America has always had a contradiction at it’s heart: It purports to represent high minded ideas about freedom, egalitarianism, peace, democracy, secular enlightenment ideals, etc… while simultaneously being none of those things for most of it’s history. A country built on genocide and slavery, a government that excluded nearly everyone from participating in it, extreme inequality, a war every few years, laws based on religious sentiments of the majority, etc…

That the story it tells itself is so at odds with it’s actual identity is a testament to the power of propaganda and self-delusion. I think part of how people try to resolve this contradiction is by refocusing the story to be about steady progress: We may not have always lived up to our ideals, but that was in the past, we learned from them, and got better, as they ignore the problems of today and even actively resist changes that they would applaud if they read it in a history book or saw it in a documentary.

It’s not wholly unique in this kind of narrative self-delusion, but I think America’s relative lack of longer term history and ethnic identity makes the story a more central part of it’s identity. The pledge is one part of this.

A company trying to sell us junk being behind a thing that doesn’t make any sense is the most American thing ever.

A few angles on this:

You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.

Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.

Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.

Oh I just wanted to add. Nbd.

I know we’re mostly joking about how shitty AI currently is, but for the sake of the future, smarter AIs, don’t give them the ability to go contact others and spend money. That’s how you get the paper clip/stamp machine apocalypse.

For me Doctor Who is a fun campy show. It’s got some heart that serves as it’s basic message and occasionally more directly deals with contemporary politics, but it’s so silly that it’s hard to take that seriously most of the time.

Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

The way I look at it, it would be better if we had a nice, consistent language with rules that make sense but… we don’t have that. English is a nonsense language with more exceptions than rules. So if I’m going to have to deal with something that doesn’t make sense in the first place, I’d rather just go with the flow. If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.

The insane thing about it is it’s not like this is an unprecedented kind of racism. Tying your enemies to foreign nations is a great way to separate them from everyone else and take away their rights. The Nazis ranted about “Jewish Bolsheviks” to tie Jews to the Soviets. Catholics in America were thought to be agents of the church, answerable to Rome before the country, hence why JFK was such a notable president. There were the Japanese internment camps during WWII. Obviously for the past couple decades we’ve had right wingers try to tie Muslims/Arabs to terrorists or Iran or something.

Nothing is new if you pay attention to history, which is why it’s so depressing when we just keep seeing the same shit happen over and over again. This time it’s just so much dumber than normal because people who are supposed to be from our group are doing it while claiming that their support of a current genocide is because of them supposedly remembering the history of the last genocide against them. It’s so unbelievably cynical while somehow also being so dumb and shortsighted that I can’t understand how they don’t see that.

Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.

Most of them don’t seem to give a shit about Jewish people, they just have ulterior motives for supporting Israel. Arm sales, geopolitical strategy, hating Muslims, lebenstraum, and then there’s the crazy Christians who support it because of the rapture stuff. Then there are the Jewish people who delusionally believe that somehow having a state which is solely dependent on the US empire’s support is somehow going to protect them from another holocaust and think that priority overrides everything else. I can’t think of ANYONE I know who can genuinely square support for Israel with any kind of Jewish religious values. Because they can’t. Because that would be insane.

When an actual Jewish person comes out against Israel, they just call them a self hating Jew. Yup. Nothing antisemitic about that. They must just really want to protect Jewish people from… checks notes… ourselves.

My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.

Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.