I thought this was supposed to be a joke format. Where’s the joke? Is it ironic? Maybe replace civil engineers with car manufacturers or oil executives?

I’ll add to this an anecdote. My neighborhood is near a nature preserve. We get all kinds of animals theough here, but mostly racoon, possums and armadillo. Oh and feral cats. For a while we would occasionally have critters fighting in our yard. You’d hear it at night especially during summer. Not so much lately.

See a few years ago we got a feral kitten fixed as part of our local colony management group. Cat decided to stay, and we’ve been looking after her. Friendly, but stand-offish. We make sure shes fed, but let her do her own thing. Hasn’t shown much interest in the inside.

We noticed that in the evenings raccoons would show up to steal her food. We chased em away, but theyd just come back later. The thing was that cat would sit there and watch the raccoons. She even moved out of the way once she was done, and let the raccoons have their share. Its been a few years now, and our yard cat manages things between other cats, the raccoons and the possums, and sometimes armadillos and nobody fights about it. Heck sometimes we find a small crowd waiting for our cat to summon the food for them.

The point being, violence may be an inherent part of nature, and the wilderness. However even animals when they dont have to work so hard to survive will cooperate when its to everyone’s advantage. Which means that anyone who tells you that violence is the only law of nature is full of shit, and is really just telling on themselves. In my opinion.

I consider Vivi to be their best written character.

Honestly I agree. Theres a whole history in the time that comes after 8 where SeeD is an active force for a very long time. At the same time if you consider this a time travel story, it takes place at the start of SeeD which makes sense if you consider the true sorceress from the future trying to thwart her enemy before they ever become a threat. I think one of the places where the story fall apart is that we get no explanation of who she is other than that she wants to do the big bad. I think it would be interesting to have a game that explores that end of things.

FF8 is a flawed game, no argument from me. But to me what makes the game great is that it’s the game where squaresoft was at its most experimental. Guardian forces was an attempt at making summons be genuine characters rather than a simple simulation of the idea of summoning. The leveling weirdness was an attempt at solving the problem of level grinding endemic to the genre. The story was an attempt to go beyond the usual heroes of light just saving the world. Did these attempts land perfectly? Not at all, but they had interesting permutations.

I think it’s amazing that squarsoft even in that time tried to do so much different in just that one game. They were challenging standard tropes of the genre.

I genuinely question this writer claiming they played the game many times when they pretty much ignore the existence of Laguna when trying to find character depth and background. Really you have to remember the game in its moment in 1998, and this reads like someone playing it well after the fact. And then wondering why the game doesnt do things as well as the games that came after.

Bush 2 was a failson who was largely well intentioned, but also had no idea what his dad’s friends were doing in his cabinet. His second term he started taking a more proactive role when he realized how he was responsible for a lot of the fuckery going on around him. At the same time, Iraq was all his baby. I don’t say this to absolve him of anything, he was a shit president, but he was about as shitty as any other nepobaby that managed to fail into high office.

These days I play my games wither on a switch or an emulator. I like physical games, and if i like a game I’m emulating I try to get a physical copy of it. One of the reasons I like having the physical copy is that it gives me a plausible reason to have the data. Even if I got it through alternative sources game publishers can’t complain, especially if the game is now defunct.

Which i think is part of the problem. Stop Killing Games is a thing for a good reason. If I bought a game, but the only way for me to access it is through dead corporate servers, and links that have been left to rot, why shouldn’t I pirate it? The company itself forced me to. Or worse they brought back their old catalog through a subscription service. Sorry Nintendo, im not paying five bucks a month to play the original Legend of Zelda.

I do miss the manuals. Warcraft had a beautifully illustrated booklet of all the units thst i read backward and forward as a kid. I think the modern digital only environment speaks to an ethos of exploitation endemic to capitalism. The corporate shills control production of the art of video games. And the artists and the people who consume that art are exploited for the sake of publisher profits.

Why is Chinese ai more of a threat? Is the Chinese ai causing mass layoffs at American companies? Is China building ai data centers in our neighborhoods? Is Chinese ai being corn holed into every piece of software im using and making it worse by every metric?

I thought it was interesting at the time how it was a conspiracy of like five dudes, but the headline across several news sites was like, “two dudes from California lead conspiracy to assassinate the president.”

Hackers. It is not a good movie. It is not an accurate representation of computer hacking. But it has Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Fisher Stevens as the villain. The very ridiculous villain. I have not seen a movie quite like it since.

There is no regret in loving this movie, it is a masterpiece.

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From the article you posted:

"The talks were jolted by statements from Trump, who, from thousands of miles away, fired off comments that offended the Iranians.

Iranian state media said talks had paused after the “publication of an insulting message by the U.S. President.” The negotiations later continued."

So it did in fact happen, but despite the geriatric manchild torpedoing his own begged for peace negotiations the adults in the room recovered.

It would not surprise me in the least to find out that they ordered these soldiers to advance with the idea that them getting attacked just so they could kick off more fighting.

The only way to get isreal to agree is to tell them were not going to defend you if Iran launches missiles again. Which is years too late, but still.

What kind of bees make milk?

Boobies

My good them, they’re trying to get us back to the 19th century.

What style is that?

The arc of technology progress since the crash in the early 2000s has been pump and dump scams perpetrated on the entire market.

There is a demand for the data centers, but its not ai. That’s just the excuse. They’re building a surveillance state to track everyone. You thought the Chinese social credit system was bad just wait for the American freedom to lick billionaire boots surveillance system where anyone critical of the new nobility gets locked out of social mobility.