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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Oh and don’t forget to forget that a large number of agencies that were the ones to deal with that emergency just so happened to be wargaming something very close to the unprecedented event that actually happened that same day: dealing with a terrorist attack that uses airplanes as missiles and flies them into buildings.

    NORAD was one of them. Iirc NY firefighters were another.











  • Going through the postal service might have been safer than other forms of travel because there would have been more explicit exchanges of custody. Like put a kid on a passenger train and they could just get off and get lost before getting on a connecting train and who knows what happened to them? They arrived on train A but never got on train B.

    Whereas with mail, the kid becomes the operator’s responsibility. If the kid is handed over to the operator to ride train A but then is nowhere to be found at the destination, then that operator is the prime suspect. Or the operator hands the kid off to the next operator in the journey and the kid is now their responsibility.

    And even if you have a babysitter, passenger stations are going to be a lot more crowded than cargo stations, so keeping track of a kid will be a lot easier, plus the driver is the babysitter for the postal service, so they won’t miss their train or take the wrong one by accident (unless they are routed incorrectly lol).


  • Yeah, I’ve been assuming that plastic isn’t something I want anywhere near my food but can only really control plastic contact with my food inside my place. Most comes packaged in plastic. I think glass jars and produce/things produced in the store are the only things that don’t automatically come in contact with plastic, though in practice it’s only the glass jars that continue to avoid it because the stores provide plastic packaging for produce and their other stuff like meat/deli cuts or baked goods.

    And I’d be surprised if the contents inside the glass jars aren’t typically stored in plastic between the farm and the jarring plant, though at least there the bins are likely large enough that contact is minimal for anything not at the edges.


  • In the past, making money and making great games had a lot of overlap.

    But then the big studios realized how much some people are willing to spend on either the latest version of the same thing, to not have to wait for a timer, to skip a grind (especially one tuned specifically to make people want to skip it), to gain an advantage over other players, plus a bunch of psychological tricks and are so often chasing that money, which probably kills a lot of the passion for their staff that actually knows how to make good games until they either leave or start phoning it in.

    But indie studios, while they can also be run by people just chasing the money, can also be run by people more interested in the creating a great game aspect than the money aspect.

    You can see the same thing across the entire economy. The main difference is that regulatory capture and the amount of resources required to make a video game aren’t set up to prevent new players from entering the market and since games are digital they scale much easier than physical objects. Like some people have de-enshitified their cars or even made their own from scratch or an older one, but it’s not like they can just sell those de-enshitified cars to anyone, they’d need to ramp up production quite a bit to get the same reach viral indie games can get.



  • Though I’ve noticed that some non-porn games are adding “nudity” and “sexual content” to their user tags when the game has none to attract people looking for good porn games, but then it turns out to just be a good game without porn.

    I noticed when looking through some of my unplayed games’ tags and saw “dating sim” plus the ones above in a bunch of SAO games, which are unfortunately not very good games from the ones I’ve tried so far, which is kinda ironic given that a great game is central to the story.


  • Yeah, IMO they should either be priced cheaply because anyone who buys is essentially testing the game. Then it’s an ok gamble IMO, cheap game that might never get better and could be full of bugs.

    Or they should be priced higher to attract people who specifically want to support the idea and avoid review boms from people who expect a full game even though it says “early access”. But this model then puts a requirement for communication and transparency with those who did support it, as well as a commitment to release what they did produce as open source if they end up abandoning the project.

    Though I think there should be some buyer beware involved. Read reviews before you buy, especially negative ones, and look for trends (to avoid being overly influenced by one reviewer’s bias). It’s impossible to predict which will continue being developed and which will fail (and out of those that fail, which ones intended it from the start and which ones were trying to make a great game in good faith but it just didn’t work out), so buy early access games for what they currently are rather than what you hope they’ll be. Even if they do get finished, that final product might not be what you’re hoping for.

    Other than banning the account after it happens, I can’t really see any way to punish the bad faith actors without catching people with low resources just trying to make a game despite the system being stacked against them.