I save caffeine for the weekends and always thought it made me feel awesome. Now I know why.

You’re right they don’t flatten but the brake does have to engage to stop it from behaving similarly to a manual treadmill

Can’t the escalator like flatten out or something awful, when it’s without power?

The pledge of abeangiance.

Sucralose and other similar artificial sweeteners make human urine extremely toxic to the environment as well.

As in food and other supplies on a relatively soft target like a convoy. Didn’t stop my high school classmates from twisting “they shoot at vehicles with it” to “they shoot out engines with it”

I would grant that even if the metrics were measured largely the same way you could argue or even observe that experience would be meaningfully different in some ways.

Because the US has several million more people living below a certain level of income, experiencing a daily misery but it’s somewhat excusable because the ratio is smaller.

Fake head wounds

I thought North Korea was Seouless?

Materialistic is absolutely how I feel when an object is sold for multiple years of my income.

Not only that but by necessity the money/credits in nearly all games (EVE Online a possible exception) is closer to a labor voucher of sorts than a commodity. And labor vouchers are a potential avenue for transitioning a society away from currency.

My friends who play PDX games with me and know my politics sometimes tease me about the game using currency or referencing profitability. And then I remind them that we’re all meticulously planning our economies with virtually nothing left for a privileged class to decide. And our decisions, though made in a context of imperialism, aren’t being made for personal wealth but state power.

No there cannot be a fair form of capitalism because it is centered on exchange. You have to center your life on turning your time into a profit to afford the whole rest of society’s product also sold at a profit, at its most basic level it is unsustainable.

Turns out to have warring tribes you need to be organized enough to carry out a war.

I rather enjoyed GTAO but then I remembered that I was bankrolled by a cheater very early on. Not sure I would have loved it if I had to grind for money instead of immediately buying everything I ever wanted.

Yes they’re all liberals. That’s what I said. The guy was like ‘where blue states I thought you said libral’ and so I had to clarify that in this context the word applies to both not just blue.

You’re replying to a hexbear user. When they use the label “Liberals” it includes the folks you immediately think of but it also includes conservatives., as in economic liberalism.

I have thought about this for far longer than warranted I think it comes down to a combination of several factors.

The first is that substitutions among video games are indirect at best. Paradox for example makes strategy games but a fair portion of their fans call them “Paradox games” because of the particular connotations cultivated by their DLC campaigns, multi-year support and mechanical granularity. Also within the strategy genre are the Total War series of games produced by Creative Assembly, fans of that series are throwing fits on YouTube because the handling of the series has been dreadful in their eyes. No competitors have emerged yet to make an alternative Total War experience and several fans were excited about the final entry in a trilogy within the series so the sunk cost fallacy keeps them around.

The second is that any video game player born before about 2003 has witnessed the maturation of the video game industry as we know it. As the rate at which profit is earned in the industry falls, practices and standards change to recoup perceived losses. In video games this manifests in unusually tangible ways for the consumer. Instead of entering cheat codes left in for debugging purposes, you buy power ups with real money. Instead of unlocking alternate outfits and characters by completing challenges or secrets you buy them with real money. Instead of a game having to wait until it is finished to be sold, publishers leverage internet connectivity to ship first and patch later. Many of these practices are striking to the consumer because they are monetizing aspects of their hobby that they once enjoyed at no extra cost, and these practices are appearing in a context of escapism.

Another successful comedy amputation. Good work doctor.