Can dwarves survive such prolonged periods so far removed from rock, stone, and dirt?

On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.

HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT’s, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD’s. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it’s still a niche novelty today.

The difference with AI is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I’m not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It’s “oh this is a neat little feature I can use” not “this technology is going to change my life” the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM’s being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because “AI” will be ruined.

Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.

“Are you tired of your AI spouse getting reset after every update? Well, for just $19.99 a month you can have access to our new LLM model wAIfu!”

I have to wonder… Are these real humans mourning the loss of their AI companions, or AI bots mourning the loss of their AI bots? Did the “lost” bits ever exist in the first place?

Is this all a viral marketing scheme to get people to use a specialized AI bot for their artificial companionship?

I’m saying all this just because I’ve never actually talked with anyone who has admitted to having a relationship with an AI chat bot. I’ve never even heard of a friend of a friend of a cousin of a coworker of an acquaintance. That doesn’t mean these people don’t exist - there’s probably some sampling bias involved simply because people who fall in love with AI probably don’t talk to a whole lot of real people. But my years of experience on the internet have taught me to be skeptical.

1. I would be surprised if a Valve-made console had a discrete GPU in this current GPU market. Part of what helped the Steam Deck succeed was that it was an integrated GPU. The Steam Deck was able to be sold at presumably a low margin (maybe even at a loss), and Valve expects to profit from the games purchased on Steam. If they were to sell a pre-buikt PC at close to cost, people would scalp the GPU’s for profit and Valve would probably lose out on that predicted Steam revenue.

That does not entirely dismiss this news though. Could be that the 7600 reported here is a temporary workaround for them to test the CPU while the GPU (or even just the drivers) are being worked on. Or maybe for them to do comparison testing easily. I’m just saying I would not expect to see a 7600 in the final product.

2. There is a huge gap in the market right now. The Switch 2 starts at $450, the PS5 slim is going up to $500. The Xbox Series S is woefully underpowered and holding the entire Xbox platform back while costing $380. There are no more $200-$300 console options, unless you want to go with something janky like a mini PC or a cheap Chinese handheld. And like, yes inflation is a thing, but it’s not THAT bad. I was able to buy a PS4 slim bundled with 3 AAA Sony games in 2019 for $199.99. Plug that into an inflation calculator and I get ~$250.

Imagine Valve releases a home console for $300. I think it would have to be slightly more powerful than the Deck, to be able to target AAA games releasing over the next 5 years with 1080p 30 FPS. (And for anyone complaint about how “unplayable” that is, go buy a $600 console or $2000 PC instead. This theoretical product is not for you). What I’m not sure if is whether that would be feasible. Can we shave $100 off the Deck by consolizing it? No screen, no battery, probably of design restrictions revolving around it being portable and dust/water resistant could go away and bring the costs down. Plus general performance gains AMD has made since 2022. If Valve could do something like that they could potentially push Microsoft out of the hardware market (they have been rumored to be considering that for a while anyways).

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in tough economic times, the ultimate answer is that most people just don’t have the disposable income for videogames, so it makes more sense to downsize and focus on the premium high-end market where the volune is lower and the margins are higher. But this rumor is giving me a little bit of hope.

I see two possible explanations:

1. Class warfare. The same people banning porn are the ones banning abortion, banning homosexuality, banning gender transitions (although they never seem to ban the same therapies for cis people), banning sex education, banning contraception. All of these attacks on individual sexuality are to try to push people into unprotected heterosexual sex. At the same time, these same political groups have been attacking both parental support systems and child labor laws. They want parents too desperate to rebel. They want children working. They want a larger supply of labor: more supply means more competition amongst workers for wages, which means the labor is cheaper.

2. Power. Maybe these payments processors don’t actually care about pornographic games. But attacking pornography in the name of “defending women and children” is easy to sell to the public and sets a precedent for these payment processors violating neutrality. So eventually they will move to banning games that are too violent (well, they’ve already been trying for decades). Then it’ll be games that are too “extreme” or promote “terrorism”. If these payment processors don’t see any consequences soon, I expect in the next 5 years they will try to take down any games that are anti-Zionist. Maybe games that are pro-Ukraine. In 10 years it could be any sort of left-leaning game. Disco Elysium for promoting communism. Horizon for depicting climate change. Stardew Valley for allowing same-sex relationships and being anti-corporate.

Notice that these discussions never seem to apply to copaganda. It’s perfectly fine to be violent and bloody as long as that violence is authorized by the state. The US Military offices have a well-documented relationship with Activision for Call of Duty, so you aren’t going to see any of these groups call for CoD to be banned.

I mean, that’s just diving into the classic Console vs PC arguments that have been going on for years. My point is that it’s gotten worse for both. We can argue all day over which is the best way to go in 2025.

What I think we CAN say for sure is that buying any sort of gaming device in 2019 is better than any option in 2025. I’m using 2019 because that was the year I built my PC for $1k total, and that holiday season I bought my PS4 - a slim model that came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us 2 all for $199.99. Either of those deals blow pretty much anything today out of the water.

I guess profits are up, the PS5 is selling well so far, and it looks like the Switch 2 is tentatively on place to be one of the better-selling units of all time. Maybe the average consumer just doesn’t care about the bang for their buck- they just want the new shiny thing.

I can’t name a single PS5 game I’d want to play that doesn’t already look and run better on my PC

The keyword here is “my”.

It’s not just the console generation that is suffering. PC gaming is dying too. Crypto dealer the first blow, now AI. I’m still running an RX580 that I bought for $180 back in 2019. I was planning on buying a 9700XT at launch this year. Still not a great value- an MSRP of $600. Adjusted for inflation that’s still ~2.6x the price and it’s not going to give me 2.6x the performance. But even then it was impossible to find a card for $600 - even months later the cheapest one on nowinstock is $700, and those are hard to find. That’s JUST the GPU - you still need another grand or more to build a decent PC around it. Even with this price increase, the base PS5 is $550.

I’m not trying to make this a console vs PC thing. They all suck right now. The only good values for gaming is on the fringes. The Steam Deck was an incredible value when it launched, and only looks better today. Other cheap, low-powered solutions like Chinese handhelds and android TV boxes loaded with pirated old ROM’s. Mini-PC’s that are good enough to handle 5-10 year old PC games… At 1080p or less with the settings turned down bit. Maybe an Xbox Series S might be a decent short-term value, especially if you are a person who loves game pass or just wants to play free games like Fortnight.

It’s looking bleak. Not just videogames but everything. Food, medicine, clothing, housing.

I don’t think anyone mentioned early access here. Civ 7 “released” with version 1.0 back in February.

Honestly I can kind of appreciate the honesty of early access games, especially from smaller developers. It’s a bit of a risk, but at least on Steam everything seems to be labeled and disclosed well. Early access games are often cheaper. I had great times with games like Hades and Subnautica in early access. There will be some duds, some projects that get abandoned before they release, but that’s also why early access games tend to be cheaper: the discount should offset the risk if the market is working as it should.

Men, particularly the vast majority of working class men, are victims of the patriarchy even at the same time they receive privileges. There’s an unfortunate sentiment among the woke that people who happen to be part of a privileged group are bad. White people are colonizers, straight people are toxic, men are all violent sexual predators, etc. For a lot of people, it’s much easier to be woke and fight for an equal and just world when the victims of that oppression are obvious.

If this exact same comic was made by JK Rowling and replaced “men” with “trans women” or “trans men” the comments section would be (rightfully) shooting it down as being bigoted.

All that aside, from a practical standpoint it’s also worth pointing out that any sexual assault expert will tell you the vast majority happen between people who already know each other. A victim is more likely to be abused by their own family members, family friends, teachers, religious figures, youth leaders, coworkers, or significant other than they are a random stranger. Of course, it’s always dangerous to meet strangers (robbery, fraud, and more).

Which is important to point out because it’s a very quick jump from “women don’t feel safe because of all of these men around” to “well let’s get rid of the most violent men”. Which, oddly enough, tend to also be a part of whatever group they are trying to eliminate. Jews in pre-WW2 Germany, black men in America, communists in McCarthyism, Hispanics under Trump, Syrian refugees in Europe. It always starts with “this group wants to hurt our women and children” and ends with everyone losing rights to authoritarian regimes.

So Mario Kart World was the big launch title with bundles, and they already released a new Fast game, the series that seems to have basically replaced F-Zero.

Seems like a lot of racing games early on from Nintendo.

I think the Switch 2 will do well, as it’s already had a better launch than the WiiU or 3DS. But it’s kind of in an awkward spot. The community reaction seems to be “yeah Mario Kart World is great, but it’s still just a Mario Kart game at the end of the day, and it will need some DLC to catch up to the level of content of MK8”. Donkey Kong was received well but doesn’t seem to have the staying power of a game like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild did. Pokemon Legends Z-A is probably going to do well, but I don’t think these kind of spinoff games are going to drive console sales like the main games do (especially when there is a Switch version coming out too).

My point is that a few months after launch I still don’t see a game where I say “wow that’s worth grabbing a Switch 2 for!”. It almost feels more like the “Switch Pro” that was rumored for years rather than a true sequel- the main reason to upgrade right now is that Switch 1 games run better. That is enough to launch, but I’m looking through the list of announced games and trying to find what the big system seller is going to be. What’s going to release this holiday season that makes parents stand in line to buy the latest Nintendo for their children?

Maybe this is by design? Maybe Nintendo has purposefully left a bit of a drought to avoid having a ton of cross-gen games, and plans to start announcing more projects in 2026?

I mean, I can’t speak for everyone of course but a couple of the local farms near me are open to the public as kind of a tourist-y attraction. They have petting zoos and hay rides in the fall and sell a lot of their own products (honey and honeycomb, produce of course, baked goods, apple cider, etc). And everyone is welcome to see the animals grazing on real green plants, in open fields.

With other farms I can talk to their employees at the local market, I can find news articles about them, or I can even drive by and look then up myself.

Are they perfect? Of course not. But… What are you asking people to do? Should we all just give up and go to the local Wal-Mart for all our produce? Or are you naive enough to think everyone should be growing their own Victory gardens?

I had picked it up on sale for $10, left it in my backlog until 2024 when I was looking for a little palate cleanser. I was expecting a quick little shooter, maybe 10-20 hours, something to occupy a couple of weekends. I ended up spending 100 hours to get it 100% complete, watching lore videos with my wife, and now we are going back and playing Alan Wake.

Still have no interest in a multiplayer live-service game though. These companies all convince themselves that THEY will be the next “big thing” and it usually fails.

“Mansplaining” is sexist. It’s the equivalent of saying women are airheads, or gossips, or talk too much.

Is each man expected to just… Assume that everyone else shares their exact knowledge? Would such an assumption not therefore eliminate most communication entirely?

Or what if we decided to divide up groups by something other than gender. Would it be okay to say “asiansplaining” or “jewsplaining” or “gaysplaoning”?

Can a trans-man mansplaining? Can a trans-woman mansplain? Is there a separate category of “transplaining”?