I am a ML and everything I have seen of Jenkem’s posting here makes me think they are probably a leftist.

We probably don’t agree on everything, but they’re no liberal.

the only viable left leaning political party in the US?

I might be misunderstanding you, so I apologize if that is the case, but if you are referring to the Democrats they are far from left leaning. They aren’t even center leaning.

You can’t even say they have a better track record than the Republicans. They bomb countries as much (or in recent years even more) than the Republicans. They advocate for wars. They fund ICE even more than the Republicans. They stand up just as much for reproductive rights (read: not at all). They just do all of it while waving a rainbow flag.

I really hope you meant the Greens or the CPUSA; which have their own issues but are certainly more left than either the Democrats or Republicans.

We never had blockbusters here, but our local equivalent is actually still doing quite well. I think streaming movies is more popular, but a lot of people go there to rent music CDs. Actually buying physical music albums is really expensive.

We still have Toys R Us too actually, I think it does pretty well here for the most part.

So I guess my answer defaults to Radioshack.

I’ve said before, but we need to stop making dystopian films/tv because it just gives them ideas.

It’s a bit late, but hey I will take it still. I tend to have pretty bad luck with discovery apps as I have narrow musical tastes, but I will give it a shot for a while.

I have had the most luck with the custom Apple Music stations honestly, seems to have the best balance of songs I know and like with newer stuff in the same vein. I am not sure I would spend as much time on a playlist entirely composed of new things.

Cancelling the US subscription is really hard, they actually charge you a premium for the cancellation service. I have been working on it for a while, but the customer service is just atrocious.

I have two major oppositions to capital punishment, and neither are rooted in the possibility of rehabilitation or not.

1. The state is not infallible. If you put someone into prison for ten years and find out you messed up, you can at least release them. You can’t give them those years back, but you can try to do right by them as much as you are able. You execute the wrong person? You’re just a murderer.

2. Personally, life in prison (and not a cushy wall street exec prison) seems like a way worse punishment. Even if I was only concerned with providing somebody the worst possible punishment, lifetime imprisonment would be worse.

Mostly though for me, it is number 1.

Totally fair. Particularly in survival horror where saves are explicitly limited to highten tension, that makes sense.

I am not the expert on the genre by any means, but would limiting invasions to “only other people on the same difficulty” just segregate the player base too much?

I have definitely heard that argument, and I understand it, but at the same time there are a good number of us who would just simply not play the game then.

I realise it is up to the devs who they want to make their game for, and I am probably not their target audience, but banging my head against a wall until I get through something doesn’t give me any kind of feeling of triumph when I manage it. I just feel frustrated. Whereas the soulslike games I have played where I could turn the difficulty down, I enjoyed way more.

And I’m not going to be able to argue against your first hand account of rural North Korea.

Unless you are from the US or SK, when things open up a bit more that is looking to be possible again. I would encourage you to try visiting if you have the time and means. Even if we totally divorce things from the politics, there’s a lot of beautiful nature there.

Anecdotally, you seem relatively reasonable and I think it would be an interesting experience.

However, I don’t see the people of North Korea being able to put political pressure on their government to change policies.

It does depend to what extent, people can definitely enact policy change. While all political organizations do ultimately belong to the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea, they have multiple political parties under that umbrella that do different on some issues. Obviously they aren’t going to suddenly pass laws making the place capitalist, but they can do and do change some things. The Social Democratic Policy is notably more liberal in their attitudes as it was formed by a lot of the petite bourgeoise. They actually have published journal articles that are critical of the ruling party.

I probably would group those into the Manamement/Tycoon genre. More economic than colony builders, but smaller scale than city builders.

The Two Point games are pretty good versions of those, if you light the more light-hearted atmosphere.

Should try Industrial Revolution 3. Electricitiy is like the third “tier” you get. You have to do burners for a while and then steam power where you are directly feeding steam into every machine.

I have a IR3 game going now, I am sitting around 20 hours with the first two science packs automated and just retooled my whole base around electricity.

Krastorio is probably still my favourite Factorio mod. It hits that sweet spot of complexity and new stuff for me. It’s the only mod I have finished to date. I loved the concept of Nullius, but the byproducts made my brain hurt.

K2 really does feel like Vanilla+, which is a good thing.

I would consider them a few different genres, but they are easily my favourite types of games these days. I cateogrize them in my steam list as below.

-Colony Builders: Games about building well, a colony, often from little to nothing. Often lots of You vs Environment friction, with the natural world. Tends to have a bit more focus on the individuals that comprise the colony. Examples: Rimworld (my favourite game of all time), Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Stranded Alien Dawn, Space Haven.

-City Builders: A bit broader in scope than a colony builder, working more on the macro level. Friction is often economic, sometimes adjusted with the natural world. Cities Skylines is kind of the prime exampe of this, but also games like Timberborn or Anno.

-Automation: Games about building a factory that…builds things automatically. Challenge tends to be logistical complexity but some games do feature combat as well. Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program (my personal favourite), Satisfactory, and Captain of Industry are the Four Horsemen of this genre to me. Techtonica is very early still but seems to have some promise as well.

For many of these games, there is a whole world of content to explore if you are interested in mods. Rimworld players regularly run hundreds of mods, my current game has about 350. Factorio has extensive overhaul mods that can take literally thousands of hours to finish in some cases (Py’s). Satisfactory has a surprisingly robust mod scene for an early access game too.

Finished what is available in Techtonica, so went back to Dyson Sphere Program for a bit to work on missing achievements. DSP is definitely my favourite of the Factory-Automation games at this point.

I still have a Factorio (Industrial Revolution 3) game going too, but am feeling DSP more at the moment right now.

I am kind of used to sometimes poking the bear on this one in particular. It’s what I personally dislike though, I don’t necessarily think they are badly designed. I totally get some people absolutely love that kind of thing in games, and I am glad they have games that scratch that itch. It’s just an instant turn-off for me though.

That said, I have never quite understood the people vehemently opposed to having a difficulty slider though; just keep it on hard and it’s literally no different.

Not a game I hear mentioned much, but man Secret World had so many great things going for it. The best quest design in a MMO* I have ever seen, and a really unique setting too. Shame it was managed so badly, in an alternate world where TSW took off and was still getting content updates, I would be thrilled.

*MMO-ish in Legends.

I feel save points themselves are becoming an increasingly archaic design choice. Just let us save anywhere, especially in a single player game. I think most people are just suspending games without expressly saving most of the time.

I am really conflicted on this, and I think there needs to be some balance or cost/reward. I mostly agree though.

An example I often use about this is in MMOs. WoW felt like a huge world, especially back in vanilla. You could fly end to end and never hit a loading screen, it felt awesome. If you gave me a map of Azeroth and asked me to label all the zones, I probably could. It’s moved a bit more to people teleporting place to place, but I still can fly end to end of a continent.

On the other hand, FFXIV is a series of maps with loading zones between all of them (a necessity because of the older console architecture, I understand) and teleports in every town. You never actually go end to end of Eorzea. If you gave me a map of Eorzea and asked me to label only the three majors cities on it, I doubt I could. It is definitely convenient to just be able to warp around place to place for a trivial amount of currency.

It takes a lot out of the feeling of “world” to just have a bunch of arbitrary areas, I admit. It’s a tough balancing act between player convenience and player immersion.