This is the United States. We don’t do cool trains. Only cars are allowed to be cool.

It happens a lot less often here than it did on Reddit, but I too get a slight twinge of dread from it.

Reminds me of Florans from Chucklefish games.

“Ohhhh, I thought you meant kill count.”

That’s like saying webrings didn’t exist, only discrete websites.

And eventually the heads start to fear for their safety and stop poking out of their safe spaces.

I like all the online features that aren’t invasions.

Invasions, however, are simply punishing me for reviving. I don’t seek out PvP, which means I don’t have all the techniques they use for cheap crits, I don’t have a PvP focused loadout (I tend to go for slow weapons and I’m usually not all that optimized), etc., etc., so when I get invaded it’s mostly ‘Welp, this run is a loss. Better die somewhere I can get back to.’ I know I’m going to get one-shotted with some OP weapon from someone who fishes out a lagstab, and it’s been that way since Demon’s Souls.

The point of a necktie is to cover up the buttons on your shirt. #2 is correct.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some secret Google search engine that still has decent search results instead of the paid-for mess that us plebs get.

AI, on the other hand? The flaws are intrinsic.

Coconuts are just really, really big seeds. They’re a nut, as the name implies.

However, I have a counterpoint because there is one fruit that I absolutely like with chocolate. Dried mango slices in dark chocolate are delicous.

Well, okay, two - bananas in chocolate are tasty. Back in the times when chocolate fountains were a regular occurrence at events, I could have eaten half my body weight in them.

Bananas makes sense in my mind; they aren’t overly flavorful, so there isn’t a strong fruit flavor that clashes with the chocolate. Why mangoes work so well, on the other hand, is beyond me.

Don’t forget that the models were built on blatant art theft.

Okay, slow your roll there. Protecting pedophiles is not nearly in the same category as directly facilitating pedophilia and engaging in human trafficking.

Downvote all you like, but a murderer is still guilty of a greater crime than their friend who is helping them bury the bodies.

TF2 had a long and prosperous life. It’s 18 years old at this point. There are a few live service games (usually with subscriptions) that have survived longer, but TF2 had its run, and it was a good one. I bought it as part of the Orange Box and I absolutely got my money’s worth and then some from it.

As for physical media - I don’t know if you were around for it, but there was a period before Steam took over the industry when most major PC game releases had CD keys you had to input and validate before you could play the game. Do something the publisher doesn’t like? The key gets revoked and you can’t play the game any more unless you buy another license. There were entire underground communities devoted to cracking the CD key validations in games. Now you just use Luna or Steamless and call it a day.

All it would take for Valve to lose their effective monopoly on PC game distribution would be for someone else to make a better product.

Every other major PC game distribution platform (besides GOG, and they’re far more niche than Valve) has essentially started their attempt to unseat Valve with enshittification baked in, and it was obvious.

Even in a democracy, you will still have a small group of people imposing their will over others, and only giving them what they feel they deserve. The only difference you are seeing is that of scale. Instead of a collection of elected representatives who are granted disparate powers by the plurality of people they are ruling over in their various capacities as governors, a benevolent dictatorship has one person who is granted all governmental powers by the people they are ruling over. Even a democracy can, briefly, be a tyranny. It just requires multiple bad actors to work together.

The primary difference is how long it takes for the wheels to fall off. In a dictatorship, it can - and usually does - happen virtually instantly. That’s the primary reason democracies (and republics) are the way they are - to slow down the encroachment of tyranny, hopefully enough to allow people to react to it and overturn it. (And as we’re seeing in the USA right now, that’s no guarantee.)

Yes, that is why I continued to give examples of when it would go south.

This is absolutely a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Benevolent dictatorships work as well as state-run communism does - which is to say, in theory they’re great, but they show cracks nearly the instant they’re actually enacted.

What the fuck?

WHAT THE FUCK??

The original point about a benevolent dictatorship being the ideal form of government is, in my opinion, true. Having a single point of decision means that issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently, the ‘benevolent’ part means that the needs of the populace are heard and addressed, oppression is eliminated wherever it can be found. A truly benevolent dictatorship looks a lot like a well-run democracy.

The problem comes when the benevolent dictator dies peacefully in their sleep. Or when other parts of the government begin to realize that they can feed the dictator lies in order to get what they want. Or when the dear leader starts to get paranoid. A benevolent dictatorship only works briefly, after which the ‘dictatorship’ part starts to become a real problem.

Or if ‘benevolence’ includes religious extremism (although I would argue that a leader like that wouldn’t count as truly benevolent).

If you have something that you can’t afford to part with, you don’t let it leave your person. It goes in your pockets, or in your carry-on.

If you have something that needs to get somewhere safely, and you can’t afford to lose it, and you can’t carry it with you onto an airplane, you don’t put it in your checked luggage - you ship it. With insurance.

Everyone either knows someone, or has had the experience themselves, of losing luggage due to an airline’s neglect. It’s a known risk.

Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.