The go-to example I always think of for 2nd person is Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the boss battle against the Tyhrranoid Mother. You cycle through phases of the boss, and one shifts the camera’s perspective to the targeting system of the boss, while you still control Ratchet.

I’m interested, but I think the Dev woukd need to find a way to incentivize “normal” driving.

I think back to my youth playing Driver on the PS1, and it was a lot of fun just… Driving around. Exploring the world. Even dealing with traffic was fun when I was only a kid who could nkt drive myself.

I tried tk do similar in GTA3, and I even had a wheel and pedlas I would use for it. Unfortunately GTA3 is incredibly unlrealistic. The physics are cartoonish, the AI behavior is dumb, the pedestrians are dumb, the cops are dumb. The game incenvitcizes chaos.

The question is: how do we make things likr speed limits and stop signs and pedestrian crossings fun?

My instinct is to model off the real world to an extent. Could involve delivering things that are fragile and cannot handle a bunch of G’s. Could be fines or a karma system of some kind for rolling stops. Could be that a realistic damage modeling system makes dents and scratches look terrible and lead to rust, and repairs are just as expensive as they are in real life. Maybe a LOT of the car is consumable or wearable. Not just gas and tires, but all the fluids too, and brake pads. Maybe taking a turn too hard damages the suspension. Crashing into something means you not only need to repair your car, but also whatever you hit.

The more I list this out, the more this seems like a punishing and tedious slog. It seems really hard to design a game that incentivizes something like this, at least with most of the current mechanics in games today. Maybe a multiplayer social component would help? Like a virtual parking lot and drag strip for people to meet up on the weekends and check each other’s virtual rides out? I would not be interested in that, but my uncle might be.

Maybe it could be heavily story-based. I would go noir-style, where as you drive around either you see things or your driver character provides some narration. Something like “that abandoned building over there used to be an ice cream parlor. That’s where I had my first kiss. I wonder what ever happened to Suzie? I drove a '69 Cobra that night. Lovely car” and then the Cobra is available in the shop. Maybe there is a mystery about stuff going on in the world. Maybe it is a post-apocalyptic world and you’re scavenging, mostly alone and unchallenged, in the ruins of a city, slowly learning what led to this. I think about how Detroit’s population went from ~1.8 million to 0.6 million in ~50 years and what it would have been like to stay there and experience that.

Maybe a parody of Crazy Taxi called Sane Uber where the main priority is ride comfort?

So what has changed? Do you think Biden woukd have stopped “his proxy war” in Ukraine in order to go and fuck things up on Iran?

China has been doing fantastically well, continuing to influence Africa and Europe despite what you think the US’s intentions in Syria may have been, and China also seems to be benefitting pretty well from what is going on in Iran too. Russia does not have the economy to compete with the US or China. China has been benefiting from the NATO division too, the undermining of the US dollar, and the high oil prices have driven the world to invest even more strongly in solar panels and electrical infrastructure, which China is by far the leading supplier of.

The simple fact that makes Iran different from Ukraine or Syria is that ear with Iran is bad for the US and its allies. Biden understood that.

The US has books on going to war with literally every country, because its an imperial power with employees whose literal job it is to make sure they are prepared in every scenario. They purposefully use code names and try to obscure the plans that are against countries they are currently allied with. That absolutely does not mean it is realistic to predict that anyone who would have been elected would go to war with every single country. That document was written in 2016: why didn’t Trump go to war in his first term? Why didn’t Biden do anything in his term? Suggesting Biden would have changed without material changes to the global economy, the middle east, or within Iran, is a silly oversimplification just trying to hate on Biden for no reason. Which is even more silly considering there are very real reasons to hate on Biden. I find it odd you haven’t even mentioned Yemen, which is what I was referring to when I called him a war criminal.

Biden had 4 years to make that happen if he wanted, yet at every chance he turned towards economic and political pressure instead of military pressure with Iran. I really do not understand why you think that would have somehow changed in a hypothetical second term.

Trump tried to start a war with Iran in his first term, failed and then forced it in his second term and is failing miserably in every way possible.

It is possible that Biden may have personally wanted to go to war with Iran. I don’t know him personally. But every move he made aa President and as VP signaled he did not want to. Regardless of his personal motivations, he probably understood what Trump did not: the US has never had the ability to force the Straight of Hormuz open, Iran has the ability to close it, and the closure would have disastrous economic consequences for the US and its allies.

Its funny you mention Ukraine out of nowhere because the one country which HAS benefitted from all this is Russia. Sure, they supported Iran, but suddenly there are tensions within NATO and the world is more desperate for natural gas.

US-Iranian Relations under Biden were complicated and nuanced.

Biden was VPnundee the Obama administration who famously came close to finalizing the “nuclear deal” with Iran, under which they would cooperate with UN inspectors and be allowed to enrich unraniun for energy, sanctions woukd have been eased, relations would have been normalized. That is NOT to say everything would have been sunshine and rainbows in the Middle East. Khomeini was still an oppressive dictator, US inperalism would still continue, oil would be even cheaper and continuing to destroy the planet, and the region would still have plenty of tensions from religious, ethnic, and political divides. But it would have been one of the biggest steps towards peace and stability since since the Ottoman empire collapsed.

Trump tore it up in his first term and illegally assassinated an Iranian general in early 2020. Which was quickly forgotten about in the news cycle because of Australia wildfires and then Covid.

Biden tries to restore that deal, but it waa made much more difficult because Iran (and most of the world) learned they could not trust the US long-term.

Biden was a war criminal who continued a lot of war crimes in the middle east from his predecessors, but to suggest he would have provoked or forced an issue with Iran similar to what Trump is doing is just asinine “both sides”-ing. Biden also LISTENED to his military experts who would have told him what a dumb idea this was.

I don’t see Steven Universe mentioned anywhere. That might be my all-time favorite, and slots right in with the likes of Adventure Time and She-Ra.

Sticking to the Adventure Time-related ones, Over the Garden Wall is great and very autumnal. My wife ans I try to watch that every October. Gravity Falls is also great, especially for the summer since it takes place over the course of one summer vacation. Bravest Warriors is okay- not a must-watch, but decent. Bee and Puppycat is pretty solid and chill.

For slightly older crowds (I see yoy have stuff like Gurren Lagan on here), Midnight Gospel is pretty good and also from Adventure Time’s showrunner.

For other anime, there is always Fullmetal Alchemist. Saiki K if you can get past the fast editing. Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple is one that’s probably just “okay” but I like a lot.

Centaur World was surprisingly good.

Oh I think I recognize you from arguing on Reddit many years ago. Not many people would call the ACA a Republican bill- the Massachusetts bill it was based on was still substantially different, but was written and passed by a predominanly Democrat legislature and Romney got to put his name on it because he was governor, even after he failed to cut a lot of the parts he didn’t like because they were too nice to poor people. Its absolutely silly to call it Romneycare.

Ah yes, the “nuclear option” certainly must be somethibg the government can casually undertake without consequence, right?

Just like how Lincoln lifting Habeus Corpus was a tool used for good and was never used for anything bad at any point by any future government?

Did you forget to edit the article before you linked it or something?

That’s only true if you count independent senators as Democrats for some reason.

Trifecta = 3 branches of government. Executive, Judicial, and Legislative. It makes no more sense to break Congress up into two branches than it would to break the Executive branch up by all KF the various agencies under the president.

It was the Supreme Court that decided to overturn Row vs Wade during Biden’s term. It was the Supreme Court that decided to strike down his executive order forgiving federal student loans. Essentially the same Supreme Court that decided to hand Trump a blank note saying “do what you want” stymied the Biden administration repeatedly.

Claiming that the majority in the Senate matters for anything other than the annual reconciliation bill shows how little you know about how the Senate works. A majority does not give effective control in either chamber, though the Democrats did have the numbers to control the House. Even the “50” you claim has to include independent senators who caucased with the Democrats, not actual registered Democrats, to get there.

So like, if you just want to spread Republican propaganda about how bad the Democrats are in an attempt to get their voters to stay home on election day, you can go ahead and say stuff like that. You’re spreading lies that help conservatives.

If you want to do an actual good-faith evaluation of when the Democrats have had the power necessary to do anything, you can look back through history and find that the only period of time they have had that control in the last 50 years was when they passed the ACA, and that was only for a few months, not a full two years.

They absolutely were not, unless you know so little about how the US government works that you think a 50-50 senate split and a 6-3 Republican majority supreme court counts as a trifecta?

The best way to win the game is to not play.

Reddit had a lot of issues and I am glad I left, but one sub I really liked and wish Lemmy had was r/anticonsumption. You make a great point about razors, but that already relied on the assumption that you have decided to shave.

That is not to say that shaving is bad, but to recommend that all individuals think about it. WHY do they want to shave, and how much time and money do they want to put into that? How much of it is mere societal expectation, and is that really worth it?

Look at the Got Milk campaign as another example. That was not promoting any particular company, just the concept of consuming dairy, and led to disastrous health, environmental, and economic consequences in the US today.

The problem is that downvotes do not work. They do not function as an incentive for these users to stop posting, because they do not matter at all.

It can work on larger platforms, where thousands, or even tens of thousands of people vote. There the users form roles based on how they sort the posts. People who sort by New are well aware that they are going to have to sift through a lot of trash, but their reward is that they get to have a more active role in setting the taste for the entire community. Because then you have people who sort by Hot or Active, which tends to be the majority of users in most communities (and is often the default). So in communities with dozens of posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of votes every day, the things the community doesn’t like gets buried.

The Fediverse is too small for that system to work. There simply is not enough posts, comments, and votes to make any of that meaningful. The same users can just spam the same authors over and over again, and it doesn’t matter whether the post gets 100 upvotes or 100 dpwnvotes- the whole community is going to see it in their feed regardless. And it’s not as if having negative "karma"really matters.

One of tbr systems Reddit had to combat this was that karma occasionally mattered. Some subreddits would require karma to join, or ban if your karma dropped. I’m not sure if the tools exist for something like that here or not. There are a lot of different t ways you can slice up the numbers, but basically looking at post history, ratios of up/down votes, total down votes, etc. Effectively letting community feedback drive the moderation process.

That’s still not perfect because users can block/mute other users. Doing so would effectively be abstaining from voting, and that’s not the healthiest system. But we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

The stroke was before he took office. For his first 18-24 months in office his voting record was pretty much along Dem party lines.

Similarly, what about wishing for another linear and stoey-focused 3D Zelda?

OK boomer

Anker owns Eufy, a security camera company. A few years ago people were able to access footage remotely, even thpugh Eufy claimed it was only stored locally. Anker, as the parent company, doubled-down and responded poorly at first.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/anker-admit-eufy-security-issues/

Now, that does not impact stuff like cables or battery banks at all. In 2024 when I was shopping for new battery banks, Anker had the best value so I bought Anker. But the corporate response is kind of sketchy so I’m never in a hurry to buy from them anymore. And I woudk never buy anything where security or privacy could be an issue.

I liked it, but this was also the first Metal Gear game in ever played so I wasn’t as invested in Snake.

I can’t remember exactly when I first watched it. Within a year or two of the pandemic though. I was solidly an adult.

It was not my first anime, but I still would not call myself an experienced anime watcher or anything. I watched it because I really liked Kill La Kill, looked up the history of studios Trigger and Gainax, and saw that this was one of their core franchises. And I saw Evangelion’s cultural impact on Japan being compared to Star Wars in America, so I figured I shohkd watch it.

I think its great. It starts off with relatively high-budget episodes, showing off smooth animation, cool and unique-looking mechs and great sound design (I watched the Netflix English dub, which had a bigger budget than the original). The kaiju they fight are pretty unqiue looking too. I’m also a sucker for other cultures appropriating western culture, so I love all random christian imagery they toss in unattached to any of its original meaning, just to appear “foreign” to their Japanese audience. It hits a lot of the mech anime tropes, complete with an animal mascot side character for comic relief. The 14 year old girls are a bit too sexualized for me, but I kind of get they were trying to sell this to 14 year old boys so… Eh. And even though its 14 year olds, they don’t spend a whole lot of time lingering on school life which is nice.

After the first few episodes it slowly shifts to the point where calling it a mech anime is an inside joke. The pacing is incredible and refreshing, and I think has aged even better when compared against most modern media that is edited extremely quickly to hold people’s attention. Beyond that… Well I could make a wall of spoiler text but I just recommend watching it yourself. I will say that this is a rare case where the sexualization of young girls is an actual artistic choice with meaning to it beyond just creepy horniness. Although I still think that’s mixed with an element of marketing that is a bit gross… Its complicated.

I also feel like I need to say I don’t take it too seriously. The psychological aspects are largely based on Freudian theories that were debunked decades or centuries before. I also often see Shinji used to represent introverted people, and I disagree. There’s a common trope of characters like him, who I would categorize as either extroverts who are bad at being extroverts or introverts written by extroverts trying to imagine what introversion is like. For reasons, I think Shinji is the latter.

Since then I’ve watched it a handful of times again. I showed it to my wife and it became her favorite anime, and she even got a tattoo based on it. We have watched the rebuilds a couple times, and they’re… Okay. I don’t think they stand up on their own, but they are more accessible for people who don’t have the attention span to watch the original.