sp3ctr4l comments on New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars"

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

I really do feel terribly for Gen Z and A.

I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.

The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.

When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can't afford it any more due to economic depression...

A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.

Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!

Untill that service is no longer available in your area.

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[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I'm old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad's truck. Didn't have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.

I don't think there's any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I'd like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn't make it.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

"We can't rewind, we've gone too far..."

I wanna poke fun at you for actually having an 8 track, but at this point, culture is auto-cannibalizing, so I think we should just mostly celebrate, and maybe personally archive, what was once good.

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[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

8-tracks and 45s. I even remember early day modems where you actually had to pick up a landline, dial the number and then place the receiver in a specially built cradle that used analogue noise to communicate. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 that used cassette tapes to save data.

Best days of life if you ask me. Well actually maybe the mid to later 90s, when the Internet first started coming home for everyone. Watching live concerts and Napster and all of that. Instant messaging people, and being able to download every Nintendo game in existence, on demand. When computer games went from here to THERE, like Carmaggedon and games like that. Those were the magic days. When I discovered Napster I think we legit skipped school for almost the entire week.

Thanks for a trip through the memories!

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

Hey any time man!

Yeah I am a bit younger, but I dove head first into all things computer at a young age, so I completely agree with you that the mid to late 90s were... yeah, magic, just... incredible leaps and bounds being made by tech, there was a real optimism back then.

I was losing games of Starcraft in 98/99 because mom or dad picks up the phone, 56k modem now earrapes them and i get connection lost lol.

Trying to play Half Life 2, a few years later, on the same shitty eMachine... the computer could not handle the scene with Alyx being teleported in the intro / first level.

The uh, screen negative effect, plus the streaking emmisive particle blurs, every time it would crash so hard I would have to repair windows/defrag the drive.

What worked, was to stare at the floor that whole scene. That way you only get the screen negative flash effect, without the particles on top.

But yeah like, the leap from HL1 and like, Goldeneye style graphics, to HL2... fucking mind blowing.

Nowadays its all unoptimized UE5 garbage that actually looks worse in many instances than better optimized and more cleverly rendered games from 5 to 10 years ago.

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[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well the games for sure haven't for the most part gotten any better. Maybe with the exception of the Rockstar games, like I totally get all the hate, but their games are also always next level.

And the dial up days lol. My dad wisely and thankfully got a second phone line.

Also I remember those underpowered computer days too lol. We got a 200 Pentium MMX the spring of 97, and that thing was cutting edge at first, but it quickly got pretty dated, like even around 2000 it was starting to struggle with some of the newer stuff. The old man insisted on riding it into the mid aughts. I was long and away at school and afterwards, with my own computers by then, but he rode that thing into the ground, and oh boy was it crawling at the end. We'd come home from school, where we had like wide open broadband, and have to suffer through Christmas break at dial up speeds lol.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

Rockstar is so obviously just money grubbing for the last 5+ years that it is pathetic.

Yes, they do put out groundbreaking shit, truly S tier in many ways... but I won't be playing GTA6.

Oh boy, two idiot criminals have shennanigans happen to them in Florida while they look cool and hot and do crime and appear to be basically morons with no personalities.

Meanwhile the GTA6 youtubers spend months, fucking months, inventing new gameplay mechanics by noticing random details and doing pattern matching like a schizophrenic.

Remember when GTA4 had like... a really serious and biting commentary on US society?

And then GTA5 was basically 'nihlism, but expensive, and also infuriating!'

And now GTA6 seems to me to just be 'lol thug life, life fast die hard, respawn, do it again.'

... Sorry, I could apparently write a fucking novel on how disappointed I am with Rockstar, they realized GTA online was a Steam like money spigot and then just never looked back, ruined everything in the name capitalistic profit they once artfully, and sullenly, exposed.

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[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

I hate GTA online. Actually I have to admit I still don't understand the appeal of online gaming, it has never scratched the itch for me.

I'll play GTA 6, but I'm going to keep my expectations in check. I also agree, GTA IV was thus far the pentultimate. I really like RDR2 as well, both are definitely in my top 5.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

RDR2 was legitimately fantastic, unbelievably good story telling in single player, astounding graphics imo.

But, it also has (had?) an online component, and dear god what a shit show. monestized as fuck, full of bling'd out cowboys and cowgirls, broken network mechanics and hackers everywhere... and they basically just abandoned it because GTA V online was way more profitable.

You can have a good time in an online game, but basically, you have to find a rather rare and niche game that has somewhere between a small to tiny community, that is actually both politr and has a good sense of fun.

Back in the day, you could find that with some clans for some games, but most of that devolved into toxic bs and petty power struggles.

perhaps ironically, many of the simulation level military/flight type games, some tactical shooters... basically stuff that by default has an older audience on average, thats usually gonna have at least a better chance of having a non toxic community.

but, on the other hand, if you just don't care for multiplayer games, i totally get that, most game players online are literally idiot racist children, lol.

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