Maybe Grausame Töchtor? At least, Aranea is one of the most consistently transgressive and productive artists I have enjoyed.

The first Clarissa comic has a bit of an anchor in my brain.

I’ve found others I enjoyed over the years but they’re usually one-off, unattributable, etc.

Something something butterfly wings?

Oh there’s no more need for any more experimental data. All further sex is canceled.

I’m not saying worst thing ever. I’m not catastrophizing. I’m not saying equal. They are different things. I’m saying unacceptable. I’m saying extent, though extant, is irrelevant to the question of acceptability.

This is an important point that keeps coming up in a thousand places and a thousand ways. The fact a femur can be broken does not make the papercut meaningless, acceptable, or excused any more than the fact someone can torture you and your loved ones for days on end could mean it’s acceptable to ‘only’ break your femur. If we try to scale measurement of harm in relation to ‘what might have been,’ attempted murder is completely acceptable as long as it fails, successful single murder is negligible as long as mass killings are possible, mass killings are fine as long as genocides are possible, and so on, and so on… You do not want to live in a world which takes the idea of ‘at least it’s not…’ seriously.

I’d take it as both being ‘past the line’ regardless of distance. If someone is seeking to defraud people, I don’t care whether their targets are made easier by desperation or not. The guy effectively robbing you is bad, but that doesn’t mean the guy price-gouging you isn’t. He didn’t help you out of a bad situation. He moved you from one bad situation to another. They are both harming you, and both would be prevented from doing it again in any just system.

Don’t misrepresent me and then pretend to have defeated my positions by defeating your own misrepresentations.

I didn’t say they suck. I said they are designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, and mechanically stagnant. They are the corn of gaming. They aren’t poison, or shit, but they are decidedly mediocre in their makeup, and there are so many options that are better on one metric or another, basically any metric other than scale, if the players weren’t locked in or tricked in, the AAAs aren’t going to get the kind of support they have. Saying ‘some of my happiest memories are eating my way through a big trough of corn,’ isn’t a demonstration that corn is better, or even good, but that you, specifically, anecdotally, really like your corn.

And yes, there is something about them that bugs me on a deeper level, specifically their manipulative place in the industry/culture, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong to call them mediocre. Are all opinions invalidated by emotional entanglement? Then why should we trust your word as an avowed supporter of AAA game companies? You have an emotional reason to support them. Why should anyone listen to you about them if your views are emotionally tainted and your own standard requires detached judgement?

Here’s an article for those who want to know a bit more but don’t want to click on that idiotic thumbnail.

They’re both forms of fraud. The gift card one is misrepresenting their position to trick you into giving them money. The house scam is misrepresenting your position to trick them into giving them something worth more than the money they give you. The only difference is that when they misrepresent you, it is expected that you be aware of your own situation such that you will be treated as though you gave informed consent, even if you didn’t. It’s analogous to the difference between someone sexually assaulting you by pretending to be a doctor vs never promising to be a doctor but telling you how sick you look and how they’re no expert but they’d be willing to condescend to feel around inside your undies as a favor to you. The only people who accept the offer have to be so dumb, desperate, intentionally misinformed, or some combination of all three as to be essentially incapable of informed consent.

You can’t.

‘Medium is the message.’ There are inherent limitations to the formats of social media and the way people interact with it. Text stores well for social media companies, but acts as a brutal limitation of social interaction. There is a self-selection issue for the kind of people who end up spending significant amounts of time online. There is a selection pressure created by the business model of social media. Anonymity is politically important but socially toxic. There is a problem of cultural inertia in changing anything about any of these things, even within the limits of their structures. All of these things interact with other external forces in complex ways.

All you can do is try to make your little part of things better. Help those you come into contact with. If you can, help them also to try to be a good influence on others. The earth is too big to affect all at once. You will never move it. But you can move someone near you.

I recognise this image from a ways back. Do guys still do the unsolicited dick pic thing? It’s practically a meme how stupid it is and how it doesn’t work.

Cool. Welcome to the world of options that exist outside of designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, mechanically stagnant gaming.

It’s telling that your prime examples of AAA are games that choke on their own development but ultimately only offer bigness as their value. Big maps… big, mostly empty maps. Big crowds of NPCs… that do the same three idle animations, duck and cover like a choreographed team at a gun shot and then go back about their day 30 seconds later. Big, powerful engines… with big piles of bugs that take a year of dev time after release to fix. Big texture files… that you probably don’t notice because you’re playing on less than top of the line hardware or just ignore if you aren’t. Big ‘storylines’… that ultimately end up being ‘choose path A or B and then shoot/stab a giant pile of mostly similar enemies,’ and 95% of your game time is the distraction of sidequests you wander into with no effect on the main story. Big collections of voice acted lines… saying generic things and repeating them so often they hit you like an arrow to the knee. Big teams… that get so big they have to have meetings about their meetings with the meetings team before scheduling a meeting with someone from art, marketing, sound, code, and three other people to decide whether its reasonable to have a meeting about adding a hair to the dog in side quest 37.

So, yeah, welcome to the part if gaming where you experience the small, but meaningful. ‘To the Moon’ is never going to have an impressive trailer, but it might make you weep, if you have the heart for it. Disco Elysium doesn’t have square lightyears of map to wander, but its creators paid attention to everything you can see. Pacific Drive was made by a team of less than a dozen people, but was put together with incredible skill and artistry. Bullets Per Minute took an idea many have had and made it real, and even did a great job of it. Quality over quantity, every time.

You can re-putty the drain fitting for a better seal but the flex will require some kind of support or it will work itself loose again given time, even with a flexible coupling. Moving parts tend to get looser over time.

If it’s a broad drain, you could probably try to remove it, use the gap to add something underneath the pan and then close it back up? Or if the crawlspace has better access, you could try to do the same from below? You need to get a peek under the pan to know how easy/hard to fix it might be. Empty space could be fillable. Extant but soft bedding would have to be removed before adding something solid.

How do you know we’re not in a time loop so long you can live entire lifetimes inside of it?

Let them die. AAA games are games built to be marketed, not played.

The mental image of one if them dancing into the whitehouse like a Ghanaian palbearer just to flip everyone off and say ‘I don’t give a fuck what you creepy old paedos have to say. I went to the fucking moon,’ is immensely entertaining.

All my characters are insane.

Game industry: Steam is a monopoly!

Customers: Yeah, but it’s because the rest of you suck.

Steam: Heheh, this is fun. Should we just sit on our laurels here and coast on this good will? Or maybe we should burn that good will by selling ad space? Nah, let’s add another feature people will actually like.

Well, they are your gut bacteria, and you feed and care for them, so, like other pets/livestock, you are responsible for what you feed them, which controls some of the production, and for what you do with the results.

Treat it non-literally. Say ‘How’s it going?’ which turns it into a greeting rather than a question.

I explained it pretty clearly in that previous post, as did several others. You don’t seem ready or able to listen so I don’t see much value in repeating myself. Maybe you should find a hobby that isn’t arguing online.