Also Trump mad because DOGE was a failure (from a budget cut perspective), and Trump mad because he wants to pass the big beautiful bill that will astonishingly explode the national debt and defecit, but Trump is either too stupid to understand that it will do that, or he’s mad that anyone in his circle would publically say as much… or some combo of both.

Its like with the tariffs: Trump is genuinely so stupid he doesn’t understand how any of this actually works, but at the same time, any idea he came up with is a good idea and fuck you if you disagree… because he has the emotional maturity of a narcissistic 12 year old.

I have said before I will eat both of my socks if a SpaceX rocket and ship fly humans to the moon and safely return by 2030.

I will also eat both of my socks if a two bit mob boss turned fascist nationalizes any significant corporate or industrial anything.

Fascists don’t outright nationalize shit, because if they did, the entire oligarch class that is a huge part of their support base would turn on them instantly.

Fascists make deals with, facilitate, get kick backs from corporate oligarchs.

They essentially never seize their assets outright, because that would undermine the entire capitalist system that the corpos rely on, and support fascists so that they will keep getting tax breaks and grants and other government subsidies.

I am at the point where if anyone, ever, for any reason, asks me what my astrological sign is, I stop communicating with them.

They always turn out to be irresponsible, narcissistic idiots every time.

An exception would if this interaction is taking place completely within the confines of an actually defined fantasy world like a video game or ttrpg.

But real life? People who actually believe there is, or could potentially be anything to astrology?

Dangerous morons.

Yep, I am jumping in with you on this one.

The cell-shaded art style? Not the problem, imo.

The problem is the just astoundingly terrible writing, immensely insufferable characters, and astonishingly brain dead gameplay.

Why have weapon balance of tactically interesting scenarios or any real sense of progression in gameplay when we can just procedurally generate guns and do everything we can to make everything into roughly the same level of bullet sponge with auto levelling?

They are the lowest common denominator of co-op shooter games, made for people who enjoy bombastic sensory overload and near zero prefrontal cortex brain activity while gaming.

Damn, its such a shame you can’t run a crack in a vm, or on linux via WINE and Proton, aw shucks.

Pretty much nailed it, yep.

A youtuber named Hellfire has been on a spree, basically discovering how fucked up EULAs have been in games for the past 20ish years… well this is all brand new news to him and and his Zoomer / Gen A followers.

There is, as of right now, literally zero evidence that Borderlands 2 has been updated with a rootkit, with kernel level anti cheat, anything like that.

The last update to its game files was 2 years ago.

This is almost certainly them updating the EULA everywhere, the precise timing of this being for some specific arcane legal and business reasons… TakeTwo runs a whole bunch more games than juat Borderlands… namely GTA V…

…

Is this EULA bad? Yes.

Is it much worse than it was before, or what other large gaming companies EULAs have, and have had for… a decade+?

Maybe by a bit, but not really, no.

…

Is Randy Pitchford a dumb idiot asshole?

Oh absolutely yes, but that shouldn’t give people the liscense to make completely unevidenced claims about other things.

…

The game does not have a kernel level AC or some kind of rootkit DRM, as many, many people are currently saying it does.

I guess gamer attention span can really hold onto a few keywords and phrases at a time.

… I say this all as person who is vehemently against kernel level AC, who has been pointing out for 4 years, that almost all existing anti cheat systems currently have at least one game that implements their AC, on linux, without using kernel level anything… it is entirely possible to do AC without kernel level shit, even on linux, and has been for at least 4 years. EAC and BattleEye have supported linux for 4 years, but nearly no game that uses them has actually used this feature/available and offered support.

I am glad that this level of hate is finally being directed at shitty EULAs, but lets at least get our facts straight, or actually provide some hitherto unseen evidence that Borderlands has had some kind of sleeper malware in it for at least the past two years, just waiting to be activated by a TOS update to every single Take Two game.

5 to 10 years later, Skyler has remarried…

…Donald Margolis, (John De Lancie, Q from Stsr Trek lol) the former Air Traffic Controller who was the father of Jesse’s girlfriend who OD’d.

Surprise! He survived his suicide attempt! … He’s had reconstructive surgery, changed his name… he can only speak through a vocoder, but he has genuinely found new meaning in life working at first as a counselor, eventually working his way up to an administrator of a fairly small, but low cost sort of rehab / mental health retreat/clinic.

Their relationship is of course basically built on similar levels of traumas ultimately leading to similar levels of a no bullshit attitude, yet at the same time, determined to hit the reset button and move on, live life…, but they are also totally unaware of how directly they are connected, with both having… not really directly mentioned too much about their recent past.

Skyler has been using her maiden last name, and has never at all mentioned anything about Walter. She was married to abusive man, she got the courage to leave, that guy disappeared, etc etc.

Together they raise Holly, out of a different home in say… Reno? Albuquerqe? Tuscon? Colorado Springs?.. Skylar runs a different car wash now.

Flynn (who likewise has officially changed both his first and last name, and goes along with Skylar’s fake story about Walter) has gone to a community college and gotten some kind of Comp Sci degree and is doing decently well for himself as some kind of an entry/mid level programmer or db admin or some such, able to afford the specialized car and an ADA compliant apartment… he pops in from time to time to visit mom and new dad… but he is still totally unaware that Walt threatened the Whitmers into putting aside millions for him in a trust fund.

At some point, they approach Flynn with some kind of offer and concept for some kind of … medical tech startup.

… I am not quite sure how to write the next part, but at some point… well, all you have to do is have Jesse enter the plot either directly or remotely, and probably at that point, shit gets insane fairly quickly.

1: You a veteran?

2: Yes. No. I don’t wanna talk about it.

Camera zooms in on 2, fades to montage:

MiG 21 thundering overhead at tree top levels, while blasting ‘Hush’, which is being comically raised in pitch to squeaking chipmunk levels as it approaches, and then instantly downshifts by two octaves into quaalude voice after it passes overhead… it is being pursued by an f4 phantom who fires off all of his seeking missiles in a quick burst, all of which guide themselves into your convoy of m113s, as well as a nearby mortar emplacement

squad is slowly advancing through Hue with no resistance thus far… and then suddenly, from 3 different directions, VC on mopeds, blasting ‘Surfin Bird’ and headbanging maniacally, rapidly approach the unit… 2 are shot, but one makes it through, moped detonates with the force of 4 bundles of TNT

… rocket pod armed mi8s and hueys pieroutting around each other in the night sky, throwing unguided rockets everywhere, taking out ground bound friend and foe alike, both ultimately running out if ammo and then crashing into the ground sideways and upside down…

Camera pops back to 2, slowly zooms out.

2: … I don’t … don’t wanna talk about it.

It complained about it for me as well.

And then kept working.

I am currently crippled and basically just do PT, shitpost on lemmy, and watch youtube… all day long.

If it was gonna block me after 3 videos, it missed it by about 100.

Ok so… hear me out.

You know how the common aphorism for dog years is that 1 dog year is 7 human years?

BF 1942 came out in 2002.

60 year difference.

…

I hereby propose a ‘Gamer Age’ formula:

(Real Age - Youngest Age you first put over 50 hours into a single game) * 6

…

So if you are now 40, and you mainlined Starcraft when it came out in 1998, your gamer age is 78… pretty old, seen a lot of shit in your time.

If you are 20, and broke 50 hours into Fortnite at age 14 (when Fortnite first released), your gamer age is 36… middle aged, been around the block a few times.

If you are 16, and broke 50 hours in Fortnite when you were 14… your gamer age is 12 (lol), you are still a little nooblet in terms of gaming experience.

If you are 60, and put 50 hours into a Pacman cabinet when it came out in 1980… gamer age is 240, true elder, arcane wizard status.

If you are Lord British (Richard Garriot), and you use the release date of the first game he developed (Akalabeth) as the 50hr game…

He works out to a minimum of 276, which is almost certainly a low estimate… by my reckoning, he could potentially be as old as 330…

…few know such things precisely, such is the nature of a truly ancient one, hahaha.

…

If I run this for myself… first game I put more than 50 hours into would have been… Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles, think I broke the 50 hour mark in '96…

So… my gamer age works out to 174.

Unnaturally old, by no means the eldest of the wizened ones, but considerably more experienced than most would guess by my physical form, rofl.

…

Now, this isn’t a perfect metric, as … you could argue the 50 hour threshold should be some other number… and that it doesn’t account for people who have played a whole lot of games, but only a single playthrough… so it is kind of biased toward ‘hardcore’ gamers…

But it does seem roughly in line with the way online lingo and vocabulary and memes seem to work.

And also, non ‘hardcore’ gamers are probably not going to care about any kind of ‘gamer age’ metric.

…

Thoughts? Suggestions? Critiques?

That is the joke:

If you’re still using WinRAR, you’re probably/possibly also still using Winamp, out of either a faux hipster-like desire to be retro and esoteric, or are just very stubborn and never changed your software setup.

It would kind of be like… if you go 10 years further back, and you know that one guy who is still vehemently arguing about how 8tracks are superior to cassettes, even though most people would be using CDs at that point.

About half a decade younger than that, just picked up pc gaming as a hobby at a young age.

But yes, I know that there are many significantly older gamer folks / tech dorks here on lemmy… but there are also now a lot of Gen Z folks, and even some Gen A… who just actually did not ever experience the ‘pre-internet’ era at all.

It gets difficult for me to manage my age perception whiplash at times.

I apparently look young enough that people irl, only 10 years older than me (or less) still refer to me as ‘a bright young man with my whole future ahead of me’, as if I’m in my early 20s… while people 10 years younger than me refer to me as an ancient elder gamer online, and irl, once I tell them my actual age, oh now I’m an uncle, I’m an old man.

??? confused millenial noises ???

I truly, truly don’t get it.

Ublock Origin + Firefox still works.

Works just fine.

Been that way for over a decade.

Yes, if you’re more privacy concerned (and there are good reasons to be) you can use some other browser, something like NewPipe, or Invidious…

But I just don’t get why any normie, ever, goes for YT Premium…

Amazon still can’t even figure out how to reliably get human drivers door passcodes into an apartment building, and then into its mail/package locker room.

The map system it uses for telling drivers how to get around a city to make deliveries is also garbage, can’t account for traffic, punishes people for using faster side routes to get to the same place, tells you to park in areas that either have no parking at all, or where parking there would majorly disrupt traffic, or assumes available street parking will always exist in places and times it almost never does.

I once did an Amazon delivery gig where they booked me in for the time slot, I get to the FC, after waiting an hour they tell half of us: ‘oops we booked too many drivers, so today you all get $200 for showing up and doing nothing, go home now’

???

New Republican child incentive for young families:

All babies get a pair of made in America bootstraps!

… choking hazard you say? Eh, God’ll sort it out.

DON’T TRUST HIS LIES

I Love Tesler!

Has anybody checked in on Patel and Bongino?

Are Patels eyes just now permanently stuck in bugged out psycopath stare now?

Did Bongino have a heart attack?

EDIT:

dear god.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9-FCJwuv0i0

Patel was on Joe Rogan and learned about Elon claiming Trump is in the Epstein files in real fucking time.

Patel: Not my lane, staying out of this.

wwwhhhhaaaaaat?!

Fucking ‘no comment’?

Motherfucker, you are the head of the FBI who is supposedly currently combing through those files!

No fucking comment?

Yep, same, exactly.

This is way, way too in depth to be an elaborately staged, intetional hyperreality performance.

These two just actually are this stupid, this self-centered, this insecure and ego driven.

If this is some kind of an act, it would require both of them to have been method acting at Daniel Day Lewis levels for about a decade with no breaks.

Its ‘performative’ in the sense of intentionally being catty, shit-disturbing, dramatic, old men acting like the cast of the Mean Girls… but it is not performative in the sense of ‘entirely staged to fool us dumb rubes.’

That being said, this all still does function as a grand distraction to any other person or kind of nefarious nonsense… but no, these two are having the messiest, most high stakes, most public breakup in probably the history of the world right now, and they are both totally genuine.

… It is also arguably the funniest way concievable for the American Empire / Era to end.

How in the fuck do you write a history book about this in 20 years?

… I don’t fucking know, but I do know I want Larry David to write a script for a ‘The Death of Stalin’ style movie about the last 9 months.

EDIT: Wait! Mel Brooks is still alive somefucking how, get in him in the writing room too!