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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • I mean… it’s the best survival horror remake since what? Dead Space? It’s aimed at people who like good games.

    For the record, a 3:1 or 4:1 split between consoles and PC isn’t necessarily unusual for AAA stuff, particularly for a game that is strongly associated to the PlayStation brand that isn’t cheaper on PC. This game runs heavy, if you’re on a laptop or an older PC and have a PS5 that is a common sense purchase.

    Great game, though. Really enjoying it so far. And like the other poster said, not a remaster at all, it’s a full remake. Not that I wouldn’t have bought a good remaster of the original. It’s been hard to get solid versions of those games, historically.


  • That’s fair, I suppose. I’d just argue that the movie forgot to… correct him? Endgame even makes a point about how nature is healing and the air is cleaning.

    If the point was that he was wrong and misguided, the movies didn’t make that clear. Instead it was just “he’s ruthless and evil, but he maybe has a point” as an angle, which is a really weird way to frame your omnicidal nutcase.

    I get why, relatable villains are more interesting, especially if you’re going to have the entire movie revolve around him. It’s just that they went about it in a way that raises questions.


  • Well, if you’re gonna be really nerdy about it, keeping the ability of life to reproduce intact and culling 50% of the population once only gets you one slice of the doubling time back. I’m not the first to point out that Thanos started a galactic war to send the population of Earth back to 1975. Tony’s kid would still be alive by the time humanity thwarts Thanos through sheer horniness.

    He’d have been way better off by making every sentient species like 90% less likely to conceive or whatever. Except then most animals and plants would go extinct, so what’s the point. It’s really very unclear what “resource” Thanos is trying to preserve.

    So… you know, if his take doesn’t make sense in the first place, and we do know that he at least impacted animals, because the movie explicitly shows a bird showing up as a confirmation that the un-snap worked, it’s not a crazy idea to ponder all the other ways it’d be weird, counterintuitive or self-defeating. Dead gut biomes, suddenly liberated E. coli, sudden deserts and unexpected outcomes of random distributions are all fun thought experiments, I suppose.

    But mostly, it shows that it raises enough questions to break suspension of disbelief a little, which I think is the biggest sin of that particular change. The comic take is absurd, but at least it settles the question.


  • Look, we’re in the realm where the guy decided to remove 50% of all life… as a resource conservation attempt.

    Lovely movies, but the “guy’s a literal death cultist” required way less suspension of disbelief. Jilted incel Thanos pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza or whoever would have been way more timely, too.

    But if we’re doing it this way… 50% of the plants, algae and plankton would have died too. XKCD MUST have figured out what that’d do to the atmosphere by now, right?




  • Alright, let me take a step back to the OP.

    The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

    That’s the claim.

    The counterclaim is that makes sense for US-based social media where most users are American. I dispute that because… well, most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

    The logical way to organize that would be for the US politics channel, forum, magazine or whatever to be flagged “US politics” while everything else keeps its own qualifier. There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics. That makes logical sense, but it’s often not what happens in social media unless the specific social media site is heavily restricted to a specific non-English language or territory.

    That’s the observation here.


  • Wait, what?

    We’re talking about assuming that a site’s default user is from the US. I’m saying if 49% are not, then that assumption seems ethnocentric. That doesn’t require every other user to be part of a monolith of non-Americans, they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

    That’s a big chunk of your users that don’t conform to your default use case. If this was about anything else you would not a default at all in that scenario, but that’s not what happens. Also, it’s not blamed on the “average American”, it’s being blamed on Americans as a whole, culturally, on the aggregate, which is fundamentally different.



  • Well, yeah, but it’s not anecdotal. There is data to tell you how big Facebook is and was outside the US, in what territories and by how much relative to their US popularity at what point. My personal experience just happens to match those numbers (India, by the way, is Facebook’s current biggest market).

    I would also point out that by your own data, which is accurate as far as I can tell, 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

    Now, I agree with you that assuming things about anonymous accounts, and especially anonymous accounts writing in English, is foolish. Lots of people are fluent in English who are not native speakers and definitely who are not from the US. Most, in fact, depending on how you define your parameters.

    I disagree that this is “human nature”, though. I don’t assume the same thing from people who speak my native language online. I also don’t assume the same thing about English speakers. The reason the OP is asking is that US ethnocentrism stands out. That’s not to say it’s not natural. We non-native dwellers in anglocentric social media will often comment on US cultural and political minutia, because US cultural and political minutia is present and relevant to us in a way ours isn’t to Americans (thanks for that, cultural imperialism). We pass for Americans in more situations than some American lurking in a German-language forum would, and we’re likely many times more numerous than… well, Americans lurking in German-language or Chinese-language socials.

    But it being natural doesn’t mean it isn’t notable or an issue or a symptom of a dysfunction. Which it is, and it does annoy me for that reason.


  • … I am a non-anglophone who, at the time of Facebook’s raise to social media dominance lived in multiple non-anglophone countries. I was there.

    In one of the places I lived there was briefly a popular local Facebook alternative. It lasted maybe a couple of years before entirely capitulating and getting absorbed. That place does still have a local Reddit-like alternative, and Reddit is certainly more US-centric. You are right that Facebook stayed popular much longer outside the US. It has started falling off in some of those places, but I did keep a Facebook account for work purposes for a lot longer than you’d expect because work relations in those territories would share Facebook credentials as a way to establish professional contact. Twitter may as well have been a lost ancient civilization, though.

    There’s also a lot to unpack in the assumption that on a thread about “why do Americans default to assuming everyone is from the US” you’re reflexively lumping the entire anglosphere as part of the US, but honestly, I’ll let the recently annexed English-speaking countries deal with that one on their own.





  • “Forced exclusivity is bad” is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going “what exclusives does the Xbox have” like two posts down the road.

    Or maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember where the “I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives” was instead “Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation” (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).

    Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.


  • It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn’t like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.

    Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that’s the ultimate motivation here. That’s not a particularly disputed fact.