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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Shining Force is a classic. Basically Seva’s answer to Fire Emblem.

    Wargroove is pretty good too. Kind of like Advance Wars, but in a more medieval fantasy setting. From an indie dev with pixel art. My only real complaint is one I have with all modern “retro pixel art” style games: the “pixels” can move by much smaller increments than themselves. I wish games that used that style would align everything, including animation, to the fake pixels. It looks kind of busy and messy imo. It doesn’t bother me enough to ruin Wargroove though.

    Banner Saga was pretty good. It’s a combination of tactical RPG with mostly text-based choose-your-own-adventure style elements between battles. Still haven’t played the 3rd one, but I enjoyed the first 2.


  • With how bad TV news has gotten this might be a good thing.

    Social media allows for all sorts of disinformation and misinformation, yes. But there’s also real people talking about real experiences. Primary sources spreading their eyes and ears across the world.

    TV news is owned by billionaires like Murdoch and Bezos and are basically just propaganda outlets for them. And while I’m sure Zuckerberg and Elon are influencing their social media platforms just as much, at least on the internet there are places like Lemmy where the truth at least has a chance to exist.


  • You and I remember the press for the Wii very, very differently. Just look at the Wikipedia article listing all the awards it won before or around it’s launch. Game Critics, Spike TV, Golden Joystick, Popular Science, IGN, GameSpot, the Guardian, and much more. including awards and praise for the innovative controls.

    Was there negativity? Sure, but it was a miniscule minority. The kind of thing only an extremely defensive Nintendo fan would notice. The Wii sold out instantly and was impossible to find for the first year or two, similar the PS5 except without the excuse of a global pandemic disrupting supply chains.

    It’s not some anti-Nintendo bias. The press was pretty mixed on the Xbox One for example, with some outlets pointing out it was a bit overpriced, and of course the whole debacle about being always-online and the Kinect being mandatory caused a lot of backlash. The PS3 was seen as overpriced at launch and got a 6/10 from IGN.

    And another important factor is that conditions change after launch. (The 360 probably would have had worse reviews if the press knew about the red ring of death before launch. The PS3 saw price reductions and eventually outsold the 360 despite having a worse launch. The 3DS floundered for its first few months until Nintendo dropped the price.

    The press is neither monolithic nor perfect. I guarantee you can find some outlet somewhere with the exact take you are looking for, but to just dismiss the entire industry because you don’t agree with most of them on the Switch 2 seems like coping.





  • I would normally agree with the general sentiment that the POTUS gets both too much value and too much credit for the economy, and that particularly early in a term we are usually still seeing the results of older policy.

    Except that in Trump’s case he has spent the first 100 days in office implementing policies with nearly universal agreement that there will be an immediate negative impact. Drastic, nonsensical EO’s like mandating commerical truck drivers speak English. The tarrif nonsense. Threatening global war with the talk of annexing Greenland, Canada, and Mexico. Etc.




  • Then why didn’t Republicans vote for it?

    And not just votes. Republican Attorneys General across the country tried to get it overturned in the courts. The House and Senate Minority Leaders have quotes strongly against it. Romney himself did not hold any office at the time the ACA was passed, but was preparing for his next presidential campaign. He described it as “an unconscionable abuse of power…the act should be repealed”.

    If you look more closely at the Massachusetts state government in 2006 when Romney was governor and passed “Romneycare”, you’ll find that the state Senate was dominated by Democrats 34-6, while the state House was dominated by Democrats 139-20-1. There’s a much, much stronger case that Romneycare in Massachusetts was a Democratic piece of legislation than there is that the ACA was Republican.

    The Republicans had plenty of control of the federal government before Obama, and their plan of "leaving Americans with nothing* was already in place. That’s what the Republicans voted for in 2010 by voting against the ACA.



  • What times are these?

    As I said, they have only had control for 4 months in my lifetime. Before that you need to go back to 1961-1969 with Kennedy and Johnson. I would actually need to do more research to find out whether they had a Supermajority or not, but it’s not even worth looking up because going that far back in time shifts the politics of the parties significantly and is not very relevant to today. The Democratic Party still has plenty of Southern Conservatives all the way into the Carter years.

    So I would love to know what pattern you are seeing.


  • Romney was indeed a Republican, but a moderate one. The Church of Latter Day Saints has always been a weird outlier in American politics, and as a Mormon Romney largely follows that tradition. Utah itself is a great reminder that the trends Americans see with the two-party system, where every issue is a binary choice with the GOP or DNC each picking an option, the reality on the ground is more complicated.

    It’s also worth looking to how Romney was the first senator in US history to vote to impeach his own party’s president. He did it again the 2nd time Trump was impeached too, along with a handful of others.

    That’s not to say that I like Romney at all, or even that I like the ACA or even that I like the Democrats.But Romney is perhaps the furthest left Republican and created that initial bill with the intention of being a bipartisan compromise. He’s far closer to Neoliberal than Nazi. And while it was the foundation, his bill was NOT the final bill that passed into law. The bill that did pass saw 100% of Republican senators vote against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with 1 meaningless Republican vote. To say it was a Republican bill is simply historically inaccurate.


  • My apologies if a crosses a line with the comment, but calling the ACA Republican is demonstrably and factually false and, in my opinion, actively spreading disinformation.

    The bill passed the Senate 60-39, with 1 abstaining. All 39 Republicans Senators voted against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with only 1 Republican vote.

    If you want to say it wasn’t enough, that’s completely fair and I would agree. If you want to say the Democratic Party, both back then and today, is dominated by Neoliberal interests and suppresses Progressives or Socialists or whoever else then I would also agree. But none of that was the conversation- the bill that passed was demonstrably not Republican.



  • They had control of the Presidency and the House of Representatives. I never said they didn’t have that- I said they didn’t have control of the Federal Government.

    The Senate was tenuous. Just having 50 Dem Senators (well, that’s not true either because you need to include Independents to get to 50) isn’t good enough- you need 60 votes to have a filibuster-ptoof majority. The Dems just barely scraped that together in 2009, complicated in part by Ted Kennedy’s seizure and eventual death and Al Franken delayed in getting seated due to recounts. They only had 60 votes (still including Independents) from September 24th 2009 - February 4th, 2010. 4 months of controlling the federal government.

    That is why when the 2008 financial crisis happened and the Dems wanted to pas a stimulus package in 2009, they had to get Snowe, Collins, and Spectre (who would leater switch parties to get them to 60) from the Republican side in order to get that passed.

    They absolutely did not have control of the Supreme Court at any point in the Biden administration and the Republican SCOTUS shut down a lot of what the Biden administration tried to do. I remember checking every day for months to see how they would rule on Student Loan forgiveness, for example.

    This is why they have the perception of being powerless- because they’ve pretty much never had the power. The Republicans love people who say the Democrats are useless. They love saying Biden didn’t do what he promised when he DID and the GOP-dominated Supreme Court reversed it. They love being able to stall Democrat legislation and blaming a Democrat president. Everything the Dems have done outside of those 4 months have required careful compromises and negotiation with the GOP to pass.



  • That is the maximum size, but it’s also the most expensive size.

    Street Fighter 6 is 60GB on Steam, so they probably could put it on the 64GB card if they wanted to. But it’s going to be a download.

    Bravely Default is only 11GB, but it’s going to be a download too. Probably because it’s a much more niche game that SE doesn’t expect to sell a lot of units of. It’s probably more comparable to an indie game where the physical release is more of a collector’s item for hardcore fans than the main way they expect people to play the game.

    It’s a combination of Nintendo following their tradition of using expensive and obscure formats, publishers being cheap, and some combination of publishers/devs for not optimizing for storage.