nosignono

The US president has been an emperor in all but title for generations at least.

The collapse of an empire is correct. USA is absolutely an empire, and we're clearly seeing unprecedented contractions and spasms of our government as it ineffectually attempts to govern while doing everything it can to foment civil agitation.

It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.

This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.

> Do people play video games to look at pretty scenery?

Yes.

> No most people are testing skills in video games

That's not mutually exclusive with playing for scenery.

Games, like all art, have different communities that enjoy them for different reasons. Some people do not want their skills tested at all by a game. Some people want the maximum skill testing. Some want to experience novel fantasy places, some people want to experience real places. Some people want to tell complex weaving narratives, some people want to optimize logistics.

A game like Flower is absolutely a game about looking at pretty scenery and not one about testing skill.

If the fidelity of the video is high enough, you could use SFM to build point clouds from the generated video frames and essentially do photogrammatry on the assets from a genie video.

You don't have to do it in real time, per se. I imagine a world in which the renderer and the world generation are decoupled. For example, you could descriptively articulate what you wanted to achieve and have it generate a world, quietly do some structure from motion (or just generate the models and textures), and those those as assets in a game engine for the actual moment to moment rendering.

You'd have some "please wait in this lobby space while we generate the universe" moments, but those are easy to hide with clever design.

It is that difficult, otherwise everyone would do it.

I find my compulsion towards videogames is decreased. Not eliminated, but I feel much less compelled to be playing all the time.

Weird. I tore up my lawn and replaced with wildflowers, native perennials, deep mulch from local leaf litter, and a small vegetable plot. I don't think I robbed the local ecosystem in the slightest. In fact, I'm fairly confident I did the opposite. But you seem convinced it's axiomatic that planting a garden robs the local ecosystem...

> It's not even clear until like the last dozen episodes that Zeon is evil.

Zeon is literally portrayed as eugenicist Nazis early in the show. They literally chant "Sieg Zeon!" while saluting. Literally the very first episode shows Zeon dropping a space colony on Earth, essentially nuking a major population center (and says half the civilian population dies in the war.)

It's pretty clear Zeon is evil. What's unclear initially is that it was the Zabi family that made it evil.

Originally, Zeon was an idealistic movement by an essentially leftist philosopher (Zeon Deikun) whose work was co-opted by a militant autocratic family (the Zabi family). The leftist guy gets assassinated, and a big part of the series is watching his son, Char (the primary antagonist of the show) trying to take down the Zabi's while fighting for independence from the Federation.

> My only complaint is that I am a grown-ass man and shouldn't be tearing up every other episode of a children's cartoon...

Or maybe you should! Maybe we shouldn't be making people feel bad for being emotional! Maybe it's really successful art to be making so many people feel so strongly!

It's more complex than that. That's like saying planting a garden robs the local ecosystem. Maybe! Maybe not!

Native pollinators have different life cycles and different plants they evolved to get food from. Honeybees, likewise, will only visit some flowering plants. That may increase competition for scarce resources, or it may not.

You are correct that honeybees are non-native, and that honeybees do draw a few lbs of nectar and pollen every day from the environment (up to a 3 mile radius from their hive), but it's unclear how much of that nectar and pollen is surplus from the plants or removed such that local bees experience pressure.

Sorry, I should have included -- in the context of the story. They are of course, not agents. They are fictional characters in a videogame.

But humans built them, and humans framed them in the camera. Those humans did have the choice to provide them with a setting in which the characters do or do not have that agency. Those humans chose whether or not to depict that agency.

Art reflects something about the creator, and often (but definitely not always) it's the values of the creator. If the authors choose to depict a world in which the character has no agency (within their setting), then perhaps the authors did not feel it was important or valuable to do so. Likewise, if the authors do depict a world in which the characters have agency, perhaps the authors feel it is valuable.

But even detached from authorial intent, art is subject to critique -- we can look at a piece of art, knowing nothing of the creator, and ask, "What themes do we draw here? What values does this work put forward?" Kotor 2 raises many interesting questions about pedigogy and teaching, for instance. One critical read is that it is a piece of art that believes you should absolutely question the motivations of the people who want to teach you. Another thing Kotor 2 seems to value is women can (or even should) be objectified (in the case of the handmaiden) or instrumentalized (in the case of Kreia).

None of the above requires you to recognize that the characters are agents within our world or have agency here.

They absolutely work. I'm a parent, my kid plays games. I have yet to have any concerning close calls with NSFW content. People who make adult games (by and large) don't want kids to play their games.

If the platform doesn't want kids to see them, and the creators don't want kids to see them, it's pretty easy for kids to not see them.

If creators, platforms, and users all say, I would prefer to not see the content, it's pretty easy to make that happen.

There's plenty of hard core material on Amazon as well, fwiw.

In a videogame, I can think of some examples.

In Kotor 2, there's a character called "The Handmaiden", who will join your party if the player character is a male. She talks at great length about her situation and the decisions the player should make. She's depicted as a chaste, virginal religious character. But one of the very first things you can do with her when she joins your party is spar with her. And she strips into black lingerie to do so. Then she stays in black lingerie on your ship while you go and do other stuff.

She's clearly there as an object for the audience to drool over. It's given a very surface level justification ("we always spar with only our bodies"), but that justification is provided the instant before the player sees her in her undies. (Which, it's important to note, aren't like modest undergarments one might expect from a religious figure like this, but are specifically sexy underwear.)

Compare this to another Star Wars game, Jedi: Fallen Order, where the Night Sister Mirrin can becomes romantically involved with the player character. She has a well developed culture, and is given space to articulate her personality, choices, and opinions in a cogent way. She can be a romantic interest without being an object. She is as complex as all the other characters, and we don't see her positioned in sexy lingerie suddenly out of the blue.

I can come up with other examples if those aren't illustrative.

Weirdly, Amazon sells TONS of porn and NSFW content, and yet doesn't lose their Visa/Mastercard processing.

Game of Thrones, both the books and the show, contain content much, much more explicit than many of these games. Yet Itch and Steam have to pull stuff or their very existence is threatened.

> That being said they should probably sell them on different website.

Why? (Genuinely)

Why are filters not sufficient? If I enjoy adult games and non-adult games, why should I have to manage two storefronts?

It has to do with agency, primarily. Is the character in the media given the agency and depth necessary to support their sexual appetites? Or are they treated like an object by the camera, a 2 dimensional cutout whose purpose is only to be an object.

Compare, for example, Sex and the City, where 4 women were regularly engaged in a variety of sexual encounters and say, background dancers in a music video or advert that exist to appeal as objects to a male audience.

There exist sex-negative feminists, but it is wrong to describe that as a feminist position.

For the better part of a decade feminists have been wildly anti-objectification, not anti-sex. It's an important distinction.

For example, most modern feminists are pro sex-work, but only under conditions that guarantee safety, autonomy, and health care for the sex workers. That's very different from how most sex work is done today. So a modern feminist might say that we should be doing more to protect the sex workers who are held in bondage by a pimp, and forced to walk the streets while simultaneously arguing in favor of well regulated, protected brothels or private sex work.

Murder is not the only violent crime. Please don't construct such obviously poor strawmen. Both men and women suffer similar rates of violence, albeit typically different violence.

Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.

This is absolutely a wedge to censor LGBTQ+ content. If you can separately argue that adult content should be blocked and LGBTQ+ themes are for adults, then you can block queer content online en masse.

Visa and Mastercard have too much power, and are too willing to capitulate.

The FBI & DEA definitely did an investigation and came to the conclusion that, at a minimum, not all the safeties on the firearm work as designed. https://www.outdoorlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/MSP-M...

I probably spoke imprecisely. I meant rushed, which has a similar but different meaning than panicked.

In general the safety rules I was taught were defense in depth -- multiple failures need to happen before someone can get hurt. So, even when you have a holstered firearm, pointing the muzzle away from people is preferable because then if it somehow does fail at least it's less likely to shoot someone.

Obviously that's not always practical, but if you are placing a chambered firearm down on a desk, you might as well try to point it in the direction of least harm, it basically costs zero to do.

When you draw from concealment, an experienced shooter needs only get their grip and an eye picture -- point gun at target and fire. You only need to train muscle memory to get into a firing position, which is also what you are regularly training every time you live fire or dry fire.

If you don't have a round chambered, you need to draw, rack and release the slide, hope a round is properly chambered (in a panicked situation you might not rack the slide properly), then get into a firing position. This is a much more complex movement and evaluation of state. You are pulling the gun up, manipulating it with two hands, then moving it forward and finding your grip. In an emergency, that time loss and complexity of motion is considerably more difficult to train.

Even experienced shooters will draw from a holster and immediately present their gun and try to fire, and then realize they don't have a round chambered, have to bring the gun back to rack the slide, and then present the gun again.

You conceal carry because you want to be prepared at an emergency to deal with an imminent threat. Adding complex manipulations to that erodes your ability to do that, and any modern pistol should not fire unless you pull the trigger. They should be safe from drops, shakes, or manipulations.

If your threat isn't "I need to have a firearm ready asap", then you should consider not conceal carrying, in which case you may want your pistol unloaded or unchambered.

This wasn't a case of an idiot, except perhaps placing the muzzle in a direction that a human would be present.

The gun was in the holster, and the entire holster was removed from the belt and placed on a desk. There's nothing in that course of action that would allow a finger or anything to get into the trigger well. The gun should absolutely not have gone off.

Yes, if you are conceal carrying, having a round chambered is typical. You don't want to have to draw and rack the slide in an emergency.

Most modern pistols have multiple internal safeties to prevent firing without a trigger pull. There's something extremely wrong with the Sig 320.

Everyone I know has been saying, for years, to not carry Sig 320s or their variants. Those things are dangerous. It's tragic it took the death of someone from what (at this point) was an entirely preventable outcome.