sp3ctr4l

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

He, entirely unironically, has a cult following.

Like… an actual cult.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.

Oh no!

Who could have guessed another fascist was also totally corrupt?

Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.

This deserves some kind of award.

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You said ‘we are in agreement’ to my last post in this thread, and my last post in this thread pointed out that all of those scenarios are terrorism with the definition that you chose as ‘pretty much the definition of terrorism’.

So yes, you did agree.

But now you don’t agree, but also do not disagree.

… Could it possibly be the case that the definition of terrorism you chose is a bit too broad?

Great!

I am glad you agree that by your (the FBI’s current) definition, most police in the US are terrorists, every President going back to at least JFK is a terrorist, everyone who violently resisted the Nazis were terrorists, and every single protest everywhere, ever, that has involved any single member of that protest being charged with resisting arrest has also been terrorism.

Well you accused me of whataboutism, so I explained how… yeah you could see it that way if you only look at the surface, but it’s really a way of illustrating a more complex idea.

And well, here you go again, attempting to distill everything into neat, simple little boxes.

Twice now I quite literally explained to you how context is important in … you know, definitions, which literally are a network of syntactic associations that are context… and now you’ve selectively replied by removing all of the context I gave.

So uh, yes, I’m glad we’ve cleared up that you are definitionally a simpleton, only insterested in very surface level, simple understandings of things.

When the person that started this thread said ‘property damage is not violence’, they likely (I can’t read minds, but I’ve got a hunch) meant that property damage is not of the same magnitude of severity, does not or should not be judged by the same set of standards as violence directly against a person, that the entirety of a scenario involving violence should be considered when assessing it.

IE, they’re using shorthand, and I attempted to unpack some of that shorthand for you.

Sort of like how the colloquial definition of ‘theft’ generally includes shoplifting, but generally excludes wage theft by employers, despite wage theft being of considerably greater monetary magnitude than shrink loss.

If you want ‘a definition’ of violence that doesn’t include property damage, here you go:

Violence is any act that causes direct harm to a thing capable of suffering.

Now you can point out how that’s a flawed definition, and I will redirect you to my comments on your own flawed and favored definition of terrorism from the FBI, and my own previous attempts at better defining violence, and then maybe we can have the actually interesting conversation about violence and property that you’ve thus far done your damndest to avoid.

Oh, are you asking me, personally, for a definition of violence, just flat out, with no context?

I’d say violence is anything that causes unnecessary suffering to a living being, or significant damage to a nonliving thing.

What exactly do I mean by that?

Well, its quite context dependent.

Is burning down a Tesla dealership violent?

Sure!

Is a lesser act of violence in pursuit of a reduction of much, much greater violence justifiable?

Again, context matters, but generally speaking, the world is built upon violence, people just disagree about when it is justified.

If a man has pummeled you with hammer blows, you’d be justified in doing some violence back to him to get him to stop.

If a cartoon supervillain has become either the most or second most poweful man in the world, he has a history of and declared intention to commit mass systemic violence against hundreds of millions of people… and burning down some of his shittily designed and built self-immolating cars stands a good chance at knocking him, his grip on the minds of his idiot sycophants, and his overall level of power and influence down a peg?

When there are no ‘legitimate’ means that will effectively do this, effectively lessen his capacity to do violence against millions?

When this harms only things directly, and not people? When those things are overpriced luxury items?

Well, I’d rather not keep taking the hammer blows.

If you’ve got a more peaceful way to stop the hammering, I’d love to hear it… but my bones are breaking.

Its an Anarchist thing, you wouldn’t get it.

Super simple version?

Violence is defined by the state in such a way that it binds the actions of its subjects, but exempts the actions of itself/its agents.

Look up ‘systemic violence’ or ‘stochastic terrorism’ and you can begin to see how it becomes harder to draw very clear lines than you seem to think is.

Lets go with your definition that violence includes acts against property.

Ok… are… taxes violence?

Is it violent to threaten you with immediate arrest if found operating a car without a valid liscense?

Howabout valid insurance?

Is civil asset forfeiture violence?

Is emminent domain violence?

Howabout clearing a homeless encampment, destroying all their belongings?

Is that violent?

Is it violent to, either intentionally or unintentionally… crash the stock market and knock about 20% off of the value of 401ks of the majority of the population?

Reminder that involuntary assault and involuntary murder / manslaughter… are violent crimes.

… The most basic definition of what a State is, is “a formalized group that has the ‘legitimate’ monopoly of the use of force (violence) within a defined geographic area.”

There we go, hahah!

Yes, that is basically what I am doing.

Was that not clear?

I am attempting to point out the given definition of terrorism is quite broad, and easily interpreted subjectively depending on your biases.

Burn down a Tesla dealership?

Terrorism.

Boston Tea Party?

Terrorism.

Jan 6th?

Terrorism.

Bay of Pigs Invasion?

Terrorism, more technically ‘State Terrorism’.

Many, many acts of resistance groups in German occupied Europe during WW2?

Also Terrorism.

Order an extrajudicial assasination? Order or carry out mass arrests without proper warrants or authority?

Plant false evidence or fabricate some kind of ‘suspicious behavior’ to justify an arrest or detainment or use of force or conviction, motivated by a political/religious/ethic/etc bias?

Again, Terrorism, though more specifically that is ‘State Terrorism’.

Saying “I am going to kill [very important political figure]”?

Terrorism.

Pilot a ship on the sea to harass dragnet fishing boats or whalers?

Terrorism.

Any protest group that has ‘illegally’ gathered in an area or building without a permit, where a single person threw a punch or resisted arrest?

Again, also terrorism.

… All of these things either are or could easily be interpreted to be both violent and criminal acts, with either a motivation or desired effect being biased toward some specific group of people.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism

You may note that precisely defining terrorism is actually somewhat difficult, as indicated by the wide range of different definitions used by different groups and at different times, and is actually the subject of a whole lot of academic and legal debate and disagreement, with slight but very significant differences over time and place/jurisdiction.

Yes, but that definition also defines… basically all the most heinous things that Trump and those around him have done in the last… 5 years, lets say? … as terrorism.

Remember CPAC, 2022?

… kinda speaks for itself.

I… am assuming / hoping they will just pretend all the … basically straight to dvd sequels… do not exist.

Ok, actually read the article: It’s going straight to the actual source material, the 1959 book… which… could actually be pretty interesting, there are a lot of non total parody ways you could portray that future world, and you could of course put your own spin on it and change some plot or worldlore or characters and come out with your own thing.

Blade Runner, for example… diverges fairly significantly, in many ways, from the actual book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Of course, it could also be terrible, or mid. Who knows! But it seems more like its going to be a different attempt at adapting the book to film, not a sequel to the Veerhoven movie.

Maybe we’ll get Lynch Dune, maybe we’ll get Villenueve Dune, maybe we’ll get SyFy channel Dune, lol.