PSA: While chewing plastic is usually benign, silly cat behavior it can sometimes indicate something is off/wrong
Pulled from Purina's info page on plastic-chewing:
Although unusual, diseases like hyperthyroidism in cats, feline diabetes, anemia or dental issues might cause a cat to chew on plastic.
Stress or anxiety can cause cats to show changes in their behavior and chewing plastic can be one of many signs that your cat is feeling anxious
It is natural for cats to eat things that they can gnaw and chew. If they do not have this in their diet or provided in appropriate enrichment opportunities, they might be feeling the need to exercise their teeth and jaws on inappropriate items.
Many unusual behaviors are driven by pain – and chewing, gnawing, and eating often inappropriate things can be one of them
Cats can show compulsive cat behavior patterns, similar to OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) in humans.
Your cat might be telling you that they’re lacking some nutrients by biting plastic. If they feel like they’re missing out on something, they could resort to biting and chewing on other things
Learned this lesson the hard way once, so spreading the knowledge just in case :)
Deplatforming works. Demanding civility from people under attack by disingenuous, insincere "intellectuals" is so much more than just tone policing; it's direct enablement of disenfranchisement and allowing the spread of harm.
It's easy to be bad. It's hard to be good. When bad people are allowed to express their evil ideologies, it is much easier for people to pick up the evil than for the righteous to defend the good.
We cannot be tolerant of intolerance.
So, again, FUCK YEAH, Ada. You rock for protecting your users AND the rest of the world by contributing to the deplatforming of bigots.
Warp Drives use up massive amounts of energy in a single burst. We all know acceleration and deceleration are the things that are costly in space, not maintaining momentum. So you can design against that, right? Massive capacitors that are easily replaced, that store the charge before passing it to the warp drive, which only needs to operate for a short time.
Shield emitters, on the other hand, need constant power running through them to generate the necessary energy field. Like a powered magnet, it's only by running current through the device that the field is generated. And any time you move large amounts of power continuously like that you're going to generate heat and degrade the medium.
So it comes down to the fundamental nature of the task being performed by the hardware.
I never said anything about the quality of the games. I'm speaking specifically to the monetization bullshit.
As I said elsewhere: budget bloat happens in a lot of places. Greedy executive and publishers is one place. Overambitious design goals that get scrapped is another. There's also bad tools workflows, mismanagement, and any number of other contributing factors.
But even indie devs are getting screwed on pricing and making far less than they deserve to be in many cases.
If people keep buying CoD and Assassins Creed, devs will keep making them. And if they can't increase retail price to cover the budget they will find other ways to do it.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the capital structure is fair by any means. I understand all the reasons why people - especially right now - are struggling to justify big purchases.
And I will readily agree that inefficient and improper use of resources is one of the contributing factors to ballooning development budgets
That said, video games are - and I challenge you to disprove this - easily one of the best investments for entertainment. Dollars-per-hour of fun on a 20hr, $60 game is $3. For a live service game where people spend hundreds of thousands of hours playing it can get below $0.10 per hour.
EDIT: I also agree that demos need to make a comeback because I'm sick of wasting money. Though people also need to read some reviews before they buy occasionally :/
While that may be true, the costs and budgets we're dealing with today are orders of magnitude higher than they were back then. Physical product manufacturing doesn't even come close to making up the difference when you factor in digital storefront costs.
I simply chose two big, well known, and beloved titles for the sake of expediency.
This problem is not unique to big budget games.
Indie devs are getting screwed too. You saying that you've found great games for $30-40 from indie devs isn't an argument against more sustainable pricing like you think it is.
If the dev budget for the indie game was 5% of the AAA game but the price was 50% then you've literally just helped prove my point
The fact is - and I challenge you to prove me wrong here - video games continue to be hands down the best dollar-per-hour investment for entertainment. Even a $60 game that only lasts 20 hrs is still coming in at $3/hr of entertainment, which is very hard to beat. When you look at live service games where people will spend literally thousands of hours after paying anywhere from $60-200 you're looking at $0.10/hr in some cases.
Inflation adjusted Mario 64 cost in 2022 = $111.91
Inflation adjusted Mario 64 budget in 2022 = ~$2.91mil
Cost of "Elden Ring" on release = $59.99
Estimated dev. budget for Elden Ring = $100mil-200mil
Mario 64 units sold = ~12mil
Elden Ring units sold = ~28mil
These details are provided without comment. You do the math and decide whether the fact that prices haven't changed since 1996 might be the reason for some of the enshitification we continue to see.
And now for the comment:
Consumers are horrifyingly resistant to price increases for games. It is directly responsible for many of the shitty monetization models we've seen. Development budget continue to rise, even on indie games, while consumers pay less and less in "real money value" over time.
It's completely unsustainable and the very reason the "business types" get involved, forcing unpopular monetization schemes
Exactly this. I work in the games industry as well and even big studios are falling over themselves NOT to release anywhere near GTA6.
Nobody believes there won't be people playing other games at that time. But it's going to dominate the media cycle for a month, especially if it is either better or worse than fans hope. And the reality is that many, many people have limited gaming budgets. If you've only got $100 to spend, GTA6 is very likely to be the default pick at that time.
It's a behemoth in terms of grabbing attention from both the media and players. All the best laid plans for a successful release can be completely derailed by a game like GTA6.
On Mastodon at least there is a mod available to add regex-based rejection patterns. We added the identifier from the discord link to our reject pattern and that seems to have stopped this particular spammer from getting at our users.
Maybe there's something similar for other fedi services
"Spend more time in the real world"? Fuckin-a that is some pompous, condescending bullshit. You have no idea who the fuck I am or what I've experienced.
Done now. You've made it incredibly clear exactly what type of person you are
You are shifting the goal posts. My point is simply that the delusion of an armed insurrection against the government is naive in the extreme. It will never play out the way you imply by saying "the crazy Nazis are in charge so don't give them a monopoly on force". They already have the monopoly on the only force that matters in any realistic internal conflict scenario.
As for vaccines: your right to be a moron stops at the point where it endangers others. Your right to be an idiot does not supersede my right to life. That is a well understood principal in US law. Are you allowed to skip the vaccine? Sure. But I'm allowed to require you show proof of vaccination before letting you on my private property, including my place of business. And the same goes for public property too. The metal detectors used to keep guns out of government buildings is proof of this reality
The point is that if the total IDF death count in Gaza is that low after more than year of fighting, you and your rifle aren't gonna do shit against the government if they're able to convince the military to attack Americans on their own soil.
Like I said, I'm not trying to ban guns outright. If you want to defend your family from other crazy civilians with guns, I can appreciate that.
But this conversation started with a comment about Nazis being in power. You cannot fight that kind of power with the firearms available to civilians. Only other civilians with equally weak armaments
And my original comment was simply pointing out the hypocrisy of reversing course on vaccines when kids start dying when there are thousands of deaths every year, dozens of which are children in schools, and our leadership won't even consider strengthening background checks or banning bump stocks
PSA: While chewing plastic is usually benign, silly cat behavior it can sometimes indicate something is off/wrong
Pulled from Purina's info page on plastic-chewing:
Learned this lesson the hard way once, so spreading the knowledge just in case :)