Leaving it to rot for 15 years was far more unjust than a slightly less “revolutionary” game. And the concepts they show in the new doc are cool as hell! I would have loved to shoot at blobmonster! They just decided singleplayer FPS games weren’t as profitable, and that’s fine, I guess. They’re a company, they want to make money. But pretending they were somehow doing us a favor by leaving the cliffhanger for so long is utter nonsense. Especially since they wound up simply retconning it so the whole wait was pointless anyway!

Edit: y’all they literally said in the doc that if they’d kept working on it for 1-2 more years they would have been able to complete it, but they were more interested in multiplayer games and went to go work on that. But if you really want to drink the self-aggrandizing bs that Newell spouts, go right ahead

They’ve admitted to cancelling ideas before, getting to various stages of production before going back to the drawing board, but always (and appear to still) insist that it is in development on some level. That’s why Newell’s responses to questions about hl3 are usually some form of “we have nothing new to share.” Valve doesn’t like sharing until they’re in the final stages of development, and hl3 has never made it that far.

When I look at the steam store Portal has a price tag of $9.99.

Portal didn’t come out until 2007 with the orange box, which also had hl2: episode 2 (and tf2), but the base game of hl2 came out standalone in 2004. This giveaway is a celebration of hl2’s 20th anniversary, so maybe they’ll do a portal giveaway in 2027.

Oh cool, good job waiting until AFTER the election to do this incredibly basic and easy move, everyone. Jesus fucking christ

… Goofier than Flo?? God help me I hope I’m never subjected to one of those commercials

You can download Firefox and install Ublock on the mobile app, then just go to YouTube.com. That’s how I usually do it on my android phone anyway; I assume it works for iOS too

I wasn’t really referring to the free years, but the many years where people put up with increasingly loud and lengthy commercial breaks which became so invasive that shows would literally design their beats around being interrupted

The same way people watched cable TV for decades. The slow ramp up of ads has a portion of the population prepped to be slightly frustrated, but willing to deal with it.

But yeah having been spoiled with no ads for years now, I have to mute my parents TV every time I go over. Even muted, there’s still something about lots of ads that draws my eye more than whatever the actual show is. Drives me nuts.

99% sure Lemmy has a higher average age than any social media other than maybe facebook

Because you (we) have brainrot

deleted by creator

I seriously doubt going to the center wins any votes in the general. The type of people who think conservative policy is good for society are gonna vote Republican no matter how stupid and fascist it is. “Shifting right wins over never Trumpers” is a line that works on people during the primary when everyone is on the left anyway, but in the end it’s an excuse to more deeply entrench the oligarchy and it turns off people who need something to be excited about in order to bother coming out for the general. Like, I can’t imagine young voters were happy to hear Harris at the debate talking about how she’s going to expand oil drilling.

Biden won because leftists were energized about getting Trump out of office, not because centrism won over conservatives. In fact, I think the centrism is why he was projected to lose this year! His presidency went fine considering the senate, but fact is he didn’t do a whole lot to get people interested. Gaffes and age notwithstanding, even a perfect public speaker wouldn’t have had much to work with. That’s why the switch to Harris got the poll numbers moving: it was a big move that got people engaged. But I firmly believe every move she makes to the center is doing more to turn off leftist voters than it is wresting people from the right.

If you actually have a group of peers that consistently challenge each other and have scholarly debate, congrats. You’re in a very small minority. You personally not having a use for arguing online doesn’t mean it’s useless. I know plenty of Americans who have been convinced that gun control is important by things they’ve seen online.

Very few people in this thread are kidding around. It’s worth pointing out that most of the things they are saying are extremely shallow.

It is not a place for nuanced debate.

Why not? Compared to other social media it’s way better equipped for reasoned debate, with an easy-to-read layout designed for mountains of text and ease of linking sources. Maybe c/memes isn’t the right place but considering how serious the rest of this thread is I’m pretty sure my spiel was worth it.

Maybe the people in my social circle are just a lower caliber than yours, but I can’t remember the last time I got asked to source an opinion irl. Most of my friends already agree with me. Hell, offline, most people aren’t willing to discuss politics at all. Even saying you have opinions on politics is basically a faux pas…

I’m gonna say some stuff that most of the people here probably know on some level, but considering this thread, I think it needs to be explicitly said.

Very few of the people who post comments on the internet are highly educated in whatever field they’re making a claim in. Getting challenged by people who know next to nothing and receive all the upvotes anyway is an exhausting experience, so many well-educated people keep their debates private. If they are here, you probably aren’t enough of an expert to recognize them. The simple, easy to understand takes are what get upvoted, and in-depth, nuanced ideas are almost always ignored or ridiculed. Most forums are full of people who know just enough to feel confident in making calls for radical action without any knowledge of how that action could be implemented or would play out.

Look through this comment section. Lots of vague, single-sentence arguments about being “capitalist,” “communist,” or “socialist,” along with “leftist,” “liberal,” or “conservative,” but I don’t see a single one acknowledging that each of those words can individually encompass vast groups of conflicting ideas and have wildly different meanings in different parts of the world; a serious problem considering at least a few of the people posting in this thread aren’t in the US. Very little discussion of substantive ideas like “people should be given a universal basic income of $15 a day,” or “food stamps should be granted without application to anyone under a certain income threshold,” or “social media servers should receive public funding and be administrated by an elected body.” It’s almost never more specific than “universal healthcare,” or “abolish the police,” Those might be the right direction, but when was the last time you saw people discussing things like whether experimental treatments should be covered, or the number and type of professions that should replace the current myriad of roles police are expected to fill? I seriously doubt if you randomly selected two self-described communists (or whatever ideology) on Lemmy and had them start making decisions together, that they would agree with each other on exactly how society should be run even half the time.

I’m not saying these conversations shouldn’t happen, vague as they are. I certainly don’t have the energy to write out long arguments 99% of the time. We all have to make our own way to finding deeper knowledge, and building a knowledge base of buzzwords can be a useful stepping stone. But far too often people stop once they feel they have a sufficient understanding of the buzzwords and then start talking like they know the answers. it’s important to temper the depth of your convictions based on where you’re having the discussion, where you’re getting your knowledge. Are you watching youtube videos and reading unsourced comments, or are you reading research papers from institutions with a history of making accurate claims? Are you reading news articles from ad-supported papers, and if you are, are you checking whether those articles are making sources available for readers check on? Should I have bothered writing several paragraphs under a meme of a glowing red bird, and am I really qualified to tell people to be more careful with their discussions?