before anyone says Microsoft/Xbox are idiots and are sabotaging themselves… yes they are but also this strategy is an extremely successful longterm strategy so long as you have enough money to survive the temporary collapse and can buy up large chunks of the industry during the downswing.

Eventually if you keep doing this then you own most of the industry and neither developers nor gamers have any choice but to accept the crap you serve them. Problem solved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own “too many games” if you keep buying them and then… oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!

When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn’t to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol…

No shit

Yes but part of the selling point a lot of the time does perversely come back to US-centric companies providing the leaders of Governments and Corporations a Backdoor-As-A-Service product to force upon those lower down in the pecking order.

In a sense this AI bubble is really two things, it is partially a bullshit bubble full of idiots and it is partially an embodiment of the basic philosophy of Sun Tzu demonstrating the act of losing a war before it has ever begun by becoming obsessed with pouring everything into a costly illusion that only the elite are really enamored by.

The same thing with the F35, that thing is a thesis and world monument to the philosophy that the way to win a war is by making the opponent lose on multiple levels before you begin the outright war part. It doesn’t matter how well the F35 works or doesn’t work, the amount of resources and waste have already “lost a war” entirely from the diversion of a Trillion plus dollars of resources that could have transformed the US in any number of other more productive directions. The F35 already lost an entire war before it ever even fought in a battle.

Oh yeah, I am livid about that ughh.

I hate Android with a bloodcurdling passion but yes.

Apple has the most condescending design philosophy I know of and I will never tolerate the degree of suffocation Apple imposes on devices you have purchased and own.

Also Android has F-Droid which makes Android categorically superior to iOS.

https://f-droid.org/en/

Get all of your core basic apps like flashlight apps, image gallery apps, file browser apps etc… from F-Droid.

Samsung? I hate samsung and yet I have an older used flagship samsung phone and ultimately that is what I recommend doing with Android, always buy near top of the line phones (samsung or otherwise), just go used and older until you hit a price point you are comfortable with. This reduces the headaches you will run into with Android a lot since you are always getting the experience Android was meant to give and that designers focused on especially when it comes to the hardware and camera + camera app.

I recommend Swappa for buying used electronics/phones since the website is dedicated to only those kinds of sales and provides a lot of confidence and comfort vs. buying off a random ebay seller.

https://swappa.com/

edit ALSO on Android you can change your launcher/homescreen, the idea that you can’t do this on iOS blows my mind even though it doesn’t surprise me…

Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.

It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.

Meh just accelerate with F-force and then switch to G-force when you are up to speed and vice versa when slowing down, problem solved!

One of the most difficult skills you have to learn as an artist is when to stop extracting, when to stop squeezing, when to let go and let something grow into a living thing far bigger than you.

Business majors and finance people are monomaniacally obsessed with extracting and squeezing until they smash their environment into a brickwall, at which point their job begins and they can scoop up valuable debris from the resulting calamity for cheap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

Ok well than go clean your room.

You can still get good news about cancer… in the relative sense.

I fucking hate business majors, get them the hell out of video game development.

You can’t run a videogame company if you think like a business suit.

More like ‘carpet bombed a lot of bridges’ repeatedly while condescending all the screaming.