I’ve hated him since before Trump’s first election, correctly realizing he is a fradulent try hard con man megalomaniac, and have had to endure a decade of people mocking me ‘oh yeah like you are smarter than the richest man on earth yeah right fuck off’.

Yep. I am smarter than him. So were half the people hurling those insults at me, actually.

Elon is actually quite stupid at everything other than conning people.

Much like Trump.

Hehe sounds about right.

Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…

And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.

I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.

But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.

We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.

This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.

Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.

It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.

It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.

But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.

Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.

Exactly.

In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.

You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.

Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.

… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.

-.-

One third of Americans, about 100 million people, are in fact this stupid.

This is (one of) the real horror(s) of fascism:

It forms a cult of personality.

As in, a literal cult, a ‘Dear Leader can do no wrong’, honest to god, utterly delusional cult.

Just go check all the polls of people who still specifically support Trump’s tariff policy.

Combine that with the fact that 20% of the US is functionally illiterate (reading/writing skills of a 2nd grader or worse), and the average literacy level is between a 5th and 6th grader, meaning that next 30% of people are… just barely out of elementary school when it comes to literacy.

Those numbers are for US adults 18 or older btw.

As other commenters have mentioned, I too have multiple family members I have had to go no contact with in the last few years because they are in the MAGA cult, are incredibly aggressive, delusional, manipulativr, etc.

In my case specifically, my Dad fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the last time I was with him in person, he was showing me how he manufactures ghost guns (no serial numbers) in his garage with some vintage machining tools.

In a sane world he would be on a red flag list as a potential domestic terrorist.

In the actual world he is just a retiree with a hobby.

He was also green.

In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.

The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player… who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s… and performed terribly at LANs…

Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.

Amazing.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

The initial comment it was replying to was exaggerating for comic effect.

The initial comment it was replying to was written by me.

I was not exagerating.

Gerudo just popped in and basically said that they thought I was being intentionally harsh as well.

Both of you have now ascribed a motive, a goal to my description of Seattle… that I do not have.

I was simply flatly stating my lived experience in Seattle.

People in Seattle are actually terrible at forming genuine relationships, that is my completely honest, not exaggerated assessment.

I am also an introvert.

I was just describing that yes, Seattle is full of introverts, who suck at socializing.

There is no joke. There was only an attempt at being contrarian in an equally exagerated manner back toward a percieved exageration that did not exist.

In fact, quite hilariously now imo, this entire course of discussion is itself an example of how an anti-social behvaior, assuming unstated intentions behind statememts, reading in context that isn’t actually there… produces confusion and interpersonal friction.

I appreciate your willingness to explain, but I am still confused.

… I am the person who described Seattle as introverted and anti social.

You are ascribing motive, intention, to my original description, that motive being ‘to talk down about something’, ie, to insult or degrade.

I am not doing that. I am describing my lived experience in Seattle as objectively as I can.

Yes, it is my personal, anecdotal experiencd, so it may or may not be truly representative…

But I am not exagerating in my assesment.

You have assumed I am doing that, and just said something with a contrarian intention than the intention you incorrectly assumed I had.

That still isn’t a joke.

It is just being contrarian.

I am not trying to be an ass, I am autistic and I do not understand what the joke is supposed to be.

This reads to me as a contradictory paradox.

If you say the joke is that Gerudo was facetious, ie unserious, sarcastic, didn’t actually mean they liked Seattle when they said they ‘liked Seattle for a reason’… and then they do indeed confirm they do actually like Seattle’s social introversion because they are an introvert…

Then… they were being serious in the first statement… ie, not facetious.

So… that cannot be the joke.

If I exaggeratedly said 'Man I LOVE~~~ hamburgers!" … and someone said ‘wait are you serious?’ and my response was ‘Yes I do really love hamburgers.’

Then again, the only thing I can see as the part that is supposed to be funny in any way is the exaggerated tone.

That to me just reads as … dramatic, quirky, enthusiastic? Not inherently funny though?

… Is the ‘joke’ that they didn’t realize why they liked Seattle untill I described the social norms?

The… joke would then be… it is funny that they couldn’t describe or put words to why they liked something and had to have their own thoughts described by another person before they could articulate them?

That… seems more like an insult than a joke? I guess that could be funny if I were predisposed to enjoy cruelty/mockery against Gerudo… but I’m not, so that just seems rude.

I am at least self aware enough of an autist to know that many people find my confusion in this scenario funny, when I would describe that as cruel, but I am genuienly baffled by how what Gerudo said was ‘a joke’.

Looks like Miami also does not have any specific vernacular for ‘friend’ on these maps, so… maybe if you just overlay all these maps and find all the deadzones, you’ve found the areas of antisociality?

I do not understand how your joke works.

If you genuienly enjoy antisociality as a norm, because you tend to be introverted, then you just like Seattle because of that.

You would then not be joking, in the sense of sarcastically saying you enjoy something you don’t actually enjoy.

‘I knew I liked Seattle for a reason’ is then just the same as saying ‘Yup, I’m also anti social and I love it here’.

The ‘joke’ isn’t that you actually don’t like Seattle’s social norms and were being sarcastic, because you just said you’re introverted.

I honestly do not understand how this is a joke.

Is… just using the pithy/vague phrasing… in and of itself… the joke?

I’m gonna need a Carlos to Cubit to Banana diagram.

With a slinky for scale.

… either you enjoy having no friends…

… or you enjoy superficial performative ‘relationships’ that are all actually adversarial social status jockeying?

I am from Seattle.

Anecdotally:

This is correct.

People are absurdly transactional, performative and superficial about relationships and also very anti social compared to basically anywhere else I’ve ever been in the US.

… As would every other currency.

Most of which are backed by more sane, stable, underlying governments and economies than the US…

… and they are much, much more connected to actual tangible factors than a completely speculative asset that has utterly failed to function as an actual generally accepted currency everywhere and time that has been attempted.

Same with gold or silver or fine art… etc.

If a hyperinflation scenario actually happens, all that means is the dollar weakens. It does not mean bitcoin strengthens generally… it would only strengthen in comparison to the dollar.

… But, because the vast majority of real money flowing into funding bitcoin investments is dollars, I would be willing to bet that bitcoin would basically also drop against basically all other currencies.

Bitcoin is largely a proxy currency for gambling with USD. Not entirely of course, not perfectly…but uh… there are way less stablecoins pegged to Not USD, and way less volume in them.

I am fairly confident that… yeah, if the USD hyperinflates, bitcoin exchange rates would pretty much track with USD:EUR and USD:Lira rates… though hey, if you have roughly 10 million USD right now, and think you can run a currency arbitrage when/if the USD goes tits up, maybe you can actually make some money.

Or lose it all due to massively inefficient bitcoin trading markets and exorbitant trading fees as compared to what all the real, giant, big boy financial firms have access to.

Bitcoin doesn’t have fundamentals. Bitcoin being ‘deflationary by design’ doesn’t matter at all, because it isn’t a currency. It isn’t used as a currency in any general economy (that isn’t already inna disaster), it isn’t regulated like a currency is.

It is basically emtirely a barely regulated speculative proxy for mostly USD investments… if you take money out of USD, in a hyperinflation scenario, you may or may not do a bit better than keeping that money in USD, but you will almost certainly still lose money if you want to convert your bitcoin into a non hyperinflating currency.

He, entirely unironically, has a cult following.

Like… an actual cult.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

I prefer a good, old fashioned, no bo-shit, big stick.

I mean … sai … its not like everyone has finely crafted throwing stars lying around, but kama(n) farming tools?

Much more practical.

((Apologies for the rough final pun, doing my best lol.))

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.