking apart.

Feel free. I’m more than willing to explain in as much detail as you want exactly why it is that I think that people who pay extra for early access to games are “idiots.”

(Just, by the bye, as I think that people who don’t wear seat belts, tahe the guards off their table saws or don’t get covid vaccines are “idiots.”)

I can’t imagine calling someone an idiot unless I thought they kind of deserved what was coming to them.

Which is exactly what I do in fact think.

It’s this schadenfreude you seem to feel that I take issue with.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

I don’t feel any sort of pleasure or sense of fulfillment at their idiocy - I simply note it.

I’m especially curious about that one.

Oh, that would be this, actually:

demonstrates more contempt for one’s fellow man than decreeing that they shouldn’t even be allowed to make their own choices.

You are, for some reason, arguing against the concept of rules. I never asked you to do that.

In response to my statement that:

any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves

you wrote:

Do you suppose that choosing not to wear a seatbelt, a very bad deal, should be left entirely up to individuals, um, “stupid” enough to take it?"

Clearly, with that, you established that the point you wished to dispute was whether or not “choosing… a very bad deal should be left entirely up to individuals.” That was the exact point of contention you stipulated.

So this:

You are, for some reason, arguing against the concept of rules. I never asked you to do that

is blatant bullshit. In point of fact, with the example above, that’s the specific focus you introduced. Curiously, you said nothing at all about the “contentious” phrasing of my original post or my supposed “schadenfreude.” That only came along now, in this desperate bit of backing and filling in which you’re vainly engaged. Rather, your immediate and exclusive focus was on whether or not “choosing… a very bad deal should be left entirely up to individuals.” The clear, and in fact only, alternative to that is that it should not be left up to individuals, so that’s the position you’ve taken, and the position in support of which I’m still waiting for you to provide an argument.

Now - if that’s truly not what you intended to say or imply, that would be another matter. And in fact, in any other situation, I’d be willing to simply grant that that wasn’t your intent and amend my responses accordingly. We could simply cooperate to find the exact point of our disagreement and focus on that (and could both enjoy this exchange much more).

But you blew that chance a long time ago.

So that was in fact the position you took, whether intentionally or not. And I’m still waiting for an argument in support of it.

It’s amusing and revealing that at no point here have you actually directly addressed anything that I’ve actually said. Instead, you’ve just used what I’ve said as a jumping off point for a ludicrously exaggerated, barely relevant and deliberately insulting strawman.

Here’s a challenge for you - instead of leaping from strawman to strawman in this vain effort to somehow prove that I’m a horrible person and therefore wrong, go all the way back to the beginning here and frame a positive argument for your position. Tell me exactly why and on what basis (as appears to be your position) publishers should be prohibited from charging extra for early access, and what nominal public good that would serve.

As a bonus, you might also try to explain how the position that publishers should be allowed to charge extra for early access is in any way “a very anti-covid-vaccine argument.” I’m especially curious about that one.

Feel free to take your time

I would say that there’s almost nothing that demonstrates more contempt for one’s fellow man than decreeing that they shouldn’t even be allowed to make their own choices.

Yes.

It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us

That’s exactly why I don’t cut them any slack. Their dumb choices don’t just harm themselves - they harm me and all other gamers, insofar as they’ve made it so that publishers can get away with putting out unfinished, buggy, unbalanced crap.

Sure - the gamers might spend a while ineffectually bitching on forums and handing out 1 star reviews, but that’s just meaningless noise. The ONLY thing that matters to the publishers is whether or not people buy the game, and those dunderheads not only buy the game - they line right up to buy the next one too.

Or, now, line right up to pay extra for early access to the next one.

Yes - it really is the customers’ fault.

It’d be different if games were a necessity - then the idea of “predatory” behavior would be relevant, since we’d be talking about someone taking advantage of the fact that the consumer has to buy the thing in question.

But games aren’t a necessity - not even close - so any consumer is at any time entirely free to say no to any transaction without suffering any meaningful ill effects.

And any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves.

I’m often reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago, with a stereotypical Einsteinish physicist standing in front of a chalkboard, looking at this enormously complex formula with a big blank space in the middle of it. Then he gets a “eureka” expression and starts writing in the blank space. Then he steps back, and you can see that he’s filled the blank space with “and then something happens”.