Sidebar, but the nominees for this year’s TGAs are ridiculous. It’s the same ~7 games shoehorned into every category they can, and a few others sprinkled in where they can’t.

You’d think there were only like 20 games that released this year that were good.

Some games that released this year, but snubbed by TGA in favor of kissing up to the same games n times over:

• Hades 2
• V Rising
• Satisfactory
• Mouthwashing
• Factorio: Space Age
• SULFUR
• Rise of the Golden Idol

Probably none. Now I’ll name one that is large and influential, and isn’t trying to combat the problem: X

No, bots are not real people, so them masquerading as real people holding an opinion is, by definition, misinformation.

This isn’t misinformation.

Right, the other example is. The whole point is the difference between propaganda (the bots) and legitimate political sentiment (all real people). Given that Musk is actively choosing not to combat misinformation bots on his platform, it’s fair to step in.

When these crappy "AI"s finally do displace my job, I will become a fireman, but in the Fahrenheit 451 sense, and it’ll be servers instead of books.

I think it’s important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it’s an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.

If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don’t like Musk’s shitty personal opinions, I’d agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that’s perfectly valid.

Take 2 scenarios:

5 million actual people telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.

500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.

In reality, you don’t even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.

tl;dr This isn’t about banning the viewpoints themselves, it’s about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.

Banning things you don’t like is not a solution

Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.

I want to pay them for Bloodborne on PC, but Sony won’t let me! Sounds like that’s their choice/ problem.

Truly curious, what did she do that was corrupt and/or racist?

that goes out the window when you start suggesting “restorative justice” for someone who shot a baby.

I mean, it’s got to apply equally to everyone. Not everyone may be open to, or able to be reformed, so some will need to be kept apart from society, but you can’t apply a different standard of justice based on how you feel about someone.

Por que no los dos?

Reading further, it’s a pretty compelling argument that sanctions are the root cause, and this kind of instability and pressure is exactly what sanctions are meant to bring about.

I think it would probably become “2X” in that case, given the “exploit” and “exterminate” parts. :P

Against the Storm is sort of a citybuilder/ 4X hybrid, that’s all about a bunch of fantasy species (humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies) working together to reclaim the world from this (un)natural blight.

The Bustling World is an RPG/ Citybuilder/ 4X hybrid that looks pretty interesting, but is not out yet.

I can’t really think of a 4X that leans towards the Grand Strategy side, that isn’t pretty combat-heavy. Distant Worlds: Universe can be played without focusing on combat, but it’s definitely still there.

I’ve played 8.2 hours of BO:BB according to Steam, and it feels much closer to the OG Ghost Recon ( +Desert Siege and Island Thunder)… BUT right now the AI is pretty mediocre (and often breaks entirely and enemies just sort of stand there), and the shooting doesn’t feel as good as Ready or Not.

Incursion: Red River is a singleplayer + co-op extraction shooter that feels very Ghost Recon.

holy shit, fucking MICROPROSE is still around!? LETSGOOOOOOOO

Little side-tangent, but @trslim@pawb.social if you like base-building RTSes, you should check out Earth 2150 if you have not already. It’s old, but it’s imo one of the best out there.

• There are 3 factions, each with their own campaign, and very different styles of units, and during the campaign you have a home base that you build, and from which you can build and send out units to your in-progress missions (i.e. build a tank in your homebase, load it into a helicopter, send the helicopter to your in-mission base’s landing zone, and unload tank for use… and vice-versa for keeping units that you build in the mission zone, etc).
• Eurasian Dynasty is very traditional tanks and helicopters, and ballistic weapons
• United Civil States is bipedal walkers and sleek hovering aircraft, and uses energy weapons
• Lunar Corporation is space-y hovercraft with arcing, electric weapons and AOE pulse weapons
• There’s tunnel-building and tunnel warfare, which is so damn cool…
• There’s unit customization, like choosing the types of weapons for the tanks, building giant bipedal walkers with 3 different weapon systems, etc
• There are aircraft and boats, not just ground units
• You are using the resources you farm in the mission locations to construct a giant colony ship to escape from Earth, which is a great mechanic to give you a reason to actually extract resources other than just to build more units

Now I have to go reinstall it… xD

There are also Earth 2140 and Earth 2160, but I never fell in love with those 2 (Earth 2160 isn’t bad, and has a cool alien faction that is basically a roaming mothership that builds units, rather than a traditional ‘base’).

Yeah, this one was wild. A bunch of our ballot measures went badly, including the heavier sentencing for drugs one getting overwhelming support, even among Democrats. The minimum wage increase also get rejected.

This was apparently the election where people decided to be their worst selves.

Honestly, I’d love to see a month-long pause on discussing the presidential race itself.

State-level stuff, ballot measures, etc, no problem, but IMO there’s not going to be any productive discussion of the presidential race right now; there’s still too little information, too many emotions, etc.

That aside, (because that’s not the kind of thing that should happen without the community agreeing to it) I know that I’m probably part of the problem because Politics is where I tend to comment the most, and I’m going to stick to discussions of what to do next rather than wasting any more energy on litigating what went wrong at this point.

I have my suspicions about what happened, but that’s all they are as of right now, same as anyone else. But I do know for sure that I’m pissed off, and I know that I’m not going to be able to keep it from affecting how I engage with people if we get into an argument.

I’m just glad we all have this community, because it’s definitely an anchor-point for me right now (and thank you, mods, for all your work maintaining it).

So until failed neoliberalism stops failing, we have to keep supporting it? Seems a little backwards. If mediocre neoliberalism was beating fascism, I’d be more okay with getting behind it.

Why keep supporting the losers and thinking they’ll miraculously turn into winners?

After Biden dropped out, I was cheerleading for Harris. I didn’t like her policies, but she had much better chances than Biden, and it seemed like she understood what pitfalls to avoid.

Didn’t matter. The DNC doesn’t understand what is needed to win. They’re still running a playbook from 1996. They think the undecideds are in between them and the GOP, when in actuality they’re to the Left.

Instead, the DNC has now absorbed a bunch of “never Trumper” repubs who clearly aren’t willing to vote for a woman, but will let a geriatric white guy eke out a win if you promise not to do the social justice.

I think the DNC being a “big tent” party has allowed it to accept a large number of very questionable supporters, who for instance won’t vote for women, and who think that Cop City and broken windows policing is totally fine akshually, and whose jaws don’t drop when someone says to “send social workers into the homes” of black parents…

Ultimately, we probably will never know exactly which demo(s) sat out, and everyone will end up just interpreting their own side as the right path forwards. Depressing stuff.

I did, absolutely. I’m much more suspicious of the older, more Centrist people who told me they didn’t think America was “ready to elect a woman”. I suspect that most of them really meant they weren’t ready, and sat out.

My nephew is trans, with an openly hostile anti-trans father (my POS Trumper brother, who luckily does not live with his kids), and lives in a swing state that went red last night. Very worried for him and every other trans person in this shit hole.

I’m also pissed off that, based on the numbers we’re seeing, this is the second time that Democrat voters across the country have sat out rather than elect a woman. Honestly, I shouldn’t even be surprised anymore.

Stay strong, everyone, things are gonna get rough.

The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren’t making anyone racist, they’re just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, “yeah, if you’re in this town after sundown and you’re not white, we’re gonna hang you” (which it’s important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).

Since they can’t do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of “justice” (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren’t there, they just make them up.

Sadly true.