I think it's a frame of mind. Generally, people are not trained to view media as art, nor to interact with art in any meaningful sense. If you see a video game and subconsciously think "this exists solely for my gratification" then yeah, you're not gonna be thinking about it much.

This is one guy, one single guy, has made a statement as powerful as a protest of thousands. You can say it's suicide, but not that it's meaningless. You can say martyrdom is not something to aspire to, but cannot say that it did not take an incredibly rare level of devotion towards a cause that is just. Writing him off as out of his mind is an insult to his determination. I don't think self-immolating is the most productive thing he could have done, but at the end of the day, if it was, I know I wouldn't have the guts to follow through on it.

So burned out on my job search. Recently graduated with a degree in computer science, looking for a job as a dev. Finally got my first interview after having sent out 30~50 applications a week since the start of last June. I get in there and it turns out they pulled a bait and switch, they weren't actually interviewing me for the job I applied for but a completely different one, not a SWE job, not in the same location, and not even full time. I'm starting to think I basically have no chance of getting hired because all I'm hearing is that I need to wait until the market is better, which won't be until I have a gap of years in my resume with no relevant experience which I can't explain away. Since I didn't graduate with a 3.5 GPA and an internship, my degree is apparently not worth wiping my ass with.

Burns doubly bad because this wasn't the fucking easy path, I busted my ass for this degree. I had to give up on college in my third semester because I lost my scholarship. Lost my scholarship because, who knew, going unmedicated and untreated for suicidal depression and ADD bad enough that I stared at walls for hours wasn't exactly great for my grades. I clawed my fucking way back in and graduated at 26 and the market's fundamentally different from when I started so instead of getting a comfortable and well-paying job like everybody and their fucking mother swore up and down I'd get, I instead just owe $20k in loans and spent an extra 6 years living with my parents. Turns out, if you had to work hard to get your degree, that means it's worthless. You have to be able to pass with a huge margin and have professional experience.

I'm just so lost, man. I'm all out of faith I'll ever live a life of anything but repeated humiliation and rejection. I'm bitter and I'm angry. I haven't wanted to just disappear this badly in a long time.

Understanding video games or not, you'd hope they'd at least understand the basic economic reality that addictive products make more money than non-addictive products. That's why it was banned: it encourages unhealthy usage habits.

Surprising that they're not making money on the game directly. I didn't really pick the TrueAnon crew as big board game people. I get that they still make money on it indirectly from the attention it'll bring to the show, but that's honestly not a huge payoff.

My copium take is that there's no way that the government wouldn't understand banning """player retention mechanics""" would cause a big divestment. They're used because they make shittons of reliable money! Did they think it was just because devs are too lazy to come up with actual games? That seems like a pretty basic idea that would come across with even cursory investigation into what's being regulated. Under this hopeful line of thought, it'd probably be a firing for messaging failure rather than a lack of will to follow through.

Because we're too lazy as a nation for it ever to be acted upon. Nobody wants to fight that war, which really drives the point home that libs and conservatives aren't actually too different. Everybody's content to let urban centers be lib strongholds and empty fields be conservative bastions.

I feel safe on this website. I know there's no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.

The Dark Age, a time of backwardness, illiteracy, and decline. Also, when books were invented.

Christianity (and other organized religions) are vestiges of a very effective way of packaging culture. Replace "God" with "the community" and things make lots of sense. It's not a terribly new observation that an individual's perception of reality is constructed by society. Why not simply call that process of construction God? Yeah, when it's stripped of all forms of communal relations and obligations as all things under capitalism are, you're left with a very dumb kernel of "imagine a really big wizard" but the fact that it's endured at all goes to show how deeply woven religion was into the lives of people before us. The difference between religion and superstition is the order: religion is about understanding the world as we experience it. A ghost dog telling you to sell the organs of children is not religion, it is, charitably, superstition.

born to ride public transit, forced to look for fucking parking

I got my degree in computer science even though that was like my 4th or 5th choice because everybody always said it was a guaranteed well-paying job and my higher choices were all "unrealistic" like astrophysics and history. Now, 8 months after I've graduated and so many hundred of applications later I stopped bothering to estimate, I still can't find a fucking job. My friend might be able to put in a good word for me at a Naval research lab, but working for the US Navy would make me feel like an absolute fucking dog, even if it's just ocean surveying. Even then, it's not like I'd expect to get hired.

My loser's lesson to anybody in college: if you hear a lot about a certain field being a guaranteed job, it's a fucking lie. Do what you enjoy, it's the least risky option because there's no guaranteed jobs, but you can at least make sure you're struggling on your own terms. That, and your actual degree is not worth the paper it's printed on. Being in college is just the launchpad to get an internship, get one before you graduate no matter what because nobody's willing to hire somebody with less than a year of work experience.