Triggered some Thomas the Tank Engine trauma

👁️👁️❓

I scrubbed the video for the better part of 40 minutes. Here’s the vibe. These points bounce off each other.

1. AI everything. This is aimed at investors who don’t know shit about games other than it has labor cost. Nothing novel was shown or discussed other than broad strokes of concepts which we already know about.

2. Sponsors and Ads everywhere. To remind us it’s EA

3. Creating is bad business. EA wants:

• to use AI, not artists
• fleeting interactions, not deep experiences
• sell platforms, not content
• engage algorithmically

They aspire to do to games what TikTok/Reels/Yt shorts did for video. Make it as easy to make a “game” (AI slop) as shooting a phone video. Let the algorithm bubble up addictive crap and get eyeballs on screens. Ads everywhere. Pay extra to make Iron Man a character in your 2-minute “game”

This is a nightmare and I hope they fail

🤮

What?

Monetary devaluation is an economic policy Inflation is literally the “general increase in the prices of goods and services”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devaluation

A little over a decade of economic stagnation, a massive flow of money and power from “the state” (the oligarchs) to private citizens (oligarchs, sometimes new ones), and years of privatization, austerity, and general kleptocracy against public goods…

Then one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, with a good standard of living, and insane rates of home ownership and some of the best and cheapest Internet in the world.

The dictatorship was overwhelmingly bad though it had some positive, socialist traits. What Romania is today is much better with some bad capitalist traits. People in the country sometimes look back to the communist days with nostalgia. Others got stuck in the post-communist bleakness and never saw that their country moved forward past them.