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In Assassins Creed Black Flag, I ran into an optional encounter with a unique hostile ship that I was completely unprepared for, as I hadn’t spent any money on upgrades for my own ship. So I tried to quit and reload. Well, the game autosaves at the start of the encounter. So I turned around to leave - and I get desynchronized. Great. I love being locked into optional unbalanced content!

So I had no other choice than to try to play the encounter. Except even with good positioning it was unbeatable as they had mortars, and a single broadside would melt my ship. But… there’s one special cannon attack aimed straight ahead. It does almost no damage, but stuns the enemy ship for as long as it takes to reload. There’s no way to turn fast enough to use any other weapon though. So I just plonked behind him too close for the mortars, and kept stunning this huge ship with the same attack for about 15 minutes, so it was never able to hit me with anything. We just sat there, neither ship moving or using any significant attack, until the 890th small cannonball upon which it suddenly burst into flames and sank.

Right, but costing them money while having it on the record that they lied is something. If you have the time and money yourself

I’m not sure how you’re controlling a ship’s Y-axis… but for planes and helicopters that’s absolutely standard and how it works in the real world. Hence the term “Pull up!”

The one or two pilots in this thread just read this in the GPWS voice and feel their heart beat a little faster now.

The K series used to have metal bodies as well, and a much better look. Glad I nabbed two before they stopped making those.

Not to forget obligatory subscriptions.

Agreed on the last part. But a less cynical take: Companies like Sony obsessively track their sales metrics. If a campaign like this does go viral, and only a few percent of people actually follow through, it does create a noticeable dip in the metrics and an explanation will be demanded internally. There’s a small chance this makes certain managers a bit more careful about such decisions.

In rare cases companies have taken back or at least delayed similar moves, and they never do so without indication that it will indeed affect their bottom line.

Though I don’t think this campaign will have much effect, since asking for a full week is not something many people will follow through with. Also Sony is clearly banking on the fact that customers will stay due to lock-in to their ecosystem.

There’s very much an ethical problem here. Sure, it’s fairly clear-cut with some debilitating genetic issues. But there’s a point at which you’re veering into eugenics, and that’s sooner than people think.

Take children who are deaf due to a genetic defect. I’m sure most parents imagine being deaf a terrible lot in life that they’d like to spare their kids from.

Then listen to actual members of the deaf community. They’re proud of their identity, they have their own language, and they’re terrified of the prospect of being essentially eliminated in just a few generations by well-meaning folks that can’t imagine a happy life as a deaf person.

What if we discover a few years from now that there are genetic markers for being queer? What if we can genetically engineer people to be thinner, more muscular, have a more attractive bone structure, lighter skin? Those are all things that offer an objectively more comfortable life, which I’m sure many parents would want for their kids without much thought given to what the societal implications are.

And what if this technology becomes available to a charismatic cult leader, a narcissistic tech CEO, a fascist regime?

Such technology doesn’t just fix genetic diseases. In a hierarchical global society that measures people’s worth by their body rather than their character, it eliminates human diversity.

This makes total sense due to the square-cube law (and cell sizes I suppose).

Have you considered relatively thicker sticks, like a log on a slower-burning fire? That should mitigate it a bit.

We just all set it to yellow the entire time so people don’t think they can call out of the blue.

Colonialism only took on modern forms. It’s always been might makes right.

Now with some countries slowly rising from its shadows, a lot of people in the west are pissing their pants that the tables might turn. Even if we’re a very long stretch away from that, and climate change is ironically affecting us less than the so-called global south.

lmao

No one implied they shouldn’t be allowed to. People just have opinions on what works.

A national self-perception steeped in exceptionalism has them convinced it can’t be anything but envy.

The entire political spectrum has moved considerably right, with “Fortress Europe” talk and blatant admissions that human rights aren’t something we should care about.

There is no hard divide between conservatives and the far right.

Also moving the overton window.

It only took a few years for our “alt right” to replace the suits talking conservative economics with demagogues spewing racial purity on national television. Self-radicalization is built into the far right mindset.

The US economy is directly tied to imperialism and massive exploitation of other nations. And we both know that’s not gonna change under any Democratic leadership.

You can’t just go back to the way things were because it worked for you.

It’s cope, at least in part, to point out that the open advance of fascism in the US is several years ahead of the rest of the Western world, and that this was possible under an absolute dumbfuck embarrassment like Trump. And I get why people need to cope right now.

It’s also not wrong to point out that this was enabled by the US exceptionalist mindset and particular flavor of nationalism that we’ve all been exposed to.

This reads as a diss against all people in the US, but it’s not. I strongly empathize with and am in solidarity with those suffering under it.

That used to be broadly my view, until I watched Dan Olson’s In Search of A Flat Earth, in which he explores the worldview in which this “opinion” persists and why.

After reading a good review I tested it with my horror-loving gf, but we found it kind of mid.

I did the same. Took a while but the whole family was on board.

Now on to convince multiple circles of friends and every new person I meet…