Oh I mean yes, it cheddar absolutely can work in varying breads and such of all kinds, fucking love me my piroshkis and all kinds of savory other ways you can combine bread and cheddar… but cheddar on pizza?

No no no no no, I am apparently religious, and that is heresy, lol.

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.

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.

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.

I generally recommend this fairly simple ‘trick’ to make almost any basic / more conventional topping mix into a better pizza.

3 cheese blend.

Never go full mozzarella.

Ever.

Unless your toppings are doing basically all the work of making a unique flavor profile.

Pick two more cheeses, fuck around untill you find a mixture and proportions that make a flavor that’s incredible with your simpler toppings.

Asiago, ricotta, parmesean, even smokey gouda or creamy brie can work.

… just not cheddar.

Something is fucking wrong with you if you think cheddar works on a pizza, you’re thinking of a hamburger and/or you are already too drunk to cook a pizza lol, you will pass out and wake up to a fire alarm going off and a smoldering cinder in your oven.

“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.

Wait untill you hear about loans and regular interest payments lol.

A more refined method of generating consistent, regular cashflow, rofl.

(Ahem, at least in theory, but then when that stops working, surprise! you get a bailout!)

… But yeah, the natural evolution we should expect is that MSFT (or Hulu or any other sub based service) will soon or at least eventually partner with something like klarna to offer 3-6 month payment loan options … for every recurring monthly subscription payment.

Think about it.

What that means is that… well, if you cancel on month 5, you’re still making payments through month 8, or month 11.

So … should you really go 3 - 6 months paying for not having something?

Or just keep your subscription going?

Loans are literally the OG of ‘dark pattern’, MTX style bullshit, its a perfect match made in hell.

Hypercapitalism, away!!!

Now, that’s a fucking pizza.

excited Italian hand gestures

See, pineapple absolutely can work on pizza, you just have to know what you’re doing, and have at least some sense of how to construct a total flavor profile.

Grow doobies, smoke boo-

Wait.

No. Don’t do that.

…

Grow hookah, suck booba.

(now its reversible!)

… do I win a prize, lol?

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.

Black Mirror?

Oh, you mean the phone you hold in front of your face all the time, everyday, right?

When the screen’s not on… literally black, glossy, relflective…

Please tell me I am not the only person who immediately made that association when that show came out.

The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.

I… remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can’t really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.

… And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.

Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.

Algos will always naturally ‘conclude’ that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.

Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.

We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I’ve read predicted or warned against.

My response so far has been ‘the only winning move is not to play’, I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.

They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.

… call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.

loling in my head at the last person I talked to who got very angry when I told them I would not install discord just to talk to them.

Nope, sorry, its a privacy and security nightmare, do you wanna install signal, maybe?

I’m not installing an app just to talk to you.

Well ok then, bye!

smdh…

Ooooh, ok.

I would think that them just getting rid of much of their discussion ‘zones’ would be something they could do without pissing off the fascists, and also just being a net good in general…

… whereas if they kept all their steam groups and discussion forums, but instead, specifically began to more heavily moderate / remove right wing extremists from those discussion zones, I would think that would be much more likely to piss off the fascists.

Basically, I don’t think the fascists in government really even understand fully what Steam is, everything it does, but, if they heard it was cracking down specifically on fascists, that would draw more heat to them than if they just removed features which are, imo, just a net negative anyway.

I’m glad its helped you, but every time I am so desperate as to end up at the Steam Comm pages looking for help, I am met by a bunch of overconfident idiots explaining solutions to problems I did not describe, or just people telling me it isn’t a problem, it can be fixed by uninstslling my soul from my body, etc.

I don’t follow.

You initially said whales who buy tons of games, I assume you mean individuals with 1000+ games on their steam account, buys all the dlc and mtx and loot crates, that kind of whale.

Now you are reffering to… the US government as a whale?

What are you suggesting… be done?

… and by whom?

Are you suggesting Valve functionally commit hara-kiri by … some kind of intentionally angering the fascist government?

What are you suggesting, that Valve fund investigators to link Steam accounts to other platforms and websites, and then… report that knowledge to… the government?

They wouldn’t do anything other than sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.

Valve cannot like… arrest people, issue themselves search warrants, … and if they did set up a system to do something like this, kablamo, now it is instantly turned around to hunt down trans people after Valve is sued into a government buy out or being purchased by fucking Larry Ellison.

Please, explain to me what you are trying to suggest, I don’t get it.

It literally is not Valve’s problem to handle what goes on off their platform.

If somebody wants to attempt that, uh, good luck? The US is currently run by fascists, all the fascists in government probably are not going to prioritize policing younger, dumber fascists.

If you just put all this burden on Steam, what you end up with is Steam gets massively censored in way more ways than just discussion forums.

But yes, I agree, I say, also just get rid of Steam Groups, entirely.

Just, boink, gone, don’t need em.

Nobody ever uses them for anything serious, they are basically always shit post zones, at best.

Thats what I meant where I elsewhere more or less said ‘nuke everything that isn’t your personal profile and stuff you publish personally’.

Sure, keep some ability for commenting on like, user’s screenshots, stuff people upload to the workshop, mods, comprehensive guides.

But, its the uploader’s job to moderate them, just offer something like ‘hold all comments for personal vetting or keyword filter scan’ before they appear.

Pretty sure those options already exist in other contexts on Steam, but yeah, I am fully down with Steam just cleaning house on almost everything.

I also think that asking for more serious moderation on more platforms is a good idea, but the problem is always going to be having the resources to do that, as well as uh, facsists aren’t going to investigate themselves.

Only other paradigm is to basically require a kind of NetID that either is your government ID or is tied directly to it, for all kinds of public discussion software, and once you do that, well, again, the government is fascists, so now if you criticize them, off to jail for you.

You don’t need to ban whales on steam who have tons of games.

Just get rid of or massively downsize steam community forums and group discussions.

They don’t need to exist.

Whales can still be whales and write an angry game review or whatever, but we don’t need discussion forums on Steam for every possible fucking thing.

I pretty much agree, I literally cannot think of a single time me engaging with the Steam forums has resulted in anything good at all.

Best case scenario you get absolute idiots who know nothing about how games work acting like they do, worst case scenario you run into something akin to Terrorgram.

https://www.propublica.org/article/telegram-terrorgram-collective-bratislava-murders-neo-nazi-online-hate

EDIT:

I was completely serious in my other post when I said 99.9% of steam forums are worse than worthless.

Just say, hey, everything in any steam forum, discussion group, basically anything other than comments on steam workshop stuff and guides and your own posted screenshots and your own profile… yep, in 90 days, it all goes away, make your backups now, if you want to, here’s a tool thingy to do that.

We have other platforms for lengthier discussions now, if a game wants to run its own community, fucking buy a domain, set up some forums, set up a discord, a reddit, a lemmy, whatever, do it yourself, its not worth steam potentially getting nuked or massively censored because it allows basicslly auto generated forums for every half baked idiot that makes some game.

Because of the group that they exemplified in the paper, the top 3 games that were common to right wing social circles on Steam were:

Counterstrike 2

HOI 4

Garry’s Mod

Now, this isn’t the same as saying ‘everyone who plays this game is a right wing extremeist’, its not that kind of analysis, but it is saying that if you are a right wing extremeist, these games are games you probably play.

You could however do some napkin math based on daily player counts and realize that CS2 has way, waaay more players than HOI4 or Gmod, and then realize that there likely are a disproportionate number of HOI4 and Gmod players who are right wing extremists, as compared to many other games.

The paper specifically says:

While most of these games are commonly played among all types of users, Hearts of Iron IV (HOI4) is an important exception. HOI4 is a strategy game developed by Paradox Interactive in 2016, and it was originally played primarily by hardcore strategy gamers.

However, since its launch, neo-Nazi and neo-fascist communities have increasingly adopted it as a symbol. Far-right communities have embraced the ability to play as Nazis and fascists in HOI4, and they have particularly celebrated the ability to create speculative fiction via the built-in story and user-created mods (White and Lamphere-Englund, 2024; Newhouse and Kowert, 2024).

Frankly, as a HOI4 enjoyer myself… they’re not wrong, go try to follow all the drama behind the New Order mod, and you will probably see what I mean.

And also, as a former Gmod player, I can absolutely personally tell you all about Nazis and grooming in roleplay servers, as I am unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with Spartan5150/ParadymShyft many times, to the point that I could easily doxx him and tell you his real name, just off the top of my head.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about: He’s a Nazi pedophile with a penchant for grooming underage girls and sending them pics of his oddly shaped cock, and then baiting them into sending him their nudes, and then him holding those over their heads to force them to keep doing weird RP shit… who then went on to be the lead community manager for “The Isle”, ostensibly an attempt to make some kind of ‘live as a dinosaur’ multiplayer simulation type game.

Anyway, here’s the full table from the study, the paper this article is clumsily based on: