I've long stopped engaging in long political debates. Namely because every time, someone is debating you for the sole purpose of winning the argument. There isn't a lot of lee way made to admit fault or see the flaws of any arguments including their own. It just turns into a pointless debate that has no end.
Religion is the same.
It is hard sometimes to talk about the flaws about LGBTQ communities without being branded. There are flaws that I've seen with it and I know they're there and continue to be there. But nobody wants to admit it and hear it, so they just go straight to labeling.
All that anyone ever wants to hear anymore is just a validated response that confirms their opinion. Because people long forgot that opinions are opinions and not any scientific source.
I was there for 9/11 like many others were growing up. Many born in 2001 and after would not understand the impact it has had on America.
I was there for the Boston Red Sox finally snapping a multi-decade streak of losing or not making it to a World Series in 2004. This is significant if you're a sports fan, especially baseball.
I was there to see the rise of social media sites that many use today.
This is going to be hard to explain. So I'll just simply say - go look for a show called 2 Sense, all of the episodes are available on Internet Archive. It was a very niche show that was hosted by a furry named 2 The Ranting Gryphon.
This is an online radio show that predates a tiny bit before podcasting as a term and as a form of entertainment began to gain ground. I'll warn you that, yes some of the content on that show will not be what you'd expect. A lot of the content on that show will be politically incorrect. A lot of content on that show will come off as juvenile and immature at times, if not entire shows.
But this is the kind of show I listen to annually that just drives me back in time. Not because I particularly was in favor of the personalities of this show or anything. But it's the things they cover and talk about that I reflect on sometimes compared to where things are now in the world and society.
I wasn't even an active listener of this show until about 2008, towards the tail end of it's second run. And quite frankly, listening to those episodes are very unbearable to me now because the content from 2007-2008 of the episodes are very loose and it really became a soapbox for the primary host, 2 Gryphon, to start airing out his most raw takes on how he feels about certain groups of people.
Out of everything we have today, Discord is arguably the best we've got.
Nobody cares about Skype anymore as much. VK Messenger, which is ICQ's successor, looks like trash. Telegram used to be very great but did take some morally questionable steps, yet still gives the user an awful lot of power. Zoom is garbage. Microsoft Teams is garbage. Facebook Messenger is garbage.
So if I had to pick, Discord and Telegram is the best we've got now.
In the Video Game Business, it's not estranged to find video game companies doing casino things. Konami doing pachinko for example, which lead to them pissing a lot of their IPs off to pachinko machines that were themed.
Hell, Nintendo licensed to Konami to do Mario Roulette which is a medal game.
And they totally wasted a new Earthworm Jim game on that thing.
But yeah, Tommy Tallarico had a personal vendetta with Pat the NES Punk for a while, taking swipes at them as he was covering the whole issue on his podcast the CUPodcast. It's a really wild ride from beginning to end, if it ever did end.
They've been this way since the late 90s and 2000s. More publishing than doing. Sometimes they'll throw out a Atari Classics compilation but that's it.
Google search needs to just branch itself off into several micro-search engines. It is useless as a general purpose search engine.
Again, try searching 'skillet' and you'll get more results on the band with the name than the pan itself. Make a media-based micro search engine where it's nothing but music, movies, shows .etc
Linux costs next to nothing compared to Windows. So if companies want to cry about having to save on budget, go with the better option for it.
Who the fuck needs Office 365? Nothing has really changed on that software for years, it's still the same shit. I don't see anything different on Microsoft Word 2007 from it's 365 counterpart. People are getting scammed.
And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.
But I don't see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it's legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.
There's a point here. The N64 too had a significantly lower count of games than the PS1. The PS1 had like three times larger the amount of games with 1,278 than N64. So there was a lot more options to pick and choose from. And there were definitely superior versions of some of the games listed.
But it is sort of like the Genesis vs Super Nintendo comparison. People can list banger after banger off of the SNES library that it easily fills a Top 50 list, whereas people can list maybe 20 good Genesis games? So I do believe that's where a lot of the favoritism stems off from is that, Nintendo had to make their games good for the N64, least the first party titles. Everything else off of it were really more misses than hits, you probably had 10 underrated gems that people now talk about (and pretend they always were that when nobody had a clue back then).
What turned me off from multiplayer games was the entitled obnoxiousness of the other players. Playing with others is cool for a few minutes, but if you run into several shit players, ruins everything. This is when the whole "if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself" rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games. People just choose to be bastards.
Someone has already opened an opportunity for me to move to the UK, but for non-political reasons. Though it will remain an option.