I’m reminded of a post from elsewhere: “You hate all the parts of capitalism separately, without realizing they’re all the same thing”

• Get accepted as goon for “Patrol” app
• Go to CEO location, armed with lethal weapons
• ???
• Profit

This is a good point. Seeing other people get onto the street can motivate people who weren’t feeling enthusiastic.

But I do worry that protests will fizzle out and be, as you say, an ending point. Maybe they won’t be.

“a peaceful movement”. Ok. Unilaterally disarming seems like a dubious move to me.

I don’t think protests where you just stand around and chant are especially effective. Maybe in 1950 when seeing people get firehosed was shocking, but the world is different today. Media is captured by the wealthy and most people don’t care.

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

Belief is social. They believe what their social group does. We all do this to some extent. Some part of the brain still feels like if we reject the social group’s belief, we’ll die alone in the woods. Going with the group feels good.

You can probably change minds if they see you as in-group, but it won’t last if the rest of their in-group has contradictory ideas.

Getting people off Facebook and other hellscapes might help.

I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.

Among other problems, people knowingly spread falsehoods because they feel truthy.

The problem is people. We’re all emotional but some people are just full on fact free gut feel almost all of the time.

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.

Fans were happy to run the servers at their own expense.

In the distant past of like 2000, you didn’t have to pay for online functionality. Also, people could host their own multiplayer servers. It was nice. Consoles and capitalism did a team-up to make things shittier for the end user, though.

It’s really frustrating how many things are bad because some assholes are making money off of it. Saint Luigi, please bless up in these trying times.

This is a revelation I think more people are going to need to realize. There’s no referee coming. The rules aren’t magic. Ultimately, the only things that matter are physics and might. If enough people just decided fuck it, all the multimillonaires gotta die, no cosmic force is going to call a timeout.

The original Diablo I remember being more thoughtful and slower paced. I liked it. Diablo3 turned into just a brainless light show without much tactics. Less rewarding.

…what? With the exception of mage hand legerdemain, you’re typically very close to locks you’re picking. If it made an anti-magic field like 6" from the ring, that would be perfectly fine for picking the lock. Ring is on hand, lockpicks are in hand, magic lock is disabled.

if the ring permanently ends magical effects that enter its area of effect, that’s unusual and probably has a bunch of unexpected uses.

It it merely suppresses magical effects in its area, I guess the projectiles would briefly return to full size when in the anti-magic field, and return to small size afterwards? Doesn’t seem very effective unless you like point blank someone.

I guess it’s part of my massive privilege, but I join all my work calls in my bath robe and don’t blur out the background. I don’t give a shit, and if you do you shouldn’t.

Facial expression and other body language sends a lot of information. It’s useful.

English. Some french, but not quite at a conversational level.

Not counting Kickstarter projects, which I rarely back anymore, no. I’ll wait for reviews and probably a sale.

A lot of kids were taught to read badly. There’s this whole “whole word” and “cuing theory” approach to reading that doesn’t work very well. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Apparently 65% of fourth graders aren’t proficient at reading (as of the linked source from 2022)