the imperial writ

@alz_zyd_ I don't think this is true. Really great games, perhaps some even masterpieces, are coming out at a steady drop, but from smaller and indie studios. The big corporate games rely on their established IP to get, yes nostalgia $ from my age range and onboard a new generation

If you are in your 30s and 40s today, you lived through the golden age of videogames, akin to being alive in the time of Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt for classical music. Your children will never experience what you did

The classics are getting remade over and over again because, while graphics are getting better, the classics were perfect videogames. The genre is stagnating, because most of the greatest possible videogames have already been made

@StatisticUrban Unfortunate that Chinese civilization is so old that there are almost no wilderness areas.

Underdiscussed, at least in America, that China is home to some of the most stunning natural environments in the world. They also mix the natural and urban in ways we really just don't in the West.

@owenbroadcast my own experience is that i spend ~1500 hrs on any game I *really* enjoy. and I've really enjoyed games since i was 7 or 8. i think that i didn't turn out a vegetable because i don't enjoy TV/streaming at all nor short-form video.

if you have kids, you end up thinking a lot about childhood and how you want to structure theirs. as a brief thought experiment, i remembered i had a game called ‘harvest moon’ for the game boy. there was a setting where you could check how much time you spent playing. i checked mine (back then, at that time). it was around 60 hours. i remember this because i showed it to my dad, who remarked that that was about the amount of time he worked a week. this game (i was about 8) was interesting, i remember it, but it certainly wasn’t seminal or particularly epic to me. if we cut a cross section of time, let’s say 5 years (late age 7 to early age 12?), i could easily come up with 30 games that im sure i played as much or more. in fact, i just did so. so, if it was only ten games, that would be 600 hours. but it’s thirty, so triple that, that is 1800 hours. keep in mind this is a low estimate. another game boy game we had, i think we noticed it reset after around 60 hours of total play time. i went over that line at least once. again, this wasn’t even a particularly epic or cool game. now, i haven’t even touched general computer use (included a few computer games above). add on to that. now, i haven’t even covered TV. how many shows can you think of from this time in your life where you saw every episode - or it feels like you did? i can think of a lot. and that’s just shows that i liked. most people are familiar with being a kid and just watching whatever is on TV. so, add that on as well. then, this subset of hours doesn’t include hanging with friends, where we were, very often, playing video games, add that on. now (last thing), keep in mind that from a parent’s perspective, you’re at school six hours a day for most of the year. so all this is taking place around that. so, if you ever clock four hours a day, you were statistically probably just at school for six hours. we’re not adding school in but, from their perspective, that’s ten full hours where you’re just not “there”. so, just objectively - without any ethical judgement at all, our parents (speaking generally) just had us in front of screens for literally thousands of hours. many thousands. if i expanded the range here (down into age 7 and up into 14) and really squeezed it, its possible we could get close to 10,000 hours. based on my general observations, it also feels like i am on the lower end of the spectrum here. for example, i never “got into” movies. that would presumably add time onto this, i could empirically observe that i was less extreme than many of my friends, and so on. so much of youtube, the internet in general, is nostalgia for these screen worlds (six hour video on a minor character from an N64 game). conversely, so much parenting discussion today is characterized by a kind of screen-phobia (which i have and think is logical). it’s somewhat fascinating to sit down for yourself and try to quantify and visualize that, for me at least, you can imagine a 7 year old and imagine that before age 14 you’re somehow going to fit in somewhere between 2 to 7,000+ hours of screentime.

@KILLTOPARTY He needs to date outside of tech. I've seen plenty of AMWF couples. Seattle are is full of nerdy white women with yellow fever

Will he likely remain single for life?

@selentelechia @tenobrus This feels accurate. The most "dinergoth" people I know were already that way almost 20 years ago. And they still are. Their family background was very dysfunctional. I think all income was derived from disability payments and occasional petty drug dealing.

re: my last point, I only skimmed the article so idk if Mariani mentioned it or even understands, because he probably isn't in a position to encounter them -- the type of person that the "dinergoth gf" is getting away from via discord and piercings and tiktok diagnoses is barely literate and almost invisible unless you work in social services, policing, charity, etc. and they don't really overlap with anyone who is writing for anything unless that person looks like a viable mark for a scam. nobody's gonna write about the parasite class tho because we're not supposed to fully acknowledge their existence as they actually are, and we don't know how to help them yet. "dinergoths" are still fair game for literary status jostling because they function and participate in modernity at all. there is a whole set of people who are currently doing the spiritual equivalent of a 24/7 fentanyl lean after years of sexually abusing their kids and punching holes in their brains with amphetamines.

now this starts to feel like more interesting commentary to me. at white collar jobs there's a lot of implicit pressure to grow the fuck up, because you're exposed to peers who manifestly have their shit together. used to be lower class people would have a kid and community members would push them to get their shit together too. older coworkers even at dead end jobs, church and other local communities, etc. but if these days the 27 yo teenagers working retail aren't having kids and basically have no older peers with their shit together in any meaningful way, what incentive do they have to do anything but keep watching the same anime in discord calls? who are you feeling social pressure from?

@GovBobFerguson This is much less important than you perceive and is going to push normal, centrist voters away.

Last year, we announced the Department of Health is processing all requests to change gender designation on birth certificates within 3 business days, down from as much as a 10 month wait. This week, I signed a bill ensuring Washingtonians can change the sex designation on their state IDs and birth certificates without fear of violating their privacy. Washington state is committed to protecting the rights of transgender and gender diverse people. That includes their legal right to reflect their gender on these documents. Thanks to prime sponsor Sen. Pedersen.

@jiratickets @ElJefeTwoloom Train Dreams got so schmaltzy by the end. I wanted to like it, but it was basically a PNW pinterest board in film form.

@ElJefeTwoloom what about Train Dreams I like Train Dreams it should’ve been Train Dreams

“Sinners” was obviously better than “One Battle After Another” to anyone who has seen both, except for the white people who think they are revolutionaries because they vote a certain way and yell at people about politics - right before they take their Range Rover to Starbucks and the yoga studio. OBAA makes them feel seen and validated, and they screech about how it is therefore better than Sinners, when obviously it is not. Which movie had dramatic tension? Did anyone think Hollywood would do anything but eliminate the cartoonishly ridiculous OBAA evil boogeymen? Sinners had actual stakes. OBAA was the silliest of political diatribes that was only ever going to end one way.

@selentelechia @the_f_m @eigenrobot New mecha anime idea just dropped

@the_f_m @eigenrobot if the sperm had built his own little nanobot exoskeleton, that would be a different story

problem with promiscuous sperm competition species is that you can win just by sperm-maxxing and ignoring everything else that scrawny monkey that can't walk straight and has extra fingers? put all his points into sperm quality and it's WORKING this is why apes lost to us

@laurashin @KevinWSHPod Every 10 years the 中国通 cycle occurs. New crop goes to China, is enamored with their technocratic veneer. Then a political or economic crackdown happens and it's all "ah now l see why Chinese who can afford it leave"

@KevinWSHPod Yeah, you can do everything ... except say what you really think without getting thrown into jail

Spending a few days in China with my (half-chinese) gf, pretty incredible how the rest of the world is living decades behind this country You can do literally everything from one single app (Alipay: travel, food, taxi, hotels, Fx rate, tax refund, translation etc..) okay maybe add Wechat so 2 apps Gigantic cities (with endless skyscrapers) that are a few decades old with tens of millions of people: clean, green, no “overcrowded feeling” (actually wondering where people are) Food and items delivered by drone to drone kiosk Top notch high speed trains Top notch premium transportations that are super cheap compared to the “western world” Etc etc…

@KenLayne perhaps related, but Disney got worse when the musical numbers stopped being written by jews

“Slop” moved into the vocabulary so easily because it replaced “schlock,” which means the same thing, but East Coast Yiddish terms have fallen out of favor. “Slop” is very Old West / Frontier.

@ReubenR80027912 The PNW is fantastic and everyone needs to stay away from it

Honestly the lesson from Joe Kent affair is don’t trust anyone from Pacific Northwest. Weird ass, eerie place that produces weird ass eerie ppl

so i had to completely reverse my initial stance on Marathon (it sucks) Actually it kind of rules and feels like I'm back at my Mac Performa II playing Syndicate for the first time. This is a classic cyberpunk RPG with all the other players part of the act.

@squirrelspcsuit @eigenrobot That's a good point. Like I'm in WA and whenever I go to Portland I think it's way too fkn weird for me. But it's good those folks get their own city.

@eigenrobot I don't think his thesis is off base, but if you can write this sentence and have it get by the editor without being told to reconsider the entire framing of your article I have questions

a full writeup of diner goth phenomenon from our own robert mariani we really screwed the kids i guess

@PatrociniuMundi @PrinceVogel From this proposition, it may be shown that 1+1=2. This is occasionally useful Something like that

@PrinceVogel You try very hard and then you quit.

Yeah? How do you say that in math

@eigenrobot I feel like I've met many people who didn't have kids but not because they're anti natalist. Usually it's something like they didn't think they were the parent type, or too focused on careers. But I feel like it's a shame, some of them would have made good parents

is it really like this in meatspace? i haven't encountered it but i could imagine it i guess i mostly go places with my kids and everyone seems happy they're there but, small town life, who knows

@marygaitspill Sounds good, hit up the roving furries around u dub

Am I awake or do I dream? The strangest pictures I have seen Night is day and twilight's gone away x.com/i/status/20322…

The visions dancing in my mind The early dawn, the shades of time Twilight crawling through my windowpane

@shakoistsLog I have less time in WA due to being a transplant, moved directly to Eastside, but I also see the issues in the city. There's a lot of awesome in it, but we've heard often from biz owners how areas have gone downhill

apart from the obvious, what's frustrating about this is it's not even effective. as a mayor all you have to do is go meet with some business leaders and ask what they need. people *want* to sell their goods. the system is built that this works really well with the tiniest bit of support.

@AliceMarker1113 @eigenrobot Wife is always pressuring me to eat fruit. Only one I'll do without harassment is raw tomato

@eigenrobot One of the recurring jokes with our friends is that my partner and I never have fruit in the house and don't really eat fruit. We used to keep a bowl of apples and oranges on the counter for appearances but it was too sad. Now it's a bowl of limes, garlic, tomatoes and ginger.

@jonfavs Chamath is a scammer and a charlatan, but in general I agree with the base premise: WA is overspending and needs to get its budget in order before passing new, unconstitutional taxes.

This billionaire thinks that asking people who make over a million dollars to pay an income tax is a "dystopian and malevolent scheme."