t3rmit3
@t3rmit3@beehaw.org
- Comment on PS5’s three best-selling digital games in April 2025 were all Microsoft titles [VGC] 5 days ago:
the capitalization of the game names is also completely unnecessary in this example
is it fine to disregard writing conventions just because its possible to understand the meaning without them
- Comment on PS5’s three best-selling digital games in April 2025 were all Microsoft titles [VGC] 6 days ago:
For anyone wondering:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5
Look at that complete lack-of-an-Oxford-comma just sitting there, mocking us.
- Comment on GTA 6's delay doesn't mean the games industry's in trouble - it's already dead 1 week ago:
R* sucks. Their asshole-simulator games-turned-live-service-cashgrabs have never represented anything but the worst of the games industry. GTA6 getting canceled would be an excellent opportunity for millions of people who would’ve bought it to spend their time playing something better.
Fight me.
- Comment on Open World Games: yay or nay? 1 week ago:
I’m a huge open world and/or sandbox nut. Non-linearity is my jam. Kenshi, Rimworld, AssOdyssey/Shadows, Project Zomboid, Witcher 3, X4…
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good story, but story takes many shapes, and not all stories are pre-written; plenty are emergent. I grew up playing with Legos (and still do), and me making whatever story I wanted (or that emerged along the way) was part of the appeal.
- Comment on Microsoft Raises the Price of All Xbox Series Consoles, Xbox Games Confirmed to Hit $80 This Holiday - IGN 1 week ago:
Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.
- Comment on Microsoft Raises the Price of All Xbox Series Consoles, Xbox Games Confirmed to Hit $80 This Holiday - IGN 1 week ago:
I don’t think they’ll do that for already-released games, but I wouldn’t put the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendon’t) from doing the barest ‘remasters’, and replacing their digital versions of those games with the ‘remasters’.
- Comment on We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites 1 week ago:
More space trash from trash corporations…
Cool tech used for boring purposes.
- Comment on After Years of Struggle, Blizzard Has Found Itself in Uncharted Territory: Overwatch Players Are Having Fun Again 1 week ago:
This is the incident that made me cancel my WoW sub, and close my Battle.net account. Never again trusting them, even under Microsoft (or rather, especially now under MS).
- Comment on The games industry is screwed. [26:11] 1 week ago:
Oh man, 2011… I’m a millennial, and even I was already out of college in 2011. My ‘kid’ games were $80 USD in the 90s. Here’s an article from 2014 that someone made about how insane N64 game prices were.
Star Fox 64 – $79.95 (Source: GamePro #106) - 1997 GoldenEye 007 – $69.95 (Source: GamePro #108) - 1997 Super Mario 64 – $66.99 (Source: GamePro #97) - 1996
According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $80 USD in 1997 is $160 today.
- Comment on From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right 1 week ago:
Obviously. The list you rattled off looks like you did a Google or YouTube search on “gaming influencer” and picked a few random names.
I didn’t Google for those, they were, as I said, the ones I do know.
Don’t spout off uneducated opinions about subjects you don’t know anything about.
I know quite a lot about the gaming space. That doesn’t require me to go look up every middling alt-right YTer or streamer.
If you have an actual take on what I posted, apart from my examples being too well-known or something, feel free to post it.
- Comment on From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right 1 week ago:
I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.
- Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
- Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
- Early Alt-right pipeline (2016-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
- Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.
Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground
You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).
It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.
No, that was never what wokeness was, it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.
- Comment on From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right 1 week ago:
they saw “woke” as a reason for why games or movies turned out bad
This only became a thing after the pipeline was established. This rhetoric is what the pipeline feeds them.
I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc. Gamergate in 2015 largely caught the notice of the Right’s political apparatus, and they saw the opportunity to convert the casual misogyny and racism into feeders for their political machine. “Woke” didn’t really become a right-wing attack in the gaming and movie spheres until pretty recently.
- Comment on From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right 1 week ago:
It’s so frustrating to see so many comments doing exactly what the post is pointing out, either deriding games as a medium, or “gamers” as some monolithic group of disaffected young men.
Games are a medium, same as books, movies, or tv. They can convey any message, and yes, many games do have Progressive (or even Leftist, see Disco Elysium) themes. But unlike TV, books, and movies, where there is a constant stream of political interaction from both Left and Right wings’ political apparatuses, there aren’t really a lot of Leftist political entities attempting to reach young men via videogames.
Name one Left-wing gaming influencer apart from Hasanbi (who it should be pointed out, many Democrats tend to hate on). I can list off at least 3 different right-wing ones off the top of my head (JonTron, Asmongold, Dr Disrespect). And that’s not even beginning to get into the gaming-adjacent Rightwing influencers who those gaming influencers direct their fans to.
It’s a pipeline, and we don’t have one on the Left.
I remember the first time AOC played Among Us, and it was a huge deal for us on the Left, because it was possibly the very first time we’d seen a Democratic politician actually engage with games publicly.
Gaming is literally the largest entertainment medium now by a large margin (yes, larger than movies and tv), but we don’t see politicians putting out lists of games to play like they do books or movies. Instead, most times we see an article about a Democratic politician somewhere like Kotaku, it’s often because they’re trying to blame video games for something.
So instead we have largely ceded the gaming sphere (not the games themselves, but the areas of discussion around gaming) to the Right. They pull in disaffected young men, tell them women and ‘wokies’ are the reason for their problems, and then hand them off to overtly political folks who transform that general disaffection into right-wing political capital.
- Comment on From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right 1 week ago:
I think you’re misunderstanding what “taking games seriously” in this instance.
The Right takes the political power of games seriously. They understand that games can be tactically used as an access route to young men, to influence their politics. They know that it is just another medium like TV or movies or books, and don’t eschew interacting with them for political purposes like Democrats traditionally have.
That’s why it was such a big deal when AOC played Among Us (and later, her and Walz streaming various games). It was a politician on the Left actually ‘deigning’ to interact with young people in a platform that they inhabit, and not belittling it.
The closest equivalent person we have on the Left to someone like JonTron or other YTers who mix Right-wing talking points with games to draw young men into their pipeline, is Hasan, and Democrats treat him like he’s practically Ted Kaczynski in waiting.
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI 1 week ago:
the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates
The problem is, this varies from person to person. My team divvies up tasks based on what different people enjoy doing more, and no executive would have any clue which repeating tasks are repetitive (in a derogatory way), and which ones are just us doing our job. I like doing network traffic analysis. My coworker likes container hardening. Both of those could be automated, but that would remove something we enjoy from each of our respective jobs.
A big move in recent AI company rhetoric is that AI will “do analyses”, and people will “make decisions”, but how on earth are you going to keep up the technical understanding needed to make a decision, without doing the analyses?
An AI saying, “I think this is malicious, what do you want to do?” isn’t a real decision if the person answering can’t verify or repudiate the analysis.
- Comment on The inarguable case for banning social media for teens 2 weeks ago:
Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.
Every panic has reasons. Whether they are valid reasons, proportional reasons, or reasons that matter, is up for interpretation.
First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.
Yes, then we can talk about banning systems that remain harmful despite corporate influence being removed. You’re still just arguing (by analogy) to ban kids from places where smoking adverts are until we fix the adverts.
companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful
No, companies didn’t make social media harmful, they made specific aspects of social media harmful. You need to actually approach this with nuance and precision if you want to fix the root cause. If, on the other hand, your actual goal is just to ban social media because you’ve decided that is your ideological goal, you need to be upfront about that.
That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful
Every reason that’s been cited in studies for social media being harmful (algorithmic steering towards harmful content, influencer impact on self-image in kids, etc) is a result of serving profits. There are other harms as well, such as astroturfing campaigns, which are non-unique to social media, and can’t be protected against by banning it.
Let me ask you upfront, do you believe that children should not have access to the internet in general?
- Comment on The inarguable case for banning social media for teens 2 weeks ago:
This is the newest think of the children panic.
Yes, social media is harmful because companies are making it harmful. It’s not social media that’s the root cause, and wherever kids go next those companies will follow and pollute unless stopped. Social Isolation is not “safety”, it’s damaging as well, and social media is one of the last, freely-accessible social spaces kids can access.
We didn’t solve smoking adverts by banning kids from going places where the adverts were, we banned the adverts and penalized the companies doing them.
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 2 weeks ago:
This got me curious, so I started digging into their documentation. It looks like you can currently stand up the appview backend as a dev environment, but making it actually run as an alternative instance doesn’t appear to be possible (which is why no one is doing it).
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 3 weeks ago:
There is only one instance, which is the company’s because the company has not released the server software. It’s completely centralized.
- Comment on Bluesky may soon add blue check verification | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
That’s not what the current PR lays out, and I’m not going to give them credit for future maybes. Right now they’re just X2.
- Comment on Bluesky may soon add blue check verification | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
This neither centralizes nor decentralizes. It’s exactly just as centralized as before (which, as they are one company, is total).
Whether Bluesky issues a checkmark, or whether Bluesky tells someone else that they are trusted (by Bluesky), and thusthis can also issue them, Bluesky osis the one who is in control of checkmarks.
Unless Bsky sets up some kind of decentralized council that they don’t control to manage this list, it’s just a form of deputization , and deputies are all subordinate to the ‘sheriff’.
- Comment on Bluesky may soon add blue check verification | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
set of trusted authorities
Sounds like centralization to me. Who decides to vest authority in this group? Who selected the members of this group?
Unless there is some method for each host to nominate members and it changes dynamically based on total votes at any given time, you’ve just entrenched centralized authority in your ‘decentralized’ app.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
Takedown resistance is a consequence of decentralization, but it’s not decentralization itself.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 3 weeks ago:
I think this scoring system is missing Language as an important aspect of decentralization. Centralization happens not just through commercial hosting, but even through self-hosters being in a relatively centralized location, single jurisdiction, etc: an app with 300 self-hosted instances all located in one city is much easier to shut down than an app with those 300 spread across the globe, and language support is important to help facilitate that.
- Comment on How I Got Hacked: A Warning about Malicious PoCs 3 weeks ago:
Not that unusual, unfortunately. The infosec community relies on researchers publishing PoC exploits in order for people to determine whether they’re affected or not, but that trust in PoCs can obviously be exploited.
Not everyone has the time or knowledge to develop their own PoCs, but you should definitely not use one if you can’t understand the PoC, which is unfortunately rather common.
- Comment on How I Got Hacked: A Warning about Malicious PoCs 3 weeks ago:
Good writeup!
Definitely never good to run PoCs sight unseen; mostly not because of this kind of situation, but even just because different PoCs will have different results, and you need to know what to expect.
Also, if you see any level of obfuscation in PoC code, it’s more than likely malicious.
- Comment on This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops 3 weeks ago:
Gentle reminder that actions should not be discussed with strangers, and elevated actions should never be discussed online/ digitally at all.
- Comment on DeepSeek: The Chinese Communist Party’s newest AI advance is making repression smarter, cheaper, and more deadly. Even worse, they aim to export it to the world. 3 weeks ago:
Inside China, such a network of large-scale AGI [Artificial Generative Intelligence] systems could autonomously improve repression
Wooooow.
AGI stands for Artificial GENERAL Intelligence not generative. Nice attempt to muddy the waters to confuse and scare people, given that much writing on AGI will talk about how dangerous it is.
“The terrorists are in possession of an A-Bomb [Asbestos Bomb]!”
Either this opinion author has no clue, or this is very deliberate misinformation.
- Comment on Why doesn't Steam support Android? 3 weeks ago:
You said there is no successful second app store
it isn’t widely used
So, it’s not successful, but it could be. So they were in fact correct that it’s not successful.
I use fdroid, so I know exactly how badly administered it is compared to Play. There are apps that haven’t gotten updated in months or years, despite the app on Play or Github being much newer. There are typo-squatting apps, and apps uploaded by people who do not own or manage those programs. It’s a wild west experience, and the average android phone user isn’t going to know enough to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Valve would be better off doing their own android offshoot OS.
- Comment on Bubble Trouble - An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us. 4 weeks ago:
Frankly, I think that fears about “continuity of consciousness” is jumping the gun a little as an objection to current AI. Water usage, Capitalism, and asymmetry of information creation/ spread is much more pressing, even in the medium to long term.