I cannot exaggerate to you that this 100% fulfils the negative perceptions of European governments that American isolationists have. The article says they cut Ukraine funding to fund social programs. The right-wing narrative in America is that needing to have the huge military is why we have a weak social safety net (not true btw, med4all for example would save Uncle Sam money) which is framed as “we pay for European social programs.” But here’s a government… literally cutting military spending in the middle of aiding a real war that could be highly consequential to the country in question to fund social programs.

How is an American supposed to argue in favor of funding the defense of Europe when the richest country in Europe doesn’t want to fund the defense of Europe? If Germany gets to decide to go for “Germany first,” how long until “Britain first?” “France first?” “Italy first?” Will Ukraine funding just be a hot potato that everyone will claim is important but nobody actually wants to do?

When European countries started raising military spending in response to a threat, it weakened American isolationist arguments. But this strengthens them. I hope no other European countries pull this shit.

France really is just America in a different language and on a time delay.

Nobody in America believes “art will change the world” shit anymore. For good reason.

I personally think that’s the only likely scenario where there’d be war on American soil.

Game Pass is a profoundly stupid decision. It doesn’t make it’s money back and now Xbox users are used to not paying for games. And from a consumer perspective, enshittification always eventually happens with subscriptions.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Kirby Planet Robobot for the same reason: while not the most innovative games and not necessarily my favorites in their respective franchises, they represent nearly flawless implementations of their respective franchise’s ideas.

Sometimes I feel like Mario and a couple popular indie games are the only platformers that get taken seriously honestly.

Terraria.

Because to me Terraria feels more like a freer version of a Metroidvania than a survival game. And while you start weak you get downright overpowered.

If the game has a good enough character creator I’ll play a male. But most games and especially most Western games with character creators don’t allow me to make a male character I’d actually want to look like or at.

They were originally on Gamepedia, which got bought out by Fandom.

I’m about as old as OP, but every time I remember that my generation grew up on mostly 360/PS3 it reminds me that I was weird, my dad got an Original Xbox when it came out, which was the year I was born, and even though we had a Wii, I think we actually played games on OG Xbox more (we relied on the Wii to access the internet through neighbors’ unprotected Wi-Fi for a while though.)

I could see there being fatigue with particular genres of indie games (Metroidvanias, Rougelites, First-Person Horror without combat, speedrunner-oriented 2D platformers) but not with the very concept.

I’d say they are. “Mom groups who want to play Animal Crossing-esque games” certainly aren’t what I’d think of when I’d think “dedicated gaming enthusiasts,” at least not what most people are thinking of.

Steam Deck lacks publicity relative to Nintendo Switch or even traditional PC gaming, but the product itself is absolutely more accessible than traditional PC gaming, even if not as accessible as consoles.

Street Fighter V.

That was a mistake.

Basically all games of note going all the way back to the OG Xbox

I’d think:

1. Gaming PC (PC games plus emulation of most systems, including Android and arcades)

2, 3, and 4. Some combination of three systems with large exclusive libraries for which emulation isn’t quite there yet or have unique features that make emulation suboptimal (Sega Saturn, Original Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii U, PS3, and PS5 come to mind)

Also just due to sheer age, which makes it the platform with the most games period, dating back to 1995 (I know it’s getting harder to run Windows 95/98 games now but it should still be possible with effort for a lot of games, unless Windows 11 got rid of something)

GIMP is way too complicated for what MS Paint gets used for, I’d easily argue it’s harder to use than Photoshop.

Paint Dot Net is a happy medium but that’s also Windows only IIRC

That is however, with the caveat that all Xbox games have to run on Series S as well.

Personally I want the Fediverse to become the norm. So that means not having an opinion on what sort of content I do/don’t want. I get why people like the “secret club” vibe but secret clubs of smarter-than-average people don’t make the world a better place. Letting the masses do what they always did in a better way does.

That’s not to say I’m pro-Threads; I don’t think gaining users through a single massive server which will be the way 90% of users engage with the Fediverse and can kneecap other servers that don’t follow their rules (which particularly worries me because of their ban on porn; I think most popular Fediverse servers ban porn, but not all, and with Facebook it’s clearly in the name of “advertiser friendly”) is healthy growth for the idea of federation.

No.

I do think Valve not being publicly traded allows them to be different in some ways such as the flat structure (“enshittification” as defined by Doctrow doesn’t apply to Valve because there are no shareholders to please) but there’s nothing “left” politically about Valve. Some of it I think is just not having to look good to shareholders allowing Valve to make actual good business decisions.

Valve’s support of free software is because during the Windows 8 era Newell gained the fear that Microsoft would phase out Win32 in favor of UWP, cutting into Steam’s business big-time. Microsoft definitely isn’t going to pull that now that Windows Phone and the Start Screen concept both died and they’ve stated they no longer see UWP alone as the future, but I do think Valve administration still thinks it’s best for their business to not rely on Microsoft’s whims.

Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 are arena shooters. Unreal (1998) and Quake 1 are not; Unreal and Quake 1 aren’t multiplayer focused.

One might say “arena shooter” has retroactively become a subgenre of “boomer shooter.”