Thanks for sharing!

Sacré bleu!

Everyone (in the tech media particularly, but also in lay commentary) seems to frame this as a matter of TikTok having the secret algorithmic sauce which the Silicon Valley firms are unable to replicate, and unable to compete with, but I truly think this is a red herring. What TikTok has (or lacks, rather) is the abysmal reputation of its Silicon Valley competitors. Due to this, it was able to attract a large number of content creators who have zero interest in setting up shop on Facebook's fifth platform, or any skuldugging Silicon Valley ad-tech company with the capital to create their own Twitter / YouTube / Instagram rip-off.

TikTok has been a rich source of original content from the beginning, many of which gets re-posted by fans on other websites. Meanwhile, whenever Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey spin up a new platform, it is dominated by communications interns and brand accounts, just treating it as a fifteenth place to dump their corporate promotions.

Note that many of the most successful monopoly platforms today (setting aside Facebook itself, the canonical monopoly platform) grew popular before their acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitch, YouTube, etc. I think it is impossible for a company like Google, Amazon, or Meta to come out and openly found a successful platform at this late date, and it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the technology. Even though Meta was in the right time and place to launch Threads, nobody apparently uses it aside from Burger King. Everyone migrated instead to BlueSky (which is perceived as independent for some reason) or, to a smaller degree, Mastodon.

The "problem" with TikTok is not their superior, inscrutable technology, but the fact that they are unwilling to be swallowed up like Instagram. Their intransigent Chinese owners don't understand that they're obligated to sell when a briefcase full of money is thrown in their face.

Something like this could have taken off if it weren't Facebook leading the charge. Zuckerberg might as well personally drive around in a third hand van with "Free Candy" spray-painted on the side. It would be just as enticing.

Literally just what the conservatives do. Working Class is when you wear Levis and drive a truck. Elite is when you do academics.

weird little alien creature

Sonic

A four year old just called me "old man"

HTS are absolutely not beating the "Israeli puppet" allegations. Wouldn't those weapons pretty much belong to them now? It's not like they're going to attack Israel.

Isfake isn't waiting around for the honeymoon to end and the mutinies to begin.

This is the kernel of idealism. You say shit like "Capitalism depends on some degree of transparency," or "As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honor, so fear is necessary in a despotic government," and just keep repeating it until the world rearranges itself to reflect your haughty aphorisms (this never happens).

Mother 3 slaps. Earthbound leaves enourmous shoes to fill, but Shigesato Itoi manages to pull it off (again).

In the Capitalist West, they take their prisoners, put them in chain gangs, and make them break rocks with hammers. In our benevolent soviet republic, we build a state of the art gravel processing factory for our prisoners to break rocks in.

I came to the conclusion that Cities: Skylines is too basic, and C:S 2 doesn't really seem like it adds all that much, so I started playing Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. The game offers a lot of difficulty options, so you can make it play somewhat like C:S if you want to, but it is an entirely different beast in it's "realistic mode."

In Cities: Skylines, you plop down a power plant, pumping station, sewage drain, run some cables and pipes, zone some residential, and unpause the game. In WR:SR, you must manage the logistics and construction of all these things. The sewage and water mains can only run from higher elevation to lower elevation, unless you install additional pumping stations. The electrical network requires you to build switches and transformers to step from 105KV to 22KV to 230V, and appear to observe Ohm's Law with regards to current and voltage drop. You also need to build heating plants and pipe steam to your residences and public services.

All of this infrastructure must be built by workers and machines. All these machines have fuel tanks which need to be filled, wear and tear which requires maintenance. Even something as simple as road construction requires delivery of construction materials, workers, and machines, and while that work is being done, no traffic is getting through. If you are not careful, you can block your buses carrying your workers to the heating plants in the dead of winter and cause a death spiral. It takes several hours of gameplay to get to the point where your first citizens can move in.

It took me several attempts before I could even start settling people, but here is my first residential microdistrict. My infrastructure is already absolutely cursed. That's the other thing. Once something gets built, you need a demolition crew to dismantle it, so if there is a power pole where you want your road to go, or an inconveniently located water main junction is preventing you from building a factory, you need to send more work crews and excavators and garbage trucks and haul the scrap to a dump. And that will shut down services for anything relying on that power pole / junction box.

Show

Setting jank controllers aside, deadzone is just a sign of wear. These things don't last forever. If you find the perfect controller, just use it for a couple years. It will be shit. I have a pair of PS4 controllers I'm kind of happy with, but they are not perfect.

My wife: "Gold... Oil..."

I'm trying to remember if Ciri taking the witcher concoction is canon (the books) or fake (the game). It's been too long to remember and I'm not reading all that again lol.

They should have just pissed everyone off and made a spin-off about Regis the Vampire.

Uhh. Are they expecting her to win the Primary, or are they just going to not have one again?

They did, wisely (as stupid as the whole ordeal was), wait until it was over the ocean, instead of shooting it down over one of the most densely populated areas in the country.