I kind of like it. You can tell where their reach exceeds their grasp a little, and some things could use tweaking.

I would ask for more map and more render distance but not a lot else.

It's unapologetically horny, which was annoying and childish in 2009 but is now somewhat refreshing.

Further updates if I finish it I guess I'm only in act 1. Also, it has explicit acts.

(One thing I do like is that the city is covered in Nazi installations, and if you destroy them they stay destroyed. The gameplay benefit of destroying them is that they aren't there anymore, which is very direct. The more you do stuff in an area, the easier it is to dodge Nazi pursuit in that area. I find myself naturally fleeing to areas I've spent time clearing out when hunted, which is a ludonarrative chord for sure)



amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

No, really like. The thing that was probably like. THE BIG radicalizing moment from "I don't like it at all but what are we gonna do, tell people how to spend their money, they worked for it", before I even realized that no one "works for" even a single billion, before all of that fell into place, the thing is that they're so fucking unhappy. Like. They're miserable! They're historically miserable, the ultra-rich! Even a lot of the comic-book fictional ones are miserable! They are not happy people and you'd think. You'd think that having more money than Jesus Christ's Vampire Sister could spend in her younger brother's lifetime would free you up to have hobbies. Shower theaters in grants to put on opulent productions tailored to your tastes. Singlehandedly set up fandom conventions for your personal interests. Go to a movie every night and eat at a different restaurant just because. Take up Warhammer without worrying about the cost of having THE BEST battle setup in your basement. Hell, indulge in my personal dream of having a fully 3D-modeled megadungeon and loot for your personal fantasy RPG campaign and provide all your players with lovingly detailed miniatures. Fund a season of Dimension20 laser-targeted at your interests. Find a fanfic author and say "for the next 3 years, make sure I have a stream of my special interest characters". Joyously indulge in your favorite activities. Learn to paint. Meet people into your kinks, I don't know, ANYTHING. I'm not even talking about "oh, fund 100,000 peoples' college tuition and buy up 300,000 more peoples' student debt per year just to cancel", this is just... personal happiness. They're completely joyless. Utterly miserable people.

Instead the only time I've seen a billionaire remotely happy, on a deep level, more than just a little "haha, ok" smile, is when Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a fistfight and Zuckerberg fuckin, he came to life, it was like someone lit a spark in him, for a brief moment it was "oh my god I'm not alone, someone cares" and just

how terrible is that? How awful, that you're on top of the world, and you cannot be happy? You have everything, you want for nothing, we are literally built for pleasure and you can't find it with everything at your disposal?

This isn't some pseudo-mystic connection to "oh, but suffering is important, suffering is what lets us be human, remove suffering and we are no longer human" or any bullshit like that; my mysticism has a place for suffering but not like that. This is just like.

Realizing that they can't even be happy it's like, where did your soul go? What is the point of your life? Why do you live like this? HOW can you live like this? I may struggle for brief moments of happiness but I have them, how can you have less happiness than I do when you have more of everything else? How have you mutilated your essential humanity like this, to the point where you're unrecognizable to me, where if I look into your eyes I don't know what I'd see looking back at me?

Yeah anyway that was one of the big radicalization moments for me, and the rest toppled from there.


argent-ions
@argent-ions

I think the reason why all billionaires are Like That is because only people Like That become billionaires. If you can feel joy, there's some amount of money where once you have it you are faced with doing the things you love and only the things you love and you never have to do anything you don't want to do ever again.

And that's way way less than a billion dollars. So anyone who has that much money passed the Pina Colada Threshold long ago, and didn't stop.

(For example, myspace Tom. He has a photography business and nobody recognizes him by name or face and he likes that just fine. Presumably there are hundreds more just like him. Most rich people you know the name of like making money more than anything else in the world. And how sad is that?)



victoria-scott
@victoria-scott

september 12, 2021

when you crest the hill leading out of Tonopah, NV on US-95, heading North towards Reno, if it's a clear morning, you will be greeted with a second sun. It is the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project installation and it's deceptively far away from the town; the incredible power of its light makes it feel tangible immediately but it's a 15-mile drive down a service road to reach it.

I first went there for a variety of reasons: yes, as a transfemme, I did play (at least most of) Fallout: New Vegas, where a structure inspired by this one makes a prominent appearance. My friend atomicthumbs has done art photography here that greatly inspired me.

The main reason I drove towards it though is that it's just striking. After days of driving in the desert and not seeing a structure taller than three stories, a massive tower glowing with the strength of the sun, visible from 20 miles away, inspired a sense of religious awe in me.

I have been planning and hoping to someday make a photo project that concludes here; as most of you know, post-apocalyptic photography and stories are my niche, and I cannot think of a better way to weave a myth into a tale than with a 650-foot tall sun inexplicably glowing in the middle of the desert.


argent-ions
@argent-ions

it's like the sun i have seen the three versions of this between las vegas and reno. most memorably in the late afternoon headed east towards las vegas the sun is mostly behind you and these three pinpricks of SUN are like star-shards fixed in place on top of gantries. they have god rays and everything. it's a lot. The real sun is behind you, but the artifice suns are here.



AndreL
@AndreL

The settlement of the University of California strike is a really big deal. [LA Times article].

In the short term the pay raises are huge: a 46% increase in starting pay for graduate student assistantships. And UC Postdocs will be among the highest paid in the world, making more than starting faculty at many colleges.

In the medium term, academics at every other US university are paying attention. Many will doubtless unionize soon, and some will strike.

But I suspect the biggest impact will be long term. UC has 26,000 graduate students and 6,600 postdocs, all of whom have now seen first-hand what a strike can do. Ten years from now many of them will be faculty across the country, or taking industry positions. This strike could signal a generational change to unionization in academia.

Update 2023-01-25: Rebuttals have been posted by JVB, argent-ions, and Ty-Foxface. And I suspect @UCAccessNow also disagrees with me. (I don't work for UC and wasn't on strike.)


argent-ions
@argent-ions

the UAW does not really know how to run an academic strike and made a real pig's ear of it. most of the pay increases are after 2.5 years, which for a 3 year contract ahem 'sucks shit' if i may use a technical term. very little remains of the diversity or access parts of the striker's platform. importantly there is no cost-of-living-adjustment so we're back to square 1 in three years. most pressingly there was no return to work agreement, so now the university that fundamentally doesn't know who struck paid everyone, uaw paid everyone out of the strike fund, and some people who got paid twice paid rent with that money, so its gone. now legally someone has to get paid back(because there's no return to work agreement!) and it's a real shitshow. so. fuck uaw, but it beats not having a union!