(Arguably)UnethicalLifeProTips

Entirely seriously, learn how to make a game in Godot.

Its literally completely free, only costs you time, and assumes you have at least some kind of existing computer, doesn’t need to be a monster rig.

Alternatively: Find a video game you like.

Make mods for it.

Here’s another one that’s basically free:

Becoming/Staying fit, gaining strength and agility.

Make ‘weights’ out of milk jugs with water in them.

Maybe get a resistance band or two, they’re not that pricey.

You can absolutely do a ton of stretches, calisthenics, and light to modetate muscle group workouts with basically just random shit lying around a typical home or apartment.

You can find basic guides for these excercises often just freely available from reputable medical organizations.

You can literally just go on a 20 minute walk, 3 times a week, and be in better physical shape than something like half of the US adult population.

Back to computer shit:

Blender is free.

Learn 3D modelling, rigging, UV wrapping, how texturing works, how to make animations, etc.

Same with Krita.

Become artist. Draw stuff good.

You can find probably literally millions of free tutorials for how to do basic and intermediate level concepts.

Whsitling/Singing/Voice Acting.

These are developable skills much more so than they are just… things you either can or cannot do, for some reason.

You can teach yourself how to do these, again to a basic or intermediate level, for pretty much free.

Same thing with at least some kinds of dancing.

If you’re feeling more EXTREME: Parkour and/or Urbex.

Lockpicking.

Go find the Lockpicking Lawyer on youtube.

Pretty sure he can recommend you a not too pricey basic starter kit for learning the basics.

… I could go on, but my hands are tired from what I’m going to call ‘autism posting’, one of my totally free, personal hobbies that I often indulge in.

… so long as it does not materially impact your ability to provide basic necessities for your own wellbeing, food, water, shelter, some level of climate control, etc.

… and you are not directly, indirectly, or functionally spending other people’s money on your hobbies.

Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.

They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don’t.

A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?

Yeah, they’re now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.

Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.

Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don’t blame them, it is absurdly complex.

Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics… while also being more performant, running on older hardware.

Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you’re not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.

EDIT: 12 polygons you say?

Runs on anything, you say?

… ok, hear me out:

What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is… what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?

Man if there was a game like that, you’d have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.

(This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)

A… commerce degree?

Forgive my American dialect, but is that… Canadian… for a Business degree?

Uh anyway, myself having degrees in Econ and Poli Sci, here’s my attempt at explaining it, at this late date:

Sunk Cost Fallacy.

IE, its now essentially its own self-perpetuating delusion, its own bubble all in and of itself.

How did it get to this point?

Uh, Elon is a con artist.

See the same part of the Poli Sci textbooks that attempt to answer ‘Why do people who are directly, negatively impacted by Republican policies keep voting for them?’

Though at that point we may need to just delve more into Psychology, groupthink, socially performed identities, cults, etc.

Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.

And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.

… Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.

Most permaonline ‘hardcore’ gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming ‘journalists’, and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers… they’re all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.

This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.

Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.

At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.

People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically ‘decade of investment’ game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.

In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.

… on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.

Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable… make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.

… and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.

… the ‘temporarily embarassed millionaire’ has ‘aspirational’ capital, in a fanciful, idealized future.

AKA, ‘The American Dream’

Its a kind of faith-based magical thinking, delusion.

Which, as George Carlin let us all know, I think over a decade ago now…

… ‘you have to be asleep, to believe.’

He has LOD order precedence/scaling set in a manner that makes sense for his use case.

I would imagine possibly also oclusion face culling as well, given that the tree is practically unobservable from many angles, for users with uh, other rendering configurations… so long as they obey the laws of physics.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

One of the very few M rated GameCube games… and, as far as I know, has a unique core sanity mechanic that fairly routinely breaks the fourth wall, aimed at driving you, the player, at losing your own sanity, not merely depicting this happening to your character.

Also, IIRC, the first iteration of Pikmin, a genuienly novel kind of game. Luigi’s Mansion, also a pretty unique kind of game.

Oh, and they remade Metal Gear Solid on it, with better graphics than the PS1.

Yeah ok so you’re levered up, think everyone else doing the same thing are ‘fucking stupid’ ‘idiots’, dumber than you, because you have the secret sauce to doing it slightly differently.

I will now quote my original comment:

… you’ve got the day traders, and they almost always get their clocks cleaned, they just develop a neurotic-obsessive personality based on ‘no, I’m the one guy that can outsmart the market’.

I didn’t expect one to actually appear, but, well hey there ya go.

I guess I should also amend ‘grandiose narcissist’ to my psych profile of the kind of person that does what you’re doing.

Here, lemme throw the ZeroHedge motto at you:

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

Good luck with your dance.

… I don’t know what half those words mean.

I know loli is basically drawn, prepubescent girls.

I don’t know what a lolishota is.

And I am afraid to look it up, lol.

I also do not know what an … ‘anit’ … is?

… right.

At no point did you deny that you’re using leverage.

Which means that if your understanding of ‘how it all works’ is… wrong… in any significant way…

Well then your personal situation unwinds in a micro version of how the rest of the economy currently is.

Your strategy relies on never making a significant mistake.

Statistically, you will.

Oh right, also this:

A few million is nothing.

Maybe enough to confidently own a pretty nice home.

Assuming the starving mob doesn’t visit you.

In terms of fixing society?

That’s roughly on the scale of helping hundreds or thousands in your local community, on an ongoing basis.

Nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

… A couple million?

Jeff Bezos makes ~3 million dollars in a single hour.

An hour.

Try and square that, really try and think about that.

That house you wanna get, that non profit you wanna set up?

That you took huge risks for, for multiple years, some how lucky enough to never fuck up?

That’s an hour of Jeff sleeping.

He could see your house, or envision that non profit in a dream, and then on a whim, just buy 8 of them when he wakes up.

The solution to this, to trying to fix society, is not trying to beat them at their own game.

The solution is breaking the rules of the game.

After all… that’s how they got to be where they are.

… did you ever get the Mew out of the back of the truck, lol?

I lost track after Gold/Silver/Crystal, so it stops at 251 for me.

No, it has a custom name, so this is a Pokemon that has already been caught.

Wild Pokemon do not have custom names.

So… yeah, she woke it up, summoned it, for this.

Ironically, Bidet will be unable to fulfill their… nomative deterministic function… if they do not have enough PP for Water Gun.

… where PP stands for Power Point(s), in Pokemon lingo, the number of times a Pokemon can use a specific move.

I mean… the … implication is still that she’s going to use the poor penguin… just its… water gun ability… as opposed to… being a literal asswipe.

I mean… I can see why people are weirded out by this, but also… it really doesn’t have to be a sexual thing.

You could put Ash, or Silver or whoever in this position… its… not like guys cannot also use bidets… and its not like the concept of running out of toilet paper, or using a bidet, is inherently sexual.

Sure, it can be, if that’s actually your fetish.

But it doesn’t have to be.

What, she has a semi risque, bikini type thong thing, as underwear?

Uh… when I was the age of this character (10-12 apparently, depending on which game she’s in)…

I would stand at the bus stop for school, and one neighborhood girl, same age as me, would brag about wearing one of these, have it hiked up past her pants/shorts waist line, and keep trying to get me to do dares or favors so I could ‘see more of it’.

I was also friends with less uh… attention seeking girls, and a few years later, I’m getting invited to their slumber parties (mostly to marathon a season of Buffy, sometimes Toonami, eventually Venture Bros) because I’m actually respectful, trustworthy, and keep my hands to myself.

What I’m trying to say is:

What this character is depicted as wearing was not an uncommon kind of girl’s undergarment bottom, even 20 years ago.

Not all girls wear granny panties.

Its not inherently sexualizing, to be wearing a fairly common kind of underwear.

I think the point of this is to be embarassing and awkward… ‘cringe’, even… not fetishistic.