The illusion of choice is even more illusory than it seems.

Even if there was real choice inherent in the systems themselves, most people have limited ability to take advantage of said choice without completely starting over, usually with damn near nothing.

What I mean is most people aren’t wealthy, they don’t have in-demand skills, they don’t have family abroad, they can’t get sponsors to other countries. That means they are effectively stuck wherever they are, until something so bad happens they have to abandon their lives and flee.

This is going to cause problems for them…

Don’t republican conventions and things of that sort tend to impact Grindr pretty heavily?

Haha, that’s a fair point.

I’d have to actually like the game and have been sucked into it to want to spend days and days finding mods that sound like good additions, or address frustrations with vanilla mechanics, and then bash my head against the wall trying to figure out the error logs and why the map didn’t spawn anything this time (I don’t have a tech background, I learn tech on the fly to do specific things, so troubleshooting is a big challenge). Like I have over a thousand rimworld mods I individually, manually, downloaded (I don’t use steam but I found a site that rips mods from steam). I’m currently running about 650 of them, but I had over 100 hours in before I even looked at mods, and it started with running out of storage and having to dedicate half my map to storage space, because I HOARD STUFF and 3 stacks per tile with vanilla shelves is just not enough space. You never know when you’ll need 167 elephant tusks. Oh they are vendor trash that can be used as a shitty improvised weapon and that’s it? Well I found that out after about a month.

I just know factorio would hit my frustration buttons quicker than my obsession buttons because I can’t even bring myself to do the fairly simple automation in rimworld because it’s too finicky and I have to learn stuff and figure out where to lay pipes and shit, so I’d struggle to hit the “let’s find mods to make this game even more overwhelming” stage.

But now I’m even more jealous, if there’s a vibrant modding community and all…

Non-paywalled link cuz I wanted to read it

https://archive.ph/uqJsi

What’s a paradox game? I assume that’s some sort of studio?

I wish I liked games like factorio.

I love base building stuff (rimworld is my current obsession, tho I almost like making my heavily modded game function properly more than actually playing it) but automation is just too many moving parts, and too much planing and I can’t bring myself to do any of it right.

If not for that it would probably be entirely my jam. I get downright jealous when I see some of the amazing stuff people do.

When I was young we averaged moving every 4.5 years, but for reasons, I got very accustomed to changing environments every year or so, and as an adult I’ve struggled to stay in one place for the clean start it offers, but moving is so expensive now, and I don’t like driving anywhere near enough to be a nomad van dweller type.

I can maybe do it one more time in the near future, assuming money and housing values don’t tank first, but that’s probably it for the rest of my days. I hope it really scratches the anxious itch for change, cuz if not…

I’d rather not have robot bees. I’ve seen hated in the nation (black mirror episode).

https://www.wikihow.com/Boil-Sweet-Potatoes

I think I might be going on a quest in middle earth…

I’ve only used genAI once, to re-write my resume. (And I played with image generation to sort of see what it can do and be a muse for me because I’m aphantasic, but I was wiiiiiildly disappointed.)

It spit out something less good than what I fed into it, hallucinated a ton of skills and experience I don’t have, and it looked like AI slop when it was done. So a lose-lose.

Might be good for people who don’t know things or who can’t write for shit (so your average first year college student, IME) but… honestly it’s garbage if you aren’t average or below already. So I’m not surprised it’s ruining people’s ability to function.

Ai is a tool for dumb people (sorry. not sorry.) to land good jobs that dumb people shouldn’t hold or be hiring for, and that’s about it.

I have zero faith in the horizon one, after they allowed a Lego game to be the third installment. What a bad decision, and this probably won’t be a better one…

Hopefully I’m wrong but… I have a feeling I’m going to be wildly disappointed even with expecting to be disappointed…

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